"How did you survive?"
Maverick could not stop his curiosity.
The Chief's lips curled into a smile—a weary, sardonic twist more scar than sentiment.
"You ever heard of something called a 'death you can't quite die from'?"
He lifted his arm and slowly peeled back the fabric at his shoulder, revealing a jagged, ropy scar.
"They implanted control chips in our muscles. Say the wrong word, move the wrong way, and someone pushes a button—"
He snapped his fingers. Crack! The sound was sharp, final.
"Then your muscles seize up like steel cables stretched to breaking point. One guy twitched on the ground for forty straight seconds. Cracked his own jaw with his teeth."
Maverick stared at him, lips parted, but not a single word emerged.
"Back then, there was only one reason to stay alive."
A pause. Then the leader's voice dropped to a dry whisper.
"To go mad… just a bit slower than the others."
"And after that?"
"One night, twenty-seven of us made a break for it. Only seven made it out alive to the woods." His tone was disturbingly even."I became the biggest freak of the lot—bigger, meaner, louder. Led them through the dark. We ran, we hid, we fought. That's how we became the'Savages.'"
The firelight threw jagged shadows across his face, carving it into the semblance of an ancient statue—hard, angular, and weathered by time.
Maverick whispered,"So… the way you look now… was that from the experiments?"
"Yes and no." The Chief shrugged, smirking again, that same twisted smirk laced with bitter humour.
"Our muscles, bones, teeth—they started growing like weeds on steroids. We thought it was just the price of genetic upgrades. But then we started seeing the black spots. Right beneath the skin."
He glanced at his arm, where the skin resembled ancient bark, worn and brittle.
"We call it Black Bloom. At first, it was quiet. Creeping like ink under the skin. But once it 'blossoms'—"
He looked up, eyes glinting.
"It's like the flower's been holding its breath. And when it blooms—it explodes, releasing clouds of tiny, black spores."
Another pause. His voice softened.
"And every time it blooms, it's like death personally knocks on your door to say hello."
"Someone figured out you could slow it down by slicing off the infected skin." He made a slashing gesture across his own shoulder."So that's what we did. Slice by slice. When we ran out of clamps to stop the bleeding, we used fire. Or bit down on belts and just... survived it."
The fire crackled beside him. The scars on his face seemed to burn with their own light.
"Bit by bit… most of our skin was gone."
Maverick winced, face drawn with raw sympathy.
"Heh. Doesn't matter. As long as we lived!" The Chief gave a coarse laugh."Then our angel in a dentist's coat came along. Things got better after that. Otherwise, we'd have been yanking each other's teeth out with pliers."
Maverick stared at him for a long moment. Then quietly asked,
"So why did you save us?"
The Chief snorted."Because you're not like those System people—all stiff and smug, scared stiff the moment anything goes sideways."
"My legs didn't shake," Maverick protested, rather feebly.
"They did," the leader shot back, laughing so hard tears welled at the corners of his eyes.
Big, ridiculous tears on a stone-cold face.
Then, just as the fire began to warm the air with a strange calm, chaos crashed back in.
"HELP! Mav's losing it again!"
A panicked sentry came barreling into the firelight, blood trickling down his cheek."He bit 'Monkey''s arm!"
The Chief's expression shifted in a heartbeat. He stood, voice low and sharp.
"Get the rope. And clamps. Now."
In the rising confusion, a little girl dove into the arms of the plump cook, eyes wide and unblinking.
Maverick stood, hand tightening around the old electric drill strapped to his side.
He looked to the leader—whose eyes were now glinting with a wild, animal light.
"I thought you were stable now."
The Chief gritted his teeth.
"Black Bloom's not the flu. It's a fireseed buried in bone, and it's always waiting to burn its way out."
-----------------
When the camp finally quieted down again, there were three figures sitting by the bonfire: the leader, whose expression remained calm; Carmen the dentist, gasping for breath from exhaustion; and the tall, thin Skinner, his face full of dejection.
The night wind stirred the firelight, illuminating their tired and silent profiles.
Maverick stared at the leader, puzzled by his tranquility, but there were some questions he could never bring himself to ask.
Suddenly, the leader bared his white teeth in what seemed like a forced smile. He spoke, his voice low and slow:
"At first, I was scared to death. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw their shadows.
Later, it turned into hatred. I thought about tearing each of them... to pieces.
And then, after I escaped, I felt empty— my body, my heart, all hollowed out.
The future? Who knows."
He paused, gazing at the flickering flames, his eyes the color of ashes.
"Now, time has worn everything down. What's left are the things you wish you could forget... but never can.
Sometimes, I even think— this damn disaster... at least it brought me brothers, people I could survive with."
