Divinity Rescue Corps
84- Who Gets Humperdinck?

When the hood was removed and I was shocked at the bright sunlight still streaming down on me, it was to a completely different scene than before. I took a look around, tried to anyway, until a hand clamped onto my face and steered me back toward the gigantic and furious visage of Blake. Only gigantic because it was inches from mine, and only furious because that was Blake’s resting birch face.

“Oh,” I managed, through his iron grip smooshing the sides of my face. “Hey Lake.”

If Blake was a mountain of muscle before, he was the Everest of muscle now. His muscles had muscles. His neck had been eclipsed by the biggest fracking trapezius muscles I’d seen outside of a comic book. He looked impossible, like humans shouldn’t be able to manage this.

Because aside from his missing neck and gigantic traps, his trunk tapered down to a stacked and chiseled eight pack of abs.

“This little putz,” Blake hissed. “This is the Healer from the other team in town?”

“That’s right,” another familiar voice said from behind me. I started turning my head again, only to have Blake’s iron grip squeeze a little and begin what would certainly pop my head like a grape.

“Rat? Zat you?” What the hullabaloo was Drat doing here?

So Blake was the first person I’d met here who wasn’t enamored with the job and didn’t love seeing newbies… or he was just a dick. He had a thing for Regina, and she didn’t have a thing for him. That had made him real angry for some reason. It wasn’t like a guy with this kind of physique should have a problem getting women to sleep with him.

Drat’s soft curse was the confirmation I needed. He was here.

Okay, to put things together in my head: Blake had been given some kind of awful assignment after he’d used a special ability on me. When Timmy hadn’t gotten the job on my team, he’d either applied to be on Blake’s team or just deserted his post at the HQ. Which meant Timmy’s friends could be here too, the ones who did not like me much. They weren’t thrilled to be forced to clean up my mess in the saga of the God of Footfalls.

Fact: I had been taken, which meant they needed me alive. I doubted this was specifically so Blake could pound my skull into a paste on the ground here, but that was one possibility. What was far more likely was they needed something healed. They had someone who was ill or broken bones and needed that person fixed right away.

“Lake?” I asked, my face still very smooshed. The one thing I did not want was to antagonize the unstable and very muscular douche canoe. “Han oo eggo I hace?” Or, Can you let go my face in ‘unable to talk properly’.

“You are going to do what I ask, or things are going to get really ugly for you,” he breathed. His breath did not smell of peppermint and joy. “The number one thing you will not do is ask questions, or attempt to go running off.”

“O-hey,” I said, attempting to look as cute and harmless as possible with my face squished on either side and head immobilized.

“The number two thing you’re not going to do is begin to ask stupid questions. There are a couple of dangerous questions going around getting people hurt. Badly.”

He released my head, and I spent the next few seconds massaging my jaw.

Dangerous questions… for a second I considered the possibility that there was a god of asking questions and that this was yet another thing I needed to heal up, then gave myself a hard mental slap. What he meant was, asking questions around Blake was going to get me hurt, and that I should keep my trap shut. The less I understood and knew, the better.

Which was obviously bullshirt. I was going to find out everything I could as soon as I could.

“Now, this is what you are going to do. We have a member of our team who has himself some injuries he got while adventuring in this wild and dangerous land. You’re going to heal those injuries.”

I opened and closed my mouth several times.

“You know that you could have brought him to my team’s camp and I would have been happy to deal with this, with a fully stocked laboratory, heating element, cauldron, herbs and plant materials, and more importantly the solutions I need—“

Blake scowled down at me.

“—for creating potions, elixirs, and tinctures and such that can’t be easily made in this world and have to be imported from earth.”

“Rainer could just heal someone by touching them,” he said.

“Rainer is also level one million. You can take your injured team member back to him if you want instant healing with a touch, because I can’t do that.”

Baring his teeth at me made Blake look feral. Eyes narrowed, face pinched, muscles bulging, he appeared like a cornered animal. He hadn’t been taking the anti-magic pills.

In that moment I knew he was up to no good. Something bad was happening and he was going to just have me along as part of his group now. Maybe they would steal all my lab materials from the camp, maybe they would just try to get me to work without them, but Blake was off the reservation on this one. He was going against whatever HQ wanted him to do.

