Season 3 chapter 6
The Imaginary Disease
Before Malesh could physically assault him again, a doctor in a white coat walked through the swinging doors. He looked incredibly nervous, sweating profusely under the waiting room lights.
"Gentlemen," the doctor stammered, bowing slightly. "The patient is completely alright. We cleaned her up, and she also just woke up."
Malesh crossed his arms. "Does she have any other diseases? Any internal injuries or other problems?"
The doctor swallowed hard, glancing nervously at Kniya, who was giving him a massive, threatening thumbs-up from behind Malesh's back.
"Well, sir," the doctor lied, reading from a blank sheet of paper. "We ran some tests. And she actually has a highly lethal, entirely imaginary disease called Spontaneous Wallet Combustion. To treat this, we need to order extremely rare medicine. It will cost exactly 76 trillion credits."
Malesh's face went completely dark. The sheer, astronomical audacity of the scam made his blood boil. He turned his head slowly and glared at Kniya.
"Ah, now you are literally getting out of line with me, Kniya," Malesh growled, stepping into his personal space. "What the fuck is this?! You literally bribed the doctor!"
"I have bribed the whole fucking hospital," Kniya whispered in a dim, dramatically villainous voice, wiggling his fingers.
Malesh turned back to the sweating physician. "Doctor. I did not expect this level of blatant financial extortion from a medical professional. Just get the fuck lost out of my sight. I am going to the front desk to pay the real bill."
"I have already paid the real bill!" Kniya laughed, waving his hands to dismiss the terrified doctor. "It was just a bribe! I was just kidding! I threw a hundred thousand credits at the receptionist twenty minutes ago! The medical care is fully funded. So yeah, let's go meet her and talk about the scenario."
The Ward Argument
They pushed through the swinging doors and walked into the private emergency ward.
The Yatsua priestess was lying in a standard mechanical hospital bed. They had taken away her tattered clothes and dressed her in a nice, clean, light-blue hospital gown. She was awake, but her eyes were half-closed, clearly exhausted and heavily medicated.
Kniya and Malesh stood at the foot of her bed. Instead of asking how she was doing, they immediately began bickering like an old married couple.
"This hospital is a structural embarrassment," Kniya noted, aggressively tapping the metal frame of the bed. "Look at this cheap alloy. Kavilson Steel would never produce such garbage tubing. It looks like it could snap if you put a heavy book on it."
"The lighting is also mathematically inefficient," Malesh agreed, looking up at the flickering fluorescent bulbs. "It drains the soul. Anyway, Kniya, I am not paying for anything else."
"What?" Kniya demanded, turning his attention back to the money. "Malesh, you need to pay the cost of the expedition! I drove for four hours at 250 kilometers an hour! The wear and tear on my tires alone is fifty thousand credits! Pay up!"
"No," Malesh stated flatly. "I am not going to pay for that, you fucking idiot. You drove us into the middle of a forest chasing another man's soiled underwear. That is a personal financial loss."
"Okay, so what are we going to do?" Kniya asked, crossing his arms and looking at the weak, half-conscious priestess in the bed. "Because if you don't pay me, I am definitely going to sell her to a black market broker to recoup my gas money."
"Absolutely fucking not," Malesh warned, his voice dropping into a dangerous, lethal register. "You are not going to do that."
"I had incurred a huge loss because of this!" Kniya complained loudly, completely ignoring the fact that the girl could hear him. "I had to pay the real hospital bills! I had to use my emergency gas! I need to recover from that!"
"I will pay the fucking bill, you idiot!" Malesh snapped, finally breaking. "I will write you a check right now! Have some human dignity! We cannot do something like that! And especially not right in front of her own face! You are literally threatening human trafficking while standing at the foot of her hospital bed! We cannot do something like that, bro!"
"Ah, finally," Kniya grinned, completely victorious. "Okay. Whatever it is. The debt is settled."
Main Character Syndrome
"Let's listen to what she's trying to say," Kniya said, noticing the girl was struggling to lift her head.
The priestess looked at them. She looked terrified, exhausted, and incredibly weak. She tried to speak, forcing her whole body and whole energy into a single breath, but her voice came out incredibly low and dim.
"They..." she whispered, her voice trembling. "They are... really dangerous..."
Her eyes rolled back into her head, and she instantly fainted again, collapsing completely flat onto the cheap hospital mattress.
"What the fuck just has literally happened?" Kniya asked, blinking in confusion. "She fainted again."
The terrified doctor poked his head into the room. "Uh, yeah, I think so... it was extreme stress, sirs."
Kniya rubbed his chin, a look of profound, philosophical realization crossing his face.
