I Clean Gods to Pay the Rent

0014 Turning It Back Around (2-in-1)

    MIRA!!!

    The moment the frail girl dropped, Cassius — watching through his scope from the building diagonally opposite — went cold from the inside out, like he'd fallen through ice.

    His brain hadn't even gotten as far as the concept of death. His consciousness just blanked. His heart felt clamped in a huge invisible fist, the blood supply to his whole body seemingly cut on the spot, and his hands and feet went stiff and numb, frozen solid.

    The whole world went dead quiet in that instant. Everything in it froze on one small, pale face — thin lips pressed tight, falling, helpless — and the only thing left that Cassius could do was watch, powerless, as his sister tumbled from on high, despair brimming in her eyes!

    "BOOM!!!"

    An ear-splitting roar rolled down most of the street. Hard on its heels came the wide crackle of shattering glass, and the low, grating shriek of metal warping under monstrous force.

    More than half the hospital's windows blew out from the sheer violence of the impact. The fourth-floor outer wall took a colossal hit too: the metal skeleton embedded in it buckled and jutted out, blasting the outer brickwork in every direction and strewing the street below with rubble.

    But to Cassius's overwhelming, ecstatic joy, Mira — in free fall a heartbeat ago — hadn't hit the ground after all. She had stopped, dead, between the first floor and the street.

    She'd been knocked out by the sheer force of it, and a shard of burst glass had apparently sliced her thigh — but through his scope, Cassius could still see her chest heaving hard. Alive. At minimum, alive!

    Thank you... thank you! I owe you my life!

    But just as Cassius was watching joyfully while Mira was lowered gently to the ground, silently showering the dependable bandaged woman with gratitude, the Soot Bishop narrowed its eyes and said, brow twisting:

    'This is bad. We're in trouble now.'

    He was right!

    The Soot Bishop's words jolted Cassius awake with a chill. The impact point — that had been Mira's room! The bandaged woman was still inside!

    Catching Mira proved she was alive, and her soul was as steady as ever. But after a collision on that scale, could she really have come out without a scratch?

    'I'm not saying Agnes is in danger — relax! When it comes to staying alive, that bandaged woman ranks with the best in the whole Oddity Cleanup Bureau. You could drop dead and she'd probably still be ticking.'

    Sensing the strange ripple in Cassius's soul, the Soot Bishop shook its head and explained unprompted:

    'What I'm saying is, this business isn't normal. That runaway Contaminated most likely didn't appear "naturally." Odds are, he knows the Oddity Cleanup Bureau exists.'

    Now that it said so... yeah, that actually checked out!

    Cassius's face tightened, and he spotted the wrongness too.

    A hospital that grew a soul at the exact moment the bandaged woman stepped inside. An impact that landed on the intensive care ward precisely when she had Mira hoisted out the window and couldn't dodge. It was all far too deliberate — as if the whole attack existed for no other purpose than to hit her.

    So... there might be accomplices? And me staying out here isn't necessarily safe either, huh?

    Once Mira had been untied from the curtain by the nurse who went down first and carried off on her unsteady back, Cassius let out a breath of relief. Then, wrestling down the cowardly urge to run, he kept searching for the runaway Contaminated's soul and asked through gritted teeth:

    "Do you... do WE — does the Oddity Cleanup Bureau have enemies?"

    'Oh, plenty.'

    The Soot Bishop's lips peeled into a grin, and it let out a low heh:

    'Demons, evil bells, the Contaminated, Grand Bells, moonfolk, prehumans — I can't even count all your Bureau's mortal enemies! If they ever joined hands, the Oddity Cleanup Bureau could be ten times stronger and still get stamped out!

    'The good news is, your Bureau's enemies aren't on the same side either — the hate between them runs even deeper. Whenever one faction looks about to pull it off, another will quietly trip them up from behind, or even openly sell their weaknesses to the Oddity Cleanup Bureau. So for the time being, you're safe.'

    Having explained the Bureau's situation, the Soot Bishop looked at Cassius — whose face was going from bad to worse — and said, cheery as ever:

    'Right, enough. That stuff's not something a newbie like you gets to worry about. Eyes on your job!

    'As for Agnes — she's a Bureau veteran; she'll have smelled that something was off too, guaranteed. You just keep track of where those souls are, and when it's your moment to act, put a round in on time. That's all!'

    ...

    Sure enough, there was something wrong with this Contaminated!

    Earlier than even the Soot Bishop's guess — from the very instant those bolts blew out for no reason and the metal corner cabinet came smashing in — the bandaged woman had already worked it out.

    From the lobby up to the fourth floor, nothing abnormal had happened the entire way. And the attack had come at the one moment she was busy rescuing Cassius's sister, the one moment she couldn't dodge.

    Which meant this runaway Contaminated absolutely knew the Oddity Cleanup Bureau existed — knew plain ordinary attacks were useless against her kind — and had picked this exact moment to strike on purpose.

