Something stirred Vic up. A wall was against her shadow armoured back.

  She slumped back up, hearing the end of another “…my lady?”

  Vic rubbed her face and ignored the notifications for the time being. She turned her face to the standing guy. The governor was holding a couple of papers in his hands, along a cup, that he handed to her. She took it. It smelt floral. Fuck, this wasn’t coffee at all. Whatever, better than nothing. She removed her shadow armour and took it in her hands. She drank the warm beverage. It tasted sort of flowery. No sugar.

  “…Thanks,” she awkwardly said in a quiet tone, even if she didn’t mean it at all. This stuff didn’t taste good at all. She dried her mouth with her sleeve.

  She got up, putting down the cup over one of the boxes in one swooping movement. She was leaving that there without touching it again. She’d take a snack before restarting “healing” the sick, though, as soon as he left. Nuh huh, not giving away the fact that she had a magical inventory. Unless… yeah, she could keep the lie going that it came from her coat, huh huh huh. The thought of randomly having random stuff pop op up from her coat’s pockets in front of people was incredibly compelling…

  She finished rubbing her eyes as the governor continued staring at her worriedly.

  “Ight, keep ‘em coming. How close are we to finishing up?” Vic said. At least halfway, right? A third. A good third. Just one more day. One more day and she’d be done and leave.

  “My lady, do you feel… alright? Any aches from the chest or the head?” he said. “You were… talking in your sleep. Or so I’ve been told.”

  “Was I now?” Vic said. She rubbed her eyes again. She glanced at her latest notifications. The game interface looked weird. Some boxes weren’t where they were supposed to be. She scrolled through the notifications. She only took notice of some.

  [You have successfully repelled a [Sun’s Apostle]]

  [Nightmare’s nightmare] has levelled up!

  [Nightmare’s nightmare] has levelled up!

  [Nightmare’s nightmare] has levelled up!

  Vic stared.

  Wasn’t that just chummy.

  “Yes, my lady. Proper bedding has been prepared for you in recently requisitioned quarters. They’re right at the corner of the street. You can go t…”

  “Oh yeah, I think I got visited by the god,” she said cracking her neck while stretching. “Must have been a forgettable experience.” Fucking hells, getting a thirty minutes long break of sleep on separated intervals just sucked. At least it’d get the job done. With this sort of rhythm she was going to get deep circles beneath her eyes the size of a swimming-pool. The governor was going to get some serious competition.

  “What,” he said.

  Vic glanced back. She reread the notification. Yeah. Yeah, right, it wasn’t the god itself that had done it, but one of its lackeys. Vic finished rubbing her eyes again. They felt dry.

  “Nevermind, it was one of its lackeys,” she said.

  “Should… Should we ask help from His Eminence? For you, he’d surely move hells and earth to-”

  Vic interrupted him by laughing heartily. As if he could actually do something remotely useful.

  “Please,” she said, abruptly deadpan. “The only reason I escaped that so called “mind control” is because I wanted it. He did nothing,” she said. Honestly, she really wanted his role in “saving her” to be reduced to nothing if he was really going around telling everyone that she’d been mindcontrolled. “It’s really pathetic that he’s lying about who did the real work.” No way was he going to be allowed to play the part of the knight in shining armour, not on her watch. That twig didn’t have the actual stature to wear fully plated armour. And he was even less capable of being the embodiment of an actual knight. Bro was the snivelling counsellor called “Snakeass Betrayus” in a fairy tale if anything, existing solely to betray the main hero in the final act to said hero’s betrayed, unnecessary, heroic surprise.

  The governor had been staring.

  “As you say, my lady,” he said neutrally. Damn it. Couldn’t read the guy. He was probably used to sucking up to… people, whatever. He looked tired.

  “Yeah, sure, anyway, you can probably tell whoever’s outside that I’m ready for the next one,” Vic said. The system they’d put it in place was at least efficient at what it did, which was to try to optimize the amount of people healed in the limited time they had while only having one individual capable of nuking the illness from the inside on a microscopic scale. She had becometh Death, the ultimate Antibiotic. Yeah, yeah, her magic sword had levelled quite a bit from doing this without stop. It’d been a bit disturbing to hear that they were actually giving up on some people because she wouldn’t have the time to do them all. It kind of made her seethe how she didn’t know how they were selecting the ones that were getting healed. Even the other priestesses like Trista and Elina who she’d been working with had no idea how they picked which people got selected for the queue. Or so they’d said. And Vic herself didn’t have the time to get herself up and ask about it without wasting time that could be used to help save someone.

  “…my lady?” he said. Vic blinked several times. Fuck, he’d been speaking to her. She’d spaced out.

  “You were saying? I’m not going to rest or whatever.” she said. She resisted yawning. Fucking-shit-ass, she needed sleep, but that would be for later, once this whole thing was settled waaay behind her.

