There's a loud beeping right by my head. I reluctantly open my eyes and see only yellow. The beeping doesn't stop. I reach up and peel a post-it note off my forehead. I think I'm in a hotel room. The room is dark except for moonlight streaming around the curtains. The beeping is from a cheap black alarm clock. I spitefully turn it off with a slap. Which smashes the thing apart. Black plastic flies across the room. Riiiiight, I have super strength. The beeping does not stop. I sigh, grab the wreckage and pull it by the cord, away from the power outlet. The cable goes taut and the power outlet pulls out of the wall before the clock unplugs. Well I am not getting the deposit back on this room.

I glance down at the post-it. Someone (Mercy) wrote in black Sharpie.

|------|

| OD |

|OK! |

|------|

Ah, that's nice.

I look around and find my phone, clothes and some burritos with green chile sauce. I catch up on messages and the news. Apparently I was out for 32 hours.

7/25

Westin Hotel at Denver International Airport

11:40 PM

Pathbreakers Discord Group Chat:

...

Mercy: Odysseus left to go help people. Ivy is stuck inside the dungeon for 24 hours. Jun is unconscious because he's a dummy. I think Odysseus never fully entered the dungeon, so he didn't get the lockdown quest.

Jose: Sending Eagle Team from Las Vegas to LA to help with dungeon break.

Ivy: OD Says he has very specific spell.

Quins: I'll hold down the dungeon break until backup arrives. The guys and gals who were out here are not okay.

...

Jose: Mercy, Ivy, Quins, look through your inventories and see if you have anything that recovers Faith Points. Ask any leveled around you. Odysseus has a spell that heals radiation burns specifically, over an area, but he's burned through his FP.

...

Mercy: Got FP stuff from the Navy. A ring, necklace, belt and potions. Odysseus, if you see this, they're coming to you. Keep going!

...

Henry Gallup: We're in the LA area. Sending Florence and Eddie to recovery efforts. Wilhelm, Kovalchuk and I will be at the Hollywood Sign in 15 minutes.

Quins: I'm alright, if you lot want to go help with recovery.

Jose: Henry, split your team like you planned. Get Quins that backup.

Ivy: (picture of Quins sitting on top of a mound of monster corpses, waving at the camera) Nah really he's good.

Jose: BACKUP EACH OTHER. NOT A DEBATE.

...

Gwen: I did the math on Mr. Han's KP recovery, he should awaken around 11:40 PM, 7/25.

Mercy: Thanks, Gwen!

...

Jose: Mercy, I'm sending you details about our next step with Jun and his ability to heal Scourge.

Mercy: I'll get him there. Probably fastest to take the airship, honestly.

Jose: Do not attempt to fly that untested thing long distance.

Mercy: Some Navy peeps volunteered to come with me on the airship so I'm not flying alone. It'll be fine!

...

Quins: They brought Odysseus back up here, he's a wreck, but he's mostly okay. Going negative gives you memory loss? I didn't know that.

...

Mercy: Flying an airship is pretty easy, actually. Updates?

Odysseus: Quins finally fell asleep. Ivy's 24 hours is up so she's doing Regen Refrain on the move, playing music from an ice cream truck. Henry somehow is in command of the troops up here? Andrew Wilhelm and Viktor Kovalchuk are an amazing team, holding the dungeon break line really well. I've recovered, and am going to go help more.

It's really, really bad out here.

...

Text Messages From Mercy:

>You're a dummy.

>I love you.

...

>If you're reading this you're now in Denver. Yes, I brought your stupid airship. We are NOT getting married in, on or around this thing. It is useful but not pretty in the daylight.

>When you wake up, tell the guys in room 403. You are in 404. They're coordinating the Scourge treatment plan. The short version is that the CDC is doing the math and spreading the word etc. They have a route planned out to save the most people possible as quickly as possible.

>The president is giving you Air Force One to use for the world tour. WHICH IS INSANE. Apparently it's fast and has a bunch of security stuff to keep a terrorist or monster from wrecking it to get to you. Also, bedrooms~wink~

>BTW we're at Denver because it has a lot of terminals and is sort of centrally located-ish. So people across North America can get here when they announce you've got the cure. CDC lady says it's the optimal location.

>Burritos in the mini-fridge!

...

>Damn you're sleeping forever. It's nice being able to cuddle you again but if you're not awake to smile at me it's not the same. You always have this goofy, dreamy smile when we cuddle. It's cute. I need it back.

>I was just watching you sleep but that got boring so I'm going to Denhac, it's a 24 hour makerspace. I have some ideas for new costumes. My current set is great for combat but it's clear now that more utility would be extremely useful.

...

It's strange having super human Intelligence and Reflexes. When I read for content, I read insanely fast. If I read for enjoyment, I read at a normal speed. You know, because my brain has to think about how the character voices sound. And add sound effects if the author doesn't. Point is, I read through all that in about 7 seconds. I walk over to room 403 with a foil-wrapped burrito in one hand. I knock.

