Chapter 193: Emergency Room.
"Dear...!" Ikaris stopped walking, holding her hand over her heart by her sigil and staring at the ground as a sudden retching feeling hit her. She held her mouth and ran to the side by the bushes almost falling over the rails of their stairs as she brought up everything she had enjoyed back at the cafe.
"Ikaris!" Sol reached her side in record time, pulling up her hair and slightly resting his hand on her back.
"Was it the food?" He asked, looking around at Sara who held Henry jr away from them and then across the spacious lawn at a gardener who stopped and stared in concern as the bushes she had just pruned the previous day were puked all across.
"No, something terrible is happening to Dina and Arla!" Ikaris tried to stand straight again but held her chest in pain and hurled up even more leaving Sol with a shocked and almost desperate expression as he stared at her in disbelief.
"We saw them just a few hours ago, I'm attuned to their every emotion, I am sensing that they're fine right now, or rather I'm not sensing anything wrong, what are you talking about?" Sol asked, staring at her while his hand hovered and trembled. "There's no way something happened to them without my knowledge..." Sol denied what she had said.
"Go to them, find them, help them!" Ikaris spun and grabbed him violently by his shirt and Sol's breath shuddered and his chest caved when he saw a trickle of blood drip from her nose while her eyes fought back the crimson he sensed beneath them.
"I can't leave you, you're in pain-"
"...They need you more than I do right now, please, Master." Ikaris weakly pleaded with Sol and then leaned forward and fainted against him.
Sol sucked in another rigid breath, and every atom in his body began to violently tremble as he caught and righted her and then carefully raised her off the ground turning to Sara with a face so stoic and foreign the maid flinched and averted her gaze.
"Tell Usami to get over here right now and stay by Ikaris's side, Sara." Sol ordered, and like her shadows had come to life Sara glided over to him rushing to the doors and pushing them open.
"Henry, go home."
"Nobody's home yet-"
"I won't repeat myself." Sol looked down at the kid and watched the innocence get scared out of him as he was beheld by golden irises slowly rotating with a loud ringing in the air filling the entire estate from the ground floor to his study in the very back, the boy looked to Sara for help but her eyes had completely glazed over with black, scaring him even more.
Henry jr ran out as fast as his little legs could carry him hearing the doors slam shut as he sprinted across the courtyard and through the gates and then hightailed if down the street towards his house, not daring to look back.
"Sir," Sara called to Sol, but rather than an answer he looked away and hurried up the stairs taking Ikaris into their bedroom and gently resting her on her side, seeing her sweat and in a state of complete vulnerability as if all of her mana had simply vanished and she had become mortal, he watched her continuously replenish her reserves and saw them drain again.
"I'm going to get Arla and Dina." Sol looked at the maid while she wiped the sweat from Ikaris's face and pulled a small bottle of room temperature water from the kitchen through her shadows, pouring it on the napkin and wiping Ikaris's neck with an increasingly worried presence over the goddess.
"Sir she has a fever, she's burning up," Sara spoke up and immediately regretted uttering that sentence as she saw Sol's hair brightly flare up in gold and violently spinning rings appear, hovering before his chest and on his back.
"Ikaris-"
"Please, if you don't go now they will die!" Ikaris peered her eyes open and stared at Sol before curling her toes as another wave of pain invaded her body and knocked her out again.
"Go!" Sara snapped at him when she saw him looming forward hesitate to leave his wife in such a state. "I am here, and Usami has been notified she will arrive in another few minutes, go!" She snapped again, and Sol vanished like a thunderclap leaving a charred hole in the ground where he stood.
***
"Doctor, her heart rate is way above the average!" A nurse had Dina under a respirator and several ice packs around her head, neck and arms trying to cool her body as fast as possible.
"She's 140 over 98°F how the fuck is she even alive!?" The woman panicked looking at the monitors.
"This one's the same!" Another doctor called from a bed opposite of Dina with a respirator over Arla's face as well.
