The sun began to rise, its first rays piercing through the leaves, but they brought no warmth. They only made the dead silence of the village more pronounced. Returning here for the second time, Kael felt a chill run down his spine that had nothing to do with the temperature.
They moved like ghosts between the huts, weapons lowered but always at the ready. Jotun and Rook took up watch on the perimeter while Kael, Gryphon, and Wraith moved into the center. Viper had been placed safely in a dense thicket, still lost in a medicated sleep.
No one spoke. It wasn't necessary. The solemnity of a graveyard had enveloped them.
Gryphon stopped beside a swing made from a vine and a piece of wood, still swaying slightly in the breeze. He touched it lightly, then pulled his hand back as if burned.
Wraith stood motionless at the entrance of a hut, looking inside. On the dirt floor were scattered kernels of corn, spilled from an overturned basket. Beside it lay a pair of tiny children's sandals, one face up, one face down. A life, abruptly cut short.
"They didn't stand a chance," she whispered, her voice nearly swallowed by the wind.
"No," Kael answered, his eyes fixed on the disturbed mound of earth in the middle of the village. "But they might give us one. To know what we're up against."
He walked toward the mass grave without hesitation. He'd seen enough death that disgust no longer paralyzed him. Now, it was just a source of information.
Gryphon followed, his face a hard mask. "Wraith, keep watch. Let us know if anything moves."
Wraith nodded, drew a dagger, and silently disappeared into the shadows of a nearby hut, her eyes constantly scanning the tree line.
Kael and Gryphon stood before the makeshift grave. "Where do we start?" Gryphon asked, his voice low and heavy.
"We start by finding out why they had to be silenced," Kael said, and began to dig with his bare hands.
The earth was thin and damp, easily clawed away. Soon, they exposed what lay beneath. The thick stench of death rose up, but neither man flinched. They worked with a cold, almost mechanical focus.
They weren't trying to unearth everyone. They just needed a few samples.
"This one's a man, about forty," Gryphon said, pointing to a face that had begun to distort. "Gunshot wound to the back of the head. Execution style."
"Same as the others," Kael murmured, carefully brushing dirt from another body, a young woman. "They rounded them all up and opened fire. Fast and efficient. But why bury them? Why not just leave them for the scavengers?"
"To hide it," Gryphon answered. "They didn't want anyone stumbling upon this by accident."
Kael continued to work, and then he froze. "Gryphon, over here."
He was pointing at the hand of the woman he had just uncovered. Her fingers were strangely contorted, and her skin... her skin had a pale, grayish-blue hue, dotted with tiny black spots, like burst blood vessels.
Gryphon knelt beside him, narrowing his eyes. "Looks like necrosis. But it's developed too quickly."
"It's not just that," Kael said. He gently touched one of the black spots with his fingertip. It was hard. "Look."
He used his fingernail to gently pry at it, and a small, glossy black fragment flaked off. It wasn't skin. It was like a tiny, rock-hard scale.
"What the hell?" Gryphon whispered.
"I don't know," Kael admitted. "But I've seen this skin color before. On the Scaly-hounds."
A heavy silence fell over them. Hypotheses began to form in Kael's mind, each more horrifying than the last. This wasn't just a massacre to silence witnesses. This was something else. Something worse.
"Check the others," Gryphon ordered, his voice urgent.
They quickly examined a few more bodies. Not all, but about a third of them showed similar symptoms: patches of discolored skin, and upon closer inspection, the growth of tiny, hard scales beneath the epidermis.
"They didn't just kill them," Kael said, straightening up, brushing the dirt from his hands. "They infected them first. Or... they were testing something on them."
"And then killed everyone, infected and uninfected, to erase the evidence," Gryphon concluded, his face darkening. "That lab... it's not just producing B.O.W.s. It's turning people into them."
"There has to be a reason," Kael said, his eyes scanning the village. "They wouldn't pick a random village. These people saw something. Or knew something."
He left Gryphon to his grim forensics and returned to the hut where he'd first seen the scratches on the wall. He stepped inside, the air stale and smelling of old fear.
He looked closer at the scratches. They were made by someone in extreme pain and panic. But they weren't random. There was a pattern.
He followed the scratches, and they led him to a dark corner of the hut where a few old baskets were stacked. He moved them aside. Behind them, there was a loose clay brick.
He carefully pried it out.
Inside the small wall cavity was an object wrapped in a piece of cloth. Kael took it out. It was a small, worn leather-bound notebook. He opened it.
