Dimitry tossed and turned all night. Every fragmented dream saw him choking Josef, squeezing tighter until the light faded from the eyes of the homicidal maniac that packed wounds with condiments and strove to turn every employee and patient in the hospital against Dimitry. Josef probably ordered the delivery of the severed head as well! What was that asshole plotting to do next?

Visions of murder had plagued Dimitry since that evening, but even if he had chased Josef down when he had fled the hospital, what could he have done? Fought him in the middle of the street? Knocked the geezer’s brains out in plain sight, earning the ire of Malten’s guards and providing further credence to those spiteful rumors? No. Physical revenge was a foolish ambition.

Dimitry instead stayed behind to suture the squire’s gash. Being the only surgeon that cared for his patients would mend his reputation faster than vengeance ever could. But that didn’t mean Dimitry let Josef off the hook. He would doubtless return to create more issues.

All he needed was a good plan.

So Dimitry schemed. Scheming was all he could do as he lay atop his bed, forcing his eyes shut and hoping for rest that never came. The struggle continued until something thrashed against the oak planks of his castle guest room door.

He jumped up from his feather-stuffed pillow, only to aggravate the pounding headache he finished his shift with last night. Must have been a mixed tension migraine from all the stress.

Or so he thought, until another symptom gave him pause. A thick layer of crust sealed his eyes shut, thwarting Dimitry’s attempts to open them. It took several tries before he could see the first lights of dawn oozing out of a dark blue sky and in through an oval window.

Another volley of kicks slammed into the door. Their desperation grew with every strike. “It’s Angelika! Wake up so we can go do the rat thing you were talking about!”

“Hold up.” Dimitry mopped his face. Although early morning nagging didn’t assuage his migraine, he sympathized with the girl: her mother suffered from the plague. He couldn’t sit around, stewing in anger while some kid’s parent teetered on the brink of death.

Dimitry threw his legs out from under the blanket and onto a cold and hard stone floor. He pushed off the bed with his hand—the one whose wrist continued to tug him in two directions simultaneously. Judging by the force with which his emblem pulled and his experience in the Amalthean Kingdom, one destination was less than a day’s horse ride away, while the other lay somewhere out at sea.

A bout of dizziness nearly tripped Dimitry as he lumbered towards Precious’ hidey-hole. He pulled her blanket-padded drawer open. “Let’s go.”

“Dumitry, make her go away,” a sleepy voice responded from within. “It’s too cold.”

More knocking. “Hurry the hell up!”

“You heard her.”

“Why does this one have to be so loud?” A messy golden ponytail crawled out from the back of the drawer. “I want Saphiria back. At least she didn’t talk so much.”

Dimitry thrust his arms into a shirt. “Stop complaining.”

Precious’ head popped out, followed by two small arms reaching for the ceiling. She yawned. Her eyes opened, then widened. Her golden irises frantically scanned Dimitry up and down before focusing on his hand. “Dumitry?”

“Yes, we’ll steal some grapes from the kitchen larder before heading out. Now hurry up.”

“No…” Her tiny fingers pinched the skin on the back of his hand. “Look.”

Dimitry raised his hand to his face. Although difficult to notice at a glance, it had a faint purple hue.

“Fuck.”

Angelika banged against the door once more. “Stop talking to yourself and let’s go!”

Dimitry didn’t respond. All he could do was gawk at the back of his hand. The discolored epidermis told him he would soon end up like the dozens of patients at the hospital and the thousands more littered across Malten’s streets.

He caught the plague—an outcome both expected and surprising. Working with the ill would eventually infect the caretaker, but Dimitry assumed his circumstances weren’t that simple.

Given the variety of perks the dark hall granted, he hoped immunity to disease was among them. A sensible conclusion. Not only was his cancer cured, but when he injured his foot in Ravenfall, the open wound didn’t become infected despite him stepping on gravel, dirt, and countless other contaminants. Did he avoid illness with only half-assed first aid and luck?

“Now what?” Precious asked.

Dimitry rushed to throw on clothes. “I don’t know, but it might be in your best interests to find another blasphemer to feed you.”

“You know I can’t find a Dumitry anywhere else.” She dove into his hood. “Figure it out.”

“I’d love to, but it’ll take time, and I don’t know if I have enough.”

The faerie pinched his earlobe. “Then stop wasting it and go!”

Ten days.

The length of a week in this world and how long Dimitry had before the plague killed him. Clewin told him the symptoms started mild: drowsiness and loss of appetite. Before long, he would experience nausea, nosebleeds, and body aches. Finally, when the disease reached its terminal stages, excruciating blisters would crop up all over his body, making movement difficult.

