Light Beyond The Dome

The dyehouse stank of boiling fish fat and ash. Smoke curled from the vats as Kaguya scribbled so furiously her ink bled through the parchment. Karin stood at the doorway with her arms folded, scowling at the stink while a handful of apprentices scraped paste into rough bars.

“This is worse than burning Sephis corpses,” Karin muttered. “At least those stop smelling.”

I wiped sweat from my brow, stirring the vat with a heavy paddle. “You think this is bad? Back on my world, doctors had to work shifts so long they barely slept. We’d be on call day and night, covered in blood one minute and bile the next, running between patients who all thought their case was the end of the world. The smell never stopped. You learned to live with it.”

Karin raised an eyebrow. “And you volunteered for that?”

“I trained for years just to earn the chance. And I never once got to hear anyone call me doctor.” I lifted a dripping paddle, the froth sliding off into the vat. “Now here I am, stirring fish guts for soap because this city doesn’t know how to wash its hands. I’ll take the stink over another grave.”

Kaguya leaned closer to the pot, eyes gleaming. “Saponification. The reaction is beautiful. Boiling oil and lye to create a cleansing agent. Ken, you truly are wasted on cooking and sweeping.”

Karin pinched her nose. “No, he’s wasted on this. You call this medicine? Smells like someone set fire to a fishery.”

“Better fish than corpses,” I said.

Kaguya clapped her hands. “Ah, another fine saying! I must write that down.”

“It’s not a saying,” I muttered.

“Too late,” she sang, scratching it onto parchment.

The first bars of soap cooled on the rack. Crude, lumpy, but solid enough. The apprentices handled them with awe, as if they’d been cast from gold.

Karin snorted. “If this is gold, the kingdom is poorer than I thought.”

I held up a bar. “Mock all you want. You’ll be the first to wash with it.”

She crossed her arms. “Over my dead body.”

“Considering how often you end up covered in blood, it’s a miracle you’re not dead already. Soap will help.”

Kaguya beamed, jotting notes. “Yes, yes, I can see it now. Soap reduces infection rates by sixty percent. Perhaps more. A miracle substance discovered by our very own Ken.”

Karin gave her sister a flat look. “Are you trying to canonize him already?”

“Canonize? No. Publish? Yes.”

“Do not publish me,” I muttered.

Karin smirked. “Not until you survive another month.”

That was when the shouting started outside.

A midwife stumbled in, hair sticking to her cheeks, apron streaked red. She clutched a crying infant in one arm, her voice breaking. “Please, someone come. The mothers, they’re burning alive inside. Fever. Chills. They die after birthing, every one of them.”

The apprentices froze. Karin’s jaw tightened. Kaguya’s quill stilled.

I knew the pattern before she finished. Puerperal fever. Childbed fever. I remembered Semmelweis, his colleagues mocking him while mothers died in droves. The solution had been soap. Nothing else.

“Bring every basin you have,” I said, already rolling up my sleeves. “Boil water, lye, ash. And not one hand touches a patient without scrubbing until your skin stings.”

The midwife stared, wide-eyed. “Soap? That is your miracle?”

“Yes,” I snapped. “Because death doesn’t come from the womb. It comes from your hands.”

Karin’s eyes widened. Kaguya’s quill scratched again.

We moved fast. Boiling cloth. Scouring hands. Burning rags instead of reusing them. By nightfall, the fevers broke in two women who should already have been ash. Word spread faster than the plague. What had begun as stink and scraps of fat was now saving lives.

Karin leaned against the doorway, wiping sweat from her brow. “Damn it, Ken. If this keeps working, the guild will choke on its own pride.”

Kaguya grinned, holding up a half-used bar of soap like it was a holy relic. “If the council refuses to acknowledge this, I will. I’ll declare the Age of Soap and publish the treatises myself.”

“Again,” I muttered, “do not publish me.”

“You’ll thank me later,” she chirped.

Karin jabbed a finger at her sister. “No one’s naming an age after fish guts.”

That was when the Executors arrived.

Yamada ducked through the doorway, his cleavers knocking a rack of soap bars to the floor. He picked one up, sniffed it, then burst into laughter. “Fish guts and ash. And they call you the Greatest Healer?”

Ulric followed, mask gleaming, posture straight. He glanced at the scrubbed basins and the midwives washing their hands raw. His voice was calm but firm. “The council has ordered a purge outside the dome. We leave at dawn. You are coming.”

I stared at the bars of soap cooling in the lamplight. Civilization in its ugliest form. Civilization that might hold.

