The group quietly made their way through the mine, using Zara's Shadow Laws to conceal themselves within the darkness.
Eventually, the tunnel opened up onto a large natural cavern.
Drip!
The tunnel exited about halfway up the cavern's wall. The bloody stream flowing through its ground dripped onto the cavern floor, taking its role as the only sound within the eeriness of the atmosphere.
But the dripping blood wasn't alone on that ground. It fell into what looked like a lake of blood, gathered for unknown purposes.
"There's light on the other side. You three stay here with Zara and investigate the cavern. I'll go scout." Damien sent a sound transmission to his squad members.
The three young geniuses and Zara nodded. Since Damien could teleport if the situation got out of hand, he was the best scout among them. And with Zara's concealment abilities, they would have a far easier time moving through the cavern.
After receiving their confirmation, Damien's figure immediately vanished and reappeared on the other side of the cavern. There, a continuation of the previous tunnel was present.
'There must've been a rail system in place when this place was still actively used as a mine, but it was taken down when it was repurposed by the Nox.' Damien thought idly as he walked down the new tunnel.
His figure soon turned illusory and disappeared altogether.
'One With Dimension'
It was a concealment technique created using Zara's shadow concealment as a base. Damien's body melded into the dimension itself rather than the spatial layers, essentially becoming part of nature.
This ability was perfect for stealth, but it had a major caveat. The degree of fusion forced Damien to remain stationary. If he wanted to move without exposing himself, he'd have to precisely control the flow of his mana and tune it to the environment as he did so.
This was still above Damien's level. His understanding of natural law was still in the process of forming, and he'd barely touched on the concept of "flow" that he'd begun noticing not too long ago.
However, in the current situation, he didn't need mobility.
Laid out in front of him was an all-too-familiar scenery.
It was a lab-like space filled with scientists and researchers. Technological equipment that didn't match Calypto's aesthetic at all was strewn about. However, more than any of this, the main occupants of the lab's space were large vats filled with unknown liquid and, as Damien had long been expecting, tanks filled with bodies.
'It's another one of those.' He thought to himself.
He'd been seeing them everywhere. He saw them in the Niflheim base on earth, in the secret auction on the Cloud Plane, and practically everywhere on the unnamed world. He always knew that the Nox had plans involving the horrific procedures they performed in these facilities, but he was never able to understand what those plans were.
Of course, he had plenty of guesses, one of which was likely correct. The Nox didn't seem like a race that was involved with heavy scheming. Rather, they seemed the type to blaze through everything with sheer force, ironically similar to Damien.
Regardless, Damien refused to give any of his conjectures weight until he had solid proof. Because if any of his thoughts were true, they would have a serious impact on the war itself.
'For all I know, the things I'm questioning have already been answered by Heaven's Army, who've been combatting the Nox for years now. Still, until I get access to that information, I have to find out myself.'
Slowly, Damien masked his presence and undid his concealment, stealthily moving through the darkness of the tunnel and arriving inside the facility.
The bright white lighting scheme disallowed any sort of shadow concealment, and the turbulent mana in the air made it difficult to move without alerting anyone.
'Without One With Dimension, it's impossible for me to get deeper.' Damien realized.
Only Zara, with her freakish concealment skills, would be able to take them deeper into the lab.
'I guess I'll just observe a bit and return.'
Damien sat quietly for many hours and watched the scientists work. He watched as they experimented on both living and dead bodies, injecting them with various serums and feeding them various pills to gauge their reactions.
The most common result was a torturous death.
The blackness of Nox mana or the strangeness of the other serums that were being injected would almost always cause the victims to deform grotesquely and mutate into beasts that died thereafter. Additional limbs were only the most basic growths that formed.
When the inevitable failure took place, the corpses were submerged in the vats of liquid and melted down to their base components.
'The mana doesn't dissipate.'
It was the first thing Damien noticed about the vats.
Usually when a person died, their mana and essence would disperse into the atmosphere. This was where the term "becoming one with nature" originated from.
However, these vats carried a special property that allowed them to store the deceased's mana and even amplify it as it was fused into the vat's liquid.
'They've already used over 1200 bodies in the past 2 hours, yet there hasn't been a single success. Are they even aiming for success in the first place?'
From the looks of it, the various drugs and serums that were being developed were only purposed for torture. Perhaps Damien would find something if he waited a little longer…
A change occurred.
A dead body that was injected with black fluid suddenly twitched.
After the initial injection, sickly black veins climbed up the body until they formed a spiderweb encompassing the entire nervous system. Afterwards, the liquid invaded the corpse's dormant bloodstream and reactivated it.
The heart was forcefully restarted and used to filter out old blood and replace it with the new mutated blood.
At the same time, the liquid's control over the corpse's nervous system became increasingly prominent, which was mirrored by the spread of the sickly black color on the skin.
And when both of these processes reached their pinnacle…
The body twitched.
Crash!
Nearby surgical equipment flew across the area as the twitches transitioned into a full seizure. The corpse thrashed around violently and mutated, becoming far taller and more robust than it was when it was alive.
And finally, when the thrashing calmed down…
The corpse opened its eyes.
Two pitch-black sclerae stared into the world. Like foam balls surfacing atop a lake of slime, red-slitted pupils formed in those eyes.
GRAAAAAAAAH!
The being that replaced the corpse roared madly. In that moment, as if they'd been expecting it, the surrounding researchers rolled a machine over and turned it on. The machine emitted a frightening vibration that felt like an earthquake, immediately calming down the new creature.
As he watched the scientists sedate the creature and store it in a separate enclosure away from the unused body, he couldn't overcome his shock.
He didn't care about the reanimated dead body, as it was only the obvious outcome from the connotations that he deduced.
Instead, his thought process followed something far greater than a single body.
'Those things…are parasites?'
