A servant walked down neat halls. The walls had beautiful wallpaper covering them, and the interior was decorated nicely. Walking up 4 steps of stairs, he came across double doors. The servant walked up to the door and knocked 3 times in succession.

"Lord, the report from Salazar is here,"

A voice could be heard from the other side; it was clear and smooth even with the door blocking the way.

"Good, pass it under the door; I am in the middle of finishing up one of my experiments."

"Of course."

Promptly sliding the documents under the crevices under the door, the servant turned around and left. On the other side of the door, a handsome man poured a liquid into a beaker before taking another substance and putting it into a weirdly shaped apparatus.

He watched closely as the liquid traveled and changed as it went through some kind of process and change, coming out as some sort of gas.

He sealed this gas and submerged it in the liquid inside the beaker. The gas cooled down and became a purple liquid with flashes of blue pulsating through it every few seconds.

"I did it; it proves my conjectures! It should be safe to consume whole, but I should wait. Hehe, it will be the perfect ending to this hell."

Cain talked to himself as he finished his experiment and walked to the door. He picked up the documents on the floor and scanned through the papers as a smile crept up on his face. He then began to talk to himself again.

"Seems Yonio made a breakthrough...siege beasts... sounds amazing. I should memorize all the research he's done over the years and keep some samples for the future. Actually, I should make some rounds and do that for everyone, though Yonio's work should be the most important."

Cain smiled at the report the more he looked at it. He especially smiled when he heard of Anders's blight.

"That apprentice seems to have lost himself. He was doomed ever since Numineer laid his seeds; I pity him."

Cain turned around and looked above him, he stared at the black hole in the sky while his smile contorted to his madness.

"It will be time soon; blood will flow, and all will end."

He then looked at a cage in the corner of his room. Inside was a spy who was caught by his men.

"My condition has been flaring up.... I think I found a use for you, Mr. Spy."

The dejected soul inside the cage looked up as they began to shiver.

"Please don't, I saw what you people did to Lamrick! Don't come near me, stop! AH!"

............................

"This is your report?"

Alex looked at Anders as he handed a one-page report in a folder.

"It explains everything plainly and simply. No need to go into too much detail when all I would be doing is making conjectures."

Alex's eyes rolled, and she peered at the paper in her hands. As her eyes scrolled down, her mouth turned downward. When she was done looking over the report, she looked back at Anders, visibly tense.

"The Church is using Salazar as grounds for creating monsters? You saw thousands of horrifying creatures who could regenerate like Cain? We don't have any way to fend this off! I didn't see this previously!"

"All that sap showed you was the past, present, and the possible future; of course, you didn't see it. Those mutants were only failed experiments from the priest's words. We need to find a way to combat this."

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Alex's eyes shifted around the room as her chin met her hand. She took a few minutes pondering before she looked at Anders once more with a determined look.

"Follow me; it's not ready yet, but it should work."

Anders followed Alex through doors that slid open automatically as they approached. He entered a hallway with pulsing white walls that seemed alive.

"What is this place?"

"This place was built from salvage from the Union with the help of some Plague Doctors and Rune Smiths who switched to our side. This technology originally came from another territory."

"Another territory?"

"Forget it. Just follow me to what I need to show you."

Anders stayed silent as he looked around him with curiosity. The walls seemed to move like water; he would touch the screens as strange energy flickered across the surface, reacting to his touch when he reached out. It felt like dipping his hand in warm water. The organic nature of it all left him uneasy.

Mesmerized by this place, he was lost in a trance only woken by Alex's stern voice.

"In here, this is where we have been developing a virus to deal with regenerative effects."

They entered a chamber where they put on yellow suits that covered their entire bodies. Some sort of spray came out from air vents around the room, and the door across from them opened.

Entering the lab Anders saw glass tubes snaked along the walls, filled with murky liquid and weirdly shaped apparatuses made of glass with bubbling liquid inside.

His focus shifted to Alex and other people in the same weird suits. They were studying a vial in the center of the room and Alex grabbed Anders's attention as she explained.

"We call the virus 'activator.' It's used to activate dormant cells that every person has. These cells have the unique property of killing the entire body, and that's not all, it's also impossible to recover from. Our testing showed a 100% mortality rate in the victims. Anyone who's been infected had their body break down at a rapid pace and die."

"You've kept something like this! We could have killed Cain by now!"

"Proper application as a weapon has been slow, and it's highly unstable. If you use it in its current state, we could be harmed. Although the dormant cells aren't contagious, the activator virus is."

"Then why are you showing me this?"

Alex turned to Anders. He couldn't see her expression as it was blocked by the suit.

"I'm showing you this so you know it's not a hopeless battle. All we need now is something to boost our soldiers in some way, and it will give us enough time to develop this weapon. We have made progress in increasing human strength, but it has been slow."

Beneath the suit, Anders was distraught before he forced himself to blurt out something his greed was telling him not to.

"If I give you something that can give our men regenerative effects similar to Cain and far above the monsters, will you be able to remake it on a large scale?"

Anders was pulled out of the room and went back and removed the suits while being sprayed again. Alex took him down the seemingly endless hallways into a research room that appeared to be Alex's personal laboratory.

"Please give it to me. I've been trying to find ways of having similar regeneration to Cain, but I have hit dead end after dead end."

Pulling out one of his remaining scarlet vials. He hesitated, Anders loathe to part with such a valuable asset, but the hope of gaining more of them won him over.

Alex grabbed it from his hands with a possessive look.

"Can you reproduce it? Can you give some to me? They helped me escape Salazar and can combat the weakness in my technique."

Alex's eyes never left the vial as her mouth curved so high it got stuck.

"Sure. Just leave it with me. I might even be able to find the longevity property in it like Cain!"

Anders raised an eyebrow before his lips curved ever so slightly downward. "Sure, I just want to be able to regenerate like Cain. You can have that longevity or whatever."

Alex didn't respond, leaving Anders standing awkwardly alone near the entrance. Realizing she was too engrossed in the vial to speak further, he turned and traced his steps back through the twisting white halls, hoping to exit the facility's depths.

Alex remained still as she swirled the vial again and again, entranced by its beauty.

What Anders didn't understand was the attractiveness of immortality. Cain had reached this and blatantly exposed this fact long ago.

To Anders, his life goal was to kill Cain and then die of old age, but to people like Alex, longevity was like a forbidden fruit that they had to obtain. The case of Cain made this dream something that could be reached, and many had long begun research on being able to live forever, all having no luck until today.

Perhaps even Julius himself was close to unlocking the secret of living forever, but he would never use it on himself, for he would rather die and return to his sister and Augustus's side. Life had long lost meaning to him; he barely even cared for his daughter; that fact was apparent.

...

All the while Alex and Anders held this interaction, the trees in the swamp outside Ansross rustled as large balls of flesh moved through them. If one looked closely, you could see the figures of people on this moving object as tall as the trees.

The fleshy creatures moved relentlessly through the trees, their numbers endless. Grotesque shapes covered in tumors and dripping ooze shuffled closer.

As they neared the city walls, tortured wails rang out, high-pitched and inhuman. The sound alone could curdle blood. Those manning the ramparts shrank back in dread.

There was no telling what nightmares crawled within that pulsing, amorphous mass descending on Ansross.

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