A half-minute later a dark-skinned woman in a hastily donned button down shirt answers the door. "Oh, Mr. Han, great to meet you finally. I'm Destiny Carson, deputy chief of staff and your liaison with the administration. Ms. King over there is your CDC liaison." She points at a woman with a blanket wrapped around her.

I decide not to draw attention to the facts that Ms. Carson is not wearing pants and the shirt she's wearing is too big and probably fits Ms. King better. And they were both clearly sweating. And smooth jazz is playing on someone's phone.

Ms. Carson, however, suddenly looks down and then back up at me, obviously embarrassed.

I hold up a hand. "Look, if you guys are going to be traveling with me I'm going to need you to ignore a lot of... stuff my fiance and I get up to during the next few days. We can all be adults, right?"

Ms. King bursts into laughter in the back.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Ms. Carson rolls her eyes and smiles. "You good to go on your cure?"

I had already checked my menus. My two bottlenecks for curing people of Scourge are the Scourge poison cooldown and that I have to put a different creation on cooldown to cure it afterwards.

Scourge Poison

Exotic

Create a single dose of Scourge Poison.

Creation Time: 1 second

Item Duration: 1 minute

Cooldown: 10 minutes (1 minute after Luck)

Proficiency: 1%

I'd fortunately gotten a basic creation which I could spam and use for the "put something online cooldown" part.

Mini Healing Potion

Basic

Create a very small health recovery potion.

Creation Time: 1 second

Item Duration: 1 hour

Cooldown: 10 minutes (1 minute after Luck)

Proficiency: 0%

So I could cure one person of Scourge every minute. Sometimes my Luck would automatically refresh it before the minute was up. I do the math and figure out the average time between cures.

"Yeah, I'm ready to go."

Ms. Carson says, "cool, give us a minute to get dressed, your first patients are already here."

-----

7/25

Field hospital outside of Denver International Airport

11:50 PM

Inside the tent everyone except for me is wearing full-body PPE. Their white plastic suits make crinkling sounds with each movement.

Ten people in stretchers. Ten people in pain. Ten people just waiting for me to wake up. I get to work.

"Who's worst off?" I ask the room, not knowing exactly who is in charge.

"Here!" comes a muffled cry from one of the workers. There's 23 medical personnel in here, treating the patients as best as they can. She raises a hand and I walk over to the patient. He's wearing a face mask. His eyes are closed and he looks like he's wincing in pain. His breaths are low and shallow.

There's suddenly silence in the tent.

"Do you need anything to get started?" someone asks me.

I make a dose of Scourge poison. It appears in an eye dropper. I drip its deadly liquid on the patient's hand, then take his other hand and trigger my disease cure.

Suddenly, the man's shallow, rough breathing relaxes. He opens his eyes, looking drowsy. "The fuck?" he asks, then relaxes. He closes his eyes again, this time to check his menus. "It's gone. The sickness is gone." He opens his eyes again, this time wide awake. He looks straight at me. "You do this?"

I just nod.

A medical person comes over to me. "How long until you can treat another patient?"

"On average, 42 seconds," I say.

Someone in PPE bursts into tears. Several of the staff start hugging each other. I don't share their joy but I understand it. They've probably been treating Scourge victims for weeks, watching every single one die. And now they're all going to live.

Well, at least the ones within my reach.

I start my way across the room, healing each person in turn. It takes 8 minutes. A cheer rises up. Someone turns on some upbeat pop song. I can't help but smile.

I know I won't be able to save everyone. The math behind people getting infected and then being able to get to me prevents that. There's just no way every person infected will have time to get to me. Especially if they get infected while in a dungeon. Some people won't be able to leave their area safely. Some people won't be able to leave their country. Some people won't be allowed to leave their country. People are still going to die.

But not everyone. I look around at the people in the tent. These people have hope now, where before there was only resigned despondence. I don't know how many people I'll actually be able to cure. But I think that it'll be really, really important that it happens at all.

I leave the tent and Ms. Carson and Ms. King are rapidly making calls, sending messages, and getting things lined up. Within minutes, everyone in the USA (including Puerto Rico) gets an emergency alert text.

MESSAGE FROM THE CDC!!!

A METHOD TO CURE SCOURGE HAS BEEN ACQUIRED! THE PERSON WITH THE ABILITY IS CURRENTLY WORKING WITH THE CDC.

PLEASE CLICK THIS LINK IF YOU OR SOMEONE YOU KNOW IS INFECTED:

There's a link to a website set up to help coordinate with victims, hospitals and even the government, if you're not in America right now. It's pretty impressive. Brian said gay people are best at web design. I look at Ms. Carson and Ms. King and at the website and I still don't know if he's fucking with me or not.

I get a call from my fiance.

Mercy: Sooooo you're awake, huh?

Me: Yeah. Thanks for the burritos, they were great.

Mercy: You didn't call or text me.

Me: You said you were going into creative hyper focus mode. So I didn't want to interrupt.

