The Steam Age: Gears and Bones

Chapter 6 Double Interference

Perfit looked up at Shabel.

"Your Honor, I have a plan, but I need your cooperation at the same time." Her speech was fast and clear. "These filamentous things only attach to the wound and surrounding tissue in the early stages of infection and have not yet invaded the deeper organs."

I can directly use human transmutation to pull them out of the wound.

However, during the removal process, they will cause a violent pull on the host's soul.

If your sacred words can protect his soul from being torn apart in that instant, we can block the infection on two levels simultaneously.

Sabel glanced at her.

That glance was brief, but Perfit saw something she hadn't anticipated in it—not hesitation, nor fear, but the habitual reassessment of a situation by a seasoned judge before making a judgment.

"Have you done this before?" Sabel asked.

"No," Perfit answered truthfully, "but I just saw its complete infection mechanism under the microscope. Both soul and body are involved; it's the only solution I can think of right now."

Sabel didn't ask any more questions.

She switched the emblem to her left hand, placed her right hand on the soldier's forehead, closed her eyes, and began to recite a passage of scripture that Perfit had never heard before.

This passage is not the same one used when suppressing the infected. Its tone is more even and lower, with a strange penetrating power.

Perfit noticed that the soldier's brow, which had been furrowed in pain, suddenly relaxed a little.

She didn't wait any longer.

She pressed her right hand back above the wound, her mental energy condensing into a beam that traveled along the wound deep into the other person's tissues.

In the perception field of the human body, those black filaments looked like clumps of fine threads wrapped around muscle fibers.

She carefully peeled them apart layer by layer, detaching them from the blood vessel walls and pulling them out from the fascial spaces.

Black, gelatinous substance began to seep from her fingertips, dripping onto the sterile gauze spread on the floor.

The filaments twisted violently the moment they left the body, each thread desperately trying to burrow back into the wound.

Pflick gave them no chance, picking them up one by one with the silver tweezers in his left hand and dropping them into a wide-mouthed glass bottle filled with hydrogen peroxide.

The filamentous material made a slight hissing sound as it fell into the bottle, then began to decompose, solidify, and eventually turn into a small clump of grayish-black flocculent sediment.

She could feel the filaments deep in the wound decreasing, but with each one pulled out, the soldier's breathing became more rapid.

His body was convulsing, not from pain, but because something deeper was being pulled.

As Perfit peeled away the last clump of black gelatinous substance, the soldier suddenly let out a suppressed scream and arched his back violently.

In that instant, Perfit clearly felt something crack open on the level of his soul.

It's not that the soul is torn apart, but rather that some foreign object attached to the surface of the soul is forcibly peeled off.

Sabel's verse finished its last syllable at that very moment.

She pressed the emblem to the soldier's forehead, and a faint silver-white light shone from the emblem's surface, lasting only about two seconds before quickly extinguishing.

But in those two seconds, the soldier's body relaxed, his breathing became steady again, and the blood seeping from his wound returned to its normal dark red color.

Perfit looked down at his hands, which were covered in black filaments, and remained silent for a brief moment before turning to another soldier.

The same process.

This time she was even faster, because the first operation had already allowed her to basically figure out the force and rhythm needed to peel off the filaments.

Sabel's teamwork also became more seamless.

As Perfit began the stripping, her prayers were already being recited.

After the second soldier's wound was treated, Perfit stood up, his legs feeling a little numb.

She put her gloves back on, walked to the wide-mouthed bottle, and looked down at it.

A layer of grayish-black flocculent sediment had accumulated at the bottom of the bottle, and it had completely lost its activity.

"I've never seen those two passages of scripture before." She turned to look at Sabel.

Sabel hung the holy emblem back on her chest, her face paler than before, but her voice remained deep and steady: "That is a requiem prayer passed down within the Inquisition, usually used only for the dying."

Its effect is not to expel evil, but to temporarily protect the soul of the dying person, preventing her from suffering additional pain in her final moments.

"So you used it to protect their souls as they were being torn apart, instead of attacking the filaments themselves."

"The attack was ineffective; your experiment just now proved that." Sabel looked down at her hand holding the Holy Symbol. "But protecting souls is what I can do."

The two exchanged a glance.

Perfit recalled the final judgment in the analysis given by the Emerald Book—that the holy water burned not its body, but the part of its soul that it parasitized.

But everything is very limited.

The torn fragments were not enough to kill it.

It was just a momentary interruption in the energy cycle.

What Sabel just did was fill the gap that had been stripped away with the protective power of the Requiem Prayer, which filled that moment of "interruption".

This is not about killing it, but about preventing it from tearing the host's soul apart along with it when it is removed.

The approach is correct.

But they need more data.

"How many people are on the infection list tonight?" Perfit asked.

"Besides the two soldiers we just saw, there are four researchers in the early stages of infection," Archibald's voice came from the doorway. He had been standing guard outside and hadn't come in. "Their symptoms are currently limited to pale skin and whispering auditory hallucinations; they haven't shown any aggressive behavior."

"Those four, handle them all tonight according to the same procedure as before." Perfit took a clean handkerchief from his pocket, wiping the remaining black glue from his fingers as he walked out. "I need your continued cooperation, Your Honor. At the current pace, it will probably take us about two hours."

Sabel followed behind her, her steps still steady, but the arm holding the Book of the Holy Word was visibly trembling—a sign of mental exhaustion.

Perfit noticed this, but she didn't ask.

Both she and Sabelle knew that in this battle against the blight, every bit of their strength had to be used only at the most crucial moment.

And tonight is far from over.

When the two walked out of the quarantine area, all the steam lamps in the corridor were already lit.

Perfit opened his palm under the light and found that his fingertips were still trembling slightly.

This is neither fear nor fatigue, but a physiological reaction left after mental energy has been frequently depleted in a short period of time.

She clenched and unclenched her fists several times before reopening the suitcase and taking out two bottles of medicine with different numbers.

She opened one of the bottles herself and drank it, then handed the other to Sabel.

"An energy-restoring potion," she explained simply, then walked forward. "The effects will last for about two hours. We'll all need to rest after two hours."