"I've never seen anything like this, her respiratory rate and blood pressure are high enough to kill a rhino several times over how hasn't she gone into cardiac arrest yet or had a stroke?" The doctor asked, picking up the cool pack that had gone warm and placing another cold one in its place.
"Where did they come from?" The leading doctor asked checking their monitors. "Why haven't we sedated them yet?"
"We can't, sir, the needles break!"
"What do you mean they break?"
"The needles all broke on their skin, we can't-"
"Don't be preposterous..." The doctor quickly opened up a close-by drawer and pulled out a fresh syringe loading it with sedatives and flicking the bubbles free before taking a calming breath and holding Dina's hand, but as soon as he touched her she unconsciously grabbed on to him and started squeezing.
Although by her standards it was weak the man screamed out in pain and released the syringe, falling to his knees and prying his hand away with a terrified stare at the unconscious girl.
"Is it some kind of drug, how is she so freakishly strong?" A third nurse present held the doctor and checked if he had any fractures from his deformed hand.
"We don't know yet, this one was bleeding from her nose but the blood samples are all checking negative for everything we test them against," Another doctor walked through the door.
Standing on the outside watching it close again was none other than Mark; the fellow art major from Dina's college.
"What would have happened if she hadn't left her phone, what if I hadn't decided to try catching them and giving it back?" He asked pacing across the hallway while his friend sat nervously on the bench behind him tapping her feet.
"Mark if you don't calm down they're gonna kick both of us out into the waiting area-"
"What the hell happened to them, they were perfectly fine when they left, but it's already been three hours and the doctors are all running back and forth unable to help them?" He looked at his friend just as the lights in the hospital flickered.
"Sir, sir! You can't just go down here!" A nurse from the reception desk came running down while the two of them watched a tall man ignore her as he stormed the hallway towards them.
"Sir if you don't stop I'm calling security!" The nurse called again, but Sol wasn't even hearing her, with the amount of power he had to be holding back for the good of everyone around him, he had to walk through the doors and down the halls like a regular person or risk killing everyone with cosmic levels of mana by simply breathing.
"Sir!" The nurse called again. "Please!"
Time seemed to slow for Mark as his and Sol's eyes met for a brief moment before Sol pushed the doors of the emergency room open and barged in causing every soul to pause as he stopped and stared at Dina and Arla on the cusp of complete mana depletion; minutes away from death.
It wasn't a wonder he couldn't sense them property earlier, their slave contracts relied on mana, but evidently every bit of mana in their bodies had been forcefully drained and they were both going through severe backlash, had Ikaris not felt it through an alternate connection they would have both died before he even realised what was happening.
"Damnit." Sol hissed through his teeth.
"Who the hell are you?" The doctor asked when Sol stepped further in, but instead of an answer he was met with a death glare as this strange man reached for the unconscious girl's hand and held on to her, staring down with a gentle expression contrasting the violence his rigid appearance promised.
"I want answers." Sol looked down at Dina as he fed his mana into her and all her vitals and abnormalities started rapidly returming to their average levels.
Before anyone could say or do anything to react to the miracle they had just witnessed Sol stepped over to Arla and raised her off the bed setting her down next to Dina as the latter suddenly sat up and held her head with a hiss and groan.
"Who did this?" Sol asked looking between the two of them with his hands on either sides of their faces caressing their cheeks as they both realised the danger they had been in having been at death's door.
"M-mas, master!" Arla launched herself at him first pushing him to the floor and crying loudly as he held on to her while Dina slowly slipped off the bed and pressed her forehead against his before kissing his neck and then hugging him as well.
"I could do nothing to help myself, it was awful, all of my mana, every last bit, gone in an instant, I prayed for your arrival, but you never came~!" Arla continued to cry like a child causing Dina to hold on to her as well.
"Who the hell is this guy, I've never seen him before." Mark stared through the doors after he and his friend had pushed them slightly open, he would have said more but his heart took a spear when Dina held on to Sol's cheeks and kissed him several times before she too broke down crying.
"What the fuck...?"