Things just had to happen at the current hour. Of course, it just had to. If not for that, Cassandra would have been able to relax for an hour or two more before finally checking if her mind had adapted to the leisurely life enough to where she could sleep. Her eyes had actually been getting close to drowsy!

Not anymore, of course. Not even close to where she even had a chance of holding her eyes closed for over ten seconds. There was too much to do, to many things to be stressed about, and too many damn medical bags that needed to be brought out.

How long until they got there? Two minutes and thirty seconds, according to what the map said. But the map was wrong and Cassandra knew it, that stupid thing always assuming that the officers would only drive the exact speed limit. The woman didn't doubt that the man was trying to increase that by more than a few kilometres, at the bare minimum.

Most of the gear had been brought outside to the front, with a wheelchair sat up for immediate movement into the station. Cassandra knew that they had to get them to one of the medical beds within a few minutes of their arrival, and for that, they needed to be as versatile as possible. It didn't help that Jared believed he had a broken rib or two. The man had been continually updating them on his pain levels, reporting them about his extreme breathing difficulties.

Jared had actually stated that he would have let the automation drive, if not for the thing being unable to do much at the current time. That had certainly been a surprise to everybody on the channel, even if nobody had commented on it. The silence spoke a thousand truths, one could say, and the fact that Grunwald had not immediately continued asking for reports told a whole tale in itself.

The chair was sat up, sedatives prepared for immediate injection, and the… construct sent out to gather materials for the damaged automation coming in soon had just come along. Jules seemed positively encumbered by all the things he had gathered, though that might have been due to the size of it alone. Just how many pieces of gear was needed for hands-on medical stasis? It wasn't like they would be undergoing an operation in the parking lot.

“Got everything you need?” Cassandra questioned, as she gave herself a few seconds of breathing time. Her pulse was getting her, so she needed to get it as low as possible. There was no space for rash decisions in the current state, and twitchy hands could be the reason that a lung was punctured.

“That and more, I hope,” Jules answered. The construct carefully lowered his arms full of gear down to the ground, methodically disassembling the tower that had been put up. The woman temporarily considered helping, but just figured that the machine knew better than her when it came to systems it had created. “I have just about everything I could possibly need here.”

“Are you even going to need half of it?” Cassandra said, picking up one of the man pieces there were. The one she held looked like a peculiar razer of sorts, the blades able to move around at certain intervals. There were no buttons on it, so she assumed it had to be remotely controlled somehow. Not that she ever figured it out, since the automation took it right out of her hands and put it back onto the ground where she had found it. Exactly the same placement, actually. Maybe another system that the woman hadn't noticed. It wouldn't have been her first.

“I hope not. But… I am going to need some of it,” Jules said, finally done with all the preparations, and able to look at her with full attention on its face. “And since the other one has an extremely broken diagnostic system, there isn't really any telling what's wrong with it. I have to do a scan using my own tools, and then figure out the problems from there.”

That didn't sound good. Whatever had broken the other construct, to the point where it couldn't even tell what was wrong anymore, had to have been something of a hard hit. Just what had happened out there? From the vitals shown by Jared, it had been decided that questioning was delayed until he was in a more stable condition. They only knew that there weren't more of them and that he needed medical assistance. Nothing more. Nothing less.

But they would definitely know more soon, Cassandra was able to see the car moving into the parking lot. It had been obscured by the building around it, yet was now plain to see, out in the-

One of the windows was broken. Holes littered the size of it, hinting strongly at the fact that it hadn't been bashed in. Not like any normal human could do such a thing. Those windows were meant to be bullet-proof, to the point where it should have been near-impossible to break easily. Yet… Cassandra must have been wrong, else just how had it been broken?

The car doors had bullet holes on them. Not to the point where she could see through them, but they had been very clear shot at. Seeing as Jared had been out helping clean out the cultist base, Cassandra could only really see one option on how that might have happened. And she didn't like that assessment one bit, to the point where her fists clenched around the handles on the wheelchair. She actually felt the metal bend the slightest bit because of it. Maybe that was what allowed her to relax.

“Get ready to help your friend,” Cassandra ordered, as she moved the wheelchair over to the side with Jared. Jules did mutter something back, but she didn't pay much attention to it. The car was coming close to a stop, within a few meters from her. Those precious seconds were spent getting around to where Jared promptly stepped out, the man not even bothering to shut off the engine.

“I look like shit, I know,” Jared said, hands up, one of them pushing out the car door even more. The three steps he had to take to get to the wheelchair seemed extremely painful. The small spasm in the core was more than enough for Cassandra to take it just that more seriously. “No need to remind me of it.”

“I thought that your assessment didn't need to be said at all, actually,” Cass stated, doing her best to sound calm. There was no need to sound agitated after all. “Sit still for a moment. I believe you have deserved yourself some morphine.”

