Warning: there are questionable medical practices in this one.

Quick name reference: Zima=Sonya, Istina=Anna, Gummy=Lada, Leto=Rosalind, Rosa=Natalya, Absinthe=Zoya, Carrion=Mikhail (the OC)


Not like this

The hostage was not treated kindly despite turning himself in. A few bounty hunters gave him a beating as revenge for their dead comrades. Carrion could only close his eyes and take it all in. He wasn't a stranger to receiving his just desserts. If anything, he felt frustrated that the entire conflict could not have been resolved peacefully.

With a last kick to his guts from a female vouivre, the redhead was forced to puke even his favorite chef's cookies. Dragged by the leg, the operator rubbed his back against the dirty ground of the tunnels all the way to the jails. He was thrown in, but not before getting spat on again. However, Carrion didn't mind at all. He had already accepted his fate. If he was going to die, he would rather ignore the details and dedicate his last thoughts to his friends.

Would Absinthe be alright? Of course she would. The cop was the strongest girl he knew. Great things had humble beginnings and he knew no one humbler than her, even if she sometimes took it to the extreme. What about Click? Her drone got smashed quite badly during the massacre, so she would need to get a new one… Carrion hoped they would donate all is savings to his favorite streamer.

A faint sob sounded nearby, so the redhead stopped faking to be dead and moved the corpse he had for a body, his long hair loose and messy. There were a pair of lupo siblings hugging each other despite the chains binding their limbs. The sister glared at him threateningly, but the younger brother could not stop trembling and sobbing. Carrion shut his eyes, damaged from witnessing the youths in such a predicament.

The operator dragged himself closer to them and rested his back against the jail's cold wall.

"It's okay, small ones. I'm not with the baddies. I was sent here to rescue you."

"Really?" The brother whispered with hope. "Are you okay, mister?"

"Forget about me. Are you injured? Did they do anything to you? Please, I understand that it is painful, but I must know everything you've been through."

The sister dropped her canine ears and stopped putting a tough front. Tears wouldn't come out, however. Theirs run out a long time ago.

There was nothing special about their story or their background. They were just the children of some local farmers. No riches, no special properties and no real value to any terrorist group. The brother squeezed his wrist again, enduring a sudden pain that sometimes spiked in their veins.

They were Infected.

When Mastermind received them into her dungeons, they were purposefully cut with active originium. Anger burned Carrion's stomach as he reached for his skirt to find the emergency dose of suppressants, but then remembered he had been stripped of all his equipment and he removed his skirt during the last combat.

"Does it hurt?" He asked, his throat feeling crammed. They nodded. "From one to ten, how bad is it?"

Both siblings answered with a nine, which probably meant they had not been given any kind of treatment after their infection. Panic, rage and fear piercing his heart, yet the operator forced himself to smile.

"I know how that feels. I've been through such a pain as well, so I know that it will get better with time. Trust me. When my friends come get us out, they will help you get better and they will… they will let you see your parents again."

It just hit him. Would their family welcome them back now that they had been infected? Carrion wanted to cry so bad that it ached, but he didn't allow himself to show a vulnerable side before those two. As long as he still breathed, he would remain a Rhodes Island operator. His life may be close to its end, but, until then, he wouldn't allow any harm to come onto those kids.

As such, the long-haired operator got a little bit closer to lend them his body warmth and started making more questions about their life and the things they would do once everything… returned to normal. He couldn't save them from their situation, but at least he could provide heat and some distraction.


Light vanished from the land, covering the abandoned town with a veil of silence and darkness. Among the ruins of the collapsed building, a campfire worked its hardest to provide illumination to the operator's camp.

Sitting the furthest from it, the girl with antlers buried her head into the legs she hugged, her black dress now dirtied by soot and blood. The white-haired forte sat next to her and let out a pained grunt. Istina had just finished patching her wounds up, but that didn't mean the pain was gone. Cannon took the silence in and sighed.

"Thanks." But the elafia didn't reply. "If you hadn't thrown rocks and pebbles at the snipers, they would have been had their way with all of us and we wouldn't be here now."

