The streets of Lone Star City have become desolate recently due to the attacks of the giant bloodsucking mosquitoes, while bars and restaurants are packed to the brim—after all, it’s much safer indoors.

Citizens have also adapted to competing for the “monsters.” Despite the government’s repeated calls to immediately incinerate the bodies and fluid remains of bloodsucking mosquitoes with gasoline, many private companies across the U.S. are offering hefty rewards for monster samples.

Forming a 30-person team to hunt down an evolved mosquito that no longer drinks blood but only lays eggs greatly reduces personal risk. Even obtaining a mere test-tube-sized sample could fetch a month’s worth of living expenses at auction.

Though wandering alone outside remains dangerous, thanks to intensive military and police patrols and the efforts of bounty hunters, the bloodsucking mosquito crisis in Lone Star City is indeed nearing its end.

Tolya hit the jackpot this week in the bento delivery biz, thanks to his guts, talent, and some pretty special connections. He also heard that Nemo had received a hefty allowance from his job as the private chef for Matthew Grimm. Over the phone, Tolya suggested celebrating with a long-overdue movie night. However, upon hearing the phrase "movie night," his Taiwanese roommate reacted explosively, yelling a resounding "NO" in response.

Initially planning to visit the video rental store to pick out a film, Tolya declined a friend’s invitation to a bar. He suddenly realized that ever since the giant mosquitoes appeared, he and Nemo hadn’t really spent much time talking.

Lone Star City’s first classic monster invasion should have been their daily hot topic, but they had each been too busy. Tolya had been running around all day, practically carrying half of Westlake Restaurant’s delivery and procurement operations on his shoulders.

“Just go home already!” he decided. He had plenty of interesting stories to share with Nemo—tales of strange people he’d met during deliveries, thrilling encounters with monsters, and the time he escaped with a military convoy. Sitting down with tea, snacks, and a good chat with his roommate sounded like the leisure he’d been missing.

Moreover, Tolya couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off with Nemo during their phone call. Nemo’s voice reminded him of how he had sounded last year after losing his memory—confused, cautious, but determined to adjust, avoiding burdening others while also not wanting to be disturbed by anyone.

Carrying a large bag of Nemo’s favorite chips, Tolya stepped into their shared apartment’s living room, just in time to see Nemo rolling up his sleeve, revealing a bandaged wrist. On the table lay the newly purchased first-aid kit, and it was clear his roommate was about to change the dressing.

"Nemo!" Tolya set down the shopping bag and hurried over.

"Oh, you’re back?" The Taiwanese casually unwrapped the bandage on his wrist with one hand in front of the Russian.

"Did you get distracted by another headache while cooking? Or is the kitchen at the billionaire’s villa hard to work in?" Tolya immediately assumed the injury occurred while Nemo was cooking. The meticulous bandaging suggested a serious wound—something more severe than a minor cut, which Nemo wouldn’t bother wrapping up like this.

"No..." Nemo had anticipated Tolya would notice his injury, so he decided to deal with it openly in the living room.

"That’s your dominant hand! Can you even manage to rewrap the bandage properly?" Tolya noticed that the original dressing had been neatly and tightly applied, which was clearly not Nemo’s handiwork. Muttering to himself, Tolya sat down beside him and took over the task.

When the last piece of blood-stained bandage fell away, Tolya was shocked to see the bloody, mangled wound on his roommate’s wrist—a deep injury that had bled profusely.

" Nemo! What the hell went down? Did Grimm actually cuff you? Why haven’t you called the police?" Tolya demanded, furious and anxious as he held Nemo’s injured hand.

Sorry, Nemo had nearly pierced the billionaire in the head and smothered him with a pillow! Though he had justifiable reasons, it was a complicated story. Not wanting to come across as a lunatic, Nemo opted for a white lie.

"We were just playing around and got a bit carried away."

Tolya froze, his hand trembling as he held Nemo’s forearm.

"Playing... what?"

"Escaping handcuffs! Matthew’s been kidnapped so many times since he was young. As a genius, he taught himself lock-picking as a precaution. After I finished cooking, we got bored, and he asked if I wanted to learn some self-defense skills. I agreed, so he only cuffed my right hand and gave me a set of tools to try it myself.

"What was he doing while you were unlocking it?" Tolya asked angrily.

"I don’t like being watched, so I told him to go to his study and work so I could focus."

Tolya rubbed his temples hard. It was definitely something Nemo would do.