First, this meant he had no intention of letting me go. I would (and could) do the work he wanted me to do, but as long as I knew he wasn’t playing by HQ rules, I was a liability that would be better dead than spilling what I knew to anyone outside this circle. Now that I knew who he was, I wasn’t going to be allowed to go anywhere.

“How long has it been?” I asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“Since you took the anti-magic pill,” I said. “Two weeks? Longer?”

Blake’s ham fist crashed into his other hand with a sickening crunch. He then picked up a piece of firewood and literally crushed it with his bare hand. “I will not have you misunderstanding me, Fletcher. You are going to heal my people.”

What was his Physicality? Above 12, like Cinzy’s unbelievable Likability?

“Sure,” I said. “If I can. These are checks made with my skills and attributes, and those are made a heck of a lot easier with all the tools and materials.”

“He has an ability where he can breathe healing onto someone,” Drat said from somewhere behind me. Since Blake was the size of a barn door and he’d forbidden me from moving, I couldn’t see my Rogue, but I recognized his voice anywhere.

Blake’s open hand slap sent me to the ground. It was upside my head before I could register the motion. I wouldn’t be surprised if it broke the fracking sound barrier. I lost a good chunk of my HP on that one. I gritted my teeth and spent an immediate Durability token with Healer’s Resistance. I gained an immediate 3% to my physical damage resistance. Which gave me a plan I didn’t like much, but one that would work in the end.

“Should’ve led with that one, Fletcher. Would’ve saved you some pain. Now, let’s get you healing.”

***

“Who gets Humperdinck?” my father demanded.

I blinked at him. “I don’t understand.”

“Who kills Humperdinck?” he repeated. “Who?”

“Nobody,” I said, quoting one of my favorite childhood movies.

“At the end, who kills this Blake bastard? Is it Chrysta? Does she freeze him to death with her ghost powers or something? Does Larelle rip him in half from nuts to nape?”

“Nobody kills Humperdinck,” I repeated.

He threw up his oily, greasy hands. “Come on, kid! You can’t just have a gross and irredeemable villain character who doesn’t get his comeuppance. How’d you get him in the end?”

“Dad, I was there for weeks. You have to know, this is only three months into my stay. I’ve been there for six months… when I left Sara was just finding out she was pregnant, and now she looks like you could pop her with a pin. I have weeks with Blake and his people. They’re not fun.”

“Not my son,” he muttered, low enough that he thought I wouldn’t hear. But somebody didn’t have Eagle Eyes any longer.

“Hm?” I asked.

He moved deeper into his workshop and pretended to rummage through tools looking for the one he needed. “Injustice like that in front of your nose, my son wouldn’t let that kind of nonsense go unpunished.”

My heart ached for him a little there.

He took to wiping the engine grease off his hands and pointed at me holding the formerly blue rag. “You skip past all this nonsense with your mother. In fact, you might as well get through it all with me, and we’ll condense it all down to a couple sentences, then boom you’re practically back home.”

I pursed my lips in thought. “I… guess.”

“And then you tell me how long it took before your Rangers figured out where you were, and the team snuck you out of there under cover of night or what-have-you.”

“Dad—”

“And you also tell me how many people got really messed up in the fight between your people and Blake’s, and we’ll figure out how to soften the blow when your mother and Sare-bear hear this part.”

I didn’t think Mom and Sarah needed the blows softened. They were tough as hell, what with Mom going through chemo several times and Sarah having her ass kicked by at least one of her sleazeball exes.

I realized too late that my father was calling her Sare-bear again. Like she was twelve and hadn’t yet declared that she hated them.

***

The special ability Healer’s Breath worked like this.

Healer’s Breath

(Special Ability, Uncommon, active)

Make a Treatment check with Affinity (or spend an Affinity Token) and breathe on the target in order to administer a temporary treatment for any damaging ailment. The target is healed by 3-18 hit points over 6 seconds. Symptoms of the ailment are reduced in intensity by 50% for a day. May only be used on a target once per day.

The ability was specifically created so that it didn’t eliminate symptoms all together. If you had, let’s say, a coronavirus that ravaged the whole planet for a couple of years, my ability would keep people alive on a day-to-day basis. It would not cure them. It would not stop them from being miserable. It would heal them up, just a bit, and make their bodies capable of handling another day sick.

