The irregur tempo of crashing footfalls echoed in from the distance rapidly, a single metallic cw forcing itself below the slowly rising door to the workshop and yanking it up and out of the way as its owner cmbered inside, finally yanking the goggles back up to their familiar perch atop her forehead.

  “Oh, welcome back--”

  One of the usual guards had jumped to their feet as someone had began forcing their way inside, only for their posture to rex on seeing the familiar metal tentacles of the makeshift workshop’s current tenant slipping inside.

  Their greeting was neither noticed nor reciprocated however, one of those shiny tendrils shoving them out of the way as its owner stormed past them, only barely giving them time to notice the savagely beaten body they carried along with them.

  Mari raced through the facility, heavy, chrome limbs carrying the small girl along as she pushed herself past the rest of the staff present, not slowing down at all as she forced them out of her path.

  She eventually reached her destination, sliding to a halt before pushing into the medical wing, already pushed the staff within away as she cleared space.

  “Everyone out, now!”

  “I… y-yes ma’am…!”

  Not wanting to challenge the living weapon while she was clearly frantic, the room’s other occupants quickly made their exit, Mari smming the door to the room shut behind them as the st one of them left.

  She carefully sprawled Beelze’s body out on a table after pushing the other tools and equipment left out on it onto the floor carelessly, other limbs already gathering fistfuls of first aid supplies from every corner of the room.

  Mari pressed the back of her flesh-and-bone right hand against the side of her neck, checking her vitals as best she could while she prepared to attempt to stabilize her.

  Her heartbeat was erratic and her breathing was bored, but she was still somehow alive, even after nearly getting partially reduced to kibble.

  Her every appendage worked fast, wrapping a heavy strip of torn cloth around the gory stump of her left leg before tying a heavy knot around it, fashioning a makeshift tourniquet as best as she could manage to stem the river of viscera still leaking from the massive wound.

  It only took seconds for the dense fabric to begin staining red, but even then it still managed to hold most of it in, cutting off the flow of blood that covered them both on their way here.

  She had some amount of medical training, mostly just enough to take care of her own maintenance needs, her own broken body necessitating constant upkeep to prevent her myriad of integrated systems from breaking down, with her comparatively fewer biological bits not faring all that much better on most days.

  Still though, treating injuries from limb loss was a topic she was very familiar with, and muscle memory took over as she gathered up drug cocktails she had prepared for her own use, strapping various biological monitoring systems onto her as she worked.

  And as she worked, there was a very small, polite knock at the door to the treatment room she’d procured, the sound just barely loud enough to not be drowned out under the constant noise of medical equipment moving to and fro.

  Mari ignored it entirely, her focus fully dedicated to keeping the short-sighted idiot ying in front of her from bleeding out.

  There was a small pause before the knock rang out once more, still just as soft and polite as it had been the first time, completely opposite the frantic speed of the room’s current occupant.

  A vein twitched in her forehead, annoyance at the incompetent staff that had been forced upon her like babysitters bubbling up to the surface as whoever this was refused to take a fucking hint.

  Another short pause before that same exact knock echoed though the room for a third time, the bare, tiny scraps of patience Mari was able to muster at the best of times being trampled over as she snapped amidst her extremely time-sensitive work.

  “Whoever the hell that is, I’m going to shove you headfirst into the goddamn garbage disposal and feed whatever the fuck is left of you to my fucking fish if you don’t take a goddamn hint already…!!!”

  There was silence, the constant repeating knock finally stopping as Mari’s shrill voice barked at the uninvited guest, leaving her panting and furious for a few moments longer before she resumed working on the wounded woman before her.

  Heart rate monitor, IV drips of the pre-prepared medical cocktails, a myriad of other gauges and systems to keep her condition mostly stable, slowly assembling a fortress of pstic and metal around her as she--

  There was a quiet click, the door to the room opening behind her as the one who had stood outside knocking just earlier, in lieu of being invited to enter, simply deigned to show themselves in.

  Annoyance boiled over inside of her, one of her limbs releasing the tray of medical implements it had been, syringes and scalpels and other tiny metal tools cttering to the ground below as she spun around, swinging the thick chrome limb at the uninvited guest as her attention tore around to face them.

  “Didn’t you hear a single fucking word I just sa--”

  The massive steel club halted in midair, servos protesting violently as their owner compelled them to stop in pce inches from smashing against the skull of the room’s newest entrant, all of the anger in Mari’s screeching voice fading away into weak muttering, her eyes wide as she was startled back to reality.