    But even knowing what he intended, the bandaged woman hadn't let go, hadn't dodged. She'd simply stood there in silence and eaten the hit, full on.

    Under that blow, her thighbone folded backward from the force, her whole lumbar spine was smashed out of shape, and she collapsed, boneless, across the tilted windowsill.

    Dead?

    At some point or other, the young nurse wedged in the outer wall — the one who'd been wailing and begging to be saved — had gone calm again, and was surveying the bandaged woman's condition with flat, indifferent eyes.

    Fractures all over. Eyes with no focus behind them. Chest caved in by the stone sill. The bandages that had wrapped her body scattered across the floor. Dead, most likely, and staying that way.

    Like some freakish gecko, she "swam" a couple of strokes up the outer wall, slid out through the interior wall beside the window, and walked over to the bandaged woman. With her mangled, bloodied right hand, she peeled off the mask and checked for breath.

    Dead, all right.

    She tossed the bloodied raven mask aside with a flicker of distaste and was just turning to leave when she noticed, with some surprise, that even dead, the bandaged woman's hand still had the curtain in an iron grip — knuckles bleached white, not loosening an inch.

    Heh... with a body like hers, even jumping out the window probably wouldn't have killed her. And she didn't even bother to dodge... What a pointless thing to be stubborn about.

    Leaning out for a glance below, she spotted the older nurse frantically untying the curtain. The young nurse curled her lip, scooped a huge shard of glass off the windowsill, and hurled it down with all her strength!

    "So it was you all along!"

    Just before the shard left her hand, a calm, level voice sounded from behind her.

    And in her look of pure, horrified disbelief, the mass of bandages strewn across the floor reared up like pythons that had just caught the scent, wound themselves death-grip tight around the young nurse's arms, and wrenched — hard — against the joints!

    "Creeeak!"

    "AAAHHH!!!"

    One look at the young nurse — every joint of her arms and legs hauled out of socket, her whole body trussed up into the approximate shape of a ball — and the bandaged woman shook her head.

    "Setting a trap like this to ambush me — you've got ideas, I'll give you that. The execution's a bit crude, though."

    Bracing a hand against the corner cabinet and shoving hard, she flung the three-hundred-plus-pound murder weapon aside, then rose to her feet unhurried and began feeding her own knocked-loose bones back into place, one by one.

    Even her chest, dented in by the windowsill, swelled slowly back out with each strong breath. If not for all the blood still soaked into the bandages, you'd swear she'd never taken a hit at all.

    "By the way — the reason those two decided to go out the window, that was your doing too, wasn't it? The plan was passable, I suppose, but there were way too many holes in it."

    The bandaged woman walked over to the nurse-ball, crouched, and unwound the bandage wound over her mouth. Her gaze stayed calm and even as she asked:

    "A person who gives herself away this easily doesn't look like someone with the brains to design a kill-trap. Somebody taught you all this.

    "Be a good brainless little thing. If you don't want to hurt, then tell me straight — who's behind you?"

    "Heh... heheh!"

    After a few hard breaths, the captured young nurse kept her eyes nailed to the bandaged woman and snarled, face twisting:

    "YOU'RE the stupid one! You don't really think you've caught me, do you? This woman is nothing but a puppet under my control. You're already finished!"

    As if to prove her point, the moment she finished speaking, the young nurse's expression flipped — first bewilderment at being tied up, then, as the agony in her limbs apparently registered, half a syllable of a scream before she fainted dead away from the pain, right there on the spot.

    Wrong person?

    The bandaged woman's eyebrow rose at that. She was just about to test whether the girl was faking her faint — when a set of heavy footsteps came thudding up outside the intensive care ward.

    "Believe me now?"

    Picking his way through the patients littering the floor and stopping outside the intensive care ward, the fat chief — the very man who'd assigned Mira to that ward — said with a cold sneer:

    "Every person in this hospital is my tool! If I want it, I can make any of them do whatever I like! You don't even know who I am — you could never catch me!

    "Also, stupid woman — look down at your own feet. Look properly."

    He pointed at the bandaged woman's feet, already sunk beneath the floor. The "fat chief" tilted up his chins — a whole mountain range of them — and declared, lording it over her:

    "Beyond controlling this hospital, my true ability is to devour the sick! Within the bounds of this hospital, once you're infected, there's no resisting the whole hospital's swallowing you up.

    "Do you understand now? The reason I didn't touch you before wasn't that I didn't want to — it's that you never once took off that anti-contagion mask. But I've just taken your mask off you! You are FINISHED!"

    "..."

    Six straight years of caution — and she'd still slipped up in the end?

    Looking at the laughing fat chief, the bandaged woman — her lower half already swallowed by the floor — gave her feet an experimental flex, felt them refuse to answer, and sighed in annoyance.

    Granted, she could shred this man into confetti in about one second. But as he'd said himself, none of these people were his real body; doing so would accomplish nothing. This time, she had well and truly been played.

