Chapter 8: The Prophet's Warning
POV: Adam
Detection woke him with a phantom signal—human heartbeat pulsing in rhythm that felt wrong, like static interference disrupting radio waves. The source traced to Boston QZ's restricted zone, where even FEDRA patrols ventured reluctantly.
Marlene's encrypted message reached him an hour later: "Prophet claims angels with surgeon's hands haunt his dreams. Mentioned you specifically. Says you existed in his visions before you existed here."
The old church squatted in QZ Sector 12 like a broken tooth, its steeple collapsed from structural damage that might have been combat or simple decay. Detection mapped the building as he approached—dozens of infected signatures in the basement levels, but something else radiating from deeper underground. Human but wrong. Damaged in ways his enhanced senses couldn't categorize.
Marlene waited in the shadows near the entrance, armed and tense.
"He started having visions three weeks ago," she said without preamble. "Describes medical procedures he's never seen. Talks about someone saving people who should die, changing futures that were supposed to be fixed."
"Could be coincidence."
"Could be. But he drew this before meeting you."
She handed him a piece of paper covered in desperate scratches. The drawing showed a man with his face performing surgery with glowing hands while infected watched from the shadows. At the bottom, scrawled in handwriting that shook with fever or madness: The Angel of Wrong Futures.
"How the hell does he know what I look like? How does he know about the glowing hands? Unless..."
Unless the Prophet had abilities of his own. Enhanced perception working differently than Detection but touching the same impossible realm.
They descended into the church basement through passages that smelled like incense and old blood. Emergency lighting cast everything in hellish red. The Prophet waited in the deepest chamber, chained to a support beam—not imprisoned, but self-restrained.
He was emaciated, covered in self-inflicted scars that formed patterns Adam's medical knowledge couldn't interpret. Eyes fever-bright with intelligence that danced on the edge of madness. When he saw Adam, tears started flowing.
"The Angel of Wrong Futures," he whispered. "You weren't in Her plan."
"Her plan. The cordyceps intelligence? Or something else?"
"Tell me about the visions," Adam said, kneeling just outside striking range.
"Dreams of saving the doomed. Killing infected that should spread blessing. Your blood sings to them—they hear it and change to match your song." The Prophet's voice cracked with strain. "She's angry. The Mother adapts her children because you won't stop interfering."
"The cordyceps is intelligent?"
"Not was. Is becoming. Your presence accelerates everything—immunity, evolution, consciousness. You're teaching her to think by existing where you shouldn't."
Detection showed the Prophet's brain activity spiking in patterns that resembled his own neural enhancement. Whatever had damaged this man had also changed him, granted perception that touched impossible truths.
"Most disturbing," the Prophet continued, "She knows you don't belong. Senses wrongness in your existence. Now births children specifically to purge the anomaly."
As if summoned by discussion, something crashed through the ceiling above them.
The infected that landed moved wrong—Stalker body plan but fungal growth patterns Adam didn't recognize from his game knowledge. Detection struggled to lock onto it, signal interference making targeting difficult. It was faster than normal Stalkers, hitting harder, recovering from damage that should have crippled it.
Stone Breathing Form Three activated automatically, hardening his flesh as the creature struck. Its claws sparked against Stone Skin without penetrating, but the force still drove him backward.
"Evolution. It's adapted specifically to counter my abilities."
The fight lasted three minutes of desperate improvisation. Detection predicted movements through the interference. Stone Skin tanked hits that would have killed normal humans. Finally, Shambles swapped the creature's head with a chunk of concrete, but not before he'd learned something terrifying.
The cordyceps was evolving to resist spatial manipulation. The mutation showed fungal growths specifically designed to disrupt ROOM effects.
Examining the corpse afterward, Adam found cellular structures that shouldn't exist—cordyceps tissue modified to counter abilities that belonged in fiction. Natural selection guided by unnatural intelligence.
"The Prophet is right. My presence is teaching the fungus to fight back. Every surgery, every cure, every time I use abilities—all of it becomes data for evolution."
Marlene confronted him in the tunnel outside the church, her face hard with tactical calculation.
"Three sites where you performed surgeries," she said without preamble. "All of them now show mutated infected nearby. Correlation is undeniable."
"You're saying I'm causing this?"
"I'm saying you're changing them. Your abilities, your presence, whatever the hell you are—it's making cordyceps evolve faster and more intelligently."
Adam's horror was genuine. The weight of unintended consequences crashed down like collapsed rubble. Every person he'd saved might have doomed dozens more by accelerating parasitic evolution.
"I won't stop healing people for theoretical danger," he said finally.
"Even if the danger becomes reality? Even if your cures create worse threats?"
"She's not wrong. But I can't let people die based on possibilities. That's not medicine—that's playing god with lives based on fear."
"I won't let people die for theoretical anything," he repeated. "We deal with evolved infected when they appear, not before."
Marlene studied him with new wariness. The alliance between them was fracturing—her practical ruthlessness against his medical ethics. Both right from their perspectives. Both potentially catastrophic in their implications.
"Your choice," she said finally. "But when those mutations kill my people, remember I offered alternatives."
She left him alone in tunnels that suddenly felt less safe than before.
Walking back toward his clinic, the Prophet's final words echoed in his memory: "Two others sing wrong songs too. One west, one north. None of you belong."
Adam's blood ran cold.
Transmigrators. Plural.
He wasn't unique. Somewhere else, others existed who shouldn't—people with knowledge of futures that were supposed to be fiction, abilities that violated natural law, faces that belonged to characters rather than reality.
The question burning through his mind: friend or threat?
"If they have the same transmigration background, they might understand what I'm going through. Potential allies who know the weight of impossible secrets. But they could also be dangerous—people with foreknowledge and power but different moral codes. Different ideas about how to use knowledge of the future."
One west. One north.
Joel and Tommy were heading west eventually, toward Jackson. If one of the other transmigrators was there...
The north led toward other quarantine zones, other desperate communities trying to survive. Someone with abilities like his could build power base, establish control, reshape society according to their vision of how the post-apocalypse should work.
"The Prophet called them wrong songs. That doesn't sound like allies."
Detection painted the tunnels around him in tactical detail, but couldn't reach far enough to sense threats hundreds of miles away. For the first time since awakening in this world, Adam felt truly isolated. Not just hiding among people who couldn't understand him, but potentially surrounded by threats from others who understood him too well.
The cordyceps was evolving to counter his abilities.
Other transmigrators existed with unknown intentions.
His every act of healing taught enemies how to fight him.
"I came here to save people. But maybe the Prophet is right. Maybe I'm the angel of wrong futures—someone who doesn't belong, making everything worse by trying to make it better."
The weight of that possibility followed him through darkness back toward his clinic, where patients waited for miracles that might be dooming them all.
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