Rick sank into a silence so deep the ruined city around him felt quieter for it. The King's words replayed in his skull—the altered genes, the Quill fused to his blood—and he could already see the angle the old men would take. If Parler or Boris or any of the council heard this, they wouldn't hesitate. They'd use it as justification to hunt him openly, to declare war. He had been a threat before. Now he could be labeled an abomination, a walking excuse for slaughter.
In every city there were traitors, and in cities drunk on new gods and old fears, traitors multiplied like vermin. Rick didn't trust silence. He knew secrets were small flames; left unattended, they became bonfires that could burn whole worlds. For now the truth had to stay inside the city walls. The King could handle leaks, Rick decided—at least he should be able to. But ruling men were weak things, and rumor found wings in the mouths of cowards.
The first proof came faster than anyone wanted. A report filtered back through channels the King controlled: a spy had slipped into the cult's ranks and returned with news that made the blood in every officer's veins go cold. "Rick's here," the whisper said. "He's been examined. He has altered genes. He's neither man nor monster. He's… something else. Dangerous. And he holds a Quill."
That line—he's something else—was exactly the kind of phrase that bred hysteria. The spy hadn't added flourish; fearwinged men made the rest for him. In council rooms, in bunkers, over static-filled coms, the rumor unfurled its claws. The council huddled and the words grew teeth.
"We must kill him while he is off guard," someone hissed into the table's glow. "If he keeps growing and the Quill claims him fully, Then the monsters won't be the one killing—he will be the monster that kills us all." The room filled with nods and murmurs that sounded like knives being whet.
Boris's voice cut through the hum like a blade. "Yes. He must die." One by one, others agreed—voices quick, final, the sort you use for executions. Only Latisha and Mark remained silent, the former with hands clenched at her sides and the latter staring at nothing. Parler's daughters sat at the edge of the table like dead women propped up in chairs—their eyes empty, lifeless, like two candles with no flame. They didn't weep. They didn't move. They were the chilling proof of how Parler's visions hollowed a family out from the inside.
Two weeks later the decision ripened into action. "We will wage war against Rick and anyone who sided with him," Boris announced, sounding like a judge handing down a sentence. It was agreed. Plans were drawn. Maps were stained with ink and blood. Men and machines were mobilized.
Rick didn't learn about the vote by rumor. He learned by observation—by the way strangers no longer met his eyes, by the way supply lines rerouted and emissaries began to appear more often with smiles like knives. Then the scientists came for him.
They worked in a lab carved out of an old cathedral, its stained glass boarded up and the pews repurposed into workbenches. When Rick woke from his next sleep, he was strapped into a chair and surrounded by instruments that smelled of antiseptic and ozone. The doctors had white faces and steady hands. They took blood, samples, biopsies; they ran tests that made machines scream. For once the Quill was quiet inside him, letting strangers prod where only war had touched.
The results were baffling in the way that broke men. Every indicator pointed to something fundamentally different. His cells had been rewritten on a level no one could reproduce. RNA sequencing, protein folding maps, epigenetic markers—every chart they produced bent toward the same impossible conclusion: his genome had rearranged itself into patterns the scientists had never seen. The markers were not synthetic, not the result of lab manipulation; they were changes as if evolution had been forced to speed up within his bones.
They tried to replicate it. They took tissue samples, mixed nanobots with viral vectors, probed with lasers and magnetic fields, begged the math to reveal a formula. Months of simulations, shotgun attempts, and careful trials failed. The lab's whiteboards filled with equations and scrawled prayers. The xenobiology team swore black oaths and then stared at their hands. The work stopped not because they wanted to, but because reality refused to cooperate. Nature had broken one of its own rules and refused to tell them how.
In the end they drew a line. "We can't replicate what happened," the lead scientist told Rick in a voice that had lost its insulation. "We can teach some to enhance, to be more resilient. We can make soldiers who last longer, who take hits and keep moving. But we can't force genes to… rewrite themselves the way yours did. Not with what we have." Their tone was a mixture of relief and fear. For the first time, the scientists understood that Rick's body was a wound in biology—useful, yes, but dangerous to expose.
Rick accepted the verdict with a shrug and a bone-deep boredom. If he was a freak of nature, he would be useful. He trained the army anyway. He showed soldiers how to move when their blood screamed for rest, how to use the Quill in tightly controlled bursts without letting it take them whole. He taught the scientists to refine nanobot injections—how to stabilize a mutated cell long enough to make a difference without inviting catastrophe. He was a brutal teacher; his methods were surgical and cruel, and men left the training grounds broken and better. He took the Quill out only when necessary and put it away with a care that was half worship, half malediction.
Two weeks became a blur of drills and experiments. The city's skyline shifted as defensive towers rose and barricades were hurled up like teeth. The cult of worship around him thickened into an institutional fear that smelled of incense and iron. Men chanted his name at dawn and spat orders into the night.
Then the warning came, breathless and terrible. A soldier—young, patched, eyes wide—came stumbling to Rick's training yard, dropping to a knee and pounding his fist against the dirt. "Lord—Lord!" He gasped, voice cracking. "We're being attacked!"
Rick's humor died on his lips. "How many?" he asked, the words flat as stone.
The soldier blinked, throat working. "Everyone, Lord. The whole world is attacking. All at once—every border. Cities, towns, fleets. They're moving. It's not just us. It's the planet."
For a second the absurdity hit Rick like a physical thing and he laughed. But the laugh broke off and the color left his face. This was no tactical strike. This was the council mobilized with a war's speed and the kind of hatred that infected a planet. Their judgment had turned into an order that crossed continents.
"A world versus a city," