Chapter 32 The Choice
POV: Nicander
The roar of the incinerator was a deafening, rhythmic pulse, a mechanical heartbeat that vibrated through the steel floorboards of the observation booth.
From his vantage point on the laboratory floor, Nicander’s vision was swimming with aggressive, jagged static.
The Requiem Toxin had moved beyond simple decay; it was now actively seizing his autonomic functions.
He was collapsed against the heavy base of the observation stairs, his lungs bubbling with fluid.
He couldn't stand. He could barely hold his own head upright.
But as he looked up through the thick, reinforced glass of the upper booth, every synapse in his dying brain ignited with a singular, violent focus.
He saw Zinovia. She stood at the edge of the incinerator chute, her hand bleeding into the abyss, her posture defying the necrosis that should have had her long dead.
Morvath Lusk’s face was a mask of sheer, panicked hysteria.
The broker wasn't a soldier; he was a calculator whose equations had finally resulted in a variable he couldn't control. He stared at the dark, necrotic drop of blood suspended from Zinovia’s palm, then back at her eyes—those cold, obsidian voids that promised absolute annihilation.
"You're insane," Lusk shrieked, his voice cracking.
"I am a Veltri," Zinovia replied, her voice a calm, lethal anchor.
Lusk’s resolve snapped. His thumb spasmed against the vial, and he lurched backward. But he didn't drop the vial into the fire. Instead, his other hand—a hand Nicander hadn't realized was holding a small, silver hideout pistol—snatched upward.
BANG.
The sound was a sharp, localized whip-crack.
Nicander watched in agonizing, slow-motion horror as a spray of crimson erupted from Zinovia’s shoulder.
The kinetic impact slammed her backward, spinning her around and throwing her off balance.
Her hand flew to her collarbone, her fingers instantly clenching around the wound, and the titanium scalpel she held slipped from her numb, black-veined fingers, clattering across the metal floorboards.
"Zinovia!" Nicander roared. The sound tore from his throat like grinding metal, a wet, bloody scream of pure, unadulterated terror.
Lusk didn't hesitate. With Zinovia staggering and defenseless, he shoved her aside and raised his pistol again, aiming point-blank at her chest.
Nicander didn't think. He didn't calculate the physics or the odds. He simply became the weapon he had been bred to be.
He didn't have his rifle. He had only the heavy, blackened combat knife still gripped in his right hand.
He didn't rise; he didn't stand. He used the last, explosive reserve of strength in his necrotic limbs, snapping his torso forward and whipping his arm with the practiced, terrifying precision of a decade on the docks.
The blade blurred through the air, a spinning arc of lethal intent.
It struck Lusk exactly where the neck met the tactical vest—a strike of impossible accuracy born of absolute, terminal devotion. The knife bit deep, severing the carotid artery with a sickening, wet thud.
Lusk’s eyes went wide. His mouth opened, but only a gurgling, pink froth emerged. He clutched at his throat, his knees buckling, and he toppled backward into the maw of the incinerator chute.
But as he fell, his panicked, dying reflex triggered.
His hand, still clutching the lead-lined box, struck the edge of the iron hatch.
The box flew from his grasp, the velvet lid snapping open mid-air, and the pearlescent vial vaulted out, tumbling in a lazy, treacherous arc toward the roaring, three-thousand-degree hellfire of the incinerator’s throat.
Zinovia, clutching her bleeding shoulder, let out a broken, hopeless sob.
Nicander didn't wait to see Lusk hit the flames.
He launched himself from the base of the stairs.
He felt his necrotic bones shatter under the strain, a symphony of white-hot agony as he threw his entire, failing body toward the incinerator’s intake.
He knew, with the cold, absolute certainty of a man already dead, that he was moving too fast. He would hit the metal grating.
He would shatter his own ribs. He would be vaporized.
He didn't care.
He reached out, his massive, blood-slicked hand stretching into the furnace’s heat. The searing thermal radiation blistered the skin of his forearm instantly, the heat so intense it felt like he was reaching into a star.
Catch it.
His fingertips brushed the glass.
The vial was cold, impossibly smooth, and vibrating with the momentum of its descent into the fire.
He didn't grab it; he trapped it against the palm of his hand, slamming his fist against the inner rim of the incinerator chute just as the glass was about to succumb to the thermal shock of the flames.
His knuckles struck the iron with a sickening, crunching sound—the sound of bone pulverizing against metal.
He didn't open his hand. He curled his fingers into a claw, pressing the vial into his palm, shielding it with his own flesh.
He hit the floor of the observation booth, his momentum carrying him into a pile of charred, abandoned machinery. He slid to a halt, his body entirely broken, his left arm a useless, mangled wreck, and his right hand pressed to his chest, the vial clutched tight beneath his fingers.
The laboratory went silent, save for the rhythmic, mechanical roar of the incinerator and the heavy, wet rasp of his own breathing.
Nicander stared at the ceiling. The red light of the timer flickered once, twice, and then died, the power failing as the facility’s core finally succumbed to the chaos of the night.
He felt a soft, trembling hand touch his face.
Zinovia was kneeling beside him. Her sweater was soaked in blood, her shoulder a ruin of torn muscle, her breathing an agonizing, rhythmic struggle. She didn't look at his mangled hand. She didn't look at the carnage of the room. She looked only at his eyes.
"Nico?" she whispered, her voice a fragile, terrified thread.
Nicander tried to speak, but his lungs were entirely flooded now. He couldn't pull in a breath. He couldn't form the words. He only had the strength for one, final, agonizing movement.
He slowly, laboriously peeled his mangled right fingers away from his palm.
There, resting in the center of his blood-stained, blistered skin, was the vial. The pearlescent liquid glowed with a soft, pulsating light, an ethereal beacon in the dark, blood-soaked room.
He didn't give it to her. He didn't have the strength. He simply let it rest there, a promise kept in the middle of a grave.
Zinovia reached out, her black-veined fingers closing around the glass. She looked down at it, then back at him, her dark eyes brimming with a grief so profound it seemed to pull the oxygen from the room.
Nicander closed his eyes. The pain was finally fading, replaced by a cold, numbing void.
He knew he wouldn't make it to the extraction. He knew the necrosis had already finished its work. But as he felt Zinovia’s hand press against his heart, a final, flickering thought remained: She survives.
The city burns. The promise is complete.
He let the darkness take him.