“At the same time, the surveillance systems throughout the entire escape vessel were being interfered with…”
“Daddy! Daddy, what happened!?”
Several family members of the infected who were resting in the accompanying rooms had already been awakened by the disturbance outside, but Han Jianhong’s agonized screams and the strange sounds resembling the beating of insects’ wings had kept them from immediately opening the door.
But now, after the gunshots rang out, what they heard was the helpless cry for help from his daughter. Remembering what they had heard earlier, the girl’s father could no longer keep his composure.
“What are you doing!? What did you do to my daughter!?”
The girl’s father roared angrily and anxiously rushed toward the hatch of the accompanying room, intending to open it. Fortunately, the other family members realized that something was wrong and restrained him.
Mingmei, who was closest to the accompanying room, reacted quickly and immediately locked the hatch from the outside.
“Daddy, they’re trying to kill me! It hurts! Daddy, it hurts so much!”
The desperate cries for help pierced their ears like a demonic wail. The girl’s father inside the accompanying room could no longer think rationally. His eyes reddened as he struggled frantically and managed to reach the hatch.
Fortunately, the hatch had already been locked from the outside and could not be opened.
When no one inside opened the door, the little girl’s original cries for help gradually became filled with shrill resentment.
It spread its wings and flew into the air, its slender, claw-like hands slamming heavily against the metal hatch.
With the impact, a shallow claw-shaped depression appeared in the alloy wall—an area where even bullets could only leave scratches.
“Daddy, why won’t you come out? Why won’t you come save me? Why!?”
“Why!? Don’t you want me anymore!?”
The shrill cries gradually became sharper. Combined with the sounds of something heavy pounding against the hatch, the scene was horrifying.
The father’s lost rationality suddenly returned.
Inside the accompanying room, the girl’s father backed away with a pale face, staring fearfully at the hatch, which was gradually becoming covered in claw-shaped dents from the repeated blows.
He finally realized that the thing calling him “Daddy” was no longer his daughter.
“Bang! Bang!”
Seeing that shooting it in the head had been ineffective, Wendy took advantage of the moment when the girl was attacking the hatch and fired two more shots directly at its heart.
The bullets passed through its chest. The girl, who had been completely focused on breaking through the hatch, shuddered before abruptly turning her head. Her hateful gaze locked onto the person who had fired.
The next moment, she dove down, and her brownish mouthpart shot toward Wendy.
Wendy accurately judged where it would land and lightly sidestepped.
She fired instantly at the contracting center of the mouthpart.
The Human-Faced Mosquito, still in midair, let out a shrill cry and crashed to the floor.
Its mouthpart had been destroyed.
The other Human-Faced Mosquitoes clinging to the walls were immediately alerted by the injury to one of their kind and swarmed into the air.
The guards, who had originally been worried about alerting the creatures, immediately opened fire when they saw this, attempting to form a defensive line with their gunfire and keep the異种 contained within the medical department.
But the Human-Faced Mosquitoes had wings, and they had retained half of their hosts’ intelligence.
Knowing the power of the bullets, the airborne Human-Faced Mosquitoes did not linger to fight. They found gaps in the defensive line and flew out of the medical department.
A voice driven by their genetic instinct repeatedly urged them:
Reproduce.
Spread the eggs.
“Quick! Notify Captain Liao!”
Seeing the situation spiral out of control, the guards panicked. While reporting the emergency through their combat wristbands, they split into teams and chased the Human-Faced Mosquitoes flying toward the transfer residents’ living quarters.
The next squad of guards arriving for the shift had also reached the scene and immediately joined the effort to kill the异种.
For a moment, red warning lights flashed throughout the vessel, gunfire erupted in every direction, and the terrified cries of awakened transfer residents mingled with the eerie voices of the Human-Faced Mosquitoes trying to lure them out.
The entire escape vessel was shrouded in an ominous atmosphere.
“Warning! The异种 encountered this time can imitate humans. Do not open your hatches!”
“Warning! This time the Fae will imitate the humans. Do not open the hatch!”
Liao Chengyu had clearly received the emergency report. The warning instructions were quickly adjusted to account for the characteristics of the Human-Faced Mosquitoes.
