“Doc! Doc! We need yer help!”

I was still early in the morning when Ivy opened the door of the clinic. Although Peridot still lived upstairs, the first floor of Oliver’s houses had actually been turned into a doctor’s office. With several rooms for patients, a few Wordless assistants and interns from the teenagers around the village or from nearby villages. Aside from Klein, there was actually another Doctor who came over from Kale Town recently.

“Sheriff Saul and Deputy Yarkona! What happened?!”

“We got ambushed by Bandits! No time for pleasantries! My partner’s dyin’!” Saul pulled the unconscious girl into the house and quickly brought her to the nearest bed in the closest room. Aside from the shrapnel in her shoulder and the mangled hand, she had a lot of soot, burns and scrapes everywhere.

“Your foot’s bleeding!” One of the interns, a young woman, screamed in shock and knelt down to help him take off his bloody cowboy boot. The damage to his foot was so severe that it would be a miracle if his toes could be saved. He also lost a lot of blood already.

“Thanks Dear…” The old man breathed heavily and coughed a few times as he sat down on a chair and let the girl start cleaning off his foot. She couldn’t stitch it up or fix it herself, but cleaning was no problem. There were plenty of injuries in the mine that were even more serious than this, so they were pretty professional by now.

“I’ll be right back. Sidney, don’t touch the pieces of metal or stone.” Ivy left the room and walked down the hallway. As she passed an empty storage room, she saw a green glow and stopped.

“Sorry… Ivy…”

Hearing that familiar voice, she trembled and whispered, “Barry? Are you in there? What’s wrong?”

“Ivy… Run… Hide… No, time…”

“Barry?” Ivy looked around the closet but only saw some medical supplies like bandages, empty syringes and plastic bottles of isopropyl alcohol. She looked up at the vent and didn’t notice anything or hear anything else.

“Ivy? What’s going on? I heard that bastard Saul shouting!” Klein patted her on the shoulder and she jumped up, yelping loudly.

“Damn it, Klein, you scared the hell outta me!”

“Hahaha~! Sorry, but seriously, what’s wrong?”

The Nurse held her bulging chest with one hand and breathed a long sigh, “Nothing. Just, Saul and Yarkona got attacked by Bandits. Saul might lose his foot. Yarkona… You’ll have to see for yourself. I’m not a Doctor.”

“I’m not really that kinda Doctor either.” Klein rolled his brown eyes and complained, “I specialize in infectious diseases, not surgery.”

Even though he said that, Klein still dressed in a white lab-coat he conjured up and headed over to deal with the emergency seriously. When he saw the old man passed out in the chair, then looked at the bleeding foot, he shook his head and focused on the young woman instead. It’s not that Yarkona was more likely to survive or that Saul was fine… It was sheerly based on personal preferences.

“Here. Just wrap the foot up in these bandages and we’ll deal with it later.” Klein handed over the bandages to ‘Sidney’ and started examining the unconscious woman. Ivy took off the girl’s dirty jacket and shirt, revealing the severity of her shoulder injury. There were also many tiny fragments of metal embedded in her skin in various places.

“These are… Ur-uh, Greenstone metal?” Klein frowned as he removed the small pieces with tweezers at a superhuman speed. He rubbed some ointment onto the injuries and they healed rapidly, but much slower than he expected. Then he quickly took out the biggest piece of shrapnel from her shoulder and at an amazing speed, he started stitching up the wound from the inside to the outside. Then he injected a blue liquid into her neck, causing the injury to heal at a rapid pace… But then something strange happened.

“No… Shit!” He watched as a big bulge formed around the newly healed area… It didn’t stop, but continued to spread up her neck, across her chest. A pulsating lump of flesh. Then her breasts and face also started showing strange mutations. More importantly, her throat swelled up and she couldn’t breathe anymore.

“No, no, damn it!” Klein cursed as he moved his hands rapidly, slicing off those dangerous areas with an incredibly sharp scalpel he conjured! Ivy could see a blur, but Sidney couldn’t even see his movements at all!

“Stop! Stop! Stop!” 

Even though he removed hundreds of small and large lumps, new flesh started to fill the missing spaces! In the end, it only stopped when she couldn’t breathe for a few minutes and suffocated to death…

“Doc… Doctor Klein… I think he’s dead…”

“Of course she’s dead! Shit!”

“No… Not her… Him.” Sidney spoke in a quiet voice, she was a young blonde-haired, blue eyed woman. About the same height as Klein, but she hunched over most of the time.

“Saul? Ugh… Damn it. This is gonna be annoying to deal with…” Klein sighed dramatically as he saw the old man with his dry, cracked lips open. The Sheriff’s eyes were clothes and he looked like he might only be sleeping. But his pale face revealed just how much blood he lost already.

“Daddy!”

“I have to go!” Klein ignored the nightmarish scene in the room and made his bloody lab coat disappear.

“Wait, Doctor, where are you going?!” Ivy shouted as she followed him out of the room, but his speed was so fast that she could only watch him disappear a moment later. Instead, she was suddenly attracted by a bright green light at the other end of the hallway. She took off her bloody latex gloves and tossed them in the trash, before making them disappear completely. Then she ran down the hallway towards the green light.

“Hello?!” She opened the closed basement door and walked down the creaking stairs… When she was at the bottom, the door slammed shut!

“Sidney?! Are you up there messing with me?!”

“Ivy… Quick… No… Time…”

“Barry?! You’re really here?!” She walked over to one of the empty stone walls and pushed it with all her strength. Eventually it turned slowly and she was able to reach the secret compartment inside, which actually led down into a deep mine tunnel.

Down there, she saw a familiar figure in the distance. A short, smiling young man, with a shiny bald head and a long black beard. He waved at her, so she ran down the tunnel to try and catch up with him. A few minutes later, she was panting and out of breath, but she still couldn’t catch up with her elusive husband!

“Barry! This isn’t funny!”

“I’m… Sorry… I love you, Ivy…”

“I love you too, but why are you sorry?” Ivy finally got close enough to notice something wrong, no, maybe she just didn’t want to believe what she saw in the first place. When she was only a few meters away in the dark tunnel, she finally realized that the only visible light was coming from her husband’s glowing green semi-transparent body.

“I couldn’t… Give you a baby.”

“What are you talking about? We have plenty of time. Right? Hehe~! We’re still really young…” Ivy sniffled and her eyes teared up as she reached out to touch his face, but he just turned into wisps of glowing dust.

“What happened… Barry… What happened? Was it… Was it those bastards?! Saul and Yarkona?!”

“Hide… Hide, Ivy… Please… Just hide!”