Part III – Ignorant (愚昧)
The central intersection came into view as the two passed beyond the auto air-sealed double-leaf door section that separated the east-wing from the main hall.
Circular-shape corridor with overhead sign indicating south-wing, but Dr.Mintra wasn't even gaze for the sign, she turned right after following the path towards the sign indicating the direction to the north wing and the managerial zone.
Along the way, it was cleaned, emptied, just white clean wall and seamless floor with flawless green marking robot-follow line.
And then, an overhead sign ran by the corridor ceiling, low-profile and utilitarian. The header sat centered in white against a dark grey field, underscored by a thin amber line.
ADMINISTRATIVE / MEDICAL MANAGEMENT ZONE
To the right of the header, directional arrows broke outward, each pointing deeper into the same section of the building:
→ Patient Care – High Dependency
→ Clinical Documentation & Staff Offices
→ Systems Control & Operations
→ Emergency Stairwell
Yuri caught the words as they passed beneath it.
"High-dependency," he muttered.
Dr. Mintra didn't slow.
"Yes," she said quietly. "The fragile-patient ward." She drew a breath, steadying herself. "It was established to support cases that require constant care—patients who need more than we can usually provide. Funding came in part from the Crown… and the rest through private contributions."
Her voice dipped, uneven despite the effort to keep it controlled.
"It's housed here, alongside the managerial and write-up offices. This is where my students and colleagues spend most of their time. In an emergency, it's the safest place to regroup."
A brief pause.
"And I trust they're smart enough to be doing exactly that right now—thinking, planning."
Yuri could almost feel her pace. She walked fast by nature, but now it was more than urgency—her stride clipped, precise, forcing him to lengthen his own just to keep even.
They moved through a clean, oval stretch of corridor: seamless white wall to the left, a curved exterior face to the right, broken at intervals by rectangular panes of rounded tempered glass. Beyond them, the outside world lay broken, but still, serene.
The sun had climbed nearly overhead. Their shadows fell backward, overlapping unnaturally, stacked one atop the other along the floor, crossing the green-marked guidance line that—at that moment—anchored their senses just enough to keep them moving forward a little while longer. Around their edges, a faint halo of reflected light clung to their outlines—soft, pristine, almost reverent.
Too clean.
The silhouettes themselves told a different story. Misshapen where they merged, stretched, and distorted by the curve of the corridor, as if something else had been acknowledging the two, creeping far from sight beneath the shadowed pass along the building.
Through animal instinct, the urge did not sleep.
After the last quenching—cold metal skin, stone-silent shell once warm with burning grain—now empty.
Hunger rose again.
Prey move.
Prey near the place where hymn grow thin.
Too cool. Too pale. Too far from the shade of the abys.
So them gather.
Them slide.
Them fold into each other — through shadow into shadow into shadow — slap and drag and bind.
Not run. Not chase.
Herd.
Heated.
Heated meat.
Now stand.
Prey now breathe.
Them shall sing.
Sing the heat they thirst.
Sing the joy of boiling flesh unseen.
Sing madness low, wet, together.
Yuri felt it then—not fear, not yet—but the tightening awareness beneath his skin, the kind that came before tension finally broke loose and fear earned its name through torn meat and steaming blood. The smell said it was close. Too close. Close enough that his body reacted before his thoughts caught up. Whatever they were dealing with was no longer confined to how he had learned to fight human or non-human threats. Those followed rules—reaction time, intent, angles. But this—this shift was subtle, like water nudged by a faint current to herd its prey. Nothing touched him. Nothing rushed. But something nearby had adjusted, and his nerves answered before reason did.
It reminded him, briefly, of the first time their group encountered the Colos Variant.
If the tissue cells—once part of a parasitic, worm-like creature—had changed, if they no longer latched on and fed patiently but struck to take everything at once, to drain heat in a single motion, then distance stopped being safety. It wasn't circling to weaken. It was closing to end. Brute force at close range would only shorten the outcome. This wasn't something to overpower. An intricate plan was needed.
A faint sound reached him—wet, dragging, deliberate.
Not rushed.
Measured.
Now they were holding their course.
And something, unseen, was no longer still.
As the two passed the most curved ovular edge of the corridor, a long stretch of ovular wall opened before them. Too exposed. No alcoves. No equipment recesses. Less than halfway down it stood the double-leaf door, a clear sign embedded into the wall beside it—Administrative / Medical Management Zone—at last. Close enough now to matter. Close enough that his body began counting steps, with a plan to persist and do what he must.
Farther ahead, near the center of the hall, another overhead sign marked the turn toward the north wing, its arrow angled sharply to the right. A longer route. Poor sightlines. Too many shadows formed by several stretches of rectangular tempered-glass panels along the right side of the corridor. Through those glass panels, the long stretch of the north wing could already be seen at far sight.
Dr. Mintra began drifting left, orienting toward the door access. Their breathing grew heavier as they moved—hers more noticeably so. Sweat beaded along her temple despite the fourth floor's temperature having been dialed down to near-clinical cold. The chill did nothing to calm what rose inside them. The closer they drew, the more the sense of imminence pressed in—the knowledge that whatever waited ahead was something they did not yet know how to kill.
Then the smell reached them.