  “I… was here to report on the hole,” he said jadedly, pointing at it. Ah. Yeah. The hole. The covered up thing in the corner of the room. The ominous dark hole. Yeah. “And yet, are you… alright?,” he said. It sounded awkward, like he didn’t know how to ask that. “You were asleep for an hour. The priestess outside did not want to interrupt it once she saw you in deep slumber. Should we… prolong the break?”

  The new priestess had done what? It was supposed to last thirty minutes only! For fuck’s sake! This was ruining the whole point of it all.

  “She shouldn’t have,” Vic said snappily. “No, no, yeah, there’s… I mean if I sleep people could die while I do it, so yeah whatever better finish off while I still can. Yeah, obviously,” Vic said, and saw herself be stared sternly at by the governor, before closing her mouth which had been just about to yawn.

  “My lady. With all due respect, if you don’t have enough rest, you risk making mistakes. We all want to avoid that,” he said.

  Vic didn’t want to sleep.

  “I don’t want to sleep,” she said. Something like an unhinged giggle came out from her throat. “People will die in that time. People are dying right now. You know I can’t afford that. That’s why I’ve started getting the hang of the technique so fast.” Mostly because it was repetitive and mind-numbing and trying to perfect the motion was all she had left to try to find a reason to maintain her focus. “I’ve perfected the whole thing by now. I’ll finish off and then properly sleep. You don’t get to decide, I do,” she finished.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  “My lady. Even if you continued at this rhythm, which is doubtful, you would be finished in a little less than a week. If you rested, it would roughly take ten days.” That didn’t sound right. “There will be deaths no matter what, even if you did your best. We can only try to do our best.”

  “That’s why I’m doing my best. Fuck you. Keep ’em coming,” she said. She wasn’t that slow. She put back on enough layers of shadow armour to gain the height that was needed to stare him eye to eye.

  He stared.

  “I cannot stop you, but I can stop the chain of command,” he said. “You will receive no help from the priesthood, and no one will continue sending the sick in and off. Every healer here gets time to rest. Myrilla will only be coming back to you in a few hours herself, as she’s been resting herself for a good few hours by now. Everyone requires rest,” he said, jadedly, with his deep circles beneath his eyes, like a hypocrite. “Get rest, my lady.”

  Vic stared. She didn’t need rest.

  “If you’re not helping, you’re not helping. You do realise I can just go walk around and enter your stupid stone cubicles and heal people one by one. You’d actually rather I do, uh, you’d rather have me do all of that, and waste time, rather than help me help you heal all those people? Are you really going to do that? And for what, really? Are you really going to just let people die because you’re too prideful to heal their wounds once I’ve extracted that infected mana? Would you really leave people bleeding because you’re too stubborn to admit they should be healed now rather than later?”

  Vic coughed. Fuck, her throat was dry from speaking. She went back to the floral beverage and drank it, not for the taste but for the water itself.

  “And if you spiked my drink to make me sleep, you’re in for a surprise,” she said, showing her back to the guy. Yeah, he’d be in for a surprise. No poisons worked on her. Urgh. Wait a minute.

  “Hey what’s the cup made of?” she asked, glancing back. It wasn’t the weird tea that put her off.

  “…It’s a blessed cup, to ensure the illness does not infect the beverage.”

  She spewed out the water.

  Ugh. She could guess whose divinity that was.

  “You have to tell your god his divinity tastes like shit,” she said.

  The governor didn’t reply.

  “Well! Send them in. I’m fucking… I work. Let me work,” she said. Her fingers twitched. She needed to remake her big magic sword through her tiny splinter. Where had she dropped it? She needed it to incant over it again. She needed to pinprick her finger too to get some blood on it.

  “My lady, I’ve come to report about that hole, nothing else,” he said so monotonously that she exhaustedly squinted. “I’ve checked old maps, and this room isn’t connected to the sewer system. There is no chance that the evil creature prowling in them can come up from it. Those storehouses are older than the sewer system. Mere ancient remnants of the old city. This used to be a butchery, or at least where cattle was retrieved before being processed,” he said. Kind of… morbidly funny that this room was now used to heal people. “Carrion might have been evacuated through there, back when the river’s level was higher, before the great canals were built to ensure the river didn’t flood during the coldest seasons,” he said, motioning towards where the hole was with his open hand. The other one was kept close to his side.

  Vic stared.

  What in hell’s trivia.

  Well, good for her. No goop monster was coming up from the depths of a toilet. Yay. Ugh.

  “The river was at a higher level a hundred years ago, and since then, several factors made them lose their previous use. Efforts from His Eminence to push the slaughter of cattle outside the city played a part in it. Although the cattle still is retrieved here after being brought from the countryside, there has been a mandate forbidding the killing of animals in the streets of the capital, and I’ve found a formal grievance from the Counsel of Lower Instances forbidding the use of this storehouse as a slaughterhouse five years ago after receiving complaints from the neighbourhood regarding the foul smell nearby, which still implies that it continued having this use some time ago.”

