I knew the brutal mechanics of this infection inside and out from my fight in the valley. The incubation period was agonizingly precise: exactly thirty seconds from exposure to total cognitive collapse.
Yet, the strain Edrie had dumped into the city's food supply behaved differently than the concentrated dose he had used on himself. Instead of granting the host refined demonic intellect and scaling strength like Edrie's transformation, this diluted, foodborne variant stripped away every drop of humanity, reducing the host to a mindless beast driven purely by raw, unadulterated violence.
"Papa... I'm scared..." his daughter whimpered, her hands trembling violently against her mouth as tears streamed down her foam-flecked cheeks.
Then, her gaze shifted. Her wide, terrified eyes locked onto us, her pupils vanishing as a wave of unspeakable, phantom hatred surged into her vision. I recognized that look instantly… it was the exact same maddening hallucination I had fought through when the blood pathogen touched my own flesh. The agony of the mind ripping itself apart from the inside out.
Crack-snap!
A sickening sound of rending flesh and shattering cartilage echoed through the office. The skin along her right forearm ruptured violently, spilling crimson across her navy-blue uniform as a jagged, razor-sharp spike of mutated bone tore out from her arm like a gore-drenched blade.
The thirty seconds were up.
With a horrifying, inhuman shriek that shattered the glass fixtures in the room, she completely surrendered to the mutation.
"Chris, stay back! She's fully transformed! Her mind is gone, and a single drop of her blood will transmit the virus to you!"
The thrall lunged across the desk with unnatural, explosive speed, her bone-blade whistling through the air in a vicious horizontal arc aimed straight at my neck.
I swayed backward, stepping fluidly out of her reach. I couldn't just draw my shotgun and blow her head off. If I slaughtered his daughter right in front of him, it would utterly break Chris's heart, and we needed him whole to manage the city's quarantine. Knocking her unconscious without spilling infected blood was the only viable path.
"That's... that's not my girl anymore! Eirene! Do it now!" Chris choked out, his eyes wide with horror, but his instinct as a hardened survivor kicked in.
Capitalizing on my dodge, Chris leaped from behind the heavy desk, putting his massive frame into motion. He flanked her from behind and wrapped his thick, calloused arms around her neck, locking her transformed body in a tight, desperate rear-headlock.
"Now, Eirene! I can't hold her for long!" Chris roared, gritting his teeth as the thrall thrashed wildly, driving her heels into the floor and trying to stab her arm backward into his ribs.
"Hold her tight!"
Since my right arm was still a fresh, bandaged stump, I had a direct, unsealed conduit to my own vampiric blood source. I raised my mutilated right arm, focusing my mana into the wound. Crimson droplets burst through the soaked bandages, hovering mid-air before coalescing into sharp, fluid threads under my precise blood manipulation.
With a flick of my left hand, I sent the floating blood surging forward like guided needles. The crimson liquid shot straight into the thrall's foaming mouth, rapidly crystalizing into a dense, solid gag of hardened blood-stone that completely locked her jaw shut, neutralizing her bite attack before she could snap at Chris's arms.
Simultaneously, I manipulated another stream of my blood to wrap tightly around her mutated right arm, forming a dense casing of crimson crystal around the protruding bone spike, immobilizing the lethal appendage before it could tear into Chris's flesh.
She was still thrashing and swinging her hips blindly, but her primary weapons were neutralized.
"Extending suppression!" I barked, weaving more flowing blood from my stump into heavy, solid bands of crimson iron.
The blood-binds snapped around her wrists and ankles, locking her limbs together into rigid, unbreakable handcuffs. The heavy weight of the solidified blood pulled her down to the velvet carpet, binding her securely in a kneeling position.
Only when the thrall was completely immobilized and safely gagged did Chris finally let go of his grip, stumbling backward against his oak desk, panting heavily as he stared down at his bound, agonizingly mutated daughter.
Chris sank to his knees beside his bound, snarling daughter, tears burning trails down his scarred cheeks as he beat his fist against the floorboards.
"Damn it! Damn it all to hell! I brought her to the city to protect her! I was supposed to keep her safe, and I couldn't even stop her from eating a cursed piece of bread!"
He buried his face in his hands for a moment before looking up at me, his single eye wide with desperate, frantic hope.
