Volume 3, Chapter 48 – Parasite

“No good!”

In front of the video call, the man in glasses yanked his phone down and snapped, “He just won’t pick up!”

“The phones we issued to him and Hannah both have satellite capability,” the blonde woman on the screen said coolly, analyzing. “Hannah’s phone has dropped off the grid, which most likely means she’s dead. But his still has a signal. So he’s doing this on purpose ?”

“Who knows what’s going on in his head!” The man paced restlessly back and forth. “That lunatic—what the hell is he trying to do?”

After a pause, he shifted the blame to the woman, glaring at her. “How did you lot vet people when you took him in? Someone like that actually made it to senior researcher?”

The blonde woman’s brow was tightly furrowed, confusion written on her face.

Vetting wasn’t her responsibility, but from what she knew, her department’s screening was extremely strict. She had had to get through more than a dozen hoops to get in—and that was with calling in favors… So how had something like this slipped through with Evan?

“It might not be just his problem,” she said, shaking her head. “Hold on… Let me pull up his file again.”

“You’re all just wasting time!” The man cut the connection outright.

“If he won’t pick up, what’s the point of you finding anything?”

The Elend airdrop plan had been his design. If Evan lost control and the rented B2 containment object ended up lost in Great Yu—and there was no evidence it had been “used up”—then the intel they’d gathered on that “war-grade” prodigy wouldn’t even come close to covering his liability. He didn’t even dare imagine how the organization would punish him.

Thinking about it, he finally felt the organization had been too reckless.

This was a B2 containment object… Why send something this rare and important to Great Yu to toy with?

Even if they suspected there were more ancient demon corpses over there, even if they wanted to use Demon Pools to try and awaken it, they could grit their teeth and divert resources to do that elsewhere. It wasn’t impossible outside.

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But no, they’d insisted on shipping it to Great Yu to experiment. And in the end, the “Shenli” Demon Pool they’d extracted was still weaker than a couple blasts of the local blood mist. Looking back, the whole thing was clownish. He really couldn’t fathom what the higher-ups were thinking.

On the other end, the blonde woman wasn’t bothered by having the call cut short.

She was clearly the calmer one. She immediately started working the machine in front of her, fingers flying over the keyboard, strings of code reflected in her pupils as they scrolled past.

She was trying to crack the database.

She had her analyst identity as cover, and analysts had a routine task of periodically stress-testing the organization’s network defenses.

At worst, if she got caught, she’d pull some excuse. With that connection shielding her from above, they wouldn’t dare do much to her.

After a flurry of code and numbers, a progress bar popped up in the middle of the screen. It read “Cracking in progress,” with a percentage beside it.

The woman picked up her coffee for a sip. By the time she’d finished, the number still hadn’t moved.

This kind of grunt work all came down to raw compute power. She smiled.

No one would actually try to do this by hand, right? If someone did, they’d have to be an idiot. She certainly wasn’t.

Standing up, she stripped off her clothes and headed for the bathroom to rinse off.

Water began to patter and hiss in there soon enough—and at that moment, a tall figure with his face hidden in shadow slipped quietly into the room.

He stared first at the laptop on the table, at the progress bar on the screen. Then he checked the woman’s operation logs, green light from the display flickering in his eyes.

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“Karl?” came the woman’s startled cry from behind him. “What are you doing in my room?”

She was wrapped in a bath towel, brows knotted, both hands clutching a large-caliber pistol aimed squarely at the man by the desk.

His body stiffened for a moment, but he quickly relaxed, turned around, and revealed a handsome face framed by blond hair and blue eyes.

“You looked like you were working yourself into a trance, Miss Information Officer,” he said with a smile, standing up. Under her tense gaze, he took a small jewelry box from his pocket.

He opened it. Inside lay a sapphire ring. He walked slowly up to her and, under her stunned stare, gently nudged aside the barrel of the gun and slipped the ring onto the ring finger of her left hand.

“Happy birthday.”

“Do you like your birthday present?”

“I…” The woman was at a loss, realizing she might have misunderstood him—after all, the two of them were in a hazy, awkward sort of relationship. Still, a proposal seemed like a bit much…

And he shouldn’t have seen anything, really. The progress bar didn’t say what she was cracking, and the machine would erase the operation logs on its own. He shouldn’t know she’d tried to hack into the organization’s encrypted database.

So why not… have a little fun?

Men who took this kind of initiative were rare enough. It wasn’t like she was some prude—why push him away?

With that thought, her eyes softened. She gripped the gun in her other hand, leaned in, and gave his cheek a slow lick.

“If that’s how a lady responds to a diamond ring, do I need to teach you what comes next…” he murmured.

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They stared at each other across the gap for a few seconds, then turned at the same moment and locked lips.

“Mmph!?”

Suddenly—the woman’s eyes flew wide in terror, pleasure wiped away in a heartbeat.

She felt something.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t a tongue… Something was trying to burrow into her mouth.

She tried to struggle, shoving at the man with all her strength, but the difference between them was too great. His arms were clamped tight around her like a dragonfly’s legs pinning down its prey. She was forced to swallow something down into her stomach—and then a burst of agony ripped up from her abdomen.

“Ah!”

That thing… it had to have punched straight through her esophagus!

It was tearing through her flesh and organs, spreading upward, clinging to her spine!

She screamed. The towel slipped, baring her smooth back, where a centipede-like bulk was pushing the skin up in a long ridge, crawling its way up and embedding itself into the vertebrae. It followed the spine to the nape of her neck, then plunged straight into her brain.

“Oh!”

At that point, the woman suddenly stopped screaming.

Her eyes went blank, and then clarity returned a few seconds later.

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“Well?” the man asked, loosening his hold and testing her.

“She was starting to doubt Evan,” the woman said, her mouth producing the words. “You were right about that. We couldn’t let her find those traces.”

“Her computational ability is impressive, too.” She continued exploring this new body. “A shame. We should’ve taken her when she cracked that first time… She wasn’t core enough to need daily physical checks. She’s a perfect host.”

“These foreigners might not be as wary as the people of Yu, but they’ve got their own ways of guarding against us,” the man cautioned.

“Be careful. Her family ties don’t seem simple.”

“All the better,” the woman said with a smile. “Means I can have a look inside her family.”

They exchanged a glance—and then leaned in again, kissing once more.

After a bout of vigorous activity on the bed, the woman lay in the man’s arms and sighed. “The human body is so strange. Every time, it blows my mind…”

“Just a low breed ruled by their senses,” the man said, resting a hand on her neck. “Once the ancient clans return and the rebels are wiped out, you’ll understand what kind of status we truly have.”

“Can the ancient clans really return?” the woman asked, eyes half-closed. “That blood… We can’t even be sure it’s from ‘shiling.’”

“There’s no harm in trying,” the man said, stroking her cheek.

“At worst we’ll resurrect something else. We won’t be the ones with the headache.”