  “…M-Mistress… I… apologize for not…”

  The woman standing in the doorway didn’t bother even sparing a gnce at the oversized weapon that had very nearly decapitated her, neatly pulling the door closed again behind her and stepping into the room proper, eyes fixed on Beelze’s battered, barely-alive form on the table before her.

  “With all the commotion you stirred up on your hasty return, I thought it best to see what had you so worked up. I had thought to scold you for causing too much of a stir and bothering my peace and quiet, but… I see now the rush was at least somewhat justified.”

  She was the very picture of professionalism as she strode calmly past her towering mechanical subordinate, fiery red hair pulled up into a perfectly maintained bun with not a single hair out of pce, a pair of designer gsses framing cold, emotionless green eyes, a jacket and skirt of a soft grey material hanging overtop of a button-down shirt and tie.

  Brushing past Mari as she attempted to recover from her frozen state, the woman moved to the side of the makeshift operating table alongside her, eyes coldly scanning over the beaten, unconscious body spread out atop it.

  “Hm. I’d considered her to be decently competent at holding her own in a fight, so either my own judgments were mispced, or she’s gone and picked a fight with something substantially out of her league.”

  She turned to face Mari once more, her expression not having shifted even slightly since she stepped in, jade eyes burrowing into the self-appointed medic.

  “Is she well enough to speak? I would like to hear the expnation for… all of this from her own mouth.”

  “She’s… n-no, she’s lost too much blood on the way here, and her vitals are erratic at best. She’s not gonna be fit to speak for days at least at this rate, probably…”

  The older woman paused for a moment, making a quiet noise of mild intrigue before turning her attention back towards Beelze once more, surveying her other subordinate’s abused and beaten form id out before her.

  She pced a single hand against her side, slowly running her fingers along her, feeling the weak warmth of her skin as the other woman struggled to stay alive.

  Her hand ran down her side until it reached down her left thigh, holding onto the thin remnants of her ravaged limb a few inches above where the remainder of it had been ripped away.

  She gave it a gentle, testing squeeze, feeling the flow of blood underneath the pallid skin slowly coursing past, so much of it now staining the table and floor around her.

  And without a word she raised her middle finger alone, stabbing it back downwards, her nail tearing through her flesh like paper as she buried the digit into her shattered limb several knuckles deep.

  Beelze’s vitals all skyrocketed as she was stabbed into with a surgeon’s precision, wailing loudly as she violently convulsed, screaming in pain as she was wracked with mind-shatteringly severe pain throughout her entire body.

  Mari frantically moved to restrain her, not daring to stop her Mistress for fear of earning herself further punishment, instead trying to ensure her patient’s filing wasn’t able to further injure her.

  Her unconscious, agonized convulsions dragged on for minutes on end, their Mistress completely ignoring the pain she was causing her as she simply kept her finger sunk into her blood-soaked flesh, her other fingers tightening down on her leg to keep her from pulling it out of her grip.

  Eventually, the convulsions and the pained screaming both stopped, her body once more going limp against the table below, the older woman slowly pulling her middle finger out from the newly opened wound, blood dribbling off of it as she held it outstretched towards Mari, waiting.

  Mari eventually pulled herself off of Beelze as she realized she’d stopped writhing about, slow to notice the proffered middle finger aimed towards her but eventually grabbing handfuls of towels and diligently wiping the bodily fluids off of her pristine skin.

  “And how is her condition now?”

  The mechanical jellyfish snapped her attention back to the gauges and monitors hooked into her patient, checking them one by one as she verified how well she was doing after the torturous st few minutes.

  “…she’s almost entirely stable again. Still very low on blood, but… she should be able to speak in just a moment, Mistress, allow me to get her woken up.”

  Her vitals were all nearly perfect, the dispys showing her current condition as nearly perfect, almost like she’d never been injured to begin with.

  Mari gingerly pressed the tip of a syringe into one of the vials she’d gathered earlier and filled it with the faint blue medical compound within, flicking the needle a few times with her metallic hand before allowing her biological one to slowly press the tip into the side of Beelze’s neck.

  Her body trembled as the chemicals were injected into her, eliciting another pained groan before her eyelids began to flutter, weakly opening them as the bright light overhead nearly blinded her.

  “I… where…?”

  “You are currently on an operating table in our little engineer’s workshop, and I would hear a report on the events preceding your arrival here.”