"If you couldn’t unlock it, then you couldn’t unlock it. How did it end up like this?"

"Matthew gave me plenty of time. I got frustrated when I couldn’t do it, so I forced it," Nemo said.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

The excuse of failing to unlock the handcuffs might have been a cover, but the anger at the time was real, Tolya thought to himself.

Asking an amnesiac why he's angry seems a bit silly—even Tolya occasionally felt like destroying the world. Furthermore, Nemo had been tortured before. Even if he’d lost his memory, being cuffed might have subconsciously triggered the pain of being trapped in a dire situation, leading to self-inflicted harm.

"A newbie isn’t going to succeed on the first try. You have to study the internal structure or something... Besides, if you’re really cuffed, what kind of idiot criminal would leave you free to unlock it? Staying calm is the hardest part," Tolya advised.

"Speaking of which, you recognized that this was handcuff injurie at first glance. Lots of experience?" Nemo asked with a meaningful tone.

"I have some knowledge of lock-picking! I was cuffed by a professional woman once. I thought she was just looking for a bit of fun, but then she unexpectedly brought another man in for a threesome without warning. To protect my rear-end virginity, I jumped out of the second-floor window. It’s a miracle I didn’t break any bones. Thankfully, I’m quite agile," Tolya said, explaining how the incident added another survival skill to his repertoire—one he’d even used during street protests when arrested by police.

"You certainly have a colorful history of adventurous escapades," Nemo said, solemnly reflecting on the definition of a “battle-hardened” Russian while Tolya rewrapped his wound.

"That injury is definitely going to scar," Tolya commented.

Nemo gave him a puzzled look. "When do chefs not have scars on their hands? And you’ve seen my other old scars before. If it doesn't mess with my life, I'm good."

"Maybe it just feels more painful looking at someone else’s injury? It doesn’t feel as bad when it’s your own," Tolya suggested.

"That makes sense; I feel the same way," Nemo agreed. " Just make sure it doesn't flare up again, and the scar shouldn’t be too noticeable."

"For now, stop messing around with your right hand," Tolya muttered. He even considered cuffing Nemo to the bed himself to keep him from causing more harm. Either way, he was definitely going to inform boss Liu and Sunny Jie about Nemo’s wrist injury.

While Tolya was thinking this, completely oblivious, his Taiwanese roommate was already aiming at him.

“I heard from Sunny Jie that you want to delay the surgery to remove the old bullet fragments?” The boss couple were unaware that the foreign object in Tolya’s body was bullet shrapnel. The Russian had passed it off as an accident from his school days, and Nemo, feeling pity for him, didn’t say anything. After all, it wasn’t a bad thing to have something on Tolya. But when it came to private discussions, they were always straightforward.

Looking at the schedule, the surgery arranged by the Grimm Group for Tolya was in three days.

"Isn't the delivery business booming right now? If I go for the surgery, I'll need to stay in the hospital for a day and rest for an entire week," Tolya said. For the Russian, "resting" didn’t just mean eating and walking—it meant being ready to fight again.

"That's because you didn’t fully remove the bullet fragments when you got shot, and over the years, you've been moving around so much. You're lucky the fragments haven’t shifted and hit any major nerves or organs. Boss Liu and Sunny Jie are keeping things simple—just get it done while the surgery and post-op checks are still free! Don’t procrastinate; the longer you wait, the worse it could get. Miss this opportunity, and there won't be another one!" Nemo replied.

"But..." Tolya hesitated. Everyone at Westlake Restaurant knew that his current "love affair" was with money—cold, hard cash. And he was utterly infatuated.

"No 'buts.' I'll ask Matthew to have his hospital report your condition as more severe than it really is. Maybe even stage a little post-surgery drama—claim some complications and say you'll need a year of rehab. In the meantime, you can start practicing your limp and prepare to collect a fat disability allowance," Nemo said with alarming calmness.

"Uh...?" Tolya could only respond with a single syllable. It seemed that his English had deteriorated, because how else could he understand every word of Nemo's sentences but still fail to make sense of them when put together?

Nemo stared at Tolya coldly, waiting for the exaggerated confusion on his face to fade to something more neutral.

"Tolya, do you know how many gang members and undocumented immigrants have gone missing in Lone Star City since the mosquito disaster started? No? Good. The city police don’t know either. All they’ve noticed is that a lot of people are suddenly unaccounted for. Coincidentally, the groups disappearing are the same ones most unwilling to trust the U.S. government or big corporations. Convenient, isn’t it?"