Dimitry had to cure the plague before it incapacitated him, robbing him of his ability to navigate the city freely. He grabbed his leather bag and threw it over his shoulder. Just as Angelika reached to knock on the door, he flung it open. “Come on.”

The fidgeting red-robed girl looked up at him with orange eyes that opened wide and averted their gaze. “Oh. I didn’t know.”

“Don’t feel sorry for me, we’ve got shit to do.” Dimitry strode through the castle’s second-floor corridor.

“But if you got sick, what about my mo—”

“She’ll be fine and I’ll be fine.” Dimitry looked back and smirked. “If it makes you feel any better, think about it this way: now that I’ve caught the plague, it means that I have no choice but to work even harder to find a cure.”

Angelika dashed after him. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Continue to wake me up early in the morning and guard me. I’ll take care of the rest.”

Although Dimitry maintained a confident demeanor to keep the accompanying girl calm, his situation terrified him. Every passing moment saw his footsteps become heavier as they marched across Malten’s castle district, which was now packed with purple-skinned residents. Then, past the market square where ox-drawn carts carried stacks of blistered corpses as plague victims piled them higher.

Would Dimitry end up on top of a similar mound of decaying bodies? The next victim in a series of thousands? Although this world was torturous and unforgiving, he didn’t want to leave just yet. He had only recently regained control of his body—something he would never take for granted ever again.

“Hey,” Precious whispered. “I think some people are stalking us.”

Dimitry nudged the back of his hood with his shoulder to request further information.

“There’s… there’s a lot! One’s watching us suspiciously from the rooftops, and the others are hounding us through the streets! I doubt they want to break bread!”

Another problem. Just what Dimitry needed. Why would anyone follow a surgeon on his way to work? Was this Josef’s doing as well?

“Angelika.”

“What?” the red-robed girl asked, effortlessly matching Dimitry’s hastening pace.

“Do you have any stalkers?”

“What?”

“I think people are trailing us and they’re not happy.”

Head shooting side to side, Angelika’s red-brown curls twisted across her face. “Where?”

“Don’t look for them. Just stay on guard.”

“Gotcha.” She reached into her robe to retrieve a dark green vol pellet. “If they try anything, I’ll introduce their teeth to their brain.”

“Careful!” Precious hissed. “Menacing humans just ahead!”

Beside a bakery with x-marked doors, a scrawny group of men watched Dimitry. One saw Angelika and paused, while his comrades pushed off the wall, readying their nail-embedded planks and jagged brick armaments.

They definitely didn’t want to break bread. Eager to avoid a deadly confrontation, Dimitry pivoted on his heel, only to discover two more thugs closing in from behind.

He was trapped.

Skin crawling, Dimitry’s head darted back and forth, scanning up and down the street for watchmen. Where the hell did the guards go when he needed them? Were they in on the ambush? “Angelika! You live here—where should we go?”

Angelika did not share in his panic. “Fucking finally. Been a while since I vented my frustration.” Murder coalesced in her indignant scowl as eight thugs neared. “Wanna bet I can kill them all with a single vol pellet?”

“Don’t you dare get yourself hurt!”

“Oh, I won’t be the one getting hurt.”

Her tone, that of a confident soldier, hinted that his concern for Angelika was unnecessary. But that didn’t mean he wanted to see a nineteen-year-old kill starving men. “Glad you’re excited, but my reputation is already in the shit. I can’t have you slaughtering people in the middle of the street. I’m supposed to be saving lives.”

“Then I’ll just beat the living fuck out of them. Happy?”

“Not entirely.” He grabbed Angelika’s red sleeve and dragged her through the narrow entrance of a widening alley—somewhere they can fight out of sight and without the threat of being surrounded.

The thugs swaggered after them.

Angelika grabbed a lustrous green pellet from within her robe. “Hastia.”

Dimitry armed himself with vol as well, praying he wouldn’t have to cast accelall in public—a stunt that would attract scrutiny and further stoke the flames of gossip.

“We warned ya,” an approaching thug said, slapping a rusted saber against his palm. “Now—“

“Shut the fuck up!” Angelika palmed his skull, and with strength and agility surpassing the biological limits of her slender frame, slammed the thug’s face into an alley wall.

His comrades froze.

Dimitry did, too. Unlike Saphiria, who fought with tact and stealth, Angelika was a rampaging beast. The women of this world were fearsome.