"Eirene... please, how much do you actually know about this damn virus?"
I looked down at my severed, bandaged right arm… a bitter reminder of what happens when this blood pathogen gets into my system.
"My knowledge is limited, back at Castle Libra, before the Yellow Flower Guild collapsed and disbanded, we studied ancient pathogens like this. The virus doesn't kill the host immediately… it leaves them fully alive, breathing and bleeding, but it completely hijacks the brain. It floods the mind with severe, overwhelming hallucinated rage, turning living people into mindless thralls driven purely by adrenaline and violence."
Chris stared at his daughter, whose eyes were filled with unbridled, unnatural hatred as she thrashed against my solidified blood cuffs.
"Well... Does it... does it have a cure? You're an expert with blood, Eirene! Can you cure her?!"
My mind immediately flashed back years ago to the quiet, ozone-scented laboratory in Town Allure. I remembered the shaking hands of Maine, the thirty glowing flasks, and how I had repeatedly chugged lethal doses of poison… using my body's absolute poison immunity to forcibly adapt, process the pathogen, and drain my own blood to forge a miracle cure.
Could I do it again?
Edrie had explicitly bragged that this ancient viral strain was absolute… that no cure existed. But even if I tried my old method... I knew the cold, terrifying truth.
My fourth-evolution body possessed absolute immunity to poisons and chemical toxins, but a living, mutating bloodborne virus was a completely different beast. It had already infected my right arm back in the valley, forcing me to hack the limb off before it could take over my entire vascular system. If I chugged a flask of this living virus, my immunity wouldn't neutralize it. I wouldn't adapt… I would just turn into a mindless thrall myself.
"No, there is no cure, Chris. And I can't manufacture one with my blood this time... if I ingest this virus, my body can't fight it off. It would infect me, just like it did her."
Chris's shoulders slumped instantly, all the breath knocked out of his lungs. The hopeful light in his single eye shattered into complete despair. He reached out with a trembling hand, gently brushing a stray lock of long black hair away from the girl's forehead, being careful not to touch her skin or blood.
"Lukreia… my sweet Lukreia..."
Lukreia Ratt, It's a cute name... and a heartbreaking sight.
Before the echo of her name could even settle in the heavy air of the office, a horrific chorus of bone-chilling shrieks, shattered glass, and wet, crunching flesh detonated from the corridors right outside the heavy mahogany door.
The chaos wasn't isolated to this floor. The muffled, frantic pounding of boot heels, desperate screams for help, and the sickening sound of snapping bones rattled through the floorboards from every floor of the Town Hall below. Beyond the building, a low, ominous roar of pure pandemonium began to rise from the Pier District streets.
"What in God's name...? The announcement... I put it out over the stone! The guards were locking down the gates!" Chris gasped, his hands freezing over Lukreia's dark hair as he scrambled back toward his feet, his single good eye wide with absolute horror.
"It was too late, Chris, the announcement went out, but the flour was already in the bakeries before the sun even hit the horizon."
My mind rapidly calculated the tactical reality of the situation.
Lulu City wasn't an endless metropolis like Caria, but it was still a sprawling maritime hub spanning roughly seventy square kilometers of dense, cobblestone streets, packed dockyards, and tightly stacked residential quarters. Home to nearly fifty thousand people, the sheer population density meant a foodborne contagion wouldn't crawl .. it would explode like wildfire through a dry forest.
And that was precisely why Edrie Collon had chosen this place.
It was a masterclass in sinister strategy.
In Caria, a biological outbreak would be met within minutes by the overwhelming brute force of the high-tier Bureau knights and grand mages. In Sisiphon, while the local authorities were notoriously sluggish, the central presence of the grand protection wards surrounding the Central Library and the Sisiphon Magic Academy would have automatically contained a magical virus before it could reach critical mass.
Lulu City, however, had neither. It was a trade city… wealthy, densely populated, reliant on external grain, and protected by standard harbor guards and maritime patrol officers.
Edrie had calculated the response time, the distribution channels of the regional grain supply, and the lack of top-tier magic barriers. He had set this trap long before he ever made his move in the valley.
