Part 48: A Man Needs a Maiden

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"Ngagh...! Uraaahhh!!!"

"Hah...! Hah...! HAAAAA!!!"

"Ngh...! Hrigh!!!"

The man with half a monkey's tail and an open chest was quite loud for the first hour of his stay at her shrine. She was simultaneously astonished and amused that the fool had managed to end up in such a state so quickly. There were fools, yes, but to face down Ei with nothing but his bare hands? That took another level of self-delusion.

Blood. Everywhere. All over the floor in messy droplets and fountainous spurts and syrupy trails and all over the man's toned chest, which, while not bad per se, didn't quite meet her fancy when it was cleaved open like a fish mid-butchering. Ah, and on her skirts and sleeves and hands, under her nails... What a mess, what a mess. If he survived, she would make sure that he paid for this.

She began by taking him inside from all the prying eyes of the few citizens and her fellow shrine maidens. Ah, a few of the poor girls fainted at the sight of this fool's utterly astonishing amount of blood loss. By now he was losing consciousness, before which she force fed him a handful of rare herbs here, whispered an incantation there, and began to seal and bind his chest wound. While she was no doctor, she was a shrine maiden, and five centuries of living, along with being the Guuji of a nation whose entire power system was built on bladed weapons, had led her to accrue enough knowledge to keep the man on the brink of death, and not fully gone.

As for the poor man's tail, too bad. She neither knew where the rest of it was, and the man's chest wound was far more dire. Despite how much of a fool this man ended up being, to survive a single strike from Ei, unarmored and unguarded, perhaps he had the making of something with enough potential to... Ah, but that can come later, he's starting to scream again...

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It was after he had begged her for assistance that Son Wu had become far too delirious with bloodless to remember much of what happened. Someone took him somewhere darker, inside. He was fed something bitter and forced to choke it down while a soft voice scolded him. Someone whispered something soothing into his ear, and he suddenly felt very sleepy, and the white-hot agony assailing his body was dulled slightly.

Oh, but then more pain came. Unbearable pain. He thrashed and cried as those soft hands did their work on the wound the Raiden Shogun had given him. Agony, in the purest sense, enough to make Wu fondly dream of the days he had been blasted point-blank by Dvalin, had his gut mashed into one big purple bruise by Tartaglia's knee, and had his body used like a Ping-Pong ball by Osial. He didn't know just what had been done, but by the end of it, what was split open in a sideways gash was now sealed tight, and wrapped with a generous amount of bandages.

She was there. He had forgotten who she was, or did he even know who she was to begin with? Ah, he'd have to swallow his pride and thank her when all was over. Then again, this pain was quickly being cycled into a growing furnace of rage in his gut. Towards Aether, the fucking idiot who got him torn apart, and perhaps threw his own life away. Towards the god who had smite him, a familiar rage that only added to a long simmering fire towards a more personal god. 

She was there almost the entire time. She would shift in and out her and there, but she mostly stayed next to him. A soft hand working diligently to keep him alive. A soft voice whispering rhetorical taunts and clever quips that were only met by his agonized groans. A gentle presence.

"Do try not to die in your sleep, reckless warrior... I would love to hear just how you ended up here, and like this... though I can make a few assumptions..."

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