The pages were filled with French, the handwriting shaky but clear. It was the journal of someone named Jean-Pierre, likely the village teacher or elder. Kael quickly skimmed the pages. Daily entries about crops, about the children, about normal life.
Until a few weeks ago.
The writing became more frantic.
Day 12. The soldiers from the mine came. They said they needed strong men for work. They paid very well. Everyone was happy. I was not. Their eyes... they were cold.
Day 15. The first few men returned. They looked tired, but they had money. But they said they were not allowed to talk about their work. They said it was a secret.
Day 18. Matis returned. His skin is a strange color. He says he has a fever. His wife is very worried.
Day 20. Matis has become violent. He attacked his wife. The others had to tie him down. His skin... it is changing. There are hard things, like scales, growing on it. My God, what is happening?
Kael flipped to the last page. The handwriting was a near-illegible scrawl.
They are coming. The soldiers. Not to help. They have guns. They say this is a quarantine. A lie! They are killing everyone! They want no witnesses! We saw what they did to our people! They turned them into... into monsters! Into their hounds! God, save us...
The writing ended in a long smear of blood.
Kael closed the journal. His hand was trembling. Now he understood. The MLF wasn't just receiving weapons from The Broker. They were supplying the raw materials.
People.
Just as Kael stepped out of the hut, Gryphon's comms device gave a short beep. Not a call. A data packet.
"Oracle?" Gryphon asked.
"...very weak signal... can't talk... can only send..." Anya's voice broke up and then cut out.
An image began to download onto Gryphon's device, line by painful line. It was low-resolution and full of static.
"What is it?" Kael asked, stepping closer.
"Thermal imagery," Gryphon answered. "From one of our satellites. Timestamp... two days ago. Right here."
The image finally rendered. It was a top-down view of the village. Mostly cool blues and greens. But there were bright red and orange dots. Human heat signatures.
And there were other signatures.
"These are the villagers," Gryphon said, pointing to a cluster of red dots being herded into the center of the village. "And these..."
He pointed to an arc of other red dots surrounding them. The attackers. They were armed, indicated by the brighter heat flares from their gun barrels.
"MLF soldiers," Kael said.
"Look closer, Spectre," Gryphon said, his voice dropping.
Kael squinted. Alongside the soldiers, there were other heat signatures. They were lower to the ground, quadrupedal in shape. The Scaly-hounds.
But there was another group. A group he had initially missed.
They stood mixed in with the ranks of the MLF soldiers. They were also human-shaped, also holding weapons. But their heat signatures... they were different. Colder. Uneven patches of hot and cold. Like a body in transition, with different parts at different temperatures.
And as Kael zoomed in as far as he could, he saw a detail that made his blood run cold. One of those figures, for a split second, had swung its arm out. And from that arm, a long, thin secondary limb, radiating more heat, had lashed out.
Identical to the limb of the monster that had attacked them in the jungle.
"No way," Wraith whispered from behind him, having seen the image.
"They aren't just turning villagers into Hounds," Kael said, finally putting it all together. "That's just a byproduct. A failed experiment."
He looked at the figures with the uneven temperatures on the screen.
"The main product... is their own soldiers."
Gryphon switched off the device. The silence in the valley seemed even heavier.
"Las Plagas," Kael said the name, and it sounded like a curse. "But not the old kind. This is a new variant. One designed for integration. It doesn't just control the host. It changes the host, turns them into super-soldiers. Faster, stronger, with regenerative abilities."
"And the ability to grow deadly extra limbs," Jotun added, his voice filled with disgust.
"That's why Hunnigan is here," Gryphon concluded. "The package in the briefcase. The Chimaera. It's not the final product. It's a delivery system. A way to mass-infect subjects quickly and efficiently."
Finally, the whole picture came into focus, and it was more horrifying than anything they could have imagined.
The Broker wasn't just selling B.O.W.s.
He was selling an army.
He provided the virus, the parasite. He provided the technology. And people like Kante and his MLF army provided the hosts—their own soldiers—to become the first monsters in a new army.
This village wasn't a massacre.
It was "quality control." Killing off the defective products and the witnesses who had seen too much.
Kael looked in the direction of the complex. They weren't just up against a few mercenaries and some mutated dogs.
They were about to go up against a beta-test army of super-soldiers, who still retained their human intelligence and tactical skills, but were now augmented with the strength and biological weaponry of a monster.
Gryphon looked at his team. Six soldiers, one of them badly wounded. Against an evolving army.
This mission had just gone from "difficult" to "suicidal."