  Her woozy and unfocused expression instantly snapped to attention as she heard her Mistress’s words gracing her senses, no amount of residual aching pain enough to deter her from speaking up.

  “…Mistress…! Of course, I would love nothing more. Though I must apologize in advance if my words seem… confused.”

  “I am not interested in excuses or expnations, merely your retelling of events.”

  “Of course, I apologize for my btant foolishness in speaking out of turn.”

  She cleared her throat, attempting to hold herself up with a measure of decorum her battered form could not match in its current state.

  “I… I was simply carrying out my assignment as you had instructed me to, Mistress. Up until the point one of the Library’s magical girls arrived to interrupt me--”

  “One of them? I would have thought perhaps those twins of theirs could drive you back to some degree, but a lone opponent reduced you to this…? Perhaps reviving you was a mistake on my part.”

  “N-No, the lone magical girl was no issue at all… but… before I could rid myself of that minor annoyance, some other… thing arrived.”

  A single of their Mistress’s eyebrows raised ever so slightly, her stony expression otherwise not budging whatsoever.

  “Thing…? Your excuses grow ever more eborate, even when I thought you of all people to be above wasting my time--”

  “N-No, Mistress, I saw it myself as well. It’s… whatever that thing was, it’s what took the rest of her leg before I could get her out… it would have eaten the rest of her too if I hadn’t pulled her out of the way.”

  Her expression softened ever so slightly as Mari also stepped forward to vouch for her superior, their Mistress’s eyes looking back between them both.

  “…well, I would hope you both would know better than to try and lie to my face. Therefore, I would hear a proper expnation of what this thing of yours is.”

  She inspected the middle finger of her right hand, ensuring not a drop of viscera remained to stain her skin before csping her hands together behind her, exercising her infinite patience as she awaited the justifications of her seemingly incapable subordinates.

  Beelze spoke up first, clearly still severely pained from her earlier treatment and pushing herself to speak through sheer blind devotion to the woman in front of her.

  “I find myself unsure of how best to describe it… as long as I have been here, this city has remained wholly devoid of the beasts that pgue other parts of the world, and yet that is all I believe this could have been. Some manner of… unchecked feral monster, escaped into the city. Your city, Mistress.”

  “Yeah, it was… I dunno, it was hard to get a good look at it, but… probably ten feet or so tall…? Massive thing, skinless and bleeding constantly, way too many eyes…”

  “It vaguely resembled some manner of hound, though graciously I have never had the displeasure of bearing witness to such a beast before.”

  “So… the both of you were driven off by a… particurly rge dog, seemingly already grievously wounded? Am I correct?”

  “I made multiple attempts at dispatching it as it first appeared, and it had little resistance to my flies, but… that unholy beast was possessed by something. Each wound I inflicted upon it was restored as quickly as it had been dealt. It regrew an entire limb in seconds and kept moving even after having its every organ ripped from its body…”

  Beelze shivered unconsciously as she reyed what she could about the creature, while Mari’s own expression slowly shifted as she listened back.

  “That’s… hmm.”

  Their Mistress turned her eyes to the pondering girl, expression still unchanging.

  “You seem to have come to some manner of conclusion, Mari.”

  “Well, it’s… when she described it back like that… I dunno, it reminded me of that fucker from the other day. Hard to kill little shit, kept putting herself back together over and over again…”

  “Hmm…”

  Her interest seemed mildly piqued now, turning her attention back towards her wounded devotee.

  “Did you detect anything… simir to one of the Library’s transformation trinkets from that creature, by any chance…?”

  “I… hmm.”

  She wracked her brain, resting her eyes as the fuzzy details of the creature’s appearance tried to organize themselves in her mind.

  Mari’s eyes widened as she pieced together what she meant by the question.

  “Wait… w-wait, no, I thought those stupid little toys of those just changed their clothes? Y-You’re not seriously telling me they can--”

  “No, the toys the Library pys could do nothing resembling what Beelze has described to me, as watered down and feeble as they are. However…”

  “…now that you mention it, my Mistress… yes, yes I do recall hearing that absurd chant of theirs, only just barely. I’d paid it no mind before, but…”

  Beelze’s voice trailed off slowly, and Mari went silent as well, slowly grasping the situation themselves that their superior had pieced together.

  An expression that had remained almost perfectly static and unwavering for the entire time either of them had known her finally slipped, the corners of her lips turning upwards just barely.

  Reina F. Lase smiled for the first time in a long, long time, ice-cold features warming ever so slightly.

  “…well now. Where did you find that…?~”