'Not a problem, Confessor,' Alexa responded to Horacio's thanks as he exited the room at the beck of Celestian Victorine. It was, after all, her job, nay her creed, to keep her allies in good health, just as it fell to her Sisters to indulge more thoroughly in the destruction of the Emperor's foes; true to form, the fight was essentially over by the time she stepped out again, though not the battle as a whole. Her heart chilled just a little as she heard that some of the pirates may have targeted the Genetorium directly, threatening the Gellar field that kept them all safe. If they couldn't reach that in time...
Her fellow sisters and their male companions did as Sister Victorine bade, the few living foes left behind executed in short order - Sister Caroline in particular seemed very keen to do so - before the group trudged onward. Alexa, for her part, helped tend to the various injuries of her Sisters as appropriate. The most pertinent was the shoulder wound Sister Vitruvia had sustained; yet for the amount of blood that seemed to have been shed, it was a very simple wound beneath the armour, a straight cut through flesh alone, and resolved with the application of medigels and sealing agents quite easily.
So simple was the injury, in fact, that she managed to resolve it even as they moved up toward the Genetorium, save the process of sawing open Vitruvia's armour around the injury site, though that took a mere few seconds before they could keep up with the rest of the group. By the time repair cement had been applied to weld Vitruvia's protective shell closed again, they were practically at the Genetorium proper - and what a terrible sight to behold, especially the heavy stubber fire coming out of the room.
And not to mention the leaders of this heretical insurgence. One, a former member of the Adeptus Mechanicus, now clearly a heretic in his- its- own right; the other in Ignatus power armour just like Inquisitor Kliment's, albeit painted in a theme much unlike any the Imperium would deem acceptable. Not to mention the wearer being a coward of the highest order, fleeing the site with not so much a word as a scream of terror, leaving even its technologically-imbued ally to take the heat for it; in a spit of fury, Alexa unloaded six boltrounds at the fleeing body, aiming for its center of mass. Of those, it seemed at least three had merely ricocheted off its protection or missed entirely, but as for the others, she couldn't tell whether she'd dealt any significant wound or not before the coward left her sight. Alas.
'Be advised, Sisters: one of the heretics has fled the scene of battle,' Alexa called out, turning her weapon now toward the small-ish crowd of enemies that still came to them, though she noted that Caroline had seemed to end the threat of the heavy stubber for good. Switching to single-shot on her weapon, she bade the pistol's aim be true, and spat four swift shots of righteous fury into the group. One blew open the chest cavity of a woman whose arm had recently been torn away; another two found their mark lodged in the gut of a Kroot that had yet to take a wound, and in turn failed to truly die in the process despite its intestines being turned to so much paste. The last bolt was turned upon the Heretek, a small explosion only adding to the destruction wreaked upon the vile machine-entity by Confessor Horacio, courageous and without fear of death despite his exposed position.
It was only as Alexa reloaded that she spied Sister Lisbeth slumped against a generator, terror in her expression and stomach acid pooled in front of her. And two holes in her armour. Frak. Even despite her wounds, a song escaped her, a dirge for her own life... Alexa rushed to her as soon as she had an opening. Lisbeth would not die this day, not on her watch.
Having been still for a few moments for the first time since the alarms first rang, Lisbeth's head wound had slowed a little, but the blood had congealed around her left eye and clotted, leaving it sealed with a sticky mess of blood and eyelashes. Her skin was growing pale, from blood loss and shock in equal measure. She had found the strength to fire a few shots over the generator, but she had exhausted herself and was now concentrating on holding her side together while running down the chains of rosaries hanging about her waist. When the light dimmed a little, Lisbeth's heart quickened, and for a moment she thought she had breathed her last, before she recognised the blurred outline of a sabbat-pattern helmet in unfamiliar colours - Alexa, in the colours of her Order Hospitaller.
"Ah...d-did we win? Did I...was I good enough for Him?"
Alexa didn't usually find cause to be concerned with a couple of bullet wounds, but Lisbeth was clearly not in the best state. For starters, she also had a head wound that Alexa had failed to notice in the first instance - whilst she didn't seem to have fallen unconscious or been otherwise concussed, she had also bled heavily from it, only adding to her overall state of blood loss. Not to mention the shock she was in; any other Imperial servant might just yell at her to pull herself together, but she knew full-well that wasn't how that worked.
'We've not won yet, and you aren't going to the Emperor's side yet,' Alexa stated bluntly, her helmet making this proclamation sound very harsh, yet perhaps determined too? Or just unduly harsh. She hated how angry it made her sound, and internally sought a way for her to keep Lisbeth distracted from her own mortality.