She took off the cap of the needle, as she manoeuvred the small syringe into the man’s shoulder. There was a slight wince even before the needle pricked the skin. Cassandra didn't truly believe the man was afraid of needles, leading to the suspicion that the injuries sustained were more than just a cracked rib or two. His right shoulder had been looking bigger than the other, now that she thought about it.

With morphine granted to the pained man, Cassandra began to move him inside. For that, there was a need to go around all the gear laid out on the ground for the automations use. And with this manoeuvring, the woman was given ample time to look at just what was going around on the robotic end.

She almost wished she hadn't, the sight not something she really needed to see. It looked like a poorly-performed suicide attempt, the upper part of the automaton's face having been removed entirely. The fact that it was still moving around its arms and legs according to Jules' commands just made it so much more surreal. On the ground, there were droplets of blue liquid lying around. The woman guessed it to be blood. The sight only grew so much more terrible from that. If not for preparation for such sights, she might have lost her stomach's contents.

They finally got inside the station. As luck would have it, they were forced to go through corridors upon corridors, the medical wing located on the far end of the station. It had apparently been designed with protection in mind, any attackers needing to go through everything else before they could even dream of getting to the wounded. Yet… that also meant that those brought to the medical wing had to spend the longest of times simply getting there.

That wasn't a problem normally, though. There was never anything truly severe put into the police’s medical wing. Anything above a broken bone was sent to the local hospital to be dealt with. Yet now that the hospital was out of business, there wasn't really anywhere else to go for emergency medical assistance. Cassandra wasn't sure how the designers hadn't been able to see it coming.

“That thing is more beat up than me, you know,” Jared muttered. Cass tried to shush him, muttering a few words about him not needing to talk to him. Yet the man blabbered on, seemingly not understanding the serious risks he was putting out just so that he could say meaningless words. “Took bullet after bullet for me. It did more than I would ever do for it without even hesitating.”

“That is something to think about in silence,” Cass encouraged, not wanting the man to puncture a lung from talking. She wouldn't hear the end of it, if that happened while she was moving him, and the woman knew it would be an extremely annoying process to make Jared survive the rest of the way there

Jared somehow listened to her at that. Maybe it was the morphine finally starting to take effect, or maybe it was something else. Cassandra wasn't too sure, yet she somehow couldn't have cared about it either way. Doors were opening up for them, and the next room over was a room they had been seeking for a long time.

The medical room wasn't the largest in the world, only able to hold eight patients at a time. Yet those eight patients had many things to keep them alive, the place geared top to bottom with things that were designed to prolong life for as long as humanly possible. It was quite the achievement to die in the place they stood in.

Vitals synched up with the systems in the room, and Cassandra was urged to move the patient over to a diagnostics machine. It was more commonly known as a very advanced and very uncomfortable bed. She had only tried to lie on such things once before, yet the time on it was quite unforgettable. Her back still hurt the slightest bit when she thought about it.

Nevertheless, there was no hesitating in getting Jared to feel the same pain. Urging the man up from the wheelchair, the two worked together to carefully get him down on the bed. Jared complained about not being able to breathe right when down completely, so the bed was tilted to allow him to nearly sit up. Yet that comment was enough to make her more than a little worried about what was going on inside.

“Don't worry about any internal bleeding, Cass,” Jared said. “That’s where the blood is supposed to be.”

Did she give him too much morphine? No… that couldn't have been it. She barely gave the normal dose. This was all the man’s own efforts to be funny, even if it sounded as terrible as it was. The smile wasn't even put on right, a clenched jaw not helping the look at all.

The man scanned from the furthest hair on his head to his toes repeatedly. It was like a sonar, searching through the body for any inconsistencies. And… Many of those flaws were indeed found. Jared himself wasn't able to see what the machine was printing out, but Cassandra was more than able to just see it. She directly observed warnings that accompanied it.

She really should have given him more painkillers. The tolerance of that man might have been high, but Cassandra knew that Jared must have been in a bad state even with the morphine. The things she was being told by the systems were not good.

“I have some good news for you,” Cass said, not looking at the man himself but the image showing his innards. “You are not going to die in the next few hours.”

“That doesn't sound bad from my end,” Jared said, before narrowing his eyes at her. “It actually sounds suspiciously good. Where’s the catch?”

“The bad news is that you would have been able to die from choking on your own blood if you did as much as use the brake too much on your way here,” Cass informed him. “Two of your lower ribs aren't looking that good. You’re gonna have to be put under until tomorrow so that it can be put back together, and… you're going to have to wear a rib protector for a few days.”

There was also a part of the machine that recommended a month of not working, yet Cassandra already knew that Grunwald would ignore that part. So… why even let Jared know of it, to begin with?

“That’s just great,” Jared stated. “Do you want me to give out the report before I get to be put under or would you mind waiting until tomorrow?”

Sending out a message to their shared superior, Cassandra got her answer quickly.

“Grunwald is coming over in a minute. I think you’ll be telling us everything now.”