The thugs shared a menacing glance and barreled through the alley all at once.

Angelika kneed a man twice her size in the groin with enough force to inflict a rupture, punched another in the throat, and retreated from the overwhelming tide.

A brick flew closer.

Dimitry ducked under the projectile and grabbed the thrower’s face. “Illumina!”

Violet light barraging his eyes, the thug shielded his face.

A moment’s inattention allowed Dimitry to slug him in the celiac plexus, inflicting crippling pain and paralyzing the thug’s diaphragm. They collapsed, struggling to catch their breath.

Dimitry glanced back to check on Angelika.

Around her feet lay two incapacitated men while five others held their heads and limped out of the alley.

Angelika stomped after them. “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?!”

“That’s enough.”

“But they started it!”

“Hurting them won’t change a thing.” Dimitry grabbed the girl’s shoulder to pull her back, but upon encountering an obscure sight, he froze.

“H-hey. Are you… are you hurt?”

Dimitry knelt beside a thug, who curled into a ball and brandished a familiar, filthy goatee. “I recognize this man.”

“You worried me just to tell me that? Who cares? It’s just a refugee! There’s hundreds of them!”

"Not just a refugee. When I was at the glassblower’s shop, I saw him scowling at me from behind a building.”

“I bet that prick Josef hired him to intimidate you,” Angelika said. “He’s been treating you like crap since day one. Probably responsible for the severed head and those poisonous rumors as well.”

Dimitry considered the possibility, but the evidence suggested that his predicament went beyond some friction with a competing surgeon or a random street mugging. “Unlikely. When I caught this guy stalking me, Josef still thought I was sent to help him get rid of corpses. He had no incentive to threaten me at the time.”

“Oh. That’s not good. Want me to go chase another one of those assholes down so we can ask some questions?”

“That’ll be unnecessary.” Dimitry approached the thug he struck in the celiac plexus. They heaved for air on the carved brick ground moments ago, but now played dead. “Hey, I know you’re conscious. My jab was too weak to cause you any serious trauma.”

“Don’t you worry.” Angelika sneered. “I’ll wake him up.”

The thug reached into a torn pants pocket.

Angelika kicked his arm away, and several bent copper coins flew from a greasy hand, clanging against the alley walls and floor.

“My m-money,” the thug said. “It’s yours, madam sorceress!”

Rage draining from her face, Angelika glanced away. “You’re lucky you didn’t reach for a knife.”

Dimitry paused. He counted seven copper marks and felt his heart drop. “Is… is this all you have?”

“I-I can get more! My w-wife has the other half!”

“Here comes the pity.” Precious sighed. “Just so you know, he’s not lying.”

Heavy waves washed over Dimitry’s shoulders, drowning out the urgency of moments prior. His experience in Ravenfall proved that few were above criminality amidst the desperation of homelessness. He reached under his cloak and grabbed his pouch.

Hungry eyes hawking the jingling leather bag, the thug scooped up his seven copper coins, which now clanged on his outstretched and trembling palm.

“No,” Dimitry said. “They’re yours, and I’ll give you a silver for every useful bit of information you give me.”

The thug’s mouth dropped open.

“I want to know why you and your friends were threatening me. Start talking.”

After providing first aid to the injured thugs and questioning each, Dimitry learned of his shitty situation. According to them, wealthy patrons have been using intermediaries to pay refugees and the poor to terrorize Dimitry.

A big problem.

He could not combat enemies with mysterious identities, goals, and capabilities. His sole recourse was to win the trust of someone who could: the queen.

Curing the plague remained the best solution. Cures took time to distribute, and Her Royal Majesty would have to keep Dimitry alive throughout the process. All he had to do was solve the plague before someone ‘removed’ him.

Without a wasted second, Dimitry darted across an uninviting city, through a grimy alleyway, and down a dark stairway leading to a flickering cellar. His goal was to check on his experimental rats. They held Malten and Dimitry’s fate in their purple-tinted paws.

Dimitry considered telling Angelika to stay outside to avoid unnecessarily exposing the girl to the plague-carrying couple and vermin living here, but it was no longer possible to avoid disease in Malten. Not even the castle was safe.

Once they entered the cellar, a feeble warmth embraced Dimitry’s numb fingers and nose. It emanated from a fireplace whose hesitant flame struggled to illuminate the figures of the two people sitting in front. One was a gray-haired man who fiddled with charcoal in the fireplace. Accompanying Clewin was his wife, a mopey woman with disorderly dark-blue bangs. Claricia soaked towels in a bubbling cauldron.