'Whilst I work,' she continued, 'tell me about your childhood, your time in the Schola Progenium.' Whilst she spoke, she applied sprays of antiseptic and medigel to Lisbeth's head wound to keep the injury clean and kickstart the healing process, alongside a stimshot to revitalise her and stimulate blood production, and began cutting open Lisbeth's armour to examine her bodily injuries.
The sting of spray on exposed flesh was lost on Lisbeth, who was floating on a sea of adrenaline - small mercy, then, given how sharp some of the tools mounted on Alexa's wrists were. "I was the smallest by a mile - some things never change." Lisbeth laughed, and quickly regretted her levity as her laugh turned to pained coughs and wheezing. "Children can be very cruel, sister. I was forever getting shoved about. Persie -" She hesitated. "Persephone was the only progenia who wasn't interested in using me as a punching bag." A sarcastic smirk wiped over Lisbeth's features as she continued, "but I'll bet none of them managed to beat an alien in hand to claw combat!" She jabbed a finger at the dismembered kroot's head. "Mother Superior Agna would never believe that tiny child could do what I've done for Him. I suppose He - augh - sends us these challenges to forge our faith. It certainly worked." Lisbeth rolled her head back, staring up at the ceiling through the smoke. Anything was better than watching Alexa's fingers poking about inside the entry wounds.
Alexa remained silent for most of Lisbeth's explanation into her childhood, intently examining the wounds she had been dealt as she applied analgesic and sliced into the flesh. The shoulder wound was simple enough, just a matter of extracting the projectile and quickly closing some blood vessels up to stem the flow of blood before any more was lost, but the wound to her chest proper... that was a damaged lung. Not as badly as expected - it seemed the slug hadn't penetrated before coming to a halt, merely bruised and lodged in the flesh, but that still represented damage to a sensitive organ, a bleed into Lisbeth's airways. Carefully, carefully, guided by intuition and the sensors of her helmet, she extracted the slug, then sliced open the bruised section of lung, opening it up and allowing additional blood to spill, albeit in a controlled fashion that, she reckoned, would redirect the flow outward rather than inward.
Confirming as much, and applying medigel to the wound to help it heal before beginning the restitching process, she finally replied to Lisbeth's sentiments, desperately trying and failing to convey her support through the helmet's Emperor-damned vox: 'If you are unusually short, then it is only in the physical, Sister. You know much of the God-Emperor's challenges: your heart and your faith both exceed your frame thanks to them; the xeno skull in your hands proves as much.' Unspoken, she considered that she knew very well how cruel children could be - she too had suffered social punishment at the hands of others for a time, only ceased when she proved that beneath her odd features lay a physique much larger and stronger than the fellows in her age group at the time. She hadn't had much room for kindness in her until she left the Progenium behind, she considered... but then, not many left that place with any empathy at all. Those who did tended not to do as well as she had.
Lisbeth was already short of breath when Alexa began relieving the pressure on her lung; better to have blood in her thoracic cavity than pooling inside her lungs, steadily oozing from the whole in her armour, small bubbles forming with each laboured breath. As the seconds ticked by, the pressure reduced, each breath coming a little easier. Swallowing a small mouthful of blood, Lisbeth pawed at Alexa's shoulder, her other hand grabbing the strap of her bolter. "I'll - urgh - be alright. T-take this," she pleaded, her strength serving her long enough to hand Permanence to her comrade. "Give them His mercy. Particularly the one who - ooh, Throne - who shot me."
Siphoning out the blood in Lisbeth's chest cavity as she spoke, she finally began to fix up the wounds proper, ensuring they did not continue to bleed before sealing them off. First the larger slice into the chest itself, then the bullet hole around that, and finally the now-bloodless hole in her shoulder, each sanitised and medicated as she worked.
'Worry yourself not, Sister,' Alexa decreed (in harsh, blaring tone, as her vox once again decreed), pushing the bolter back toward Lisbeth even as she gave her another stim. 'You live to fight on yet, I assure you.' Her armour was sealed up with repair cement, and finally, the wounded Sister was wounded no more. Or at least was in good enough condition that it made no difference. Patting Lisbeth on the leg comfortingly, Alexa poked her helmeted head out from behind the generator, this time looking round to ensure nobody else had been injured whilst she worked. She'd just fixed up one ally belatedly, she didn't need to find that she'd allowed the same to happen again.