Luckily for a sickness like a coronavirus that ravaged the whole planet for a couple of years, the recovery was generally going to happen within two weeks. The human body had some defense against a coronavirus, even one that would kill millions worldwide.

This was not earth. These were not earth diseases, and the human body was not equipped to handle the sorts of diseases found on this planet. Lucky for us, infection from damage sources on this world were rare. Nakamamon didn’t typically poison, envenom, or inflict illnesses on us humans. They would if they had to, but this wasn’t hunt-or-be-hunted world, this was cute-and-cuddly-creature world.

They could affect humans with their emotions, like what had happened to the natives of Slinktrickle, and they could use mana to make all kinds of things happen.

Then there were the gods.

Divine beings had some pretty unique ways of self-destructing. As I’d seen so far, they had a short radius where their sphere of influence went haywire. From the mundane and ignorable—the God of Footfalls—to the embarrassing and mortifying—the God of Apparel—most of these were harmless, silly, and sometimes saucy. But they could bring some more serious problems, like whatever was going on in Glumpdumpkin.

This was why being a Healer was so important.

“Drat,” I said, “Report what’s happening here to camp. That’s an order.”

This time I wasn’t swatted on the side of the head—which hurt, if anyone was wondering—but kicked in the middle of the thigh. This one smarted. I clutched at it, not caring about the pain so much as the second opportunity to spend a Durability Token to grow my physical damage resistance. I was going to have to space these out, and somehow get my Durability Tokens back, or else I was just going to be a punching bag they wouldn’t allow to die.

Still, the damage was done. Now if Drat didn’t carry out my express order, he was going to have a lot of trouble getting experience points. Right now, this was all I could manage. In the future, if I had anything to say about it, he would find himself before Rus and the other high level HQ people.

What a cuntaluntagus.

After laying there and trying to ease the pain for a few minutes, I was ‘helped up’ by several people who had better control over their prodigious strength.

Now that I could actually get a look around, it appeared that Blake had more than a few other high Physicality Guardians with him. A lot of these were big white boys, but two were big black fellas, and one was a woman almost as thick and brutish as Larelle. They were all human.

What I recalled hearing about Blake was that he was sent out to do land surveys or magic surveys or Nakamamon surveys as part of a group of Wizards. Wizards were the ones who grabbed up xp from cataloguing things.

Weird that I couldn’t see a single Wizard.

Yet.

And I was pretty sure there was no way Blake had come out here with ten Guardians I could see. The question of Timmy remained an open one. Had he deserted his post as a runner of messages in HQ, or had he been ordered to bring the rest of Guardians out to rendezvous with Blake and company?

My money was on ‘something I couldn’t imagine yet’ going on here, and I just needed to keep my eyes open to suss out what.

And with that, I got to the first Wizard.

The first one I was taken to see was bruises all over. He lay there staring up at the ceiling of his tent and pointedly ignored what was some kind of awful wound on one leg. Blake wouldn’t fit in this tent, so another figure came into the large dome tent with me, the guy who was called Boss by Timmy.

“What happened here?” I asked.

“He doesn’t talk,” Boss said. Not that he was physically unable to talk, Boss delivered the warning in a tone that suggested he could talk, but wasn’t allowed.

Forking. Yikes.

Peeling away homemade bandages, sopping blood, made my patient hiss out several pained breaths. He also did that thing where he reaches out in an attempt to clutch at his wound, but also doesn’t want to touch it, so it looks like he’s trying to Kamehameha his wound back to normal with the force of a high ranked cultivator.

If only I were a Battle Healer. Pff, if that were the case I’d be teleporting around the place and blasting these people to pieces by igniting their internal stores of mana. Also it wouldn’t take days to heal things, but minutes.

I pulled myself out of fantasy land and got to work on the Wizard. Something had bitten him, and I would’ve laid money on it being one of those Geodiles.

“I’m a Healer,” I told him.

“I said he doesn’t talk,” Boss snapped.

“Well then we’ll have to be narrating all this to myself, and to give my poor mute patient some peace of mind, because one of the things I do when I’m stressed and in a pickle is talk a lot.” This was a lie but it came out smoothly. Still, there was a brief moment where I panicked, seeing the Deceit check come up.

This is Christopher about to earn himself a punch in the face.