"They’re the ones who don’t believe in these free treatment programs. Signing up means leaving fingerprints, blood samples, and profile photos. It also requires agreeing to follow-ups over the long term. Removing mosquito eggs isn't enough; the antidote requires signing a voluntary human testing consent form," Tolya said, his voice tight.

"Tolya, you know as well as I do this isn't some evil pharma conspiracy. The government genuinely doesn’t have an officially approved treatment for the effects of the mosquito venom. Grimm Group is forced to conduct experimental trials just to save lives. Even the new superhero, Salamander is involved in the antidote’s development. They’re trying to help people survive," Nemo chided. "And the city government has promised not to immediately deport undocumented immigrants who seek treatment."

"'Not immediately deport.' How long does that mean? Six months? A year? And what about fugitives and those on parole? Or the people relying on illegal work to feed their families who just haven’t been caught yet? For them, entering a public free treatment program is too dangerous. Many would rather die than risk being separated from their loved ones. Instead, they turn to underground, unregulated medical services." The blond Russian almost snapped back in response.

"I'm not defending them, Nemo. I'm just repeating what I’ve heard," Tolya said, gripping Nemo’s uninjured hand. "Too many similar stories have come up lately. It's no wonder those shady labs and butchers with scalpels are thriving."

"So, you’ve heard about the 'New Orleans Swamp Factory' case, then?" Nemo asked. He wasn’t entirely surprised. Tolya had his own network of underground informants, and his recent "delivery" work wasn’t as straightforward as it seemed.

Tolya raised his steel-blue eyes to meet Nemo’s. The warmth of his roommate's touch steadied him. What Nemo didn’t know was that Tolya had recently cradled a child's cold, lifeless body in his arms. That memory chilled him to the core, evoking the frozen expanse of Siberia—a mental graveyard where Tolya buried all the things that made him shiver.

"Yes," Tolya said simply.

Survivors of the giant mosquito attacks had a dramatically lower survival rate once the eggs hatched and larvae began to grow. To address this, Grimm Group and the National Guard had set up field hospitals and mobile surgical units throughout Lone Star City, aiming to remove eggs and larvae as quickly as possible.

Thankfully, each mosquito seemed to lay only one egg at a time. Experts speculated this was because the insects deemed a single human body capable of sustaining just one offspring. This made egg removal relatively straightforward, but rupturing the egg during the process still required immediate removal of the contaminated tissue.

While the city’s east-west thoroughfares were under traffic control—typically allowing more vehicles out than in—those who could still flee often chose to do so, as it helped ease the law enforcement burden on the city's government.

Ever since the discovery that the giant bloodsucking mosquitoes could lay eggs in humans, some people had refused free and expedited treatmen, the discovery that some individuals were using their escape to transport live mosquito eggs within their bodies created a horrifying new threat.

A grim question lingered in many minds: If a giant mosquito lays an egg inside a human and it hatches, what happens if that larva grows into a second-generation mosquito?

Even Grimm Group, with all its resources, hadn’t sunk to conducting such experiments. But Matthew Grimm knew someone, somewhere, was undoubtedly observing the reproductive cycle of these creatures in secret.

This was the first time since the Meteor Shower Event that a monster capable of both being subdued by ordinary humans and reproducing had appeared. The implications were enormous. The bloodsucking mosquitoes had clear potential as biological weapons, promising vast profits. Unlike other monsters, weaponizing them required no high-tech manufacturing or genius-level intellect—just a functional lab and some creativity.

Data from the city’s health department showed an abnormal distribution of victims, suggesting a significant number hadn’t sought official treatment. These individuals would inevitably turn to some form of medical assistance to survive.

Matthew worried that this hidden group of victims would become the next wave of mosquito-related threats. What began as a public health crisis had evolved into a criminal matter and a national security issue.

Grimm Group notified the FBI, which launched an investigation. Experts analyzed regional patterns and conducted criminal profiling to locate illegal treatment facilities harboring these victims.

Superheroes and special forces teams joined the joint investigation effort. Progress was swift. The task force uncovered its first major operation—a large-scale breeding farm for the bloodsucking mosquitoes. It marked the first case since the Meteor Shower Event of humans systematically exploiting monsters to produce various byproducts.

But everyone knew the Swamp Factory case was only the tip of the iceberg.