John looked at the former sacred site with one open eye. He only had the package of contact lenses in his inventory, so this was the best he had been able to do. Unsurprisingly, the entire thing was a wreck. Mostly the floor, which was probably the least valuable part of the structure. It had been reduced from one massive stone to diced and shattered chunks John could quite easily see working to cobble a street.

A massive gap at one side, with molten stone and charred wood at the edges, indicated where Sigmund had presumably used his finishing move. Now, John didn’t see a corpse, but he did hear talking and spied Eliza moment later. ‘Or Thana,’ John reminded himself, approaching very slowly and with Mana Protection active, what little good that would do him.

The figure standing still in the middle of the arena did have hair down to her waist, so an awakening of Thana had clearly happened. She was also naked, albeit only in the ‘doesn’t wear clothes’ sense, since all her naughty bits were hidden under bone plating. Her face was entirely visible, which was a good sign, as was that her skin had the usual sickly pale colour rather than white as paper.

What really made John wonder was that he hadn’t been noticed yet. Either or, the two people inside that body both had senses far above anything reasonable. They should have noticed him already. ‘Oh hey, there’s an assurance that I haven’t been followed all this time,’ John thought, finding it unlikely that Eliza would have missed even that level of invisibility for a long time. “Hello?” he carefully called out.

The pale girl’s head suddenly jerked around, dots and lines fought a little bit for supremacy, then stopped at four lines. “Oh, thank fuck,” Eliza gasped and walked towards him. “The she-cunt was really annoying me. I waited as close to the centre of the grave as I could, which was fucking creepy by the way,” she pointed at the crater where something had made a U-turn and left a molten trench. “Did I do good, daddy?”

“You know, just this once, I am letting you get away with that one,” John smiled wryly and put a hand on her head. “Yeah, you did good.” The Gamer looked around. “Where is Sigmund?”

“Yeah… about that… me and Thana kind of had a catfight and the fucker got away,” Eliza made a grimace and John’s gut felt like it got filled with ice cubes.

“Unharmed?” he asked quickly. If that was the case, he had sacrificed Eliza’s potential separation for absolutely nothing.

“Well, if you don’t count the torn liver, the missing arm,” she pointed at the limb John had overlooked until now, lodged away between two cracks, “and the eyes, ironically enough. Also, all the other small shit. We only got into a fight when we were about a quarter through torturing him.”

“Ah,” John breathed a bit more easefully after that. Still not as good as a death, but miles better than what he had just feared. “Yeah, that’s on me in all due likelihood. I let Seminaris slip away, so she would have been able to teleport him out… you think they could have retrieved one of the eyeballs?”

“Uhm…” Eliza thought. “First one got skewered, so I don’t think so, second one maybe? Fuck me, didn’t really think about where we tossed that thing. Just happy Thana didn’t eat it, you know what the creepy bitch does… also, why does it sound like you dealt with Seminaris by design.”

“Because… well, now it’s time to come clean… because I knew Sigmund was in the area,” John said and Eliza grew very quiet all of a sudden. Not that unexpected, all he could do was apologize over it. “I am very sorry. I didn’t want you to fight in the city if there was a chance that he would go elsewhere. At the same time, I selfishly arranged everything so he would fight Thana. I decided to bet on the lowest chance so I could win even if the higher probability came true,” he gave her a little bow. “I am really sorry.”

“You used me as a tool?” Eliza asked in a very neutral tone. “You used ME as a tool?!” she repeated with more outrage, glaring upwards in John’s one working eye. Nine lines, that was all John needed to try and step backwards. Ally or not, right now Thana was within the Mana Protection bubble, so it couldn’t protect him.

A lightning fast snap and suddenly he had her teeth in his neck. Unsurprisingly, the goddess of genocide was unamused about this development. What did catch John off-guard, however, was that he was being bitten. Skewered, yes, all the time, eviscerated even, but Thana had never been able to bite anybody. What had happened in Rome had created such an adversity against that in Eliza that John had assumed Thana wouldn’t be able to do that without immediately ousting herself from the driver’s seat.

The immense pain on the left side of his neck said otherwise. Touch of Humanity’s Bane was applied as per usual, but John just wrapped his arms around the girl. Since he was already wounded, there was little reason to try to get any further away. “Shhhh,” he tried to calm his Eliza out of the rabid monstrosity. “It’s going to be fine. Yes, I used you, I am sorry. I was afraid that, if I told you everything, you would storm down the street in search of him. I needed to at least try and separate you and Thana, or I couldn’t have lived with myself. I didn’t convince Sigmund to come here. Although I have reason to believe someone else did.”

His shirt was already ruined, two mountain climbs and getting stabbed did that, so the blood sinking into the linen also wasn’t a problem. Over time, even the pain got somewhat okay. It took Eliza like three minutes to get back in control and remove her teeth. “I am so fucking sorry,” she blabbered immediately.

“Not a problem. Gamer’s Body will fix it in a second,” John said and smiled. His expression turned a bit sore when the pain lasted, then downright worried when it persisted for the entire time it took for him to give Eliza something to rinse out her mouth with and for her to do so. He brought his fingers to his neck and carefully touched the deep bite mark. Looking at his finger with his one lens yielded the result he could already feel. “Well, that’s not good. That’s not good at all.”

