Weeks bled into a month, then stretched towards the fifty-day mark since the Aeternus and her bewildered crew had been torn from their own world. The Sea of Ten-Fold Shadows was relentless in its strangeness and its dangers.
They had weathered storms that shrieked with alien fury, navigated currents that defied all known laws of hydrodynamics, and glimpsed horrors in the deep that made the megalodon encounter seem almost mundane by comparison.
Through it all, Sister Amaris Doyle, the ship's Surgeon-Chaplain, found her skills, both old and newly System-granted, tested to their absolute limits.
Her small infirmary, once a sterile, alien space, now bore the marks of constant use. The synthesized medical supplies, once a source of unease, were now a blessing she thanked God and the System.
She had treated everything from the usual shipboard injuries – cuts, bruises, sprains aggravated by the crushing gravity.
To more exotic afflictions: luminous fungal infections contracted from strange, drifting seaweed; temporary paralysis caused by the neurotoxins of a bizarre, jellyfish-like creature they'd accidentally netted; and a persistent, low-grade nausea that seemed to affect half the crew, a side effect, Nythara had explained, of their passage through a minor 'Fold-Distortion.'
Her System role, Surgeon-Chaplain. Specialization: Bio-Restoration, Faith Channeling (Latent), had proven to be a powerful combination.
The Bio-Restoration abilities allowed her to accelerate healing to an astonishing degree, mending broken bones in days, sealing grievous wounds in hours.
The Faith Channeling, still largely a mystery to her, manifested as a warm, golden aura that seemed to soothe pain, calm anxieties, and, on a few unsettling occasions, had even seemed to subtly influence the erratic behavior of the ship's 'living' components when Helga Rössler was struggling to stabilize them.
Today, however, promised a new, and particularly gruesome, challenge. They had stumbled into a region Nythara had ominously dubbed the 'Graveyard of Ships.'
It was an eerie, fog-shrouded expanse of sea littered with the ancient wrecks of vessels from countless worlds and ages, their skeletal remains encrusted with a vibrant, yet deeply unsettling, coral formation.
This was the Carrion Coral, Nythara had warned, a semi-sentient, carnivorous organism that fed on the decaying organic matter of shipwrecks and their unfortunate crews, and sometimes, on the living.
The core image for this encounter was stark: Amaris tending to a crewman whose arm is being consumed by rainbowy, flesh-eating coral. It was a horror she was now facing in her infirmary.
Young Pip, one of the cabin boys, barely sixteen even after his de-aging, had been part of a scouting party sent in one of the Aeternus's cutters to investigate a particularly large, intact-looking wreck.
He'd slipped on the treacherous, coral-encrusted deck and fallen, his arm plunging into a bed of the iridescent growth. His screams had brought the scouting party rushing back, Pip cradling his arm, his face a mask of terror and agony.
Now he lay on one of the infirmary berths, his breath coming in ragged gasps. Amaris, her youthful face set in lines of grim concentration, worked under the bright, sterile light of the medical bay.
The sight that greeted her when she'd cut away Pip's sleeve was horrific.
The Carrion Coral, a beautiful, rainbow-colored web of blues, greens, and violets, had already begun to consume his flesh.
It wasn't just growing on him; it was integrating with him, its delicate, razor-sharp tendrils burrowing deep into his muscle and sinew, a network of parasitic veins spreading up his arm.
The flesh around the coral was inflamed, discolored, and horrifyingly, seemed to be slowly turning into the same crystalline coral substance.
"Hold him steady," Amaris instructed two burly able seamen, her voice calm despite the tremor of revulsion she felt. Pip was thrashing, his eyes wide with panic, the pain clearly immense.
***
***
The System's information flowed into her mind, cold, clinical, and terrifying. Surgical debridement. That meant cutting away not just the coral, but a significant portion of Pip's arm. Amputation was a very real possibility.
"Pip, listen to me," Amaris said, her voice gentle but firm, trying to cut through his pain-fueled panic. "I need you to be brave. I'm going to help you. But this will be difficult."
She administered a powerful anesthetic, synthesized by the medical bay's console, but she knew it wouldn't be enough to completely block the pain of what was to come. Anesthesia, in the traditional sense, was risky with his current unstable vitals.
Her hands, guided by years of medical training and now enhanced by the System's precision, began the gruesome task.
She used a high-frequency sonic scalpel, another marvel of System technology, to carefully begin cutting away the encroaching coral.
The substance was surprisingly resilient, and with every incision, Pip screamed, a raw, animal sound that tore at Amaris's heart.
This was a far cry from her previous life, her work with Médecins Sans Frontières. There, she had faced the horrors of war, disease, and poverty.
She had set bones, stitched wounds, and delivered babies in refugee camps. Often with minimal supplies and under the most primitive conditions.
She remembered the frustration, the heartbreak, of losing patients to infections that could have been easily treated in a modern hospital, of watching children die from malnutrition or preventable diseases.
That helplessness had been a constant ache, a driving force behind her unwavering faith and her dedication to her calling.