I reached up with my left hand and pulled the deep folds of my canvas cloak lower over my face, angling my head down so the harsh, golden rays of the morning sun piercing through the velvet curtains wouldn't scorch my vampiric skin. Keeping to the dark shadows of the room, I stepped toward the broad glass window overlooking the central plaza and peer district.
I peered down, and the scene below immediately validated my worst tactical fears.
The main square was a swirling vortex of blood and madness. Thralls were swarming over fleeing civilians, tearing through fish markets and administrative stalls. But as I observed their combat behavior, a distinct pattern emerged among the infected.
Some of the thralls lacked the horrific bone blades tearing through their flesh; instead, driven by raw, unadulterated primal violence, they simply tackled victims to the cobblestones and used their jaws, tearing into flesh with brutal ferocity.
But scattered among the chaotic crowd were individuals who had transformed far more violently.
In the far distance, near the primary dockyard gates, I spotted an infected guard whose entire upper torso, spine, and shoulders were utterly encrusted in jagged, dense skeletal armor, wielding two massive, double-bladed arm bones that cleaved through iron shields like parchment.
I mentally cross-referenced that monster with Lukreia, who lay bound on the carpet behind me with only a single bone blade jutting from her right forearm.
Then Plasma muttered through my thoughts, as if he understood the meaning and likely connected the dots.
"Eirene, hear my first, It's linked to their psychological state at the moment of infection, the virus feeds on psychological trauma, terror, and suppressed rage. The deeper the mental agony or violence held in the host's mind when the thirty seconds run out, the more extreme the physical mutation becomes. The adrenaline surge mutates the skeletal structure in direct proportion to their mental collapse." Plasma said
Lukreia had been scared, innocent, and confused… resulting in a localized, singular arm mutation. But hardened guards or citizens filled with overwhelming rage and panic were mutating into armored, biological monstrosities.
I turned back to face Chris, who was staring at the window in stunned, paralyzed silence as the screams outside grew louder.
"It's not just your daughter, Chris, It's the entire city."
Chris froze, his single eye wide with sheer, unadulterated terror as the gravity of my words crashed over him.
Without missing a beat, I focused my mana, materializing my heavy Death Chant shotgun into existence. With my right arm severed at the stump, I had to awkwardly brace the heavy weapon against my chest, using my left hand to rack the pump with a sharp, mechanical CLACK-CLACK.
The cold steel felt heavy and unnatural in my non-dominant grip, but it was the only reliable firepower I had left.
Desperate, Chris lunged back toward his heavy oak desk, frantically rummaging through the cluttered drawers until he pulled out a second, glowing communication stone. His trembling fingers channeled mana into the core as he tried to open a long-distance frequency.
"I have to call the Bureau in Caria! They have elite knights, high mages! If I can just get through to the High Commander… " Chris yelled, his voice cracking with desperation.
"Stop, Chris," I cut him off, my voice ice-cold and deadpan.
He paused, looking up at me with panicked eyes.
"Caria is a three-day ride from here, By the time a single Bureau knight saddles a horse or prepares a long-range transport, this entire city will be a dead zone. Nobody is coming to save us. We don't have time to sit here waiting for a miracle that isn't coming." I said flatly, pointing the shotgun toward the hallway door where the sounds of tearing flesh were growing louder.
Chris swallowed hard, looking at the glowing stone in his hand, then at his bound, snarling daughter on the floor. The bitter reality sank in. He slowly dropped the stone onto the desk, letting out a defeated, ragged breath.
"You're right… So what do we do?" Chris muttered, wiping his face.
"We leave. Right now, this town hall is about to be overrun, and staying trapped in an office with one exit is suicide. If you want to keep Lukreia alive and find a way out of this nightmare, we move."
"Right. Okay. We move," Chris agreed, his expression hardening.
He hurried over to Lukreia, carefully scooping her bound, thrashing body into his broad arms. He held her securely against his chest, making sure her crystalized blood-gag and bound bone-blade were away from his neck.
I adjusted my heavy canvas cloak, keeping my hood pulled low to shield my face from the morning sunlight streaming through the windows. Bracing the shotgun awkward under my left arm, I stepped past Chris toward the heavy mahogany doors, using my foot to kick them wide open into the blood-splattered hallway.
"Stay right behind me, and don't stop moving."