I wiped my hands on a clean cloth, meeting Ulric’s gaze. “Fine. But don’t complain when I save more lives than you kill.”

Yamada grinned. Ulric inclined his head. The air seemed to grow heavier.

Tomorrow, the plague would test if I could keep what I had started.

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We left at dawn.

The barrier shimmered behind us, a wavering curtain of etched wards that hummed faintly in the cold air. Beyond it, the streets of the outskirts were drowned in fog, cobblestones slick with ichor from raids that had come before.

Yamada carried his cleavers as if they weighed nothing, grinning like he was marching into a festival. Ulric walked ahead, posture steady, one hand resting on the hilt of a longsword engraved with pale runes. His mask caught what little light there was, gleaming like a polished mirror.

The fog stirred.

The first Sephis slithered out, twitching as if its limbs bent in the wrong directions. Behind it came another, and another, their bodies dripping black ichor that hissed where it touched the stones.

“Finally,” Yamada rumbled, his grin splitting wider.

He charged, cleavers swinging in brutal arcs. The first Sephis was split down the chest, the second gutted with a single backhand slice. Flesh and ichor sprayed across the stones as he laughed, a sound too wild to belong in a human throat.

Ulric lifted his sword with measured precision. The runes along the blade pulsed, and light burst outward. It wasn’t fire, not really. A cone of radiance surged from the steel, searing through the fog, cutting swaths of Sephis into ash. Their bodies convulsed in the glow, burning not with flame but with something purer.

“Fire cones,” he declared calmly, as if naming a tool.

I blinked. “That’s not fire.”

“It burns. That is enough,” Ulric said, sweeping the light across another wave. Their bodies collapsed in piles of smoking ruin.

More poured from the fog, crawling over one another in a frenzy. Yamada tore through them with his cleavers, each swing cleaving limbs, splitting skulls, cutting deeper into the tide. His laughter echoed over the cobblestones, ragged and unrelenting.

I set down my pack and pulled out two crowbars I had stashed inside. They weren’t blades or spears, just lengths of bent iron I’d taken from the ruins. Still, the weight in my hands felt steady, almost familiar.

Yamada threw his head back in laughter, cleavers resting on his shoulders. “Crowbars? You really did copy me. Two weapons like mine, but weaker!”

I met his grin. “You can’t copyright dual wielding in this world. But I’ll admit, dual wielding looks cool in any context. And when these are heated, they carry fire straight into the wound. They suit a man who prefers to be overlooked, since everyone overlooks a tool.”

“Now watch closely,” I said, scraping the bars across a primed grenade until the metal burned red.

The next Sephis lunged. I drove both crowbars into its chest, the impact sending fire bursting through its body as I twisted them free. Another shadow came forward, and I slammed both bars down, the strike exploding on contact.

Each swing sparked, each impact ignited. The crowbars hissed with heat, searing through flesh and spraying ichor across the cobblestones. I moved faster, fire trailing in arcs as I cut into the wave. Claws tore into me, ribs snapped, and blood sprayed, but the pain lasted only moments. My body knit itself back together before the Sephis could even realize it had struck.

Yamada’s grin widened as he watched. “Not bad… not bad at all!” His laughter grew louder as he carved into the horde with his cleavers, a mad rhythm that matched my own.

Ulric’s gaze lingered on me. To most of them it looked as though I had taken no damage at all, as if I were untouchable.

But Yamada noticed. His eyes flicked to the wounds that closed too quickly, to the blood that dried before it could stain. He said nothing. He only shifted his stance, just slightly more cautious, though the smile never left his face.

The cobblestones steamed with ichor. The air reeked of ash and smoke. I stood in the center with two crowbars glowing like forge iron.

When the last of the wave collapsed into cinders, Ulric lowered his sword. The runes along its length still glowed faintly, and for a moment the light looked more like sunlight than fire.

I stared at him. “Your fire cones. They don’t burn like anything else I’ve seen. What are they really?”

Ulric paused before answering, his eyes fixed on the horizon. “My grandfather always admired the sun. He believed it was the only pure flame left. He passed down a way to call on it. I don’t know how it works. I only know it answers.”

Sunlight. In a world with no priests, no temples, and no gods, here was a man channeling the light of the sun as if it had chosen him.

Yamada snorted, wiping ichor from his cleavers. “Sun, fire, whatever. It kills them all the same.”

Ulric sheathed his blade with calm precision. “The name does not matter. The light endures.”

The fog stirred again, deeper and heavier. Something moved within it, larger than the rest, each step shaking the cobblestones beneath us.

My grip tightened on the crowbars. This was no ordinary purge.

The true battle was still ahead.

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