The transfer residents lived together every day. Aside from their immediate relatives, most of them had at least some connections with one another.
The Human-Faced Mosquitoes inherited their hosts’ memories and were therefore intimately familiar with their hosts’ interpersonal relationships. They went from hatch to hatch, knocking on doors and using familiar voices and tones to lure the people inside into opening them.
Fortunately, no one opened their hatch after hearing the warning. The infection did not spread.
With no other choice, the Human-Faced Mosquitoes could only attack the guards, who had no protective rooms to retreat into.
Unlike on the surface of the sea, high-energy weapons such as ion beams could not be used inside the escape vessel.
The guards were forced to rely on conventional firearms. For some unknown reason, the Human-Faced Mosquitoes could not be completely killed regardless of whether their heads or hearts were attacked.
Thus, even though there were only ten of them, the guards gradually found themselves at a disadvantage.
Wait.
Ten?
Wendy froze.
She carefully looked around and discovered that one of the Human-Faced Mosquitoes that had originally flown toward the transfer residents’ living quarters was missing.
Wang Tianci.
The Human-Faced Mosquito that had inherited Wang Tianci’s memories could only have gone looking for one person.
She turned around and hurried toward the guards’ dormitory.
“Jianan, come out. Don’t be afraid. Come out.”
“Don’t be afraid. Didn’t you say that you loved me the most? Come out quickly. I won’t hit you anymore. As long as you come out, we’ll still live happily together, just like we did when we were in college.”
The mosquito-transformed man clung to the door on all fours, his limbs bent at unnatural angles. His protruding compound eyes rolled around as he stared intently inside.
From within the cabin came the intermittent sounds of the girl’s terrified sobbing.
Contrary to the gentle words he was speaking, his face, now covered in scales and fine hairs, wore a strange, expectant smile.
Yellow mucus seeped from his limbs as they clung to the door.
Wendy had just arrived when she saw the disgusting fluid and frowned.
The next moment—
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Four crisp gunshots rang out.
Four bullets instantly pierced the Human-Faced Mosquito’s limbs.
It let out a shrill cry of pain, its limbs immediately releasing the hatch as it glared viciously at the person who had fired.
“You again…”
The remnants of its host’s memories allowed it to recognize the face before it.
The emotions remaining within the body were instantly amplified. The Human-Faced Mosquito could sense the host’s hatred toward the person standing before it.
It grinned.
“Then… you first.”
It opened its mouth.
Its original tongue had already transformed into a long, slender, black-brown mouthpart. With the movement of its jaw, it shot forward with a sharp whistle through the air, lunging toward Wendy.
The mouthpart emerged extremely quickly. In midair, it could only be seen as a blur.
The Human-Faced Mosquito grinned, confidently waiting for its mouthpart to pierce the human before it and plant its eggs inside her.
But things did not develop as it expected.
The seemingly ordinary guard girl before it merely gave it a cold glance and casually raised her gun.
The next instant, a bullet struck the mouthpart precisely and exploded inside it.
The long, black-brown mouthpart burst apart, scattering the hundreds of mosquito eggs contained within it.
Wendy glanced at them with disgust and fired two more shots, destroying the mosquito wings on the creature’s back.
With its mouthpart destroyed and wings ruined, the fallen异种 was not yet dead, but it no longer possessed any means of attacking.
Wendy spun her gun and walked toward it before crouching down.
The Human-Faced Mosquito recoiled slightly.
Although the memories of its host clearly indicated that the person before it was merely an ordinary human, for some unknown reason, her approach filled it with an inexplicable sense of fear.
A fear that seemed to come from the deepest part of its bloodline.
A primal, instinctive fear.
“Bang.”
With the sound of a gunshot, a bullet entered the Human-Faced Mosquito’s brain through its temple.
There was no kill notification.
“Bang.”
Another gunshot rang out, and a bullet entered the Human-Faced Mosquito’s body through its chest.
Still, there was no kill notification.
Wendy tilted her head slightly, staring at the half-dead Human-Faced Mosquito on the floor as she fell into thought.
Both Mou Yan and the little girl had previously displayed obvious symptoms of their consciousness being eroded, so at first, she had instinctively assumed that the adult mosquito was parasitizing their brains.