_______________________________________________________________________

“So, you have been bleeding for AN HOUR now?” Elu asked as she put a bandage around John. Last time he had needed one of those had been because Frank and his buddies had taken a ‘football exercise’ too far. Probably the only time Frank had actually gotten punished, because it had been that overboard.

“Yeah…” John was looking at himself through the replacement sphere. The pressurizing cloth was already red. “Not even leaving the barrier fixed it. It might have if I got it somewhere public, but that’s just theorycrafting.”

“How are you so calm?” Ahanu asked as John reached for the glass of orange juice they had poured for him. Thankfully, the mobile home was pretty stocked with refreshments.

“Because I stacked pretty well on Endurance,” the Gamer answered after putting the glass back down. “Okay, sure, right now I am not regenerating Health, so that’s pretty bad, but I am only losing 30 hp an hour,” he quickly threw the numbers together again. “It’s going to take me over three days to bleed out. Not quite worried yet.” He looked over to Eliza. “Especially since I have the cure here, at least theoretically.”

“Choke on your own respiratory functions,” Thana hissed, and the blood mage still largely in control put a hand in front of her mouth. After a few seconds, she took it away again.

“I can’t push her down again…” Eliza said, not for the first time. “I thought with you around that wouldn’t be a problem, but fuck me, she isn’t going away. Fuck… FUCK! Stop making John bleed, please!” the pretty little psycho sounded genuinely desperate.

“Halt!” the Gamer raised his hand. “Don’t negotiate with her yet. That’s REALLY the last-ditch effort.” He looked over to the two Natives. “Long shot, but the ritual is probably out of question now, right?”

“We could try, but since she has advanced to a stage where she can surface to speak basically freely… the chances are almost doubtlessly zero,” Ahanu confirmed.

“Okay, so that’s out,” John sighed. He saw three more options to maybe solve this little bleed-out. One, negotiate with Thana to lift the debuff. There was no telling what she would even want, but it, given who she was, couldn’t be anything good. Two, Eliza managed to somehow get a handle on it. Three, they sacrificed a copious number of blanks in an attempt to purge it.

Needless to say, the middle option was the best one.

“Eliza,” John therefore moved onto encouragement tactics. The loving variety hadn’t worked, so it was time for the opposite approach. “I want you to realize that…”

“I know, I fucking love you, but I can’t fucking figure it out! It’s like she… grew accustomed to the antidote or something.”

“You made me a failure, your human emotions disgust me less the more I have to live with them,” Thana growled that answer back.

John, in the meanwhile, shook his head. “No, listen. You realize that we’re going to go home soon, yes?”

“Yes…?”

“And that everyone else is going to come home as well so we can tell them what happened, yes?”

“The shit you getting at?”

“Do YOU want to be the one to tell Aclysia that I am bleeding out?”

Eliza suddenly sat so straight one could have used her to draw a perfect line. “FUCK!” she screamed and immediately scrambled to enter some meditative state. While the weaponized maid had no tools to actually harm Eliza, especially since the white-haired creation would die with John, there was no doubt that the nagging and food denial in those last few hours would be almost enough for the blood mage to wish she was back in the tank in the Bloodfallen’s base.

“By the by, this,” he pointed at the wound, “is also good news for us.”

“Why?” Elu asked.

“Because I wasn’t the only one hurt by Thana today,” John told her and poured himself a new glass. “If this bitemark lasts so persistently, what do you think is the condition Sigmund is in right now?” he put the jug down and raised his glass. “My bet is something beyond agony.”

Ahanu and Elu both made a bit unwilling face. “I would have preferred it to deliver him a swift death,” the Chieftain-Elect carefully stated his opinion. “Even the wrongdoers shouldn’t suffer unnecessarily.”

Normally, John would have been totally on board with that. However, with Sigmund’s particularly egregious track record and list of things he had ruined for the Gamer, he did not feel the bad conscience quite as prominently.

“Isn’t there a risk that she will lift the curse from Sigmund just to get back at you?” Elu suggested.

“If there is one thing I am absolutely certain of,” John shook his head, “it’s the utter hatred Thana has for every last man, woman and child out there.”

“Eliza, you did something!” John informed her and the blood mage opened her eyes again.

“The fuck you talking about, it’s still there!” she exclaimed, only to be proven differently a second later, when Gamer’s Body kicked back in. It was immediately visible on the bandages by the sudden cease of blood flow. “Oh, thank fuck,” she gasped and relaxed in her seat. The leather pants John had given her created a humorous noise as she slid down the couch and halfway under the table. “That was difficult enough. I had to like… go around her and try to seal that connection my dumbass self.”

“So she is still there?” John undid the fresh bandages as he asked.

“Dumb bitch is still right on the surface, yes,” Eliza stated. “Why, it’s gone no- FUCK!”

John had pulled the stained cloth off and revealed two rows of bite marks. “Well, that’s permanent scar number three,” he sighed. “Can’t say I don’t deserve this one though. Seems like, since we can’t completely seal Thana anymore, we can’t completely seal her healing adverse effects either.”

Rather than agree, Eliza clicked her tongue in an annoyed fashion, then slapped herself. “This is going to take a while to get used to…”

“Yeah… but given the overall improvement of our situation, I will take a permanent love bite,” John joked with a smile. Really, he was quite happy with today.