Mia watched Felix as he rushed the lizard. As he got closer the Lizard began to look gradually more nervous, as it was clearly trying to find a way out. Sadly, it never got the chance to find one, as Felix had already reached it. In an attempt to defend itself the lizard hesitantly tried to hit Felix with its glowing red tail. But of course, the attack was easily avoided by Felix, who decided to use this as an opportunity to counterattack. He raised his sword high and prepared to cleave down on the lizard. However, despite being cowardly, the lizard wasn’t slow when it came to avoiding attacks. It managed to narrowly avoid the sword aiming for its neck.

Despite having avoided the majority of the blow, a small cut appeared near its neck. Luckily, only its scales had been harmed and its flesh remained intact. Seeing this the lizard backed off a bit more while clearly looking more frightened than it previously was. Seeing this Felix raised his sword again, to attempt breaking through the lizard’s natural armor once more. This blow was of course yet again avoided by the lizard, but this time without any injuries.

This went on for a while until the lizard got frustrated and decided to risk making another attack. Mia could tell that the lizard staked all its hopes of escaping on this one attack, as it readied itself to make a huge tail swing. That swing contained a tremendous amount of momentum and was extremely fast, with the added bonus of the glowing hot tail, any normal human hit by that attack would die on the spot. Felix, however, wasn’t a normal human, he had been training in the fighter unit for a few years and had finally gotten the opportunity to become a hunter. There was no way he would let his life stop there. With this in mind, he jumped backward using the entirety of his superior strength to avoid the attack.

Unfortunately, his was a tad too slow and the attack hit his left leg which was too slow in retreating. Upon impact, a loud thud was heard as Felix was sent spinning in the air with the added momentum of his jump. As soon as he got hit, Mia could tell that his leg was fractured, that attack was far too strong.

Looking back at the creature the group quickly realized that its strike was a double-edged sword. Its massive momentum had caused it to spin off and lose balance, almost causing it to end up on its back. This was the moment they had all been waiting for.

“Ross!” Mia called out, shaking him out of his daze.

He immediately understood her intentions and readied his aim.

*Bang*

The bullet, despite being spherical, followed its intended trajectory perfectly and lodged itself within the lizard’s right eye. This caused the creature to let out a loud and sharp scream reflecting the intense pain it was currently in.

At this point, Felix was supposed to step in and take out the other eye. But with his current injuries, it would be a miracle for him to even be able to stand.

However, to everyone’s surprise, Felix was standing. And not only that, he was beside the lizard and ready to strike a blow to its left eye. Instead of staying down, he got up the moment he hit the ground and rushed for the lizard. He ignored the pain in his leg to make sure the plan would proceed smoothly.

Seeing that Felix was right beside him, the lizard panicked. As its left eye was about to be taken out as well, it suddenly moved in an extremely surprising way and jumped at Felix in an attempt to bite him.

No one had been expecting the cowardly lizard to turn berserk at the last moment. However, if they had actually taken the time to think about it, it wasn’t surprising for a creature to act this way when it was corned and about to die.

Felix, who hadn’t been expecting that, tried to dodge its attack. He jumped out of the way. Unfortunately, when he did so, his left leg gave out an atrocious amount of pain, causing it to weaken and collapse instead of jumping.

“Shit” was the last word he said as he saw the lizard reach for his neck with its extremely sharp teeth.

Felix’s body was lying down of the ground. His right arm was entirely missing. It seems that when his leg gave out on him, it caused him to fall towards the left. This had led to the lizard missing its attack and taking his right arm instead of his life. With such degree of injuries, Felix was definitely not getting back up without treatment anymore. Mia was fully aware that if they wanted him to survive that wound, they had to immediately get him back to the city. Unfortunately, it seemed to be an impossible thing to do at this point.

The lizard had turned berserk and it wouldn’t be an understatement to say that the roles had been reversed. They were the prey and the lizard was the predator.

The lizard turned around and faced Ross with Felix’s arm still in its mouth. Its eye was filled with a deep bloodlust and rage. If they hadn’t witnessed this event, Ross and Mia would have sworn that it was a different lizard than the one they had just attacked.

Ross could feel the lizard’s gaze staring at his soul. He could tell that all the lizard wanted was to kill him. Its appearance was absolutely terrifying. Ross couldn’t move or breath. He stood there frozen as the lizard began to charge at him.

“Ross! Ross!” Mia shouted in desperation, trying to get Ross to run away.

Sadly, Ross couldn’t hear any of her cries. He stood there, frozen, facing the lizard.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit!” Mia cursed under her breath. “I guess I’ve only got this left.”

