Same note as yesterday – skip if read

Hey all. To those who don't read it or didn't see, the business I work for is going insolvent. This is gong to cause some short-term chaos, but will change things for the better long-term. There's a more detailed post on my p a tr eon for free, but you don't need to read it. Basics here:

Company is going insolvent. I'm going to be involved in lots of meetings and stuff for the next while. Might take 2-3 months. I don't know as have never been involved in this before. This may cause sporadic or short updates, typically on weekday fics.

I will be OKAY so please don't worry or feel you need to rush to support me. I've wanted to quit for a while but had too much loyalty to staff to leave them. I want to commit to full-time writing, so I'll be happy once this is concluded.

I'll do my best to keep updates going as usual but if you see me absent for a day, please assume it's me being called to meetings with accountants and insolvency agency. I won't always be available to post a notice on my profile but just assume it's the reason.

Cover Art: Kirire

Chapter 103

It wasn't much of a surprise to find that "good old fashioned common sense" hadn't done a bit of good to stop the outbreak. People continued to go out, to mingle, and to run the risk of passing on the anomaly's spores, seeds, or however it procreated. By the end of the first week, an additional sixteen people had died.

Or bloomed, depending on who you asked. There were already some nutjobs online arguing that this was the next step of human evolution. Blake had a feeling they'd make for convenient scapegoats once this was all over, assuming the Reality that ARC Corp had dubbed Vytal Blossom didn't become Reality Class.

The only bright side was that ARC Corp had decided to leave it to them and not interfere.

Not out of trust, of course, but because they wanted to contain the spread. Though they never said it, she had a feeling a contingency plan was being put in place to destroy Vale at the peak of the festival if Vytal Blossom continued to spread. They'd eradicate it and every potential carrier at the source, then blame the cataclysmic explosion on the White Fang or Grimm or a malfunction in Amity's systems.

They were on a deadline, then.

If this wasn't concluded by the time people started leaving Vale, ARC Corp would need to intervene.

Which was awkward considering the finals were yesterday.

That didn't mean the Vytal Festival was over – the tournament was just a part of it, as much as everyone acted otherwise. There were parties, awards to be handed out, and then a closing ceremony that would theoretically be just as big as the opening one. People would stay for that at the very least.

Oh, and Yang had won it. Or her team had, but it was hard to think "team" when the final was a one-on-one bout between Yang and some girl from Mistral. Sun hadn't made it, too distracted by having seen a man split in two and become a tree to focus on the fights and his training. Blake didn't fault him for it.

At least they'd gotten their sleep back under control.

Sighing, Blake entered the hotel's elevator and rode it to the sixth floor, then stepped out to see the floor already scrubbed clean of people. There was police tape to block anyone getting close, and two men in hazard suits carrying canisters of dust toward ground zero. One of them made to get in her way but backed off when she flashed her badge. He didn't understand the badge, but it was just an authoritative gesture that told him she was meant to be here.

"I'm from the Council," she said. "Special containments unit. What do we have here?"

"Ma'am." The man tried to offer a salute but really couldn't in his bulky outfit. "Two blooms, a couple here for… well, we figure they were here for a night of passion. I doubt either of them expected this."

"Are we looking at one bloom or two?"

"Two, but it doesn't look simultaneous. One is smaller than the other. Will you need a mask, ma'am?"

"There's no need. The disease doesn't appear to be capable of infecting anyone with aura."

A white lie. The anomaly obviously could not take root in another anomaly, of which anyone with an active aura was, but it also made some degree of sense for their excuse as well. The leading theory was spores that burrowed into skin, and since aura was both a forcefield and a general boost to a person's health, it made sense it would counteract it. And the fact that no students, huntsmen, or transfers had contracted the "disease" only worked to sell the theory.

Not that it hadn't led to some complications.

There were less-than-scrupulous people going around offering "aura unlock" for a fee. It wasn't illegal, they couldn't stop it, and they weren't even sure if they needed or wanted to. Simply having aura wouldn't help people in their lives since they wouldn't know how to use it, but it would protect them from Vytal Bloom. The only problem was wondering what the consequence of so many people having Light of the Soul would do later.

Since trading one anomalous infection for another wasn't exactly a smart move.

"If you're sure, ma'am. This way."

The man led her into the room and advised her to duck her head under the low-hanging bough. The trees had bloomed on and through the bed, two bodies intertwined with two trunks wrapping around one another in an almost erotic fashion.