  Was he trying to make her fall asleep by doing this report? Was that what was going on?

  “You know I’m not going to fall asleep from hearing you speak like that. Your plan’s going to fail,” she said jadedly. Her eyes blinked like the ones of a lizard. All plans were doomed to go to shit with her. Hurray.

  He stared blankly.

  She raised a hand and shooed him away.

  “Okay, moving on, the hole’s safe and sound and disconnected from the sewer. You can leave now. Leave,” she said. She put a hand against the wall to stabilise herself. “I got the gist of what you were telling me.”

  He nodded, swiftly bowing, and left the room. Vic stared at that closed door for thirty seconds. Things were a bit fuzzy. The corners of her vision blurred. Wait a minute. Neither the new priestess nor the two aides were bringing in the sick. She slammed the door open, seeing the governor speak with a young priestess outside.

  She didn’t want to sleep.

  “HEY. Bring in the next ones,” Vic said. Something felt off.

  A new priestess, her back slightly turned towards her, turned her head away from her a tiny bit more. How non-confrontational. The governor bowed his head again.

  “You will be doing us all a disservice by working in these conditions,” he said wearily. His smile was pained. “The last priestess who worked with you told me you stabbed your purifying needle in healthy skin two times,” he said in an ever so slightly pissed off tone. Oh. Had… had she? She hadn’t even noticed. Was that… true? Why would he lie? Did he really want her to sleep that much? Would he lie for that? “You need sleep, my lady. If not for your own good, the ones of others,” he said quietly.

  “I DON’T want to sleep,” Vic spat. “Don’t you guys have- I don’t know, some sort of potion that could keep me awake to keep working? Don’t you see what’s at stake? You have to have that. How could you not have that? Are we in a civilisation or not? Shouldn’t you at least have some useful potions lying around that no one has been using for the past six months because that’s how things would work here??”

  His eyes raised back up to hers.

  “…If it’s akathnium you’re speaking of,” he said quietly, but his eyes were cold, “are you aware that that potion doesn’t reduce the need for sleep and only gives a day of respite at best? You’d feel the backlash the next day and would assuredly sleep all day while your body recuperates, my lady. This is a marathon, not a race,” he continued, quieter and quieter.

  No. No that was terribly wrong. Vic grimaced.

  “Aren’t you guys specialised in healing magic?” she said. She felt funny. “Come on. How can you not have a spell that helps out with lacking energy from sleeping?? You’re able to give a body back its stamina! With the… the… restoration spell. You can restore stamina. How can you not spam me with restoration magic to ensure I can heal people non-stop?!”

  “Restoration magic… doesn’t work that way, not that I know of,” the governor said. He was hesitating.

  “SHUT UP! TRYING TO SLEEP” someone screamed from somewhere, before wet coughs followed immediately afterwards, overtaking that voice. There were other sleepy groans. Someone was shuffling.

  Vic blankly stared nowhere. She was in the middle of that corridor of stones. Stone cubicles. She was in that storehouse. Dim torches lit the corridors.

  “…my lady, it’s nigh the hour of the witch,” he said quietly.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Vic said. Quietly. How was it already so late?

  He made a hesitant pacifying motion with his hand, palm shown towards her, yet keeping the hand close to his chest. Vic thought the whole motion was awkward.

  “Please rest,” he said. “His Eminence cannot come down there to reason with you,” he said. “I know the last priestess failed to convince you to…” Vic felt things slow down around her. No way did he think that he stood a higher chance at doing this.

  Her face grimaced on its own. Her face felt as dry as a tomato left too long in the sun.

  “Considering what he’s done so far, you’re more likely to manage to convince me than him,” she said, disgustedly.

  The governor stared back at her emptily. Oh. He’d been in the middle of speaking again. Vic opened her mouth but closed it. She reopened it again.

  “Let me just… heal a few more. Just a few more,” Vic said. She squeezed tightly her hands to ensure they wouldn’t shake because of the tight anxiety budding in her chest. Something awful was going to happen. Her guts were rarely wrong about those sorts of things. “Just a few more. Please.”

  She needed this. She couldn’t sleep.

  She brought a hand to her eyes. Fuck. Her voice had come out tiny and pathetic. She wasn’t supposed to plead. This wasn’t like her at all.

  “…as you wish, my lady. This apprentice will be your helper and lead you to your quarters once you decide to stop,” he said, like he didn’t know the girl’s name. The young priestess froze. Vic turned her head to her. She saw the apprentice glance at her and accidentally make eye contact.

  Vic stared. Karah wasn’t looking at her straight.

  Oh.

  That was Karah.