As she said this, as symbol began to appear, hovering in mid-air in front of her. This was the fireball spell. She chose that spell because it was the one she was the most proficient in. She was fully aware that her understanding of it was too small to cast it, and that she risked being affected by backlash due to that. However, if she wanted her friends to live, she had no choice.

The symbol began to glow brighter and brighter until she yelled out.

“Fireball!”

As these words left her mouth a fireball the size of a soccer ball shot out from the symbol. Her understanding of it was only at around 3% and normally an understanding of 5% was needed to cast a spell. It could be said that she was either extremely lucky or that she was a rare genius. Despite having successfully cast the spell, it would still be weaker than if executed with a 5% understanding.

The fireball shot out of the symbol at a surprisingly fast speed towards the lizard. Within a fraction of a second, the fireball hit the lizard’s side. The lizard let out yet another cry of pain as the scorching hot flames were ravaging its body.

Contrary to Mia’s intentions, it seemed that the spell caused the lizard’s fury to grow stronger instead of stopping it. It sped up as it charged at Ross, and in an instant, it closed the gap between them. Showing no signs of stopping, it delivered a full force blow to Ross. The sound of multiple bones breaking was heard as Ross was sent flying through the air. Knocking him unconscious on the spot.

Stolen story; please report.

“NO! ROSS!” Mia shouted.

She could feel tears rising to her eyes, she had completely failed at defending her friends. When the lizard turned to face her and their gazes met, the fury within their eyes clashed, creating a tremendous amount of pressure.

“This is it.” Mia said in a calm cold voice.

Another fireball symbol appeared in front of her. However, this time, the symbol was several times bigger than it was before.

“You want to take my friend’s lives and escape!? Don’t you think I’ll let you do whatever you want! I don’t care if I die in the process! Take that you piece of shit!” It was clear that at this point Mia had completely and utterly snapped. She had lost all her sanity after having seen the sight of her two closest friends being sent to the doors of death.

The symbol began to glow brighter and brighter. Seeing this the lizard seemed to have regained its sanity. Fear now filled its eyes; it was obvious a spell of this size was more than enough to kill it. Therefore, as any smart creature would do, it tried to run away. Unfortunately for it, it was too slow.

“FIREBA…”

*Thud*

The ground suddenly rose in front of Mia and hit her in the face. Her vision turned black and her consciousness began to fade away before she could even react.

Jules stood in the clearing and looked at the results from the battlefield. All three kids were unconscious, two of which were severely injured. The reason the girl called Mia was unconscious was that Jules had knocked her out with a heavy branch he had found nearby. He had taken advantage of the fact that her attention was completely focussed on the lizard to sneak behind her and incapacitate her.

The lizard didn’t seem to be doing any better, as it had collapsed right after seeing that Jules meant it no harm. After all, it had just been through an extremely stressful moment and had suffered many injuries.

Seeing everyone at his mercy, Jules decided to bring them back alive to his camp instead of killing them on the spot. This, however, was not out of kindness. Ever since he had learned how magicules worked, he had thought of a couple of things that he would like to try. Therefore, he decided to take advantage of those three kids to run some experiments.

With the help of all of his zombies, they were all transported back to the base within no time. Jules had also decided to help the lizard, there was no reason for him not to, hating humans did not mean he was no longer kind.

He got his zombies to repurpose the kitchen tent into a resting area for the lizard. Jules didn’t know much about how to heal things, but he still had some common sense. He had his zombies wash the wounds with some clean water to the best of their abilities. Following this he had them apply some bandages he had found within the camp on these wounds. At first, Jules was worried his own bacteria would turn out to be a problem when trying to heal the lizard, luckily it turned out that if Jules focussed hard enough, he could stop the bacteria from replicating within any organism of his choice. This way the lizard’s immune system would just take out the few remaining bacteria. This process works similarly to that of a switch, once activated he would have to focus on it to deactivate it. This meant that he didn’t have to focus on it permanently.

While some of the zombies were taking care of the unconscious lizard, others were busy bringing the three humans to one of the bunk tents. They were each laid down on a bunk bed and tied to it in case they woke up. Soon after a couple of zombies walked in and proceeded to try their best to stop the bleeding from Felix’s arm. After a few minutes, they had managed to significantly slow down the bleeding by using bandages. However, it was clear that this clearly wasn’t enough, and that Felix was still going to die unless he got proper treatment. The other two seemed to be rather stable, albeit in a lot of pain.

Jules walked into the room with a grin on his face. Clearly, whatever he was going to do, he would enjoy it. In his right hand was a bag, although it wasn’t see-through it was easy to tell due to its movements that there was something alive in it.

