"You're even more undead now than you were when we first met. That much I can say for certain," Yamata said, and seeing that I still didn't quite grasp it, decided to speed up my understanding of my new condition. "At the first stage—conditional, of course; it might already have been the second, with the first having passed before we even met—you were neither alive nor dead. At certain moments, you could even be called alive, insofar as that term applies to someone like Birkin, who is technically alive yet no longer himself. Your form was in a constant state of uncontrolled change. At the second stage…"
"At the second stage, I became more alive than dead, on the contrary. But the changes acquired order and direction—and slowed down. You could say I had a kind of pseudo-life, like that already-mentioned scientist-monster or Nemesis, or, if we scale it down, a Hunter. All of them can be conditionally called alive, but definitely not human."
"Absolutely correct. And at the third stage, you somehow went in the opposite direction—outwardly becoming more human, while at the same time becoming more dead than you were in the first stage. This state has plenty of drawbacks, of course. Even sensations—which were already limited and only briefly accessible after consuming the blood of the living—are now gone. But on the other hand, you've essentially frozen in place. There's no longer any need to fear rapid mutations; they'll proceed much more slowly. Also, from what I can tell from your DNA, you don't need to worry about necrosis or a lot of other things—one might say you've been put into a cryo-chamber. Your time has stopped. You won't age; for the dead, that's impossible. You won't rot or deteriorate (you've avoided natural tissue degradation, not mutations), and a lot of other things along those lines. Though yes… that's an awful lot of downsides. And the wings…" Yamata shook her head.
"What about the wings? They're perfectly ordinary—basically like a bat's. Thank God they're not connected to my arms and function independently," I replied, far from inspired by these new prospects. I'd rather be unstable but 'conditionally pseudo-alive' than stabilized but dead.
"Sure. Like a bat's," Yamata drawled mockingly, then shifted sideways in a single motion and tore something out from the base of my wings—a feather? What? What now?
"Yes, you understood correctly. They're only partially membranous. At the base, there's plumage similar to a crow's," the Four Eyes stunned me.
"Ah. They warned me as a kid not to eat all kinds of garbage. Didn't finish digesting a crow before the changes, and here we are. Otherwise, I'd be showing off some beautiful bat wings right about now," I said mournfully.
"And why aren't you complaining about why they're like this at all—why not fully crow-like, for instance?" Yamata asked, putting on a show of concern.
"Forgive me, but I'm not completely clueless about my origins. Judging from what I'd seen in the earlier results, it wasn't hard to figure out that I was created with bat DNA mixed in. So separately, I should probably say 'thank you' to the scientists who made me this way," I sighed sadly—and at that moment, a half-groan, half-howl echoed from the direction of the elevator. Looks like it worked. Though they took their sweet time…
"Birkin's back?" the former corporate mercenary said anxiously, immediately moving toward the table with her equipment and grabbing the rifle lying just to the side.
"No, not at all. It's just that my little experiment turned out to be a success," I said with satisfaction, standing up and heading lightly toward the source of the howling.
"Have you completely lost your mind from grief? At least take a weapon!"
I shot Yamata a sideways look, as if she were a clueless blonde.
"No offense, but according to the corporation's documentation, I qualify as a weapon myself. And I always have knives and pistols on me—though I did lose some of them during all these adventures," I replied without turning around, sensing—almost with a sixth sense—how my partner fell in behind me, weapon at the ready.
When we reached the corridor by the lift, we saw two humanoid creatures. Dark-gray skin. Completely bald, gaunt bodies; their cheeks looked as if they'd been eaten away, allowing their mouths to open unnaturally wide. Both the upper and lower jaws gleamed with two fangs each—the lower ones slightly shorter, the upper correspondingly longer. They were also somewhat hunched, and their arms were clearly longer than a human's—even not reaching the floor, but easily reaching their knees. What stood out as well were the sizable, straight claws on their hands and the curved ones on their feet. The only way to identify the two of them was by the remnants of their suits and body armor.
(End of Chapter)
P@treon: /SadRaven
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