However, Salvager didn't even react to her words. The forte exhaled another sigh and scratched her head. Then she patted her young teammate's. It was not all that unusual that a girl as young as Salvager became a front line operator, but that didn't make it any easier to digest. Ever since Cannon became her partner, the forte tried her hardest to show how unworthy she was of being an operator, to push her away from the dangers… but, in the end, the little elafia might have been better prepared for life as an operator that Cannon herself ever was.

"Good job…"

The forte couldn't become their instructor's replacement, but at least she could tell the things she knew he would say to them at that point. Salvager coughed into a weak weeping. The liberator missed her teacher. She missed the idiot who always quarreled with her. She missed Pillar. She missed Suzuran. But tears alone wouldn't make them appear before her, so she held onto Cannon and allowed herself to tear up in peace.

Sitting over some rocks, Zima tapped her foot nervously. Gummy was taking a look at Rosa's injury and dressing everyone's wounds with the last of their bandages. When she treated Absinthe's, it became hard to talk due to the cop's uneasy mumbling. Click remained by her side, frantically trying not to think in anything to avoid the reddening of her eyes. Zima grit her teeth tighter.

It was late. Terribly late. The best they could do was catching some sleep, but only those who had it the worst could rest, like Leto and Absinthe. The pipe stuck to the brawler's limb was carefully extracted. Gummy and Istina worked hard to stop the bleeding and stabilizing the wound, but there was a limit to what they could accomplish on their own.

They needed a medic.

More than that. They needed reinforcements.

No. Even more. They needed to contact Rhodes Island and let them know immediately of everything that had happened.

Amiya's hunch was right, as usual. Zima led them right into a trap and it was her fault. She thought of blaming Click for not noticing the ambush sooner… but, as the commander, the responsibility of their failure was only hers to shoulder.

What angered her the most was that she couldn't even feel happy about getting rid of that bastard. There were people crying over him. It didn't matter to Zima what he did in the past anymore. The entire situation made her sick and she hated it.

A boom in the distance alerted the operators. As the liveliest, Zima, Gummy and Istina rushed to the scene and found a metallic object stuck to the ground. It was a projectile that had been fired from a great distance. Its dark shell crumbled and revealed a log-in screen. Zima swiped her operator card over the device and an antenna propelled outwards.

"Zima! This is Amiya! Operator Squire informed us of your situation! What's the current status?"

The ursus girl grabbed the monitor and hardened her eyes. "We were ambushed by a group of hostiles. Everyone is injured. We need a medic here asap!"

"Understood! Try to stay out of danger while the reinforcements make their way to you!"

"Wait!" The vanguard stopped, closing her eyes and starting to tremble. "Operator Carrion became their hostage. If they notice the reinforcements, they will kill him."

"…I'll organize the rescue team. The Doctor and I will go as well to negotiate operator Carrion's release. In the meantime, just focus on staying safe. Help is on the way."

"Roger."

Having served its purpose, the emergency communications projectile shut down until further inputs were given. Gummy and Zima picked it up and returned to their temporary camp.

"Mikhail won't last until help gets here…" The broody blond ursus muttered to herself.

"There's nothing we can do about that now." The monocle-wearing bear replied.

Zima said nothing.


Despair was an inevitable sentiment when one was cornered and pushed over the edge… but Mikhail denied himself of such a feeling. The more the siblings, Michaela and Simon, told him about themselves, the stronger his resolve to protect them became. If he thought about it, he had been given another chance by fate. In the past, he would shoo away those who messed with the kids only to become their new bully.

Mikhail wasn't such an imbecile anymore. If at all possible, he would be more relieved if those two suddenly and conveniently awakened to the strongest arts imaginable, but their story was just the tragedy of two simple children, frightened and cold. Even in the best outcome possible, their lives had forever been changed after getting infected, which meant they would need to become stronger with even greater urgency.

The bully he used to be would push them and rile them up in hopes of awakening any kind of power… but he was not a bully. Mikhail was an operator, codename Carrion, from Rhodes Island Pharmaceuticals. Help was on the way. All he had to do was making sure they remained safe until then.

A cracking sound filled the cell, the jail's door creaking open by the rustling ring of keys in that sarkaz's hands. Carrion covered the children with his arms.

"Nouvian, grab a kid." Mastermind ordered to her vouivre minion.

"I won't let you take them." Carrion warned, standing up and preparing himself for a fight. The hooded mercenary glanced at her master and then at the ursus. His wrists were no longer bound by the handcuffs.

They made the error to allow him to use his own tools to restrain himself. As the owner, he was obviously prepared to free himself when it was necessary. Mastermind started regretting the hostage exchange. Rubbing her headache away, the sarkaz sighed.

"Don't try to be a hero, Mikhail. You don't stand a chance. Just be a good cub and let us villains do our evil things."

"Oh, you're evil alright." He retorted, anger fueling his words. "You're the first mastermind so wicked as to go infecting innocent children around."

"Nouvian."

The leader of the mercenaries dashed towards the operator, pressing his throat against the wall. The siblings moved towards the corner, too exhausted to even yell or get agitated. Mastermind walked up to the hostage, her arms crossed.

"We're a necessary evil, Mikhail. Through the worst means possible, we're going to save the world."

"Sounds like… a mad scientist's ramblings, haha…"

The vouivre tossed the operator aside and approached the kids. Her hand hesitated for a moment. The redhead tackled the mercenary from behind, but he was so weak that Nouvian only had to swing her arm to get him off her. The sarkaz toyed with a knife, grinning at the pathetic Rhodes Island cub.

"Wait!" The redhead insisted. "Please… Whatever you're going to do to them, do me first."

"Wording, little one." The villain's leader joked. The minion waited for her master's input, not afraid of showing how little enthusiasm she had about separating the siblings. "Are you that desperate to die young?"

"…I don't have much time left anyway."

"Oh? Ah, a fellow infected, I see…"

"Doctor…" Nouvian called, the rest of her message expressed by her eyes.

Mastermind shrugged and smirked, returning her little dagger back to its sheathe. "Since you seem to be desperate to die a hero, I'll play my role as the villain and grant you your wish."

As he was dragged away from the jail, the children called for the kind mister, scared of being alone again. Mikhail endured it and showed them a smile.

The new bindings restraining him weren't his own, so that was as far as his resistance would take him. Carrion was brought to some sort of laboratory, not too different from the one they found abandoned under the forest. The pieces were starting to fit together, but he wanted to listen it from them.

"What happened to the townspeople?"

The doctor's assistants gave her the surgery suit and she put on blue plastic gloves. "Starting to see the whole picture now? Look at your little bruised face, itching to discover the whole truth."

Nouvian finished securing the straps that bound the test subject to the table and took a step back. The assistants cut through Carrion's shirt, revealing his crystallized shoulder.

"You said were going to save the world through the worst means possible. What does that mean?"

Mastermind received the vitals sensors from her helpers and started placing them over the operator's torso. "The world is doomed. If not the demons from the north, the sea terrors. If not the fake sky, the fragmented dragon. I sometimes find it hard to get up each morning knowing that there's nothing I can do to stop the calamities waiting for us… but there is something I can do."

"Kidnap children and infect them?"

The Mastermind got a little harsh by pressing a wound. "You're not seeing the big picture, little Mikhail. The world's end is close and everyone else is too busy with politics to bother. Even Rhodes Island."

"You're wrong."

"Shut up. You don't know them as well as I do."

"Haha. Is this where the villain tells the cornered hero her backstory?"

"Nah. There's no time for that. Louise, how is the argent going?"

"It will take two more minutes."

"Let's hope nothing blows up this time…" Mastermind grumbled. Since the silence was boring, she grinned. "Fine. You won't live to tell the tale anyway. I used to be a researcher at Rhodes Island. I was expelled a long time ago because I was the only one willing to go as far as it was necessary to find a cure."

"…a cure for what?"

The scientist moved around the table and caressed the patient's crystals. "Such a beautiful pattern. Must hurt like a bitch. When were you infected?"

If all hope was lost anyway, Carrion didn't mind some chat. "A year ago. During the Chernobog-Lungmen conflict."

"Really? Your infection is at a late stage, though. How did it get so bad so fast?"

"Oripathy crystallized a delicate part of my heart. Dr. Kal'tsit and other surgeons removed it many times, but my oripathy is particularly stubborn. Suppressants stopped working on me a couple of months ago and… here I am. I must still consider myself among the lucky ones."

"You must have a death wish, becoming an operator in your condition."

