Chapter Ten: Battle to the Death

In the heart of the ruins, a voice gritted out, “Were we betrayed? How did the Tianjing constables surround us so quickly?”

“Calm down, Arthur. They’re here to hunt down another fugitive.”

“Angus, we were so close—just a little closer and we would have caught the ‘Leviathan’!”

“Arthur, admit it. Our operation failed. The ‘Leviathan’ didn’t escape; it merely chose to spare us.”

“Damn it, damn it, damn it!”

Enraged, Arthur slammed his submachine gun into the ground. This mission was of utmost secrecy and importance; superiors had even assigned him a squad of bioengineered soldiers at his disposal. Yet he had still managed to botch it. He could hardly imagine the punishment that awaited him.

Angus placed a steadying hand on his shoulder. “Let’s retreat. Our plan was sound, but too many unexpected things happened. This isn’t the right time. We’ll get another chance.”

With a heavy sigh, Arthur picked up his gun, took out a remote control, and pressed it twice.

The rubble, which had just begun to settle, stirred again. Figures began to rise from beneath the stones and sand, gathering with stiff movements. Their eyes were vacant, their skin flushed with an unnatural red. Though they had suffered grievous injuries, they dragged their broken limbs over, some wounds even showing faint signs of healing.

Arthur spoke quietly into the remote, “Break out.”

The device swiftly converted his command into a peculiar soundwave, transmitting it to every vacant-eyed figure. They fished out their sidearms from the ruins, and those who couldn’t find any retrieved weapons from their backpacks or even their own bodies. In perfect unison, they launched their charge.

The smoke of battle rose once more, but Angus had already vanished without a trace.

The next day, the Nan Hai newspaper casually reported the eradication of a massive, heavily-armed criminal syndicate, with heavy losses on both sides. Yet the scale of the conflict was so great that even the most oblivious citizens could sense the storm brewing on the horizon.

——

Fleeing pursuit, Angus avoided the main roads entirely. He scaled rooftops from afar, leaping across five or six meters between buildings, moving like an ape through the urban jungle.

——

Once Angus had made it to what he believed was a safe distance, his body abruptly plummeted from midair like a kite with a severed string, crashing into a garbage bin below.

Purple bruises bloomed across his skin, as if drops of violet ink had been spilled upon parchment. These were hematomas left by bullets. But it wasn’t his battle wounds that caused him to lose all motor control—it was the devastating damage he had inflicted upon himself.

The aftereffects of forcibly driving his body into an explosive state through frenzied hormonal surges finally erupted in full. Agony and weakness gnawed mercilessly at every muscle and organ, like a swarm of ravenous ants.

Even this enhanced body could not withstand a lethal dose of hormones and such prolonged overexertion, and now suffered a violent physiological backlash. Electrolyte imbalance, endocrine and immune systems thrown into irreversible chaos, some muscles necrotizing from vascular spasms and lack of blood flow.

Escalating multi-organ failure tolled like an ever-louder funeral bell.

Not even the wondrous source matter could resolve this crisis. The lingering hormones had become deadly poison that even the core entity could not purge.

Angus forced his body to claw out of the garbage bin, but he collapsed, convulsing on the ground, writhing forward like a trembling slug.

His nervous system remained intact, but the disrupted balance of potassium and calcium ions had thoroughly deranged his muscle contractions, leaving his muscle fibers quivering like a colony of startled mice.

He had to find a new host.

Angus made his decision.

This was a deserted place, not a living soul in sight. He forced a strange whimper from his throat—a sound so faint the human ear would easily miss it, but with a unique frequency certain creatures could not ignore.

For instance, stray dogs.

A mangy dog, dragging a lame hind leg, hurried over, panting with excitement. Angus had imitated a mating call—a simple feat, since canine language can only express a handful of meanings, and mastering their vocalizations wasn’t difficult.

The crippled stray halted, sensing neither the scent of a female nor another dog, but instead a mingled odor of humanity and beast, wavering between the urge to mate and the instinct for self-preservation.

It didn’t matter. Once it was this close, it had no chance.

With one last seductive whine, Angus flung himself forward, seizing the animal’s attention.

The reek of blood and flesh startled the dog, which leapt away in terror, managing to evade him despite its limp.

——

But Angus opened his maw wide and spat a wad of deep violet jelly, splattering it across the dog’s face. His body then collapsed completely, lifeless.

The dog, its face smeared with the substance, panicked and rolled on the ground, whimpering and unable to breathe.

This was Angus’s true essence—the source matter used for parasitism.

As the stray struggled, the source matter wriggled into its eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, devouring soft tissue as it went. Then, with newly evolved sharp appendages, it bored a hole in the tough skull and feasted greedily on the tender brain within.

Gradually, the source matter covering the dog’s face shrank, exchanging places with fresh cerebral tissue, until at last it slipped, with a slurp, into the nasal cavity and disappeared. The once-limp body of the dog suddenly sprang up with vigor, its eyes fierce, a strange violet gleam flickering in their depths.

Having mastered human bodies, Angus found controlling a dog’s nervous system child’s play, especially since a stray dog had been his first host.

He flexed the canine form, extended the source matter to the lame leg, expelled all pus, sliced away necrotic flesh, secreted activation factors, and forced the tissues to regenerate rapidly.

But the modifications quickly depleted his energy reserves. Regenerating a limb was a costly affair.

No matter. There was fresh protein right beside him.

Angus didn’t pounce immediately, though. He waited in silence for ten minutes, letting the various hormones in the blood degrade and lose their toxicity before feasting upon the original body—a youth, barely more than a boy.

Perhaps he had once had a loving family, a distinguished lineage. Perhaps he had known rebellion, cherished innocent dreams. All of that was past now.

It ended that night, with the hellish black dog.

And now, another black dog was bringing everything to a close, completing the cycle.

Perhaps fate truly does hold sway over us all.