Chapter 269: Whatever Happened to Doctor-Patient Trust? Social Harmony? Mutual Respect?
Kian glanced at the clock on his bedside table. Seven hours had passed since he went to challenge the Aeldari warrior. Exactly the respawn time on his Tier 2 cot.
He scratched his face, a little unsettled.
"Damn. She one-shotted me. I figured I'd at least get a couple of exchanges in, pick something up. I got nothing.
Whatever. Try again."
He pulled on a pair of shorts, grabbed an iron sword, hopped in his maintenance buggy, and drove straight to the cage.
The cage was a three-airlock design. You walked through the first door, it sealed behind you, then the second opened. Through that, it sealed, and the third opened. Only past all three did you reach the actual cage floor. The layered failsafe was there to prevent the Aeldari warrior from rushing the exit.
Kian re-entered. The Aeldari warrior was crouched in the corner, curved blade in hand. Through the crimson lenses of her war mask, her eyes tracked him from the moment he stepped through.
Kian raised his sword and bellowed: "That last one doesn't count, you jumped me! Again! Let's go!!"
...
Kian opened his eyes again and climbed off the Sanctum cot.
He checked the clock. Several more hours gone. One-shotted again.
This time he'd been ready. He'd focused, and he'd actually seen her move.
Seeing it didn't mean he could respond to it.
The duelling cage was roughly 300 square metres. Not a large space. The Aeldari warrior crossed it so fast it looked like teleportation.
The iron curved blade he'd given her weighed 0.6 kilograms. In her hands, it was like holding a sheet of paper, and she swung it accordingly: fast, precise, and final.
She'd blinked in front of him and slashed for his throat. Kian had instinctively tried to raise his greatsword into a vertical block. Too slow. The blade caught his neck, blood exploded outward, and his head parted company with his body. Clean kill.
Kian got out of bed, pulled on shorts, grabbed another longsword, and went back.
Seven hours later, he sat up on the cot again and lit a cigarette with the look of a man who had run out of reasons to care.
He now had a basic read on the gap between them.
With full concentration, he could just barely track her rapid movement visually. But when she closed in to strike, his body couldn't respond fast enough to actually block. The eyes could follow; the limbs couldn't.
In short: in melee against an Aeldari warrior, he was a corpse waiting to happen. He didn't even qualify to be called her opponent.
If he wanted to grind experience from death-matches, he at least needed to survive long enough to trade ten exchanges. One-shot kills were giving him nothing to work with.
"No good. The stat gap is too wide. I go in and get deleted instantly. All I'm doing is filling the cage with shorts and longswords."
He surveyed the situation: when he died, everything on him dropped. The cage now contained one set of men's clothing, three pairs of shorts, and three longswords.
The one mercy was that his corpse vanished after death, blood and all, leaving the floor clean. Convenient. If he'd had to dispose of his own remains every cycle, that would have been a different kind of nightmare.
He finished the cigarette, got dressed, got in the buggy, and drove to the Forge Temple. Time to raise his physical stats.
After a winding route through the Underhive, Kian arrived and found Enginseer Antonius calibrating a small precision instrument.
"That bone density surgery. I need it done now. Immediately. Today."
Antonius's vox-amplifier produced a low, rumbling laugh.
"Is that so, my lord? You feel ready?"
He raised a hand. A surgical slab rose from the steel floor, flanked by a forest of mechadendrites tipped with blades, needles, and vials of unidentified fluid. Anyone lying on that table, staring up at all that hardware, would feel precisely the opposite of comfortable.
Antonius gestured invitingly.
"Then please, my lord. Lie down. I'll begin the augmentation immediately."
"Hold on."
Kian stopped him. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder.
Six Rejuvenat physicians stepped forward from behind him, all robed in green, bristling with medical equipment, immaculately turned out.
Antonius stared at them.
"What is this? No unauthorised personnel in my laboratory. Get them out. Now."
Before Kian could explain, one of the physicians stepped up and pointed at Antonius.
"Excuse me! We are his lordship's medical team, responsible for his lordship's physical welfare!"
All six of them fanned out across the surgical slab, producing spray bottles and cloths to disinfect the surface.
"Holy Throne above! The sanitation conditions in here are deeply concerning! The particulate density in this air is roughly equivalent to the number of bad ideas in a tech-priest's head!!"
"Unacceptable! The microbial load in this room is completely off the charts! Performing surgery here would be an act of biological warfare against the patient!!"
"You're Antonius, yes? Which medical college did you train at? Do you hold a valid surgical licence? What documented successful procedures can you present prior to operating on his lordship? We cannot place his lordship's life in the hands of a self-taught amateur!"
The six physicians chattered and bickered and fussed until Antonius's cognitive cores were practically throttling themselves.
He turned on Kian.
"Are you having this surgery or not? If yes, get these people out."
Kian crossed his arms.
"I'm having it. Absolutely. But my people are staying to observe.
I'm not lying down on that table so you can open me up and tuck something in there I don't know about. You tech-priests, I know exactly how you operate.
And you specifically, you've spent half our acquaintance trying to confine me, poke my body, interrogate my soul, and extract information about the Substance. So my people are watching. They won't interfere. But if you do anything to me that wasn't agreed on, that's your problem to deal with."
Antonius ground his teeth. Metaphorically, given that he no longer had any.
The fact was, he had been planning to slip something in during the surgery. Nothing unreasonable. Just a biometric monitor and a tracking node, each roughly the size of a pea.
As Kian had correctly observed, tech-priests were constitutionally incapable of leaving well enough alone. Give them an opening and they would absolutely use it.
Kian had seen it coming and borrowed the Rejuvenat physicians from General Zeppelin specifically to supervise.
Antonius muttered:
"Honestly. Is there no trust left between people? Would I harm you? How could I possibly harm you? What reason would I even have?
Fine. Lie down. Tell your six little green observers not to get in my way while I work. Doctor-patient trust. Social harmony. Basic mutual respect. Whatever happened to all that?"
☆☆☆
-> 20 Advanced chapters Now Available on Patreon!!
-> https://www.pat-reon.co-m/c/Inkshaper
(Just remove the hyphen (-) to access patreon normally)
If you like this novel please consider leaving a review that's help the story a lot Thank you