What might have been romantic as humans looked closer to asphyxiation now, and not the kinky kind. The tree at the centre was anaemic and crooked at the top, its trunk damaged by the new one wrapped around and choking it, then coming off at an angle to pierce the wall and spread new branches and roots up the wall and across the ceiling.

Neither tree was healthy, both forced to share limited room and resources, but that worked to their benefit since they hadn't been able to puncture the walls and get out the room. The whole hotel room itself was covered in roots, branches, and leaves, but at least it hadn't spread.

"How quickly were people evacuated?" she asked.

"The neighbours heard the first scream and called the police. There was fifteen minutes until the second, and then the neighbours panicked and rushed down to the hotel lobby. The floor below this felt the roof crack and dust fall on them and similarly got out before the roots dug down. They've all been tested and are in isolation and observation right now. No blooms as of this morning."

"Good on them for reacting so quickly. How full is isolation right now?"

"We still have room. We've taken over a hotel and the Council is footing the bill, so the patients are living in some degree of luxury. A few of them are going stir crazy, but most of them understand why it's needed."

"Helps that there's been no outbreaks in our quarantined zones," added the other person in the suit. "They know it's safer in there than out in the city, even if this is still less than a 0.2% chance of infection."

Blake hummed. Vytal Bloom was undoubtedly deadly, but it wasn't fast spreading from what they could see. There were less than fifty deaths in over a week now, and as horrible as that sounded it was a whole lot less than there would be from an outbreak of just about any other infectious disease in a city hosting the Vytal Festival. Even a bout of pneumonia would take out more, especially the elderly and those with compromised immune systems.

For all that this anomaly tore out of people and sprouted trees, it didn't seem to send its spores far – that, or the spores were especially bad at infecting people. Maybe they were killed off by even an average immune system, and only took hold in extremely niche cases. Blake sighed and plucked a leaf off a nearby branch. It went into a plastic container, followed by a branch from another segment, and then a bit of sap from a cut she made with Gambol Shroud. The guys in hazard suits seemed relieved by her collecting samples. Anything to know steps were being taken to rein this in.

"Have there been any blooms among your teams or the responders?" she asked.

"None, ma'am. Our suits seem to do a more than good enough job of keeping them out. Luckily, these branches don't really have the strength or thorns to pierce through the material. Even if we snag a leg on one, it's the branch that breaks first."

That was good to know. They really didn't need the people helping them contain this to get infected as well. Blake collected her samples and stepped out. "Burn this room down and make sure to collect all the ashes for disposal. Make sure the smoke and fumes are sucked up and released in containment and not let out the windows."

"Yes ma'am!"

"We'll get it done, ma'am."

/-/

Jaune was holding a branch and rotating it in his fingers when she got back to the office. He had several such containers on his desk, and many of the parts of the trees out. Some leaves were being boiled in a pot of water on a portable stove to disinfect them, and others were scrunched up in test tubes filled with various liquids and acids.

Lacking a lab of their own, and with ARC Corp not wanting to take samples out of Vale, they were forced to trundle along with chemistry sets. At least ARC Corp were prepared to have researchers outside the city guide them over video calls and analyse the data on their behalf, but it was still a pain.

"How many is that today?" asked Jaune.

"Only four so far, and mine counts for two of those. I can't tell if the rate of infection is slowing down or not."

"Neither can the eggheads," he replied. "It's not following any curves or graphs a normal outbreak would, but then this isn't normal. If this were a disease, the low rate of infection would probably mean it would burn out in a few weeks, but it's not. We don't know how long these spores can survive outside a host body. If they can survive for months or years, then it won't mater if only one person a month catches this. It'll be enough for it to keep spreading."

"Not to sound horrible here—" Because what she was about to say truly was. "—but would that be a problem to most people? The cause of death is horrific, but if we could get this down to one victim a month in all of Remnant, I feel like the populace would accept that."

"They probably would." Jaune set the branch down. "But, sadly, we don't have to convince the populace of Remnant to accept this. We have to convince my family it's safe to let people leave Vale and risk spreading this around."

Blake sighed and took her seat, caressing Timothy as he scuttled into her lap. "I really don't see what we can do, Jaune. We're chasing shadows here, reacting to every case as it happens and too late to do anything but burn the trees. Even if we convinced everyone to embrace mandatory testing, we don't know what we're looking for."

As far as they could tell, it didn't show up in blood tests, urine samples, or just about anything, DNA included. The researchers from ARC Corp were caught between two competing theories – the first, that this was simply because it was anomalous and thus didn't show up in medical tests. The second, that it was a clear indicator that the anomaly – or its seed – didn't infect the body at all, and instead rested on or inside it, kind of like a parasitic worm or fungus. It was growing in the body, but not in the bloodstream or among bodily functions.

The first theory had the human as its host and the second had the human as nothing more than a pot of compost. Nutrients and fluids for the tree when it bloomed, but nothing more, and of no otherwise intrinsic value to the anomaly beyond taking it away from its origin point. That, at least, made sense for trees, as they wanted to spread their seeds so that they wouldn't compete for sunlight and soil.

"I'm 100% sure this is a non-sapient anomaly," Jaune said. "There's no rhyme or reason here, just evolution. Nature, almost. But it had to have some from somewhere – a first tree, a first seed, something." Jaune sighed. "The only question is whether that's still out there or whether the guy you killed was the first."

Good point. "What difference does it make if that's the case?"

"Well, knowing there's no source left, this could theoretically end if we were able to isolate the last blooms and stop them spreading. If we manage that by design or pure accident, the anomaly will die out. But, if there's a mother tree somewhere, then it could always come back in the future, and we need to find and destroy that. Ozpin has already had his students comb the Emerald Forest."

"He's helping…?"

"Reluctantly. The Council has forced his hand on it, and his students are immune anyway. They've searched a lot of the forest and found nothing, and any further out I can't see the spores making it to Vale."

"Meaning the tree – if it still exists – is here in the city somewhere."

"That's my thought."

Normally, she'd consider that someone was keeping and using an anomaly, but that wouldn't be the case here. There was no benefit to owning it, and actually a lot of risk. If someone had the tree, they'd have seen the news and know how dangerous it was. They would want to report it just to protect their own lives. Similarly, if any of the dead had been exposed to it then the tree would have been found when the authorities followed up leads on the deceased and investigated their homes.

"The fact that no such mother tree has been found implies it's dead," Blake said. "So, we just need to deal with the aftermath?"

"Maybe so. Anomalies can appear out of nowhere. We know this from the intelligent ones at Alistair's. Some of them just suddenly existed one day. It's possible this tree appeared, bloomed, infected, then died. For all we know, its first iteration might have been as a garden weed some unlucky gardener found and killed, becoming infected in the same moment he ended the threat."

That was the dream scenario. It'd mean they just needed to keep playing whack-a-mole until they cut down enough of the cases that it died out when its hosts did. Not exactly a nice solution for those infected, but it wasn't like this was an actual infection they had a cure for.

The scroll on Jaune's desk went off. "Jaune Arc here," he answered. "ARC Corp speaking." He paused. "Yes. Uh-huh. Right now!?" He stood up. "We'll be there as soon as possible!"

Blake gently pushed Timothy aside and stood. "What is it?"

Jaune ran around the desk, smiling wildly. "We've got a living host. The hospital has him in quarantine and they think they've located the seed for a surgical removal." Jaune yanked on his long coat. "We're going to be there to see it happen!"

/-/

The patient was a young boy no older than eight, asleep under a white cloth as doctors operated on his left leg, in the upper thigh. His parents were in the waiting room, terrified beyond belief, and it didn't feel right for her and Jaune to be in the operating theatre and giddy with excitement. There was a boy's life at stake.

But, if they failed, then everyone in Vale might be purged for the greater good.

"I have it," a doctor said, somehow managing to sound calm and measured while digging inside a boy's body. "It's attached to the bone. I'm going to need to cut a section free. We've no idea how deep the roots go, so be careful."

"All signs positive," said another. "You're good to go."

The sounds were horrible. Horrific little nightmare noises of a person's open body being toyed with that made Blake deeply uncomfortable. Blood wasn't something she was too bothered by nowadays, but wounds weren't as visceral as this. There was a doctor with tongs pulling human muscles aside so another could tease veins and arteries out the way. It all looked so very wrong and made her stomach churn.

The sound of a tiny saw drilling into bone was no better. Blake's ears dipped low.

Eventually, it was done. The doctor moved back with something held in a set of tongs and set it down on a plate. Jaune stood to approach, and the doctor nudged the trolley toward them, accepting that they could see but not wanting them near the open body when hygiene was of the utmost importance. The doctors went back to cleaning up the incision point and putting the boy's leg back together.

"How did the boy notice this?" asked Jaune.

"The child complained of itching in his leg and a bump," said one of the doctors, speaking through their surgical mask. "We believe his small size made it easier to identify the seed compared to an adult. In a fully grown body, it would be difficult to feel even a small lump from having this on your bone. Less skin and muscle made it more pronounced. An X-Ray was able to identify it."

"Make a note of that," Jaune told Blake. "We should have all in quarantine X-Rayed with emphasis on their skeletal structure. It must be drawing nutrients from bone marrow. Now, let's take a look at you."

Jaune leaned over the small dish and Blake did the same. The seed was bloody for obvious reasons, with splatter on the glass around it. Worryingly, it was moving. Wriggling like a worm, with small roots closer to tendrils reaching out in search of something to latch onto. Jaune took a pair of metal tweezers and picked it up, holding it in the air as it squirmed.

"Living organism closer to a worm than a seed," he noted. "That explains how it finds hosts. It's not pure luck but active locomotion on its part."

"How did it get in the boy's leg, though?" asked Blake. "Did it cut its way in?"

The doctor spoke up. "The boy and his parents said there were no cuts recently and his skin shows no indication of incisions in the area. He did complain of stomach-ache and sickness, however. The parents suggested food poisoning as a cause."

Jaune and Blake exchanged looks. Ingestion.

"Fruit?" she offered, thinking of trees.

"It only looks like a seed," he pointed out. "It has these little root-tentacles to aid in movement, but I doubt it could burrow its way through the pus of a fruit. It looks much too weak for that." He eyed it again. "It's more like an octopus than a seed."

"Water, then." Blake took a deeper dish and rushed over to the nearby sink where the doctors had sanitised their equipment. She filled the tub with distilled water and brought it back. Jaune nodded and lowered the tweezers down, letting go to drop the creature in with a plop of water.

Almost immediately, it began to swim erratically about, seemingly random, but obviously in control and much more mobile in water than outside of it.

"It's water," he confirmed, with a tight smile her way. He was happy to have a vector, but not happy to realise what it was. "This thing is in the city's water supply. That's bad. Very, very bad. Doctor, how possible is it for something like this to burrow out the stomach and then attach to a skeleton?"

"It's hard to say," the doctor replied. "The victims' bodies have been torn asunder with every bloom so there's nothing for us to investigate. That said, it's possible. It's also possible 99.9% of these pathogens would be destroyed by stomach acid before they got a chance, which would explain the low rate of infection."

"It's a lead," said Jaune. "Destroy this," he told the doctors, with a tap on the tank. "Blake, we're going to investigate the water treatment plant. They're supposed to test and monitor the water before it reaches consumers. Either something has gone wrong, or they've cut back on testing in favour of pushing profits and cost lives because of it." He sighed. "And knowing how companies operate, it could genuinely be either."

/-/

Vale's water treatment facility lay on the outskirts of the city backing onto the ocean, but it took its water from rivers rather than the sea – simply dumping the waste out that way. It was a futuristic looking steel building that was rectangular in shape, with huge circular silos leading off the back and a whole lot of very big pipes running around the place.

Given its importance to the city's population, it was no surprise to find the place had its car park surrounded by a very strong fence, with security checkpoints and booths dotted about, as well as barbed wire running along the top.

A little more surprising was how none of those booths were occupied.

"Well, that's not a good sign," said Blake, poking her head inside one. "No signs of struggle. It honestly looks like the security guard just didn't bother to come into work today."

"Him and everyone else," said Jaune, looking around at the overall lack of people. "And yet there are plenty of cars here. Employees, I guess, but where are they? It's gone closing time. They should have gone home."

Blake knew where this was going. "Hundred lien says they're all dead."

"I'm not taking that bet," he replied. "But how the hell could this many people die, and no one notice? Why haven't their families reported them missing? How has no one noticed this many missing people?"

Good question. There was a chance they were alive but incapacitated, or even working with the anomaly, but that still begged the question of how the oddities had never reached them. If the water supply had stopped even once, the whole city would be up in arms, and although Vale didn't carry all its eggs in one basket, this was the main water plant. This was the one that dealt with over 75% of the city's water supply.

"We should call the police," she said.

"Eh? We're enough—"

"I mean to make a perimeter and catch people if they try and flee."

Jaune mulled that, then nodded. "Good thinking. And if anything breaks loose, we'll need them to put it down. I'll make the call. Do you feel comfortable…?"

"I have aura. I'll go in."

"Are you sure?"

"There are two ways this goes," she said. "The first is that it's a bunch of crazy tree-worshipping cultists with weapons, in which case I'll be fine, and the second is that everyone has bloomed and been replaced with trees that can't infect someone with aura." Blake smiled. "In which case, I'll be fine." Her instincts said it was the second. "The trees themselves haven't proven capable of movement or aggressive action beyond infecting people. I'll take a look, see which it is, then come back out and tell you."

Jaune nodded. "Alright. Good luck."

Next Chapter: 3rd June

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