Sharp acidity, layered beneath rot—chemical bite tangled with the unmistakable stench of decaying meat. Dr. Mintra's hand was slick with sweat now, the handkerchief dampened and useless for wiping the growing sweat from her face, but that was no longer its purpose. She pressed it hard against her nose, tightening her grip as much as she could to stave off the growing smell of unclean air that reeked of mutated death.
Yuri did not. He could endure, as he always had.
His senses had always been sharper than most—not because of implants or upgrades, but because he had never been able to afford them. What he had instead was training pushed past safety, awareness sharpened by necessity. Years spent scavenging beyond the walls, slipping through illegally uncovered old sewage routes in the slums, forcing himself to run as fast as he could through the darkness of narrow tunnels lit only by a flickering overhead lamp and an old, hand-written map—one he was only ever allowed to memorize, never to touch, guarded by a crude, broken old man, an ex-scavenger of the slums. Even then, despite fear, stopping had never been an option. Pain had taught him. Hunger had refined him. Fear was never a reason to stop. Stopping had never been an option from the start.
By the time he was caught and brought before the King, merciful grace was granted, earning him a place within militia training; and through that same discipline, he later secured a position among SAI's top official militia forces—sealed not by pedigree, but by performance.
Zero failed solo missions.
The proof rested against his chest.
The Zero-Vector Pin—a flat, matte disc no wider than a thumbnail, forged from darkened composite alloy with a faint graphite sheen. It didn't catch light easily, anti-glare treated like field equipment rather than ceremonial metal. At its center, a single etched glyph: a thin horizontal line intersected by a vertical vector, both terminating abruptly at the point of contact. No flourish. No excess. Zero margin.
He wore it not to be seen. If anything, he preferred the opposite—liked the idea of being an unseen force, something that passed through problems quietly and left no trace beyond results.
There was a certain irony to it. A mark meant to earn him free drinks or louder company in places he avoided, yet the weight that came with wearing it demanded the opposite—to become ever more deliberately unremarkable. Off duty. Undercover. Or answering some last-minute call dragged from half-sleep, where most of his missions lived, and being noticed—even once—meant failure.
So whenever those calls came, what others usually saw was not an elite operative, but a teenage boy barely past eighteen, shaped by a low background, wearing the same old pair of frayed-cut jeans. A thin under-armor combat shirt. A navy jacket worn soft at the seams. A common, scavenger's tool at his side—a makeshift axe to unfamiliar eyes, its other function hidden unless you knew what it was meant to become in trained hands. The same arrangement he always chose when he wasn't meant to be seen at all. And somehow, it always worked.
And it was that Zero-Vector Pin. Recognition, once earned, came with restraint. It could never be removed in public without consequence. It had to be worn—but never noticed. Worked into his clothing, it passed as nothing more than an extra button, unremarkable, forgettable. Exactly as required.
And now, every instinct in his body was screaming.
The smell thickened with each step. Wet. Active. Close.
Yuri's focus snapped narrow.
Door.
Mintra.
Inside.
Nothing else mattered.
He adjusted his stride, angling himself half a step ahead of her, already running the sequence—override, fast open, emergency close. He didn't look back. Didn't question it. Whatever was moving nearby was close enough now that even a fraction of hesitation would cost time he did not have. Every instinct urged him to turn, to see it, to understand its weakness—but that urge had to be restrained. Curiosity killed timing. Timing killed people. If the cost came due, it would be his to pay.
But he would make sure.
If the cost—
if it was ever imposed—
it would not be hers.
His hand was already lifting the cover of the manual override panel as his senses flared—close enough now that he could feel it, just out of sight, waiting for a moment they could not afford to give.
As quickly as he could, Yuri flipped the cover open. The rushing tension clogged his mind. Normally, the military-coded master override sequence came to him fluently—drilled through flawless runs, clean extractions, perfect completion times. But now, beneath the lifted cover, he trusted only instinct. His fingers tapped the recessed keys from memory, uncertain for a split second whether he'd mismatched intent and input—then committed anyway. There was no time to recall formulas, no time to run the sequence the way it had been trained into him. The codes were never stored digitally, never written down—doing so carried extreme penalty—but even that discipline didn't unsettle him the way this unseen pressure did, threatening to fracture his calm.
The confirmation chime was under a millisecond, the green LED flashing on with it—but the breath before it came stretched into a lifetime.
The sequence completed itself before his breath did. Mechanisms engaged under forced authority as the overridden command burst through the autonomous protocol. The double-leaf door hissed and snapped into a fast half-panel open.
Yuri was lean enough to slip through first by reflex—by protocol.
Then—
He turned back toward Dr. Mintra.
The threat was already too close. Close enough that, if it could breathe, she would have felt it at her ankle through the thin edge of her short-heeled shoes. He saw the source of the stench then—something black and wet, almost writhing in on itself, a mass of sneering tissue layered and multiplied. To careless eyes—or those too young, too untrained—it might have looked like a strip of rotten animal skin. But no animal skin could lift itself. No dead thing could surge upward like that, hurling forward with the coiled intent of a python marking its strike.
Yuri moved on instinct.
He yanked her through the doorway in the space of a millisecond, pivoted, and drove his hand back to the panel. The final inp ut hit. Manual close. Seal boost engaged.
The door slammed down and air sealed hard, pressure snapping shut behind them.