"I had my reasons… You… Tell me. Is it what I think it is?"

Mastermind chuckled and received a flask of a green acidic substance. "We are creating a cure to the rock disease."

"But then-"

"Everyone in our group has lost someone dear to them to this damned sickness."

"My parents." One said.

"My sister." The other added.

"My lover…" Nouvian mumbled.

Mastermind's red eyes stared into the infinite. "My children… Oripathy should be exterminated from our world and we're not going to stop at anything to find its cure. Rhodes Island values life too much to do what's necessary. The world might remember us as villains, but if that world is one that has conquered the infection, it will have been worth every sacrifice."

The doctor approached a shelf with many flasks. An endless amount of labels was pasted over it and the neighboring shelves.

"I fooled some local nobles to finance my project and hired bodyguards. You might have seen our old facilities under the forest. Little by little, we abducted everyone in this town and used them as test subjects to our experiments. The elder, the married and the tender. We made no exception. However, since we wanted to treat oripathy, we required infected patients."

"So you infect them yourselves."

Mastermind didn't try to look proud of her actions, but her resolve was undeniable. "Our study's focus was understanding the process in which oripathy spreads its roots in living organisms and find a way to reverse it. So having access to freshly infected patients was a must. One hundred and forty-six. Before we realized, the townspeople were trying to oppose us and… it became three hundred and twelve. We moved our base of operations to the ghost town and set our sights in a nearby village. The experiments had to continue."

"So you resorted to abducting people from other places…"

The sarkaz doctor prepared and intravenous vial for the patient while the assistants poured the creepy looking substance into a separate pack of physiological fluids. Mastermind opened a drawer and extracted a different flask. The liquid was transparent, easily to mistake with water, yet the way the scientist held the vial told him how important it really was.

"This is the result of all our tests. It doesn't even have a name yet. I will name it after the first person to be cured… In theory, it should never work on a patient in such a grave stage as you, but you know what they say. The world is built upon failures."

"T-Then why are you going to experiment with me?" The redhead asked, his voice betraying his growing fear.

The former mother frowned. "You asked for it. Let me give you the rundown."

The green medicine they called 'the argent' would put him in a comatose state. As threatening as that was, its purpose was in fact to keep him alive. After all, the next drugs would make him experience so much pain he would most certainly faint and die, like the rest of the subjects. Since most of their experiments were performed on recently infected humans, the researchers still ignored how their latest drug performed on someone like Carrion… which was, on itself, the reason why it was worth testing it out.

Silently panicking as everything escaped out of his control, Mikhail's eyes moved from here to there. The restraints were so tight it hurt. It was cold. His shoulder's aching stung, as per usual. He didn't know who to look at. The Mastermind was a lost cause, but the vouivre seemed less eager to stay. Mikhail tried looking at her for a last attempt at begging for mercy, but… there was… a familiar looking pile of junk at the corner of the lab. It was not bigger than his head, yet its shape bore a brand he could never mistake. How did it get over there? Maybe someone kicked it while they moved from one place to another as they gathered their belongings to move out? It was faint, but there was a red light still glowing.

"Can I… get something off my chest… before you start?"

The mad scientists took their hands off him. "…you have a minute."

"Thanks. D-Do no pay me too much mind. I know better than to try to guilt trip you into releasing me at this point. Radical as your methods are, I don't have any right to hold it against you. I… I really hope you make it work. Please, put an end to it."

"That's the plan."

"If at all possible, with me."

"No promises."

"Hehe… I also want to say some things… as if I were telling it to the people I care about. May I?"

"Ugh, fine. But keep it brief."

"Thank you… very much." Carrion breathed in… and out. "I guess this is goodbye. I was told to be brief, so I'll get to the point. Click, I'm sorry, but I don't think I'll be able to finish editing the deer's documentary, haha… And about my promise… I don't know if I will be able to keep it… You're the sister I always wanted to have. I hope they have wi-fi in hell. I'd hate to miss your uploads, haha… Sonya… it sucks that I will die without solving things between us. I always… hoped to be friends with you. With all of you… I worked so hard for it, too… Blyat." He paused, his eyes unable to remain open. Messy hair and a novel braid resurged in his mind. "And… Zoya. According to the medics, I only had less than two years remaining… Nothing would have made me happier than to spend every single day left by your side. I love you. Please, be happy… I will cry if you deny this world of your beautiful smile…"

The minute was over. Mastermind might have felt something from that boy's last words, but she had been through too many sacrifices. Her heart was too numb to tragedy. For every regret she carried in her soul, her determination to keep going only grew stronger. If Babel's Demon wasn't going to help her, she would do it herself.

