Lincoln’s pupils contracted.
As the flashlight illuminated its surface, the entire “body” could be seen squirming slightly, with a viscous, translucent fluid continuously oozing from the gaps between the leeches.
Its two “arms” were far thicker than a human’s, the outer layers of leeches wrapped more tightly and in thicker folds.
Its “head” was the most spine-chilling part of all.
It had no eyes, no mouth; there was only a cluster of leeches twisted into a loose bulbous mass where a head should be.
On the front of the bulb was an opening resembling a maw.
The leeches at this opening curved inward, forming a dense ring of suction cups.
The maw slowly opened and closed, making a gurgling, watery sound.
The suction-cup teeth marks in the corpse’s abdomen earlier had been left by this very maw.
A cold sweat broke out across Lincoln’s back.
This thing was entirely different from the T-Virus infected they had encountered before.
The infected were the result of humans mutating after contracting the virus, but this was not a transformed human.
It was an amalgam creature composed entirely of a massive number of leeches, merely assuming a humanoid shape.
“Dr. Marcus’s leech research” mentioned in those documents.
This creature was likely the product of that research.
As he thought, the creature squeezed its way through the doorframe.
The process of it squeezing through was stomach-turning: its entire “body” flattened as it pressed against the frame, the arrangement of the leeches warping under the pressure, but once it was through, they immediately reformed into a humanoid shape.
Normal bones and joints couldn’t do this.
It had no skeleton; its entire body was simply a shape-shifting mass of squirming worms.
It stood in the carriage aisle, its maw facing Lincoln and Billy, the leeches on its surface writhing with increased intensity.
“Back up first,” Lincoln told Billy, his voice low but steady.
The two stepped back three paces in unison.
The creature moved toward them.
It didn’t walk; its entire body surged forward.
The leeches at its base crawled along the floor to propel it, while its upper body leaned forward in its humanoid posture.
Its speed was more than a notch faster than the stumbling infected.
Lincoln didn’t use his pistol.
He raised his shotgun with his left hand and fired the first shot when the creature was about three meters away.
The buckshot blasted into the center of its chest.
The effect was entirely different from what Lincoln had anticipated.
If it had hit muscle and bone, the resistance would have caused the buckshot to rip open a bowl-sized wound.
But this thing’s “body” was a pile of leeches.
Once the buckshot struck, the pellets tore through the outer dozen-odd leeches and became embedded in the second and third layers.
Most of the kinetic energy was absorbed by those soft bodies.
The shredded leeches fell from its “chest,” revealing a cavity.
Yet the surrounding leeches swarmed toward the hole almost instantly, and within seconds, the gap was filled.
It was regenerating.
And at an incredibly rapid pace.
Lincoln’s expression darkened.
Ordinary firearms had very limited efficacy against this thing.
Buckshot could blast away the outer leeches, but as long as the core remained intact, the surrounding leeches would continuously fill the gaps.
It was like shooting a pile of sand; you blow a hole in it, and it just slides back together.
Where was the core?
Lincoln observed rapidly as he retreated.
Although its entire body was writhing, there was one area where the frequency of movement differed from the rest.
In the upper-middle section of its “torso,” the leeches were wound exceptionally tight, and their color was darker than the surrounding areas—a deep brown that verged on black.
That region was roughly the size of a soccer ball, heavily armored by at least four or five layers of tightly interlocking leeches. You are reading on novelping.com, the official source.
That had to be the core.
“Billy, upper-middle chest. There’s a darker patch. See it?”
“Got it.”
“Focus your fire right there.”
Lincoln pumped the shotgun, aiming his second shot at that dark patch.
At a distance of three meters, the buckshot spread was fairly tight, with most of the pellets slamming directly into the target zone.
A patch of the protective outer leeches exploded, exposing the second layer.
Billy fired almost simultaneously.
Four consecutive shots from his P226 sent 9mm rounds drilling one after another into the breach ripped open by the buckshot.
The 9mm rounds had better penetration than the buckshot, piercing past the damaged outer layer and deep into the inner layers of leeches.
The creature was visibly affected.
Its advance slowed, the writhing on its surface grew chaotic, and some leeches began peeling off from its “arms” and “legs.”
But it wasn’t dead yet.
Though two or three layers of the core region had been destroyed, more remained underneath.
It was now less than two meters away from them.
Its maw was stretched to its absolute limit, exposing clusters of stomach-churning suction cups.
Lincoln pumped the forend a third time.
This time, he shoved the muzzle directly into the breach of that dark patch, shooting at point-blank range.
He pulled the trigger.
The third shot.
Point-blank buckshot blasted directly into the very center of the core leech cluster.
The effect of this shot was decisive.
At such close range, there was no spread; the full force of the impact was concentrated on a single point, blowing the core leech cluster clean through from front to back.
A mass of almost entirely black core tissue erupted from its “back,” slamming against the carriage wall with a wet splat and splattering a viscous black fluid everywhere.
The effect was instantaneous.
The moment the core was destroyed, the entire humanoid structure collapsed.