    She could have blocked the cabinet with her bandages — but to bait him out, she'd chosen to tank it with her undying body. And instead of the real thing, she'd landed a decoy and lost the one mask that shut his power down. Stupid. Genuinely, sincerely stupid.

    Mm... and besides the fishing, there was another reason she'd chosen to tank it: she'd wanted to sell the misery a little, put the new kid in her debt, and make it easier to ask for his help down the line.

    Instead, the whole gambit had gone sideways. In the end she'd probably have to ask HIM to call for backup — and once the Director heard about it, three days from now, who knew how hard she'd be laughed at...

    She shook her head, resigned. In a rather sour mood and in no state to chat, she simply closed her eyes and opted out of the conversation. Apparently that wasn't satisfying enough for him, though: beyond the fat chief, he rounded up several more doctors and nurses, who stood sneering outside the ward, jeering at her one line at a time:

    "You think you're smart? You are abysmally stupid!"

    "There are more than five hundred people in this building. Once I've absorbed every last one, my power grows stronger still!"

    "Heh heh — weren't you dying to know who's moving against your Oddity Cleanup Bureau?"

    "Not that I mind telling you! The one preparing to strike at you is a magnificent Grand Bell!"

    Hm?

    At that, the bandaged woman — all set to go silent for three days and wait for her teammates to haul her out — felt an eyelid twitch even as her heart leapt with joy.

    This man was... even more of an idiot than she'd dared hope!

    Babbling the trigger conditions of his own power was one thing — but blabbing who was behind him too? Honestly, if the Grand Bell that chose him ever learned how stupid this man was, it'd probably descend on the spot just to butcher him personally.

    Utterly unaware that his IQ had already cratered in the bandaged woman's private estimation, the "fat chief" towered over his half-sunken opponent, threw both arms skyward in a sun-embracing pose, and proclaimed, eyes blazing with fervor:

    "Hear me, stupid woman! My god was born from the chao—"

    The bandaged woman had her ears pricked, straining to catch this supremely important piece of intel — when, for some reason, the dozen-plus doctors and nurses before her all froze at once, then dropped flat to the floor in perfect unison, as if on command. And the lower half that had been locked inside the flooring was, eerily, "spat" right back out.

    And by the time she raised her head, still blinking in a daze — from the rooftop of the department store diagonally across from the hospital came, right on cue, the ear-splitting crack of ruptured air...

    "BANG!"

    ...

    'Nice shot, kid.'

    Watching the murky soul on the hospital's sixth floor snuff out in an instant, the Soot Bishop smacked its lips with something close to envy, then beamed out its praise:

    "That's near three hundred meters, and you still dropped him with one round. You might just have a real knack for guns!"

    A knack... no, definitely not. Half of that lucky hit was the bandaged woman repositioning him in advance, which took most of the aiming difficulty off the table — the other half was the buff from his built-in cheat codes.

    Cassius shook his head soundlessly — just got lucky — then looked up at his badge slots, where two badges had just gone dark, their gray-black gleam fading.

    The work-efficiency boost from [Employee, Money-Back Guarantee] stacked with the accuracy bump from [Apprentice Gunner, Ammo on His Own Dime], and the temp badge [Employee, Money-Back Guarantee]

    Both badges had fired off simultaneously in the instant before he pulled the trigger, and his hand, touched by a flash of inspiration, had pressed down just so, raising the muzzle by about two millimeters.

    And that tiny lift — the nail that might only have wounded the target rose just enough, and killed him dead in one hit!

    As for how he'd known which one was the target...

    'This Contaminated's brain doesn't seem to work very well.'

    With a regretful glance at the spot where the sinful soul had dispersed, the Soot Bishop said, struggling to hold back a laugh:

    'The poor fool probably doesn't know that while he's controlling someone, the controlled person's soul-wave becomes exactly identical to his own.

    'If he'd only ever controlled one person, fine — even watching only the souls dark at heart, sifting him out of six or seven hundred people would have been no easy job.'

    "But he had to go and do it again and again — even seized control of a whole pack of them and had them surround Agnes... the veteran. Once you've got a heap of souls all waving in perfect unison, that does rather stand out."

    Picking up where the Soot Bishop left off, Cassius — dead serious — couldn't help pressing his lips together at the faintly ridiculous memory, and added:

    "Find the souls with matching waves, and the only one who never went up to the fourth floor is naturally the real Contaminated... Oh, right — I remember you saying the Oddity Cleanup Bureau has performance stats too?"

    'It does! And there are extra perks on top.'

    The Soot Bishop nodded along eagerly, and from the excited look of the thing, if it had anything left below the neck, it would probably have cheerfully given Cassius a big thumbs-up.

    'Three hours into the job, and under yours truly's expert guidance no less, you've already found and shot dead a Contaminated — and rescued a trapped veteran on top of it! The reward will be BIG, no doubt about it!

    'Oh, and — hahahaha! Yours truly cooperated beautifully this time, clean and tidy work start to finish. Even that red-haired broad, dreadful as she is, will have to treat me a little better now, won't she?'