The assistant awaited the order to inject the argent into his left arm.

"Do it."


The mouse embraced the pale Absinthe, who was too devastated to even show any emotion in her face, too tired to utter a reply and too brokenhearted to do anything else but tearing up. Click herself was fighting an uphill battle not to go red. Her foolish brother was about to get killed and all she could do was listen to her drone's audio.

When the concept of having just heard Mikhail's last words started making any sense, the injured cop tried standing up, but Cannon and Salvager forced her to lay down. Aside from the blunt trauma to the head and her twisted ankle, she had casted so many arts that her body simply had no energy to keep moving. Ignoring that and pushing the limits would have dire consequences… and after what they just heard, Carrion's students knew perfectly well what they had to do: protect Absinthe and Click from themselves at all costs.

Leto had fallen down with fever, her slumber ridden with nightmares that transported her to unpleasant times of hunger and fear. Fortunately, Salvager went around gathering scrap and broken engines and improvised a refrigerator to cool water for her fever. It always upset her that her talents only got to shine when it was already too late.

"It hurts Gummy to leave them out of this."

"If we rationalize this, we have no other choice."

"We'll be back before they notice. Hopefully."

Istina approached the ursus vanguard who was already packing a few things. "That is, if a certain someone doesn't try to go alone again."

Zima yelped and jumped out of her dusty seat. "W-What do you girls want now? I said I'm not interested in listening to what that bastard has to say!"

Rosa adjusted the shoulder strap of her weapon and picked her friend's axe from the ground. "And where were you planning to go, exactly? Take a stroll around to kick some pebbles to take out your anger?"

"Uh? O-Oh. Oooh, yeaaah. I just wanted to stretch my legs…"

Gummy giggled and hugged her side. "You and Leto couldn't lie even if your lives depended on it, heeheheh… Istina and Gummy know what happened the last time you made such a face."

"A certain someone came to my castle and defeated the 'shitheads gopniks' who hoarded all the food." Rosa whispered, feeling nostalgic. "It was a night not too different from this one."

The brunette bear lowered her head and guilt made her chest feel heavy. "That's when the second fire occurred…"

Istina moved next to her old friend, positioning herself just before her. "Sonya. Lada, Natalya, Rosalind and I know you even better than you do yourself. That night, I should have gone with you, regardless of what Vika said… Today, I won't be making the same mistake."

"Anna…"

"Lada won't hide behind your backs or lose control again. She will fight to protect her friends!"

The detective patted the defender's back. "I already informed Rosalind. She told us to go bring her punching bag back."

"I don't get her half the time she speaks." Zima grumbled, still trying to deny it.

Rosa chuckled and returned the axe to its owner. "You're not the kind of girl who would abandon someone to their luck, regardless of what they may have done to you or to others." The blushing brunette opened her mouth to reply something, but words failed her when she realized who the aristocrat was talking about. "So I propose you stop with the pretenses and tell us what the plan to rescue Mikhail is."

The only thing Zima could possibly do was scratching her head and letting out a groan. "You girls are unbelievable… There's no need for a plan. We go in, pick the children and Mikhail up and we go out. Meeting's adjourned!"


It was… oddly pleasant, at first.

His entire body had been aching from to the continuous fights. Catching some zees was unusual in the midst of an operation. The respite was so overwhelming that Carrion couldn't even remember where he was or what was happening. It didn't really matter. When he opened his eyes next, he would remember.

Something stung his left arm. It was cold. Colder than the room they were in. Then it grew hot as it expanded through the rest of his arm. It felt like acid, melting his veins. The pain was so intense it put the injury in his hand to shame. It quickly became so unbearable that he shook awake, his eyes wide open.

Carrion was still restrained in the lab's surgery table. The masked mad doctors kept working the vials to administer the next dose of the drugs he had to be injected. Despite his yells, they didn't seem to flinch or slow down. How many times had they seen such a grim scene?

