Angel of War

Chapter 2: The Operation

[warning: explicit human gore]

He felt a small amount of guilt at the way her head snapped with the recoil of getting hit with the metal he used to knock her out, but it slipped away with the observation that her vitals were still going steady.

Untying her from the chair, he heaved her onto the table. The injection would keep her knocked out for the process and slow the bleeding, but he had doubts it would do anything for the pain afterwards.

Without the fear that he'd be scrutinized for it, he took the opportunity to finally look at the woman beyond the experiment. Like that stupid doll had said, she was small. Despite that, the upcoming process felt enormous. Her big eyes weren't going to open, her mouth wouldn't leak any more screams; Not until he was finished. He had to make sure of that.

He threw his coat off, rolled up his sleeves and placed his hat aside.

Careful to not alter the subject, he began stripping her of what rudimentary articles of clothing she had left. Increasingly, he became aware that her abdomen was disfigured, and when revealed, he had to pause. It looked like knots of wood pressing underneath the skin, rippling and straining to be free of it's bruised captivity. Further down... he blanched. Miranda had lied. She had to have. There were tendrils that looked much like that of the cadou coming from between the girl's legs.

"That fucking bitch." He fell back into the chair she had sat in.. He hadn't even made an incision yet, and he was already sweating over his task. She said she'd only given her injections... He dragged his gloves over his eyes and exhaled deeply. He needed to see...

The gloves needed to be off for vivisecting.

Her limbs were now fastened to the table, so she was stable. Where to start? That was the real question. He'd put on the radio to distract any interruptions to his thoughts and he tried to hum along to it. The abdomen, he decided, should be first. He held the scalpel to the strained skin and pushed down. Once the skin layers were through, a build up of the black moldy fluid exploded from the incision, spilling out onto the floor noisily and splattering him on the face.

"Scheiße..." He used his arm to rub the shit from his mouth and began to try clearing it from her body. The muscles were practically all mold. He hacked through the stuff like forest brush until he could see the intestines. Aside from the color, they looked relatively normal. He extended the incision up her chest and across her shoulders. He tried to not look at her face. He had to wipe the black shit from his hands before he could even see what he was doing. His shirt was already beyond ruined, but he took it off anyways.

It seemed he didn't need to add much to her torso, but the abdomen had those very problematic growths writhing about....

Upon focused reflection, he found the tendrils weren't connected to a cadou. There wasn't a cadou. They were coming from her lower organs. He remembered vaguely what female anatomy was meant to look like internally, but it sure wasn't this. Around where the ovaries and uterus should have been, there was just a mass of knotted tendrils and mold. That. That was where the pain was originating. It had to have been.

With a huff of a prayer to no particular being, he started cutting into it. The tendrils started writhing more wildly and wrapped around his wrists like the legs of an octopus. He actually screamed a little before shoving the knife into their base. He moved more blades across the room to get the fuckers off his hands while he cursed at the mass. He cut along an arch-like path until the stuff stopped wriggling. Much like decomposing lycans, the dead flesh started to crystallize. He let out a sharp and violent sigh before mumbling about Miranda and the fucking dark god she had found in the caves under the village while he removed the crystalline pieces. Thankfully the rest of this girl wasn't turning into rocks, so he felt like his job was satisfactory enough. He stopped fishing around for the fragments when he realized what action it looked like, and cursed himself as he went over to the counter. Maybe it would be easier this time and she wouldn't need a cadou reactor... He glanced at the living thing in the jar he had prepared. It made his skin crawl with the recent reminder of tendrils.

He wanted to wait. He wanted to see what she could do. But the terrifying possibility she would never recover from this made him reach for it. Why did he care if she- it... survived or not. Miranda had thrown her away, hadn't she?

He hesitated, his hand over the jar, and with a decided turn of his boots he was back at her body, empty-handed.

He was better than Miranda.

He lifted the cut skin above her breasts to see her lungs and heart oozing blackness and pulsing between very fragile ribs. He poked the film between the rib bones, and it broke away easily. That was no good.

He took a breath and amassed the metal fragments he'd prepared: sheets of the stuff, screws, washers and bolts. Each bit of skin and bone that needed reinforced, would be, with steel, and each incision would be fastened shut like snaps on a coat. The next step was supporting this brittle ribcage. Some steel plating would work nicely.

At least this part was easy. He had done it hundreds of times on corpses, so it wouldn't be a problem on living tissue. Hopefully.

It continued to be messy and the stuff of mortal nightmares, but it was as he predicted: a simple mechanical task. He tried to keep that mindset. There was no extra pressure because she was still alive. Nope, just child's play, this operation here.

He was half tempted to cover up her face many times, but the quiet of her countenance assured him to keep going.

He looked over his work and folded her skin back over the moldy-metal mess with a huff of satisfaction. Suturing the flaps back together with staples went uneventfully quick for him. It was refreshing to feel in control of an experiment again after what it previously had been. Soon it was a complete body again, rising and falling with breath and not just a mess of carnage.

Heisenberg felt unusually tired. Drained from the excitement of the day, he washed his tools and his arms and face before looking over the work he'd done. The floor was a fucking mess, but it was irrelevant compared to what was on the table. No longer pulsating with foreign infection, the body was calmly stabilizing. The sheen of metal over it made it strong... made her look strong. Maybe it was the exhaustion, but he felt flustered when he was cleaning off her skin with rags, wiping the shit from her small hands, her soft face...

"I really need a beer, huh..." He shook his head and kneaded at his brow with his fingers, tossing the rag to the floor.

He shuffled over to his quarters to grab a beer and numbly downed it.

He sat on the edge of the workbench and stared at the mattress he called a bed.

"Yeah...." He was most certainly fighting exhaustion, as his mind wandered again. "Cigar it is."

Before passing out was a blur of wrapping her already healing wounds in bandages, more for modesty than anything, and him taking a longer shower than he could remember in recent past.