244: Revelations (Patreon)

The Byram Med Center was right across the street from Dead Man’s Hand. It had originally been a restaurant on a two-story building that had been repurposed when the commercial area had been rebuilt as a fortified village. There were six healers on staff, working on a rotating three shifts. They got paid via the quest system and were happy with the arrangement, which was a safer way to go up in levels and raise Skills than venturing into Dungeons or going off on monster hunts.

The Med Center had a meeting room with a long table and enough chairs for eight people. The four former prisoners had changed out of their orange outfits and looked a lot better, although the blonde guy still looked pretty out of it. At the head of the table was Nancy Perez, the lead healer of the Med Center. Which told Roland something was wrong with the newcomers.

Roland glanced at the two women sitting across from the siblings and the Kensai, the divide between them apparent from their body language. They appeared to be in their forties or fifties, but high-class forties or fifties, the kind that took expensive cosmetic procedures to maintain. One of them looked familiar. He checked their floating nameplates.

Brianna “Bri” Delmonico (Cambion (Demi-Demon) Ascendant, F-Grade)

Level 7 Rabble Rouser (R) (Empathy, Hellfire, Rage)

Health 642 Endurance 649 Mana 652

Iris Mendoza (Impling (Demon) Ascendant, F-Grade)

Level 8 Chief of Staff (R) (Second Sight)

Health 168 Endurance 173 Mana 202

Demons?

That realization was followed by Roland finally placing the name and face. The Demi-Demon was the Mayor of New York City. Her slogan during the election had been Bri Delmonico Cares! Plenty of political spam from NYC made it to Connecticut during campaign season, so he remembered her.

Of course, the aggressively grinning woman who had promised to fix the humongous mess the previous mayor had inflicted on the Big Apple looked very little like the cowering, shifty-eyed wreck who had wrapped herself in a flannel shirt and hugged herself. She was looking at Roland like the condemned meeting the hangman.

And come to think of it, this is the first politician I’ve encountered since Integration, Roland thought. Even with a death rate in the fifty, sixty percent range, some of them should have survived, shouldn’t they?

Maybe she could help solve that mystery, but at the moment she looked like she was about to demand to speak to her attorney.

The blonde twins were interesting, but in different ways:

Sondra Delgado (Blessed Human Ascendant, F-Grade)

Level 10 Chastener (L) (Humility, Peace, Serenity)

Health 402 Endurance 406 Mana 476

Raymond Delgado (Human Ascendant, F-Grade)

Level 8 Rogue Illusionist (E) (Illusion, Light, Trickery)

Health 224 Endurance 183 Mana 333

Not a normie among them, Roland thought. The closest thing to a regular Classer is the Rogue Illusionist.

“So, how is everyone doing?” he asked as he sat down.

“Not well at all,” Nancy Perez said in an almost accusatory tone.

The former RN had gained an Epic healing Class (Lifegiver level 9), which could have gotten her a better assignment anywhere in the Refuge. From the looks of it, her abrasive personality had gotten her to this frontier post. Some people always managed to sabotage themselves.

“What is the problem?” he asked her.

“There is some kind of suppression effect on those four, and I can’t remove it,” she all but hissed while she indicated the four who’d been in prison uniforms. Roland figured her frustration was at her inability to fix her patients rather than an attitude problem.

“She is right,” the Kensai – Kevin – said. “Not even the Power can remove the psychic chains inside them.”

Nurse Nancy rolled her eyes but nodded in agreement. “It’s not a curse. It’s more like a System oath, but it was imposed without their consent. No idea how they did it, or how to undo it.”

“Maybe I can help,” Roland told her before turning to the group. “It will require me to take a close look at your Cores and inner energy network. It’s not painful, but it is invasive.”

“How invasive?” Bri Delmonico asked. “Are you going to read our minds? I won’t accept such a violation of my rights.”

“No mind reading,” he said. “But I will get a sense of what kind of person you are. Your energy field can’t help revealing some of that.”

Mayor Bri and Iris Mendoza – her Chief of Staff, Roland figured – exchanged a glance. Iris nodded minutely. “All right, do it. Better than feeling like I’m being crushed every waking moment.”

“Yes, absolutely,” Sondra Delgado said, her voice tinged with tired despair. “My Skills. I’ve only used them when she needed me to. It’s been hell. That’s why we risked everything to escape.”

“Who is she?” Roland asked.

Sondra’s eyes went vacant. “Bethany Gray. My best friend before she became the Sinner. Before she became a goddess. Or a devil. If there is even a difference.”

*

A lot to unpack, but let’s fix them first.

The four patients were lying down in one of three treatment rooms, circular chambers with a width of sixty feet and two rings of beds arranged within it. Unlike traditional hospitals, the rooms were arranged to fit as many beds as possible within the radius of most area healing effects, which at F-Grade was between twenty and fifty feet.

There were a few monsters like Roland with aura effects in the hundreds of feet, but you didn’t need hospitals for them. They were the hospital.

In this case, he was treating each of them individually, but having them all in the same room made it easier to compare their afflictions and quickly apply the fix when he figured it out.

First, he needed to take a look. For the most part, Roland kept his paranormal senses on a tight leash. For one, the information could become overwhelming quickly, even with his superhuman Intelligence to process it and Willpower to avoid losing focus. He could see in so many wavelengths that opening his third – and fourth and fifth – eye while looking at a crowd of people would fill his head with the psychic equivalent of white noise.