As he started thinking that it wasn't as bad as he expected, the pain once focused on his arm extended further, invading the rest of his body. Was he shouting? Was his body completely clenched? Mikhail had no way of knowing. The only thing he could feel at the moment was the acidic pain making its way through him.

He fainted… losing himself to the desire of accepting an early death.

But he was then awakened right back up. The hell continued. He found the time to laugh, his bloodshot eyes looking for Zima somewhere in the room. She last told him she would see him in hell, which was unsettlingly similar to his current situation.

There were no Zimas to be seen. Everything was blurry. Even his eyes hurt. The doctors' words became incomprehensible. There was no point in trying to making sense of anything. The moment the pain climbed all the way to his brain, nothing seemed to make sense anymore. The ceiling crumbled and twisted backwards? Or was there originium spire growing upwards from the floor? Why did Mastermind have mantis claws?

Consciousness failed him again… only to be brought back to life by the unending pain.

How many times had that happened already? How long were the hallucinations going to continue? There was something completely wrong going on with his body, but he was too busy squirming to take a look. His eyes caught sight of something else. The vouivre was rubbing her eyes.

Carrion remembered a promise he made. For every single tear Click wept, he had to live a year longer.

So he fought it. Mikhail let go of his desire to escape. Death was an ending too lenient for a monster like him anyway. His heart felt like a bomb about to explode, but he was adamant about living on even if it went off. His barely working mind strained itself to think of the reasons why he had to live. He said his goodbyes, but he didn't want to die after all. He wanted to see them again. He wanted to…

But thoughts, sometimes, were the catalysis of something darker.

Mikhail remembered Gummy. Their conversation about the things they did when they were hungry. He remembered Sasha, Sergei and Vladimir. It only happened during feverish nightmares, but sometimes the taste of his flesh returned to him. The fragrance of blood. The madness of heresy. The warmth of death. The putrid price he had to pay to survive.

The test subject started squirming even harder, forcing the vouivre mercenary to lend a hand at holding him down. The doctors were alarmed by an unexpected outcome from the drug. Something was growing far more than anticipated.

Roaring with a voice that didn't sound like his, Mikhail swung his left arm to his side, slamming Mastermind against a distant wall. Nouvian picked a blade and tried cutting his arm, but some kind of rocky body got in her way.

It was like a three-fingered hand.

Everything afterwards became a blurry mix of the taste of human flesh, the scent blood and the burning of acid. Was it a nightmare? It looked like one.

The carrion hoped it wasn't real with all of its being.


Even though they had advanced far into enemy territory, the Ursus Self-Government Student Group didn't find any bounty hunter around. There were sounds of battle coming from the depths of a flight of stairs. As they considered whether to go down or keep looking around the facilities, a weak moan caught their attention.

"The children!" Istina identified, making Gummy brute forcing the jail bars open.

Zima touched Rosa in the shoulder, mumbled something to her ear and sneaked away. However, the white-haired ursus caught her by the arm before she could go on her lone journey again.

"I'll take care of things over here. Gummy, Istina, go with Zima before she tries to leave you behind."

Pulling the bear's ears, the defender and the supporter thanked the sniper for ratting the vanguard out. They told her. They were in this together and there was no other way about it. Both annoyed and thankful to Rosa, the leader glanced at the underground corridors once again to make absolutely sure that the aristocrat wouldn't meet any obstacles in her path.

When Rosa picked the siblings up and exited the cell, however, the lupo boy cried about the missing kind mister. Zima pat his head.

"You focus on holding onto the big sis here. We'll go save that bastard's ass."

Time was of the essence. The screams and the tremors had already stopped. An eerie silence welcomed the three girls into the last stairs they might be descending. When they reached the lowest floor, they saw the scenery of a massacre. The mercenaries who had survived pretended to be dead while some kind of beast held an assistant down onto the operations table. The victim squirmed his legs, wailing the pain as something chewed on his throat. Another bite later, the yells were silenced by the gurgling.

"M-Mikhail?" Gummy called, disturbed by the dismembered bodies and the pools of blood around the beast of long red hair.

