Chương 24: Chapter Twenty-Four: A Familiar Face, In Strange Circumstances

Everything had gone strange and slow and far away, as things did when losing too much blood too fast. But had she started hallucinating so soon? She could barely move but somehow managed to turn her head in the direction of that voice. That could not be who she thought it was. A familiar shape made its way through the infestation of demons. He was tall, upright and looked like a man who enjoyed the occasional dessert with his tea.

The weight he carried sat easy on him, as he moved unhurried, picking his way across wet grass and blood without once looking down to place his feet. It was nothing like the frantic demeanor of a man walking into danger.

"Hyde?" she whispered, feeling strange as the Hollow stood frozen in place above her. It felt very much like sleep paralysis, with her unable to move and her demons above her. The figure nodded, the doctor's favorite dark grey long coat fluttering with the motion.

"Why would you be here," she heard herself say, confused, the words coming out thick and slurred.

"You should run. Leave." Maybe-Hyde sighed and walked straight into the horde instead. The demons parted for him. Dozens of Flickers and Shades ran over each other in an attempt to open a path for this human. They writhed, like a frustrated bee hive, their edges becoming less and less solid but made no sound at all, making Alice wonder whether she had become deaf. Half-way through the man's walk, the Hollow above her finally moved, stepping back and away, like a scolded pet. No, not a pet, Alice realized, but prey.

When he reached close enough for her to make out his features, Alice's delirious state had transformed into something far more reflective. And sad. This man had dark hair, grey only at the temples. Pale blue eyes that should have read as warm but did not, not now, and a plain face she had trusted without reservation for months and had never, until this exact moment, questioned. She watched him come and could not stop the thought from continuing, ragged and urgent under the haze of blood loss, Who was Hyde?

and Why is he here? and How? How did he know? She was watching it happen and could barely believe it. The ring of Flickers and Shades drew back from his path the way water drew back from oil. And did they look afraid? How was he able to–? He stopped in front of her and went down on one knee in the wet grass and set his bag down beside him.

"You should be more careful," he scolded, picking out bright tonics and potions from his bag.

"Hyde," she managed, but he shushed her.

"Mm." He rummaged around his bag as if their every move wasn't being watched by hundreds of shadow monsters, their eyes glinting ominously all the while. He drew out a strip of clean linen, then paused over her leg, or what remained of it, with a placid expression.

"You lost your leg," he said, quietly, and did not ask what had happened to it. Alice remained silent. Hyde continued, "Bite marks in your shoulders and hands. Have you lost sensation elsewhere?" She could not answer that. She was looking past him, at the ring of things that had been trying and almost succeeding in killing her, but were now standing very still and very far back, and she thought, with the last clear corner of her mind, what makes a demon afraid? This story originates from a different website.

Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there." Observe", she breathed, not caring if Hyde heard. [Observe] – Active. Nothing showed up. No level. No class. Not even his name. Where every other thing she had ever turned the skill toward had given her something, even Hartley, with the level gap of a whole rank between them, Hyde returned only a single flat line of text floating uselessly in the dark: RESTRICTED. She stared at it.

Then, beneath it, a second line: Unable to [Observe] target at current rank. What rank was Hyde even? He was higher than a Nota? How much higher? Even though she didn't expect anything to come out of it, out of something closer to spite than expectation, she tried to expand it anyway. It worked. As a result of a Unique Skill, target is immune to standard perception and investigation-class skills. A most unfortunate turn for you, is it not?

The second line sat there in the same gold-bordered text as everything else, but it read as the System enjoying itself. It had been some time since she had seen the System use such a sarcastic tone, and that probably meant something but she was not in the state of mind to parse through those clues now. As for the Unique Skill, she did not know what it was, but could guess at it being a special tier that very few people had based on the name alone. She watched him pour tonic after tonic on her leg.

"Are we really friends?" She asked him out of nowhere.

"What do you think?" He asked in return, without pausing his hands. [Threat Detection] – Passive. She understood now that some part of her had known the answer before the rest of her caught up. At some point, the lantern had died out completely. Was she dying? Could Hyde save her, even if he wanted to?

"I was afraid of…" she said and paused as it came out thinner than she intended. He glanced up at her, unhurried, then over his shoulder at the ring of things waiting in the dark, patient, motionless, watching him the way she imagined prey watched something that had stopped being prey a long time ago.

"Of these?" Something in his voice was almost amused, almost fond.

"You needn't be."

"Of the dark," she said. The stars were very bright above and she thought, distantly, that she had wanted to see stars like this for a long time and this was a poor way to finally manage it.

"I used to be afraid of the dark."

"Ah." He said it mildly, and went back to her ankle as though she'd made an observation about the weather.

"I see."

"Hyde–""Just one moment," he said again, and stood. She watched him straighten and unfold to his full height easily and calmly, even now, surrounded by this, and the sight settled into her chest alongside the cold that was already spreading from her missing leg.

"It is rather dark, now that you mention it," he murmured, half to himself, and half to her.

"I could start a campfire, but it is rather unwise, isn't it," he went on, conversational, almost gentle, "to set a fire in the forest." The light came from everywhere at once, and blinded her. She blinked rapidly and watched as night turned to day. So strong was the brightness. The flame was white.

The demons ignited where they stood, all of them, in the same instant, with no warning, no spreading flame, simply alight, and screamed in registers she would never be able to describe to anyone, not even herself, not even lying here trying to understand it while it was still happening. And then they were gone. All of them. The Flickers and the Shades. The Lurkers. The Hollow. To the flame, there was no difference between them. Not their strength, not their size.

They all burned the same, and the marsh was only reeds and water and the ordinary, indifferent cold of a night in mid-autumn, as if several hundred creatures had not just been standing in it a moment before. He picked up Hartley's lantern, now alight with a white flame, and set it beside her as he knelt back down beside her, unruffled, and reached for the linen again.

"That should be better," he said. She lay in the wet grass and looked at him and found that her mouth would not do anything useful for a long moment. Her mind, meanwhile, would not stop. He did that with a sentence. He did that with a sentence the way she used [Strike] or [Dodge], except she had never even imagined she could make hundreds of creatures disappear in the same way. This was proper, supernatural power. This was magic. Every skill she had developed was simply an extension of real human ability.

She noticed details, she sprinted, she bluffed. She didn't make things go on fire with her words. Had she misunderstood the System this world used so completely? She hadn't even thought it possible. Months here and she had never seen anything more magical than a few blessings in the church. Was she a frog in the well that was the city of Londinium or was she simply unobservant? Who was this man, who this whole time sat across from her with a teacup, listening to her complain about rent?

"Who are you?" she finally said.

"Really." He paused, not long, but long enough that she noticed it, the way she noticed everything now, desperately needing to know more about a man she had befriended, if not fully trusted.

"Cyril Hyde," he said in the end.

"A physician on Crane Street." A small, humourless quirk of his mouth.

"Were you always–" She didn't finish it. She didn't have the end of the sentence. What could she ask? Was he always who he said he was? Something moved through his face. It didn't seem performative, even though she was not in the best state of mind to make any judgments. But it looked like the tiredness of a person who had been carrying a weight for a very long time and had just, for a moment, let it show.

"Alice," he said.

"Please."