In a controlled environment, with a handful of patients, things were easier. Only four people to work with. Kensai Kevin hadn’t been a prisoner – he’d actually helped them escape – so he hadn’t gone through what the other four had.

Roland had dozens of questions. Like how Kensai Kevin had managed to break out a bunch of people – most of them had died along the way – from the Sinner’s version of Supermax. Or how Sondra’s BFF had become a ‘goddess’ who commanded multiple Exemplars who had adopted a Sin to embody.

Helping them first might get them to open up. And the process itself might give him some answers.

First things first. The treatment room had a ritual circle engraved on the floor. A lot of healers used rituals to speed up or enhance their abilities.

Circles also helped isolate victims of curses. There was always a psychic link between the target and the source of the curse, be it a person, an item, or even a place. A circle could sever weak links and at least suspend or weaken more powerful ones.

Roland activated the circle and immediately felt an outside pressure as the suppression effect reacted to being separated from its victims. Energy was seeping through the defense; whatever this Skill or ability was, it was darn strong.

That was fine by him. He didn’t want to sever the connection, not until he knew more. Some curses had a built-in backlash mechanism that struck a victim the moment the link was cut.   

He opened his senses and picked a target. Mayor Bri got the dubious honor of being first. On short acquaintance, Roland had a feeling he would miss her the least, should something unfortunate happen.

The demonic nature of the politician was apparent to his enhanced senses. Currents of Hellfire – the same stuff Fiends had deployed – ran through her energy network and swirled around her Class Core.

Interestingly enough his Nephilim side didn’t react strongly to it. Since the Anunnaki appeared to be angelic creatures, Roland had imagined they would be the Fiends’ polar opposites. Instead, it looked like his second Bloodline had no feelings about Fiends or Hellfire, except something like mild disdain. Maybe there were different kinds of demons out there, but this type wasn’t one the Anunnaki or their offspring cared much about.

Setting that aside, Roland delved into the demonic ex-mayor. The mental picture he got wasn’t pretty. Bri was a low-empathy, high-charisma and even higher ambition type, with a high score in the Dark Triad profile. Maybe that was due to her demonic Bloodline. Although, as Roland looked at her energy system more closely, he realized that she didn’t have a Bloodline. She had been transformed by an outside force.

The culprit surprised him. There were hundreds of thousands – millions, maybe – of karmic threads sneaking in and out of her spiritual channels. And they were largely negative, and Roland realized that they were embedded deeply into both her body, mind, and soul.

Karma turned her into a demon? Roland wondered. He wasn’t an expert in Eastern beliefs, but, as he understood it, karma was supposed to affect your future lives or maybe the afterlife. You didn’t get the karmic bill during this life.

Of course, the System had made it so that karmic connections had direct effects on the here and now. Nkosi used them to strengthen himself, for example. From the looks of it, Mayor Bri had accumulated so much bad karma that the System had used that energy to turn her into a half-demon.

“Holy crap,” Roland whispered. Was that what happened to all the politicians?

Like many people, Roland believed that anybody who willingly went into politics had already one foot on the path to hell, however good their original intentions were. Power demanded compromise, demanded corruption. He could see how most people in higher offices, with the power to affect tens or hundreds of thousands of lives, would accumulate enough bad karma to turn them into the monsters they were at heart.

Interesting, but not important now, Roland told himself, and went back to work.

Besides the tangled web of karmic connections, there was another outside influence at work on Brianna’s energy channels. As a Classer, she didn’t have a Pattern, just the normal Dantians and Meridians all humans had. But somebody had engraved something like a Pattern around her Class Core.

Most of the runes and sigils in the tightly-wound network of spiritual wires were unfamiliar to Roland, which was puzzling, because his Adept Ritual Magic Skill had made it to Apprentice 2 in the last couple of days, after some intense work with Dahlia, who was probably among the top ten ritualists on the planet. The Skill had uploaded hundreds of ritual symbols into his brain; he should be able to recognize most of them on sight.

On top of that, Ascendance Architect let him examine the structure of System powers, both within Skills and Techniques. Between those two abilities, figuring out the ins and outs of the formation engraved in Bri’s spirit channels should be easy as pie.

Except it wasn’t. It felt like trying to read something written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Some letters looked a bit like the ones he knew, but he couldn’t tell if they served the same purposes. All he could do was glean something from the pattern’s structure, like trying to figure out unfamiliar words by the context in which they were.

The dampening effect was obvious. Less obvious was an on-off switch. The creator could remove the suppression whenever they wanted. Problem was, Roland didn’t know how to move the switch.

If there wasn’t a person’s life on the line, his usual method of figuring out an unfamiliar ritual formation was to feed energy to parts of it and see what happened, like running current to a circuit board and see if anything lit up. Not exactly conducive to positive outcomes.

Let’s look at it from a different angle.

He just happened to be able to look at the problem from angles that went beyond normal geometry. He focused Predator’s Sagacity through his Svarga Dantian and looked at the formation from a fifth-dimensional perspective.

Suddenly, he could see parts of the formation that hadn’t existed in three-dimensional space. And a cold feeling hit him like a punch to the gut.

His Nephilim Bloodline growled with the hatred Roland had expected when studying the Demi-Demon. The formation he was studying awakened something primal in his nature, a revulsion that almost demanded a violent response.

In the same burst of wrathful insight, Roland learned the name for the Anunnaki’s polar opposite.

Fallen.