Clewin looked back, blood leaking from his nose. “Hey.”

“You alright?” Dimitry asked.

“Just another nosebleed. I still got a few days left in me.”

Fuck. Dimitry had to hurry. If his employees fell deathly ill, he wouldn’t get any more test rats, and his chances of curing the plague would plummet. He rushed over to the vermin-filled containers lining the walls.

“Are you here to do whatever it is you wanted with the rats?”

“That’s right. Have you kept them fed and watered?”

“I did, but I couldn’t tell if your magic cured them.” Clewin shrugged. “We also caught a bunch more like you asked.” He pointed at a row of squeaking containers on the other side of the room.

“Well done.” Dimitry knelt in front of the jug containing the control—the subject that didn’t receive preservia treatment—and lifted its rock-weighted lid.

A rat bumbled around inside as if drunk, its legs struggling to support its weight. Familiar symptoms. Just like plague patients, the rodent displayed rapidly worsening fatigue and muscle weakness. Its skin was darker too.

An expected yet terrifying outcome.

Dimitry wiped the cold sweat accumulating on his palm against his pants. Was he doomed to end up the same way?

“What is it?” Angelika whispered. Her curly red-brown hair drooped from her crimson hood as she leaned over to look inside. “Did it work?”

“I don’t know yet. We’ll find out soon.” Dimitry set aside the control and reached for a box wrapped in a pink-glowing towel. By now, the preservia enchantment should have delivered a dose equal to a spell cast by a typical mage armed with a crude vol pellet, making the subject within suitable for comparison with the others. He unwrapped the cloth to peek inside only to be met with an awful smell.

Unlike the negative control, the rat trudged through its diarrhea as it slammed its wobbling body against the box’s walls, attempting to escape. Its movements were slightly less steady than yesterday. Did preservia do nothing except compromise the rat’s bowels?

Angelika pinched her nose shut. “Were you trying to make it shit itself?”

“No.” He shut the lid and pushed the box aside. “Didn’t think you were in the mood for jokes.”

She glared at him. “I’m not.”

Next was a pitcher marked with a giant ‘V’. Yesterday, Dimitry cast a preservia targeting viruses on the rat inside. Unlike the previous subject, this one did not trek through diarrhea. It had an appearance similar to the negative control—dying.

Either modified preservia didn’t work, or whatever caused the plague wasn’t a virus. If the former was true, Dimitry and every other person unfortunate enough to suffer from the disease was as good as dead.

Ignoring a deep-seated sense of impending doom, Dimitry reached for the fourth container: one marked with ‘P’ for parasites. The rat inside didn’t fare much better. Dimitry kicked the container away and tilted his head back to look up at the ceiling, which left him with a vague notion of dizziness.

“Well?” Angelika asked in a desperate tone. “Is the rat good?”

“It’s dying.”

“That’s bad, right?”

“Very bad.”

Angelika clicked her teeth and turned away.

Claricia leaned her head against Clewin’s shoulder, who wrapped an arm around her and rocked.

A vase marked ‘B’ lay in the corner of Dimitry’s eye. The rat squeaking within, the one dealing with the aftermath of a modified preservia targeting bacteria, would decide Malten’s future. Angelika’s family’s future. Clewin and Claricia’s future.

Dimitry’s future.

He half wanted to peek at the critter to find out if he would live. A healthy specimen meant that the spell worked and could be administered on a massive scale. His other half, however, was too paralyzed to learn of his damning failure.

There was no point in fucking around. Dimitry removed the vase’s rock-weighted lid.

A rat squirmed inside, bouncing from wall to wall as if fighting for its life. Unlike the negative control, ‘V’, or ‘P’ samples, it didn’t crawl around as if about to die, nor was its skin a darker shade of purple than yesterday.

It took an appearance similar to the one affected by the preservia towel: more active and covered in its feces. Dimitry placed the two containers side by side. Grayer and more energetic than the enchantment-affected subject, ‘B’ had slightly reduced plague symptoms.

Although imperfect and in need of improvement, modified preservia worked.

There was hope.

Dimitry filled his lungs to the brim, leaned back, and released a deep breath, which relaxed his muscles as it flowed from his nostrils.

Behind him, a red-robed girl paced the room, twisting her curly red-brown strands around her finger. Clewin sluggishly poked a metal rod at a fire, his eyes downcast. Claricia wasn’t better off.

“Good news, everyone.”

Their gazes shot towards him.

Dimitry smiled. “We’re not dead just yet.”