Holster Purify Radiation Witch

Holster’s purification of the Rad-Hag turns a battlefield victory into an act of restoration: she separates the Thunderlands’ untainted qi from the corruption consuming its caretaker spirit, then channels that usable energy into the spirit-train. The Rad-Hag dies, and the territory’s immediate threat is reduced, but its pollution survives her in another form.

Defeat and Decision

The purification begins only after Yuan has defeated the Rad-Hag and can no longer continue fighting. Once the battle is over, Holster emerges from hiding with a first-aid kit looted from Maurice and helps Yuan sit in a dining chair. Though injured, Yuan is more concerned that the Rad-Hag might recover. He asks Holster whether she can purify her, then urges her to act before the creature regains enough strength to threaten them again.

Holster is frightened and repulsed by the Rad-Hag, who had tried to devour her. She initially avoids Yuan’s gaze, reluctant to approach even a creature on the brink of death. Yuan reassures her that he knows she can do it. Holster gathers her courage, skirts the dying monster’s feeble grasp, and sits behind its head, searching for a place on the skull untouched by acrid blood and crawling insects. Yuan warns her not to touch the small Centidead and explains that the maggots may try to burrow into a living host; if necessary, she should burn them with ethanol. Holster then takes hold of the Rad-Hag’s skull, and the flow of qi around them begins to shift.

Method and Transformation

The purification works by distinguishing the Rad-Hag’s remaining, untainted energies from the corruption embedded in her. A caretaker spirit is the territory’s embodiment: a mask through which the land meets the outside world, and a finely formed vessel of qi. Holster unravels that vessel, guiding its clean energies into the spirit-train’s circulatory system while isolating the rot lodged in its heart. Yuan follows the shifting qi closely enough to understand the method as she performs it.

As Holster’s work takes hold, the Rad-Hag’s immense body shrinks toward human size. Her disfigured face briefly assumes the appearance she had before radiation poisoned the Thunderlands. Centidead maggots fall away like shed skin and writhe helplessly without their host; tumors and corroded portions of the spirit instead crowd into the hole in her chest, a futile attempt to heal. The transformation exposes the difference between the territory’s recoverable life and its accumulated corruption, but it does not save the Rad-Hag: her body crumbles to dust and her qi returns to the Dao.

Corruption Left Behind

The Rad-Hag’s death did not leave the Thunderlands clean. Her body vanished into dust and her qi returned to the Dao, but the rot Holster had separated from the caretaker spirit remained as a table-sized mass of pallid flesh, tumors, and corrupted qi. Half-formed faces writhed beneath its fatty surface: the region’s corruption made visible, no longer housed in its former spirit but still seeking to spread. Even after the transformation had stripped away the Rad-Hag’s immense shape and the Centidead clinging to her, the remnant moved toward Holster. Its weakness did not make it harmless.

Yuan chose to destroy the residue rather than risk its recovery. He sent Holster to fetch alcohol and paper, turning the immediate aftermath into an impromptu lesson in making cocktails; the corrupted mass burned for hours. No monster troubled them while it burned. The spirit-train left the Thunderlands only after this final danger had been contained, and the sun shone brightly when it reached the territory’s borders. The purification thus achieved a beginning, not a complete environmental recovery: a new spirit could not immediately heal the land of its radiation and Centidead infection, but removing the Rad-Hag and burning the detached corruption made that restoration possible.

The Poisoned Approach

Before the confrontation, the Thunderlands’ sickness was already legible in the landscape. Beyond Gatesville, lightning struck beneath golden auroras, while refractions and mirages blurred the region behind a multicolored veil; the road bent northwest rather than crossing it. Near a crater holding the weathered ruins of an old-world city, Yuan Guang sensed qi rising from the ground and carried on the wind. The poisonous dust made him sick, and his bullet-core struggled to assimilate it. His recognition that the ruin itself was diseased establishes the scale of what Holster’s work confronts: the Rad-Hag’s corruption was not merely a monster’s condition, but part of a territory whose damage could be felt in its air and qi.