Mercy: Uh huh.

Me: Hey, I know how you get! When you've got the tinker twitch, nothing can interfere with your creativity.

Mercy: What's a tinker twitch?

Me: Oh, I just started reading Industrial Strength Magic by Macronomicon. It's a thing in that series. Super geniuses go into fugue states when inventing.

Mercy: I'm not that bad!

Me: Oh, of course not. So how much more do you have to work on?

Mercy: ...Maybe a couple of hours? This is my first OC costume, so I'm not sure about everything yet.

Me: Original character costumes work with your Costume Witch powers?

Mercy: (whirring of a sewing machine) Yeah, it's been done by others. But you have to have a strong image of their strengths and weaknesses and abilities while you make the costume.

A while ago, word spread around that the Costume subclass, though it could appear on multiple classes, required a costume that the wearer had made themselves. There was something metaphysical about intent and mindfulness or something. Basically, you had to make the costume while having a deep understanding of the character in question. Slap on a store bought superman costume, you get jack shit. Be a superman super fan and make it from scraps of leather and spandex you got from specific vendors who handle prop reproduction? You might get your S.

(Except, of course, you'd get powers limited by your stats and the relative buff bonuses allocated by various tiers of class powers, etc.)

Mercy making her own character would involve keeping her own fictional creation in mind while designing the outfit from scratch. It wasn't impossible, especially not for someone as awesome as Mercy, but it wasn't the kind of thing you'd want to interrupt and come back to the next day. Better to finish, or at least get to a good stopping point.

Me: As much as I want to go to make out paradise, I also respect the creative process. Aaaaand I like seeing you in new costumes.

Mercy: You do like my costumes.

Me: As your official photographer and fan club president, I will agree to this accusation.

Mercy: Official photographer?

Me: I've got a carefully curated collection of photos. If you want to release photobooks or photo sets, I have both safe-for-work and not-safe-for-work sets.

Mercy: (sewing machine stops) That's both creepy and sweet.

Me: You were there when I took those photos.

Mercy: (sewing machine starts again) I suppose I'll allow it since you're my number 1 fan.

Me: Damn straight. I stan Mercy Mahar! Mercy Mahar is my Waifu! Mercy Mahar is best girl!

Mercy: Unfortunately you'll have to change the fan club name when it's Mercy Han.

My head spins for a second. Oh, right. We're going to get married at some point.

Me: You're taking my last name?

Mercy: I thought about it, and Jun Kyung Mahar doesn't sound quite right.

Me: Well, if I'm not consulted on decisions, I'm at least glad to be notified of them.

Mercy: Oh, yeah, you're very considerate and NEVER make important decisions on your own.

Me: Oh, heeey, the liaison ladies are calling me over, I've got to go.

Mercy: Juuuuuu-

I hang up. Ms. King raises an eyebrow at me, having heard my side of the conversation. I just shrug. She goes back to liaison-ing.

It's just 12 minutes before the next patients arrive. A local hospital had a few people in their ICU. And within minutes of their chopper landing, I've cured them.

I start checking the news. The Scourge cure is already all over the place. So is stuff coming out of LA.

Odysseus's face is plastered on news sites. After he saved Ivy, then I saved him, he turned right around and went out into LA. The ability he has is described as a "wide area, radiation curing spell." I know it's probably an invocation and not a spell, but whatever. There's video of him being driven around in a jeep, hanging out of the top of it, blasting golden waves out, covering a 100 ft radius. (It actually started as a much smaller radius but the repeated use must have increased his proficiency, which raised the area of effect.)

There's hours of drone camera footage following him around. In the highlights reel, people come up and give him FP restoring consumables and items to help him do more, better, faster.

I didn't get emotional about me healing Scourge. I felt good, but not emotional. But watching Odysseus fire wave after wave of healing across LA, it gets me. He's amazing. He barely survived and he just turned around and got back out there, knowing he could make a difference. And then, the thing that really does me in is when obviously injured people wave him down, not to ask for more help, but to give him stuff to keep him going.

There's this one moment, when Odysseus looks like he's about to fall over. He slumps down into the jeep. And these three kids come over and, swear to God, start giving him shoulder massages. At one point someone gives him a thermos to drink from. A man emerges from a crumbled restaurant and gives Odysseus a damn pizza. The three kids stay on the jeep and start working as assistants, managing people and things for Odysseus, and trying to keep him going. The jeep has to be swapped out after it runs out of gas, and some guy just throws the Navy driver the keys to his pickup truck.

I watch as my friend Odysseus saves the lives of thousands of people over 26 hours, before he finally can't function anymore.

I'm watching this footage, tears streaming down my face, when another set of Scourge victims comes in. Teams of people are working to get victims to me safely, so nobody else gets infected. Teams of people are treating victims on the way to me, to keep them from losing it, to keep them from going into shock from the pain. Teams of people are coordinating to get people from all over to here, to see me.

I wipe my tears. It's time for me to do my part.

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