Sorry for the slow updates. I ended up breaking three of my fingers and can barely type right now.
On top of that, the medical bills have been pretty overwhelming. If you're able to support me, I'd really appreciate it. My Patreon is $10/month, and you'll get access to 20 chapters ahead.
https://www.patreon.com/cw/Thanarit
My name is Axel Crane.
No. Bone Saw.
I am a former Major General of the Azareth Empire. I have commanded battalions. I have walked into classified battlefields where the casualty rate was not a concern because the mission was the concern. I have personally killed more people than I am going to count.
I am telling you this so you understand the context when I say that the past several weeks have made me want to go back to the battlefield because at least there the horror was predictable.
My experience with this clinic is not over.
After Father resolved the Jiang Chen situation and everyone left the grafting room, I was going to come out of the closet and go about my business. Then another patient arrived.
A woman. She was hiding her real face under a wide-brimmed hat, a medical mask, and sunglasses. She sat in the reception chair and held herself carefully, the kind of stillness that comes from long practice.
I was under the reception desk this time. Being bony and all. It seemed like the considerate choice.
I observed.
Father spoke to her. She was composed. She answered his questions. Then he asked her to show him the situation directly.
She took off the hat.
What the fuck, I thought.
I have a full black obsidian skull for a face with red light in the eye sockets. I thought I understood where the limits of unsettling were. I thought I had a reasonable map of what could disturb me at this point in my life.
This woman had approximately thirty eyes growing across her entire scalp where her hair should be. Every one of them was open. Every one of them was moving independently. They were tracking different things in different directions simultaneously, and some of them turned toward where I was hiding under the desk.
She cannot see me, I told myself. She does not know I am here. Keep it together.
Three of the eyes rotated toward my exact position and held there.
I did not move.
I am a professional.
I have survived ambushes in three different countries. I once played dead for six hours while enemy scouts passed two meters away.
I can handle three eyeballs looking at me from across a reception desk.
They blinked.
All three of them. In sequence.
Fuck, I thought.
I remained very still.
She still does not know I am here, I told myself. This is fine. You are fine. You have a skeleton made of obsidian and a Law that kills anything that bleeds. Three fucking eyeballs on someone's head are not a threat.
Two more eyes rotated to join the first three.
This is fine, I thought. Everything is completely fine. What the fuck.
Then I thought: is she one of us? She does not feel like one of us. I can sense my siblings, a faint current. This woman gives me nothing. She is something else, something that has been near Father's level of power, and the contact was not clean.
Observe, I told myself. You are Bone Saw. You observe.
Father began his examination. I have seen the needle tongue procedure before. He inserts it into the patient's ear canal and reads what is there. I understand the mechanism. I accept it.
Then Father exploded.
His torso detonated from the shoulders down. The force of it was substantial. Blood spattered in several directions including toward the reception desk.
Some of it landed on me.
Father, I thought, crouched in the dark under the desk with someone else's flesh on my skull, what the hell kind of sick theater is this. You love scaring your patients so much you are literally killing yourself in front of them. What is wrong with you. You are truly something else.
I am scared. What the fuck.
Then Father began to reassemble.
His lower body was still intact, which I noted with relief. If that section had gone too and reassembled in the open air, I would not have known what to do with that from under a desk.
Father, I thought, I respect you. But please keep your lower body intact. For both our sakes.
The woman screamed. I would have screamed too. I screamed internally.
Father stood there with his upper body bare and said something to her in a calm voice. She eventually stopped screaming. He eventually found a shirt. The procedure continued and concluded with what appeared to be a note that Father gave her before she left.
She left looking slightly dazed but functional.
Father is apparently immune to shame.
I took a breath.
I went to the toilet and sat there for a while because some situations require sitting in a quiet room and doing nothing for several minutes. This was one of those situations.
Father was in the next stall. I could hear him.
The sound was unmistakable. Violent, repeated, the sound of a man whose body was rejecting something with considerable enthusiasm.
Blergh.
Haaaugh.
Blerghhhh.
A pause.
Haaaaaugh.
Father was puking. The man who had just casually detonated his own torso, reassembled it from scratch, and continued working through a complex head transplant procedure without missing a step, was in the toilet stall next to me throwing up.
Father, I thought, you just detonated your own upper body in front of a patient who was already frightened. You reassembled in front of her. You continued working. You did not apologize or explain the explosion in any meaningful way. You gave her a note and sent her home. And now you are in the toilet next to me being sick. What is the causal chain of events that produced you. What sequence of choices led to this moment. You are the most terrifying person I have ever encountered and I have personally met the Azareth Supreme Commander who executed prisoners by feeding them to his own gate monsters.
You are a maniac. I love you as a Father. I am frightened of you in all other contexts. These two things coexist inside me and I do not know what to do with them.
Father flushed and left.
I stayed for another two minutes.
Then I washed my hands.
. . .
I was washing my hands when the bang came from reception.
Lucy, the secretary. She had a box. She put it on the desk hard and it was eleven in the morning.
I went and hid in the reception locker.
The box contained human heads.
Living human heads.
All of them talking at once.
What, I thought, is wrong with this guild. I have done things that are in files that do not officially exist. I have seen things.
I have never seen this.
Who tortures human beings like this. The Azareth Empire at its most creative, at its absolute worst, never produced a box of talking heads. We were inefficient compared to this. We were amateurs.
Father appeared to be equally surprised, which was the only comfort available.
Then he picked up the box.
Good, I thought. He is removing it. He is taking it out of the building. This chapter closes here.
He walked into the grafting room.
Of course, I thought. Of course he did.
I hid in the grafting room closet.
Observe, I told myself. You observe.
What I observed was Father removing a head from the box and opening the skull with a bone saw, which I am named after, and removing the brain, and then peeling the face off.
Father, I thought, this is organ harvesting. This is the literal definition of organ harvesting. Have you changed your occupation? Have you pivoted? What the fuck happened to just being a doctor who gives people abilities? When did head removal enter the picture?
Then I watched him do this to five more heads.
Jesus Christ, I thought.
Then I watched him do the same procedure to the woman patient, including the part where he opened her skull and removed her brain and her face, and I was in a closet, crouching, holding very still, and I had been in this guild for one month.
I need to be clear, I thought, that what Father just did is remove a living person's head and replace it with a different head that has her face on it. I need to say that out loud in my head so I can confirm I am describing what actually happened. That is what happened. I watched it. What the fuck.
This is cyberpunk. We are in a cyberpunk story. Father is a ripperdoc. I do not know how else to process this. I genuinely do not.
Then the woman woke up.
She looked at the ceiling mirror.
She had her own face but a different skull and her eyes were normal now and she said something to Father and her voice was calm and she appeared to be fine, and Father said something back and she appeared to continue to be fine.
I was in a closet.
I was not fine.
Someone, I thought, save me. I am afraid of the doctor who reassembled me. His patients seem okay with all of this. I am not okay with any of this. I am hiding in a closet. There is blood on my skull from when Father exploded. That woman's face was briefly on a tray. I cannot process this. What the fuck is this place. What the fuck is any of this.
I'm scared. Someone please help me. I am begging.