Dr. Carmen took a kettle off the fire and carefully poured the boiling water into cups. Steam billowed up as she pulled a small handful of ruby-colored leaves from the pouch at her waist and dropped them into the cups. A faint fruity aroma spread through the air.
She placed the steaming cups on a stone table. Those who needed one took a cup without a word, drinking in large gulps despite the scalding heat that made them frown— no one could bear to sip slowly.
Maverick finally couldn't hold back and asked softly,"If... if you hadn't entered the quarantine zone, what would have happened?"
Dr. Carmen looked up at the night sky, where only a few stars were scattered.
She smiled, a smile filled with something hard to define.
"Full bellies. Warm beds."
She let out a soft sigh, almost swept away by the wind.
"But inside... it would be even colder."
-----------------
The Chief looked up at the sky, then stood, ready to move on.
Beside the fire, the plump cook was stuffing fragrant wildfruit flatcakes into packs while grumbling,
"If you lot throw these away halfway, I swear I'll let you starve for three days!"
Maverick gave a weary smile as he crammed the last of the cakes into his already overstuffed pack. His shoulders sagged under the weight of flour, sap, and exhaustion.
Shen Lu clutched a bottle of some dubious oil extracted from some even more dubious animal, glaring at the leader with comically exaggerated reluctance.
The Chief didn't respond. He stared at the flames, shadows flickering across his face like old memories.
Then, to no one in particular, he murmured,
"If it gets too dangerous, run into the woods."
Maverick looked up, bewildered. Shen Lu blinked.
The Chief bared his teeth in a grin at Shen Lu.
"Not talking to you."
Shen Lu recoiled, scowling as he turned away.
The firelight shrank. So did the smile on the leader's face, leaving only a deep, bone-deep weariness.
"Sometimes," he said, voice like a dying ember,
"surviving is the hardest thing of all."
-----------------
Late the next night, the cold wind howled and torrential rain poured down. Several figures moved swiftly through the forest, the sound of hurried footsteps and low whispers intertwining.
Maverick, Shen Lu, the Chief, and two Skinner warriors were closing in on Mr Park's stronghold.
The villa stood alone atop a mountain. A winding mountain road led up to the two-story house— the only point of entry. From its commanding position, the villa could easily oversee everything around it.
The scenery around the villa was beautiful: on one side, a sheer cliff dropped away to a brightly lit, bustling city below. On the other two sides, steep slopes fell away, where barbed wire fences and a few warning signs swayed in the storm. The red letters marking a minefield flashed glaringly under the occasional strike of lightning.
Maverick and the others reached the side of another nearby peak. Using a laser pointer for a rough measurement, Maverick estimated it was about 100 meters across to reach the villa's outer wall.
Perhaps because of the violent storm, all surveillance drones had been retracted back into the house.
"That building's the operations wing," Shen Lu panted."Only one road in or out!"
"And the back?"
"No exits. Just a—" He gestured toward a section of thorny brush."That."
Beyond the grass, the shrubs rose to waist-height, thick and ghostly. From time to time, a patrol drone arced overhead.
"No way through," Shen Lu muttered."Only choice is the front."
"How many guards did you see during that meeting?"
"Uh… maybe seven or eight."
"Then assume that many again outside. No way we're getting to the conference room quickly from the front. And if the chairman's office is right above it…" Maverick pointed."Then this is the straightest route."
The trick was: how to get through 100 meters of shrubbed minefield without being spotted?
Meanwhile.
Inside the villa's surveillance room, three guards were in the middle of a quiet night shift.
"Security Index: 70%," the system droned, cold and bored. The shift supervisor popped his gum and lazily glanced at the screen.
"Peaceful night again. Too peaceful."
"System's probably over-upgraded," another guard laughed."Used to hover at 85%, now we're stuck in the seventies."
The third guard reclined in his chair, boots on the console.
"Drone feeds show nothing. We're just babysitting blinking lights."
What none of them noticed—was Maverick, smiling faintly on the other end of the screen.
Everything was going according to plan.
He never intended to storm the system head-on. That would be suicide. No, the real weakness wasn't the machines—it was the people.
And people, once they got used to"normal," stopped noticing the abnormal.
The monitors flipped calmly through carefully doctored feeds. Fake calm, like morphine for the mind.
By the time they realized something was wrong… it would be too late.
Now it was the ground team's turn.
"Think it's just a bluff?" Maverick asked, brows knitted.
"Wanna find out?" Shen Lu snorted.
Maverick didn't flinch. He crept past the warning sign and crouched, inspecting the muddy ground like a predator.
Shen Lu crossed his arms, staring into the dark with a stormy face.
At the edge of the minefield, silence settled heavy as velvet.