His torso was naked, revealing the carvings of the veins that popped open. His entire left arm had morphed into something black that spelled disaster. Like an infected beast, his limb had turned into an originium member that continued to melt and reform endlessly. The monster's long red hair covered his mouth, but there was something dripping from his mouth.

"…I don't think that thing is him anymore…" Istina whispered, holding her book tighter and preparing herself to fight with tooth and nail. "Zima?"

The frenzied test subject grabbed the drowning assistant and threw him over the girls. His blue eyes looked like those of a beast, dilated and dangerous. His mouth, painted red. The creature screamed a sharp wail at the newcomers, but his action made it vomit blood again. It slammed its originium arm onto a mangled corpse and crouched next to it to feast.

Zima pointed her axe at Mikhail. "Oi! Are you shitting us right now or are you outta your mind?!"

The carrion grabbed its head, injured by a sudden headache that made it yell again. Without prior warning, the monster lunged at the vanguard with its infectious limb. Zima parried, but lost her ground and flew towards a wall. Gummy rushed forward and tackled the creature with her door shield. Istina casted her arts to slow Zima down and nullify the second impact.

"Don't do this, Mikhail! Come back to us!" The defender cried as the beast rammed its arms against her shield.

The originium monster retracted its rocky limb and morphed it into a scythe.

"Get down!"

The entrance to the laboratory got sliced in half, putting the facility's structural integrity in shambles. Zima lunged her weapon at the enraged operator, but her axe got stuck onto the rock. She crouched to dodge the swing of his big arm and punched his face, lifting him above the ground. The beast replied by punching her with his own human fist.

While a fist-fight took place, Istina and Gummy noticed the wounded Mastermind and her vouivre minion trying to crawl towards the stairs.

"What did you do to him?!"

"How do we fix him?!"

But the scientist didn't even know what was happening.

"Urrrrwaaaagh!"

Zima punched the carrion so hard it was sent flying to the other end of the lab.

"Is this how you want things to end?! Are you really going to show your face to them like this?!"

The vanguard's words tried reaching into the beast's captive soul, but it was no use. Originium had sealed off all attempts to make sense of anything. It hurt. It still hurt. When it hurt, the carrion got hungry. When it was hungry, it ate anything edible. That was what it had to do to survive. The consequences didn't matter. Nothing mattered. Its mind was so stirred by pain and confusion that the beast didn't even know how to distinguish reality from illusion. The red-haired monster attacked the empty air and tripped with its own feet. He got up, punched the figure next to him and roared again.

For a single second, his eyes identified the girl's.

The carrion grabbed its confused head before slamming the ground over and over. Afterwards, it crouched and jumped to the ceiling. Its monstrous arm morphed into a drill and it made its way up to the surface. When it felt the cold breeze of the night, the carrion roared to the fake sky.

"Mikhail!"

"Ins...tructor...?"

There was a campfire nearby and some familiar faces.

The boy he once was hoped to see them again… but not like this. Not with something stuck between his teeth.

A different kind of pain made his chest grew so heavy that he had a hard time standing up. The suffering made him hunger and the closest source of nourishment watched him in mute disbelief.

Howling his loudest yet, the carrion tackled a building and rushed to the edges of the town. It had to go away as fast as possible, to put as much distance between them and those people. If it ate them, that would be it. Mikhail would be no more.

Her face still throbbing from the punches it received, Zima stomped her way to the culprits, pushed Nouvian aside and grabbed Mastermind by the collar. "What the fuck did you do to him?!"

The sarkaz scientist looked past the operator and glanced at the ruins and the corpses around. Everything she had been working on… gone. Every sacrifice, every death… it had all been for naught. Of course she would laugh. It was too much to remain sane. Truly a zero-sanity moment.

Zima helped her calm down with a few blows to the noggin, but she was so agitated that she knocked Mastermind out. Perhaps it was some kind of accidental mercy.

The dark-haired vouivre shook, but failed to stand up. "I'll tell you everything… but please, save the doctor!"

Disturbed as the operators were, those two were the only ones who could offer some answers. Gummy removed the doctor's blouse to address her abdomen's wounds and cracked ribs while Istina took a look at the mercenary. Nouvian's arms had been broken during her fight with the carrion, even though her kind was usually quite tough. Just what in the world happened to the instructor?