Deprived of the “instructions” to aggregate, all the leeches fell apart at once.
Within a second, the two-meter-tall “body” crumbled, pooling into a squirming heap of leeches that carpeted most of the aisle.
The scattered leeches were still moving, but they no longer aggregated, merely crawling aimlessly across the floorboards.
Without a core, they were nothing more than a pile of ordinary bugs.
Lincoln took a step back, avoiding a few stray leeches wriggling near his feet.
From its appearance to its collapse, only about ten seconds had passed.
The carriage fell silent, save for the faint, wet rustling of leeches squirming on the floor.
Three shotgun shells and four 9mm rounds.
The ammunition consumption was several times higher than that of a standard infected.
Moreover, if they hadn’t located the core, no amount of ammunition might have sufficed.
Billy lowered his gun, looking at the massive puddle of leeches on the floor with a sour expression.
“What the hell is that thing?”
Lincoln didn’t answer immediately.
He squatted down, drew his KA-BAR knife from behind his waist, and used the tip of the blade to prod the scattered leeches.
The leeches were still writhing, but there was no sign of them attempting to aggregate; they simply crawled on their own.
He studied them closely for a few seconds.
Each of these leeches was about half a finger long, pitch-black, with a slimy, oily sheen on its skin.
Unlike normal leeches, they had suction structures at both ends of their bodies, and the maw on their heads was noticeably larger, lined with fine rows of teeth.
Lincoln used his knife to flip over the shattered remains of the core.
Mixed within the black tissue fragments were about a dozen thicker, longer leeches, darker than the outer ones—almost pure black.
He then moved his knife to a nearby corpse of a normal infected killed earlier, prying open its already decayed chest muscles.
The inside was crawling with a dense swarm of the same black leeches.
Over a dozen of them wriggled in the gaps between the ribs and internal organs, with a few gnawing on the blackened tissue of the lungs.
Lincoln’s brow furrowed.
These normal infected had leeches on them as well.
In other words, the T-Virus infection on this train might not have spread through air or bodily fluids, but rather through leech parasitism.
The leeches burrowed into the human body, and the virus they carried directly infected the host.
“Dr. Marcus’s leech research” mentioned in those files.
These black leeches were the products of that research.
And the two-meter-tall amalgam from earlier was an advanced form assembled from a massive swarm of leeches under some kind of command.
One was a foot soldier, the other a swarm.
In essence, they were the same thing.
“Leeches,” Lincoln said as he sheathed his knife and stood up to face Billy.
“These mutated people weren’t infected by a normal virus; they mutated after being parasitized by these leeches.”
“That big guy just now was a humanoid amalgam made of a massive swarm of leeches, controlled by a core tissue that directs its overall behavior. Once the core is destroyed, the whole thing falls apart.”
Billy glanced at the corpse with its chest pried open, watching the leeches writhing inside, before averting his eyes.
“So the people on this train were turned into monsters by these bugs?”
“Most likely.”
A panel popped up.
[T-Virus Sample Library] Collection Progress: 15/100 Safety Threshold: 85/100
[New Virus Vector Detected] New Virus Type: Leech Queen Virus Collection Progress: 5/200 Identified Virus Types: 2/?
Lincoln’s eyes narrowed slightly.
Two changes.
First, the T-Virus collection had increased by five units at once, indicating that although the Leech Amalgam wasn’t a standard T-Virus infected, the system had still extracted T-Virus-related samples from it.
This was probably because the leeches themselves were mutated products of the T-Virus.
Second, and more importantly.
The system had detected an entirely new virus, the “Leech Queen Virus,” and had automatically opened a new collection progress bar at 5/200.
The cap was 200, twice that of the T-Virus’s 100.
Furthermore, “Identified Virus Types” had changed from 1 to 2.
This meant that this leech mutant carried not just the T-Virus, but also an entirely new, independent viral strain that the system could identify and harvest separately.
If it followed the logic of the panel’s “Virus Adaptation Overview,” each virus would correspond to an exclusive specialization branch.
Once the Leech Queen Virus was fully collected, it would also unlock a new set of abilities.
But a cap of 200 meant he would need to kill many more leech mutants.
Lincoln ran these details through his mind, then closed the panel.
The gains and costs were still proportional.
The T-Virus collection had gained five units in one go, but the threshold had correspondingly dropped by five points.
Collecting the Leech Queen Virus seemed like a bonus, but he didn’t know if it would come with its own independent threshold consumption in the future.
This would require fighting a few more leech mutants to confirm.
He glanced down at the specialization routes at the bottom of the panel.
The T-Virus Combat Specialization and Perception Specialization were still locked, with unlock requirements at 100/100.
Currently at 15/100, he was still a long way off.
But now, he had an additional collection line.
If he entered the Executive Training School later, as the birthplace of the leech research, the density of leech mutants would only be higher.
The two paths could be advanced simultaneously.
Lincoln stood up.
“Let’s go. There shouldn’t be any more of them on the train.”
The two men returned to the cab.