But in the medical department, the shot she had fired into the little girl’s temple had pierced straight through her entire brain, yet it had failed to kill the Human-Faced Mosquito.
Then, because of the obvious signs of mosquito transformation, she had assumed that the异种 inside the infected person had already fused with the host, becoming one with it.
So she had shot the girl through the heart.
Yet she was still unharmed.
To rule out the possibility that the bullet had simply missed its mark, Wendy had just conducted another test on the Human-Faced Mosquito that had transformed from Wang Tianci.
There was no kill notification, and it had not died.
This confirmed her current theory—
The true异种, the Human-Faced Mosquito, was not the mosquito-transformed body on the outside, but an adult mosquito living inside the host’s body.
And the adult mosquito was not hiding in the brain.
The Human-Faced Mosquito had been shot twice. Its battered shell lay motionless on the floor, yet when it saw the human before it looking thoughtful, it pulled its mouth into a smug smile.
“You can’t kill me.”
“Unless you find where I am.”
“Guess where I am. If you guess correctly, you can kill me.”
“If you can’t guess where I am, you can’t kill me.”
“If you guess where I am, you still can’t kill me.”
The fear it had felt earlier had completely disappeared after two attacks that had proven entirely harmless.
It raised its head without a trace of concern, its rotating compound eyes revealing a strange, almost human expression.
“We cannot be killed. There will only be more and more of us. Eventually, all of you will become one of us.”
This time, the异种 lying on the floor no longer spoke in Wang Tianci’s voice.
Instead, it spoke in an extremely shrill voice accompanied by a vibrating buzz.
Wendy frowned slightly and stood up.
The mosquito-transformed man lay twisted on the floor, his horrifying compound eyes constantly rotating as he grinned at her.
Whether it was because of those words or that fearless smile, Wendy inexplicably felt irritated.
She had the feeling that something was about to slip beyond her control.
The surveillance cameras in the corridor continued flashing red, while the fallen异种 kept emitting sharp, shrill laughter.
Wendy took a deep breath and rolled her neck.
Originally, because she was concerned about the surveillance cameras aboard the escape vessel, she had only intended to hunt the异种 using human methods.
But now…
Since the 028 AI had already developed one malfunction, it wouldn’t be strange if it developed another, right?
“Bzzzt—”
Amid the chaos aboard the escape vessel, the guards raised their guns. A storm of bullets maintained a defensive line as they struggled against the mutated Human-Faced Mosquitoes.
No one noticed that, at the same time, every camera aboard the vessel began flickering.
Inside the central control room, all the surveillance feeds throughout the vessel simultaneously turned into static, as though they had been disrupted.
Fourth floor, guards’ dormitory.
The异种’s laughter abruptly stopped.
It stared blankly at the human guard before it.
Those originally dark eyes, as still and cold as a frozen abyss, suddenly surged with a dangerous deep-sea blue.
The moment those blue eyes appeared, every hair on the Human-Faced Mosquito’s body stood on end.
A danger signal originating from its genetic instincts sounded like a blaring red alarm.
It wanted to escape.
But for some unknown reason, this body—which had originally possessed an extremely high compatibility with it—suddenly stopped responding to its commands.
No…
It wasn’t that the body was no longer under its control.
It itself could no longer move.
The next second, the black-haired, blue-eyed girl tilted her head.
“Bang!”
A tremendous explosion erupted.
Wang Tianci’s mosquito-transformed body suddenly burst apart from the inside.
A mosquito the size of a human palm lay in the pool of blood.
Its wings were broad, its antennae slender.
And the patterns on those wings, when brought together, formed a human face.
A face exactly identical to Wang Tianci’s.
Wendy stepped forward.
Her psionic energy enveloped it.
Before the horrifying insect could even struggle, it vanished completely.
【You have killed the C-rank Mutant Species
—Human-Faced Mosquito. You have obtained 50 Action Points.】
Amid the blood and gore, the black-haired, blue-eyed girl raised her cold gaze and looked toward the staircase below.
The buzzing of beating wings.
The eerie, human-like voices of the Human-Faced Mosquitoes.
The continuous sound of gunfire…
The prey had fully matured.
It was time to harvest it.