Jules walked up to them and inspected them with a glance quickly one by one. After some careful deliberation within his head, he decided to approach Felix and sit beside him. He then proceeded to reach within his bag and pulled out a black goop that seemed to have a life of its own.

“Alright, it’s time to experiment.” He said, looking extremely eager to begin. “Xena, name the recording of this experiment ‘Parasite 1’.”

‘[Beginning recording ‘Parasite 1’.’ She replied within his head.

The reason Jules had named this experiment ‘Parasite 1’ was that he wanted to see if it was possible for his bacteria to live within the host without killing it. He wanted to try it because he came up with an interesting idea. Magicule farms.

He wasn’t able to produce any magicules himself and had to rely on what he absorbed from corpses. If he wanted to get stronger, he would have to kill. This in itself wasn’t a problem for him morally, however, if he killed too much, he would without a doubt draw attention to himself. Considering the fact that he wanted to survive above and that he had a rather careful nature, looking for alternatives wasn’t such an unreasonable idea. Therefore, he was very interested in searching for solutions to this problem.

His current idea was a very simple one.

‘Since humans can produce magicules, would it be possible to steal these without killing them. This way it would be possible to have an unlimited flow of magicules.’

Therefore, his goal was to attempt having his bacteria replicate within their host without killing them. The hurdle was that he would have to find a way to bypass the host’s immune system. Which was why wanted to experiment.

So, when stumbled upon three people that seemed to have rather high vitality, he decided he had to try it out. And worst-case scenario, if his experiments failed, he could just turn them into zombies. Therefore, he wouldn’t really lose anything by giving it a shot.

The first step of his experiment would be to infect the subject. To do this he decided to try using the slimes. This could prove more effective than just making them consume blood or scratch them since the slimes were made of 99% bacteria.

His first subject was Felix. Since Felix was doomed to die regardless, it would be good to use him for his first attempt. This way he wouldn’t lose too much of an opportunity if he failed.

Therefore, Jules opened Felix’s mouth and placed a slime the size of a small potato in it. Afterward, he closed Felix’s mouth and pinched his nose until he swallowed the slime.

Jules took a deep breath and focused on the bacteria now with Felix’s body. There were approximatively 1 trillion bacteria within the slime. By the time the slime made its way to Felix’s stomach, about 500 thousand bacteria had already entered his bloodstream. Soon enough another 50 million followed, then 10 billion. The flow of bacteria stopped at roughly 20 billion, it seemed that the rest had been destroyed by the acid within his stomach.

Now that he had his forces inside Felix’s blood, he had to find a way to bypass the immune system. His first idea was to find a spot that was safe from it. To do so he made sure to spread out his bacteria evenly throughout the body.

As expected, the immune system kicked in quick. Felix’s white blood cells began to devour countless bacteria. It was extremely quick and efficient. Jules was taken aback; he wasn’t expecting this. But it made sense, the higher their vitality, the better their immune system. However, since Felix was wounded, he wasn’t expecting that much. If compared to the bandit leader’s, Felix’s one was way stronger, even in this state.

This made Jules come to a conclusion. If he didn’t find a way to bypass that immune system quickly, his bacteria would either be eliminated, or he would be forced to kill Felix. The reason he felt that he wouldn’t be able to try again was that Felix’s immune system was getting better and better at fighting back his bacteria. It was learning extremely quickly. Essentially, the longer it took, the more immune Felix was becoming to him.

This prompted Jules to search more frantically. Unfortunately, he still remained unable to find a safe spot. At this point, 50% of his bacteria had been eliminated and the enemy was only growing stronger. Therefore, Jules decided to gather his bacteria in one spot, he was going to have to switch tactics.

“It’s time to fight back.” He said.

This was his other idea. Destroy the immune system and have his bacteria replace it. The reason he wasn’t too keen on doing so was that he wasn’t entirely sure his bacteria could do a good job at replacing it. However, it was clearly visible that his original plan wasn’t going to work.

After having grouped up, his bacteria began fighting Felix’s immune system. Those on the outside of the group would fight, whereas those on the inside would replicate. By doing this Jules was able to gradually gain ground on the enemy. But quickly enough he started being overpowered, the immune system kept getting stronger and had started to push back.

Unfortunately for the immune system, they weren’t the only ones getting stronger.

[Beep! Immune system analyzed. Optimal fighting plan established.] A nice voice declared within his head.

As soon as he heard her voice, Jules grabbed another slime and forced Felix to swallow it too. At the same time, he got his bacteria to follow the optimal fighting plan that Xena came up with.

This move instantly turned the tides of battle. Within a minute Felix’s entire immune system had been destroyed.

“Alright, now is time to see if it can take its place,” Jules said with a satisfied smile on his face.