Free Web NovelChapter 434: How About Some Action?
"Zero..." Grayson’s voice dropped an octave, demanding an answer.
However, when he looked at Chronos’s face, a single tear escaped the corner of Chronos’s eyes. His expression was filled with quiet determination.
It was a look that Grayson had only seen on the faces of men walking into suicide missions. It was a silent vow that no matter what the General decided, he would comply without resentment.
But when Grayson looked closer, his sharp eyes caught a detail that chilled him to the bone.
Chronos was visibly trembling. His fingers were shaking against the Zerg’s chitinous claw.
Chronos never trembled, not even in dying moments.
There was something here—something Helena was desperate to reveal and Chronos was even more desperate to bury.
Keres saw the frantic shake of Helena’s head.
He felt the tremors wracking Chronos’s body. freewebnσvel.cøm
He saw Grayson’s failure to bridge the gap between the two.
Keres smiled wider, a wet sound of triumph emerging from his throat.
"Aww. This is a really good drama," Keres hissed, his grip tightening until the fabric of Chronos’s clothes crumpled. "Sadly, I don’t have a thing for dramas. How about some action?"
And without another word, Keres’s throat worked in a series of violent, rhythmic convulsions.
Hk-hk-hk-hk.
The overlapping plates along his thorax rippled like a disturbed pond. His abdomen tensed, then convulsed with a sickening, wet squelch—shhh-lump.
From the seam of his alien mouth came a long, viscous arc of a green substance. It was so bright it looked radioactive, glowing with an internal, bioluminescent light.
The smell hit the back of the throat instantly—a cloying, rotten, rusty sweetness.
It was spawn-spit.
Every soldier who had survived the front lines at the Border knew that smell and liquid. They had seen it in the trenches, the way high-ranking Zerg seeded hosts who weren’t going to volunteer.
It was the Zerg’s biological weapon of the highest order.
The liquid bypassed the skin and barrier made of spiritual power. It only needed a single point of contact to begin the "dyeing" process of the host’s neural lattice.
It was a death sentence for the host’s consciousness, but a greater danger to the Zerg themselves if it failed.
It required a massive expenditure of Keres’s own life-force, a rare and potent phenomenon that signaled the Zerg was going "all in."
Without the extraction liquid, it was impossible to defend against. Unless, of course, the prospective host was of the lineage of the Water Kingdom’s royalty.
No matter how distant its connection to the royalty was, their blood carried a natural resistance.
But there was a darker, more terrifying fact to spawn-spit. If the target was pregnant, the liquid would ignore the adult nervous system and head straight for the fetus.
It was a predator designed to prey on unborn neural networks, turning a child into a Zerg vessel before it even took its first breath.
Standard extraction liquids were useless against fetal infection.
The only known cures were the Water Kingdom’s Pearl or the high-frequency vibrations of a Mermaid’s Song—things that didn’t currently exist in a dusty basement storage room.
The arc of glowing green hung in the air for half a heartbeat, shimmering grimly under the flickering lights.
Ssssssss-thwip!
Half a heartbeat was more than enough time for Grayson to fire. His finger squeezed the trigger, the plasma gun barking a sharp, ionized crack.
BOOM!
The blue bolt of plasma met the green arc of spawn-spit mid-air. The collision was a violent explosion of light—cyan and emerald clashing that illuminated the room.
The bullet bore a hole through the seam between Keres’s compound eyes. The hole was the size of a thumb through the front of the zerg’s skull and out the back.
The green spit died in midair. But some of it still hit the floor with a wet splat, hissed, and steamed.
None of it touched Chronos.
None of it touched Helena.
The droplet that had been arcing mid-air passed through the trail of the plasma round and evaporated. fгeewebnovёl.com
Chronos was staring at the green stains on the floor, his breathing coming in short, panicked gasps—huff, huff, huff.
He wasn’t looking at Keres.
He was looking at his own stomach.
His hands were still trembling in a silent prayer. He was praying that not a single liquid would touch him.
Because no one knew apart from the zergs that it wasn’t just the liquid that needed to invade the host’s body, but also the consciousness.
Once it failed, meaning the transfer of the consciousness failed, a backlash towards the zerg would happen. All the spawn-spit around or touched later after the failure wasn’t threatening anymore.
Helena’s chest heaved once. Then she clamped down on the relief, because the situation had not yet ended, and she knew it.
So did Grayson, three seconds late.
He fired at the head, not at least one of the hearts.
Meaning Keres could still regenerate and function normally despite taking a headshot.
Keres’s body slumped, and he looked like he was dead. Then the chitin around the hole in his forehead began to quiver.
Tiny green threads extruded from the bone, fanning across the wound, closing it from the inside. The green blood along the plasma blade gash on his shoulder bubbled and withdrew.
The compound eyes flickered, and Keres was awake again.
BANG!
With Grayson’s second shot boring in his body, Keres became painfully aware that his gamble had failed.
He knew it was going to be hard, but he didn’t expect it to be this hard.
He lost the chance to take over a newborn fetus.
He lost his master’s chosen host’s body.
Keres felt like dying for good as he replayed the repeated failures, just counting today. It was humiliating and utterly disgraceful.
Now, he could only do one thing.
If he got really lucky this time, he could escape.
Grayson didn’t stop firing during this time and stepped forward to get a good aim at Kere’s body.
Thwip-thwip-thwip!
But Keres didn’t mind the persistent shots boring holes in his body. He didn’t care anymore and went for another attempt to escape.
Like before, Keres lunged at Grayson.
Not at Grayson but past him.
Again.
Grayson saw this and felt like the veins on his temples would pop any second now.
