Chapter 184: Infected (5)
Misha stared in disbelief, but she snapped out of her trance when she saw Corren's elbow move.
"Don't pull it out!" she shouted.
It was already too late. Corren jerked backward, the blade came free, and blood followed.
Pell fell forward.
Misha immediately caught him before his head struck the floor. She lowered him awkwardly onto the ground, both knees hitting hard enough that pain shot through her legs. Warm blood spread almost immediately beneath her hands when she pressed against the wound.
"Alaric!" She did not look up when she called him, because her attention had already narrowed entirely to Pell's breathing and the wound beneath her hands.
「 Elevated stress and fear levels detected. Emotional interference reduced. 」
Misha shifted the pressure point and watched the way Pell's chest rose.
Pell's fingers found her sleeve, they closed around the fabric.
"Stay still." Misha tightened pressure, though Pell flinched beneath her palms. "Look at me. Don't move."
His gaze found her mask. His eyes were huge and terrified. He tried to breathe and failed to draw enough air.
"You're alright," she said, and the lie left her automatically before she could stop it. She hated the sentence the moment it existed, but right now she knew that was all she could give.
His lips moved, blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth. "I-I'm not…"
Misha's chest tightened. She did not know, not yet. He might have been innocent, he might have been infected, or something might have been moving inside him at that exact moment while he begged her to believe he was human… but he was dying, and Misha refused to make him spend whatever remained of his life pleading his case to her.
"I know." Her voice softened, and she tightened one blood-slick hand around his shoulder. "I know."
Pell's grip tightened once more around her sleeve, then weakened.
Behind her, Corren's voice rose.
"That bastard is infected!" He stood three paces away with the sword hanging at his side, his face gone pale enough that his lips looked gray. "I know he is! You saw his hands!"
Ding!
The System chimed, clean and almost cheerful.
「 Incorrect Target Eliminated. 」
「 Quest Progress Unchanged. 」
「 Parasites Killed: 0 / 5 」
Pell's fingers slipped from Misha's sleeves.
She kept pressure on the wound for another few seconds anyway, though she already knew there was no point. Her hands stayed where they were because stopping felt too much like agreeing with what had just happened.
The blue translucent notification hovered above the room while blood spread beneath Pell's body in a widening pool.
Corren stared at the System.
"No…" His voice came out barely above a whisper, and he shook his head once as though the word itself might correct the display.
Nobody spoke, they were all staring at the windows in front of them.
"No, that's wrong. He had blood." He looked around, his breathing became quick and uneven, and the sword in his hand suddenly looked too heavy for him. "He did! I saw it!"
The people nearest him avoided his eyes.
Dorian walked toward him.
"Corren." His voice remained controlled, but his expression had gone grim.
Corren stepped backward.
"They can trick the System!" The thought appeared in his face before he finished saying it, and once spoken, he clung to it immediately. "We don't know what those things can do. Maybe the parasite left him before he died, or maybe the System can't tell once–"
"That wasn't blood," Misha cut him off. She finally lifted her hands from Pell's wound.
Corren looked at her. "You don't know that."
"No." Misha rose slowly, her knees stiff from the floor. "I don't."
For one second, something like relief touched his face.
Then she continued, "And that's the point. We didn't know."
His mouth tightened. "I thought–"
"Yes." She cut him off once more before he could finish, and her voice stayed low enough that nobody needed her to raise it. "You thought."
Corren flinched.
Misha took one step toward him. "You saw something under his nails and decided it was blood. Then you decided blood meant infected. Then he tried to get away from the person holding him against his will, and you decided that meant guilt too."
Corren swallowed hard. "I was protecting everyone."
What was the difference between protecting people and hurting someone because fear demanded action? Intent? Evidence? Outcome?
"Drop the sword." Dorian's shoulders remained still, but whatever patience he had possessed was gone.
Corren tightened his grip. "Dorian–"
"Drop it." The second command came even more softly, and somehow that made it harder to resist.
The man's fingers opened, and the sword struck the marbled floor.
Two Blackthorn members moved immediately, approaching from either side before removing the knife at Corren's belt and securing his arms without unnecessary force.
Corren did not resist them, he simply kept staring at Pell as though the dead man had somehow betrayed him by remaining innocent.
Misha looked around the room, nobody met her gaze for long. Then she noticed Alaric. He was still standing beside one of the pillars, exactly where he had been when she called for him earlier. He gave her a small shake of his head.
Her jaw tightened. She had been watching him since Floor Fourteen. Through every fight, every ambush, every time someone went down bleeding, Alaric had found some way to remain near the edge of the danger. He kept his abilities tucked safely and let everyone else bleed first.
At the beginning when she first met him, he supported when it suited him, and he healed when the situation threatened to become inconvenient for him. Ever since they joined others, she never saw him using his skills again.
Misha tried to be fair about it. A healer who could fully restore serious injuries was valuable, too valuable. Once people knew what he could do, they could easily start taking advantage of him and treat him more like an emergency resource that belonged to everyone.
She understood why someone might want to hide that. What she understood less was watching people die when he could have helped them.
By the time they reached Floor Seventeen, fifteen people had already been lost.
Not all of them could have been saved, Misha knew that. But some of them might have been, and that was the part she could not ignore.
A part of her still understood Alaric's reasoning, but another part of her was beginning to despise him even more for it.
Dorian stepped into the center of the hall.
"From now on, nobody acts on suspicion alone." He waited until the murmuring settled before continuing, making sure every face had turned toward him. "Any accusation goes through me, Misha, or Senna. No one draws a weapon unless there is an immediate threat. If someone is suspected, we restrain them first, gather what evidence we have, and discuss it before anything irreversible happens.
If the evidence becomes strong enough, then we decide together. If we act too quickly, we get another Pell. If we refuse to act at all, we may wake beside another Relva. So we do neither."
"What are we going to do with Corren then? He just killed Pell!" someone shouted from the crowd, the accusation carrying enough anger that several people agreed with him.
"You're telling us nobody acts on suspicion, but he gets to stand there after murdering someone?" Another joined.
Misha recognized the voice before she found the face. It belonged to the same man who had shouted that Pell was trying to escape.
His name was Anderson. He had come from Exodus with another cluster of survivors and had been unremarkable during the climb that Misha knew very little about him beyond the fact that he fought with a short spear, rarely volunteered for anything, and had spent most of the past four days positioning himself wherever the largest number of people happened to be gathered.
There was nothing inherently suspicious about any of that, until there was.
What if the Parasite could transfer from one body to another?
Misha's first assumption had been that it was hiding among the sixteen NPCs from Floor Seventeen. That made sense because of the quest. But if the parasite could abandon one host and move into another, then the original body no longer mattered.
The infected person standing in front of her might not have been infected when they entered the floor. Which meant narrowing the threat down to sixteen was useless. It could be anyone, even her.
Although for now, she was sure that it wasn't her. She had already enough souls controlling her body so she would know if something felt different inside her body.
Misha turned toward Anderson. When he met her faze, he flinched.
It was a small movement, barely anything. Most people probably would not have noticed it because half the room was still watching Dorian and some were staring at Pell's cold body, but Misha had been looking directly at Anderson. His shoulders jerked backward before he caught himself, and his eyes dropped briefly toward her blood covered hands before returning to the white mask.
Something in the back of her mind shifted. It was not certainty, but recognition without a conclusion.