"You know..." Kniya muttered. "It was like the exact same reality from the same situation from a comic novel. I have read this exact same thing. It is the classic trope where a dying side character says the similar vague, dramatic lines to the main character right before passing out. 'They are coming... they are dangerous...'"
Malesh stared at the fainted girl, then back at Kniya.
"I think she is reading a lot of these books," Malesh noted flatly. "Because I didn't get the context of what she just said. I am not a contextual reference index. I cannot just automatically know who 'they' are without proper data inputs."
"No, you don't get it, Malesh!" Kniya grinned, his ego absolutely inflating to massive proportions. "I think so... the other side character only says this to the main character! Which means... we are the main characters of this reality!"
Malesh squeezed his eyes shut, letting out a long, deeply exhausted sigh.
"Absolutely fucking not," Malesh groaned. "And stop talking about this shit. You read way too many of these fucking comic novels, you idiot. My brain is rotting just listening to you."
"I'm a main character, bro!" Kniya cheered.
"If this is a novel, it is a terrible one," Malesh muttered, turning around to leave the room. "And next time, I would be publishing my own fucking novel. I am going to call it: That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Useless Moron Who Bribed a Hospital for a Joke. It will be a non-fiction bestseller."
The Awakening
Time: 10:00 AM Location: Provincial Hospital, Emergency Ward
Two hours later, Kniya and Malesh were sitting in uncomfortable plastic chairs in the hospital cafeteria, drinking absolute garbage-tier coffee out of styrofoam cups, when a nurse finally waved them down.
"She is fully awake," the nurse whispered, leading them back down the sterile hallway. "And she is trying to speak again."
Kniya and Malesh stopped outside the swinging doors of the private ward. They looked at each other.
"Okay," Kniya whispered seriously. "This time we will listen to her first. We will not start yapping to each other for no reason while she is trying to deliver exposition."
"Agreed," Malesh nodded flatly. "We must allow the narrative input to complete."
They pushed through the doors and walked over to the edge of the bed. The Yatsua priestess looked slightly better. The heavy IV fluids had brought some color back to her pale face, and her breathing was finally steady.
She looked up at the two billionaires, her eyes wide with lingering terror.
"They..." she whispered again, her voice shaking violently. "They are really... so dangerous..."
Kniya bit his lip, trying his absolute hardest not to interrupt. Malesh squeezed his eyes shut, fighting the urge to point out the lack of context. They lasted exactly four seconds.
"Okay, listen," Kniya sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "We are not a contextual reference index. We don't know who 'they' are. Who the fuck are you referring to as 'them'?"
The girl swallowed hard, tears welling up in her eyes.
"The government," she sobbed, clutching the thin hospital blanket to her chest. "The government is using the Federal Army to completely destroy my religious town."
The Evacuation
Kniya and Malesh stopped completely. The annoyance vanished from their faces, replaced by the cold, calculating instinct of corporate warlords. Whenever the government moved the military domestically, it meant massive amounts of money were changing hands.
"Start from the beginning," Malesh ordered, his voice dropping an octave.
"I am the daughter of the High Priest," the girl began, her voice trembling as the horrific memories flooded back. "I was living in the holy town present in KDC... deep in the Migrains state. It is a very peaceful, ancient place."
She took a shaky breath, looking down at her hands.
"Suddenly, one day, a few high-ranking government officers arrived in armored transports," she explained. "They told us that we had to completely vacate the entire town. They claimed they had authorized a massive federal development grant to renovate the city, the central temple, the roads... everything. And they needed it completely empty. We were hesitant, but we eventually agreed."
"What was the timeline?" Malesh asked clinically.
"One year," she whispered. "We had some massive issues with the government officers because they were not allowing us to be in the town for a full year. That is a huge amount of time for renovations. We just asked if we could get back in between the construction for some time, if we needed something from our homes. But they absolutely denied it. They locked the borders."
Malesh crossed his arms, leaning against the cold hospital wall. "What is wrong with this? The government always does massive urban renovations. It is really weird to vacate an entire city just for concrete pouring, yes. But if it is for the good of the infrastructure, you should be supporting that. You should just go to the next town. The government usually provides relief funds for federal seizures."
"They did," the priestess nodded, wiping a tear from her cheek. "The government was aggressively providing us with subsidiary homes in the neighboring cities. They gave us heavy medical relief, and every extra funding that was required. The massive costs that were incurred during the transportation and the housing losses we incurred... everything was covered out in that. They paid us perfectly to leave."
Kniya frowned. "Then why were you running through the forest looking like you went through a warzone?"