Chapter 566

For a human woman to successfully carry and give birth to a demonic child while keeping both mother and child alive was remarkable in itself.

Nadia’s constitution was clearly anything but ordinary.

Evenson had conducted some preliminary tests on her blood much earlier and discovered that it possessed an unusually high tolerance for both fel energy and conventional magic. Further research had revealed something even more valuable: her blood could function as a stabilizer.

The human body was simply too fragile to withstand direct magical enhancement. Injecting vast amounts of energy into an ordinary person carried a high risk of catastrophic mutation.

Evenson’s earliest creations were a perfect example.

The corrupted humans who had drunk the blood of an abyssal lord gained tremendous strength, but the price was hideous physical deformation and drastically shortened lifespans. The harder they fought, the faster the fel energy consumed what remained of their lives.

They were, in the most literal sense, disposable weapons.

Their mental faculties were also terribly fragile. A sufficiently strong stimulus could shatter what little reason they possessed. Once that happened, they would no longer obey orders. They could not distinguish friend from foe, and the very concept of a mission became meaningless.

All that remained was rage.

They would tear into anything within reach until their bodies finally gave out.

As cannon fodder, they were barely acceptable.

As soldiers?

Not even close.

At present, Melinda was arguably Evenson’s most successful enhanced individual. But creating her had required Evenson himself to oversee the entire process, administering the enhancement in small doses over multiple stages.

It was painstaking.

It was slow.

And it was completely impractical for mass production.

Nadia’s blood changed that.

Its stabilizing properties eliminated most of the dangerous mutations caused by the enhancement process, making the large-scale, semi-automated production of enhanced soldiers possible.

There was only one problem.

How much blood did a single adult woman actually have?

Killing Nadia and draining her dry would certainly provide a large supply in the short term, but wasting such a valuable resource was the very definition of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.

So the Eredar twins had chosen a different approach.

They kept Nadia alive.

They gave her excellent working conditions, tied her firmly to the company, and made her monthly medical examination the equivalent of shearing a particularly profitable sheep.

During each examination, a substantial quantity of blood was quietly taken from her body.

Nadia, naturally, knew none of this.

Once the examination began, a specialized spell rendered her completely unconscious for ten minutes.

To prevent the massive blood loss from causing discomfort or, worse, putting her life at risk, ordinary blood was transfused into her at the same time.

Because she remained unconscious throughout the entire process, those ten minutes simply vanished from her perception. To Nadia, it would feel as though she had blinked.

The rest of the examination proceeded normally.

Or, rather, mostly normally.

The doctors deliberately made the procedure painfully thorough. They moved slowly, took their time with every test, and generally ensured that the examination lasted long enough to account for the missing ten minutes.

The examination room contained no clocks, either.

By the time Nadia walked out, she had no reason whatsoever to suspect that anything had happened.

The blood they collected was then diluted and stored.

The diluted product was naturally less effective than Nadia’s pure blood. But for mass-produced soldiers, the reduced potency was more than sufficient.

For elite enhancement, however, there was no substitute for the undiluted original.

The Eredar twins had given the two projects different names.

The mass-production program was called Project Tyrant.

The elite individuals created using Nadia’s pure blood were designated Project Nemesis.

"Please wait here for a moment."

Voskaya led Holmes and Watson into the twins’ office on the top floor of the company’s headquarters.

The room was empty.

"The chairman is currently occupied with a few matters," Voskaya explained. "He’ll be here to meet you shortly."

"I don’t particularly mind waiting," Holmes said hesitantly. "But..."

A thin trail of smoke rose from the armrest beside him.

Holmes immediately lifted his glowing hand away before the sofa could catch fire.

"My current physical condition appears to object."

Voskaya didn’t seem particularly surprised.

"Don’t worry. The directors anticipated this."

She walked over to the water dispenser and filled two large mugs, placing one in front of each man.

Then she reached inside her coat and produced a small crystal vial.

The vial contained a deep crimson liquid.

Voskaya carefully removed the stopper and let a single drop fall into each mug.

"Drink it," she said. "It should calm your bodies down temporarily."

Holmes stared at the water.

"What is it?"

The moment Voskaya had produced the crystal vial, something about that dark red liquid had struck him as suspicious.

Holmes was a consultant to the New York Police Department.

He was familiar with that particular color.

Blood.

There simply wasn’t enough of the liquid in his mug to produce the unmistakable metallic scent he associated with it.

Voskaya smiled mysteriously.

"It is a red potion refined within the Cauldron of Everything."

Holmes and Watson exchanged a look.

The deliberately cryptic answer made it abundantly clear that their hosts did not trust them enough to explain what they were actually drinking.

That was understandable.

They had only just arrived.

Their hosts had no obligation to reveal their secrets.

And considering the identity of the person who had sent them here...

Well, there was a distinct possibility that Voskaya wasn’t joking.

Holmes and Watson looked at each other again.

Before the heat radiating from Holmes’s hand could boil the water in his mug, they both raised their cups and drank.

A moment later, Holmes blinked.

"Oh. That’s remarkable."

The change was immediate.

The violent energy surging through his body settled almost at once. The unstable power no longer reacted violently to every movement. Instead, it flowed quietly through him, steady and controlled.

"I feel much better."

"Good."

Voskaya nodded.

"Then just wait here."

She turned and left the office.

After closing the door behind her, she stood outside for a moment and sighed.

Two more poor bastards had just boarded a ship they weren’t getting off.

She knew the feeling.

Voskaya herself had long since realized that she had climbed aboard the same vessel.

A few months earlier, her father, Milkhak Berikov, an Eastern European arms magnate, had taken a group of people out to negotiate a deal.

He had been the only one to return.

He had come home looking as though he had escaped from hell itself, carrying an extremely nasty curse and suffering severe psychological trauma.

It took an entire month of treatment, during which her father nearly lost his life, before the terrifying curse was finally removed by the very person who had cast it.

The caster had also left with two suitcase-sized nuclear bombs.

Without paying for them.

But Voskaya supposed that was fine.

Those things were impossible to sell anyway.

She considered it a matter of having the world’s strangest garbage collector come by and take them away.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of her problems.

With her father confined to a hospital bed, Voskaya, his only daughter, had no choice but to take an extended leave from her own job to look after him.

The company responded by firing her.

So she had to find another job.

Unfortunately, Russia wasn’t exactly renowned for being kind to women in the workplace.

She went through interview after interview without being hired.

Eventually, she found a company willing to take her on.

That should have been the end of it.

Instead, her new boss turned out to be a complete bastard who decided that employing her came with certain... personal expectations.

Voskaya’s response was simple.

She slapped him twice.

Then she went home.

The bastard disappeared the very next day.

According to the rumors, his body was discovered in the Volga River a week later.

Well...

Part of it was.

The rest had apparently been dredged out of the Caspian Sea.

Voskaya had decided not to ask questions.

There were some mysteries in life that were better left unsolved.