She recalled a particularly harrowing week in a makeshift clinic in a war-torn village. A cholera outbreak.
She'd worked for days without sleep, surrounded by the dead and dying, her prayers a constant murmur against the backdrop of suffering. She'd saved many, but lost too many more.
One little girl, no older than five, with eyes that held an ancient wisdom, had died in her arms, her tiny body wracked by dehydration.
Amaris had held her, weeping, questioning a God who would allow such suffering. It was in those moments of profound despair that her faith, paradoxically, had solidified.
Not as a blind acceptance of doctrine, but as a fierce, unwavering commitment to compassion, to alleviating suffering wherever she found it, to being a beacon of hope in the darkest of nights.
Her likability was rooted in this deep well of empathy, her quiet strength, her refusal to give in to despair, even when faced with the unimaginable.
Now, in this alien infirmary, with tools and abilities beyond her wildest dreams, the challenges were different, but the core of her being, her drive to heal, remained the same.
The Carrion Coral was a new kind of horror, but Pip was still a child in pain, a soul in peril. And she would fight for him, with every ounce of her skill, her faith, and her System-enhanced power.
The debridement was slow, painstaking. The coral had burrowed deeper than she'd initially thought, its tendrils wrapped around bone, infiltrating nerve pathways.
With every piece she removed, more of the iridescent, parasitic growth seemed to appear, as if it were actively fighting her, regenerating almost as fast as she could cut it away.
"It's… it's growing back," one of the able seamen holding Pip whispered, his voice hoarse with horror.
Amaris saw it too. Despair threatened to overwhelm her. Was this a battle she couldn't win? Was she going to lose Pip's arm, or even his life, to this alien plague?
***
***
Disruptive Spiritual Energy? Faith Channeling to attack a pathogen's 'Life Matrix'? It sounded like something out of a fantasy novel, not a medical textbook. But the System had not steered her wrong yet. And she was running out of conventional options.
"Hold him," she said, her voice tight. She closed her eyes for a moment, pushing aside her fear, her doubt.
She focused on her faith, not as a passive belief, but as an active force, a conduit for… something. She remembered the warmth, the golden light she'd felt in her hands before. She called upon it now, not just to heal, but to fight.
She placed one hand on Pip's forehead, trying to project calm, to soothe his terror. With the other, she hovered her hand over the grotesque, coral-infested arm.
She prayed, not with words, but with intent, a focused beam of spiritual energy directed at the alien life form that was consuming the boy.
A faint, golden aura began to emanate from her hand, brighter this time, more intense. The air in the infirmary seemed to crackle with a strange energy.
The Carrion Coral, which had been visibly, horrifyingly, regenerating, seemed to… hesitate. Its vibrant iridescence flickered, dimmed. The tendrils that were actively burrowing into Pip's flesh recoiled slightly, as if in pain.
***
***
Amaris opened her eyes, a gasp escaping her lips. It was working. The golden light from her hand seemed to be actively pushing back the coral, causing it to shrink, to wither.
The angry red inflammation around the affected area began to subside. Pip's thrashing lessened, his breathing becoming slightly less ragged.
"By the Saints…" one of the seamen breathed, staring in disbelief.
Now that the coral's aggressive regeneration was halted, Amaris could work more effectively with the sonic scalpel. She meticulously removed the remaining dead and dying coral tissue, her movements precise, efficient.
The golden aura from her other hand continued to bathe the wound, preventing any regeneration of the pathogen and, it seemed, accelerating the healing of the damaged flesh beneath.
It took another hour of intense, focused work. When she was finally done, Pip's arm, though horribly mangled and scarred, was free of the Carrion Coral.
The flesh was already beginning to knit itself back together at an astonishing rate, thanks to the combined effects of her Bio-Restoration and Faith Channeling abilities.
He would need extensive rehabilitation, and the scarring would be severe, but he would keep his arm. And his life.
Exhaustion, profound and bone-deep, washed over Amaris. She swayed slightly, and one of the able seamen caught her arm, steadying her.
"Easy there, Sister," he said, his voice rough with emotion. "You… you saved him. We all saw it. It was a miracle."
Amaris shook her head, though she knew, in a way, he was right. It felt like a miracle. A terrifying, System-assisted, faith-fueled miracle. "It was… God's will. And the System's assistance," she murmured, still trying to reconcile the two in her own mind.
Later, after Pip was stabilized and sleeping peacefully, his arm bandaged, his vitals slowly returning to normal, Amaris sat alone in her small cabin, her hands still trembling slightly.
She looked at them, at these hands that could now channel energies she didn't fully understand, that could fight alien plagues with the power of faith.
She was still Sister Amaris Doyle, the healer, the woman of God. But she was also something more now, something new.
A Miracle Surgeon, the System called her.
And in this Sea of Ten-Fold Shadows, with its endless horrors and its desperate need for hope, she was beginning to understand that miracles, in whatever form they took, were going to be essential for survival.