Chapter 88. Silence and Darkness (1)
“Then why didn’t you send your daughters outside, like the contract required?”
Victoria asked.
The old woman immediately shouted back,
“I tried! More than once!”
“But every time, my daughters became sick just like me. Their lungs were all weak because they inherited it from me!”
In a way, it made perfect sense.
The old woman was the original source of everyone in the village, and her lungs were weak.
The children born from her genes would naturally inherit that weakness as well.
“Whatever the contract said, those girls are my daughters and granddaughters.”
The old woman’s voice turned gloomy.
“I couldn’t stand watching them suffer from illness.”
“So for fifty years, we had no choice but to gather here and live together.”
“That’s all.”
Victoria could not say anything after hearing that.
She knew she had no right to pretend she understood the weight of the loneliness the old woman had endured.
“So this is where you were.”
While they were catching their breath halfway up the mountain, No. 11 came limping toward them from the distance.
“Aaaaah!”
The old woman screamed the moment she saw him.
Victoria immediately stepped in front of her.
She glared at No. 11.
“How did you find us?”
“There are ways.”
No. 11 answered while breathing heavily.
“As you can see, my leg is not particularly good, so chasing people is somewhat difficult.”
He was definitely not an opponent to underestimate.
Victoria realized that immediately.
On the surface, he looked like nothing more than an overweight bald man with a bad leg.
But he was still one of the Twelve Archons.
He could easily possess some strange ability she knew nothing about.
While Victoria was thinking, the old woman suddenly stepped forward and shouted desperately,
“Please leave us alone!”
“We’ve lived quietly all this time without hurting anyone!”
“You can just pretend you never saw us!”
The old woman’s plea was desperate.
No. 11’s response was cold.
“I cannot do that.”
“You are all test subjects belonging to Abraxas.”
“When an experiment ends, laboratory animals are disposed of, regardless of the circumstances.”
“More importantly, you could become an obstacle to the large-scale project we will soon carry out in Korea.”
He spoke as calmly as though explaining something obvious.
That made it all the more chilling.
“We are not lab rats!”
The old woman shouted angrily.
No. 11 answered in a strangely gentle tone.
“To me, there isn’t much difference.”
“Did you know that mice and humans share most of their genes?”
“If you think about it, humans are little more than large rats without tails or fur.”
He raised his cane and pointed it toward her.
“More importantly, as the person responsible for this experiment, I have a duty to eliminate all of you cleanly for Abraxas.”
“We cannot allow your bodies to fall into the hands of a competitor and let our parthenogenesis technology leak.”
There was not a trace of humanity in his words.
He had already reduced human beings to laboratory animals.
Now he was treating them like proprietary technology.
Victoria trembled with anger and stepped in front of him.
“Get lost!”
No. 11 merely scoffed.
“You cannot stop me, Doctor Frankenstein.”
“We’ll see about that!”
Victoria immediately prepared to attack again.
Of course, she knew physical attacks did not work on him.
But she could not simply stand there and do nothing.
She was willing to try anything she could.
“No.”
No. 11 smiled at her.
“I have already finished what I needed to do.”
“The combination is complete.”
At that moment, the old woman suddenly began vomiting bright red blood from her nose and mouth.
“Ghhk! Gaaagh!”
“Great Elder!”
Victoria hurriedly caught her.
But blood was already soaking the front of Victoria’s clothes.
No. 11 watched and smiled mockingly.
“Don’t worry.”
“I plan to send the remaining test subjects to join you soon.”
Victoria did not even think to wipe the blood from herself.
She shouted in shock,
“W-What did you do?!”
As far as she could tell, No. 11 had done absolutely nothing.
He had merely looked at her and said something strange about a “combination being complete.”
Yet that alone had caused a person to start bleeding from the nose and mouth and die.
The impossible situation filled Victoria’s mind with pure fear.
“If you’re curious, why not study it yourself?”
No. 11 asked mockingly.
“Doctor Frankenstein, aren’t you a researcher just like me?”
Victoria immediately bristled.
“You bastard!”
But the old woman weakly stopped her.
“S-Stop...”
“I’m already finished...”
Her convulsions were growing worse.
Victoria did not know what No. 11 had done, but the old woman was clearly dying.
“Just hold on!”
“I’ll fix you!”
Victoria desperately tried to reassure her.
But the old woman slowly shook her head.
Apparently, she already understood her own condition.
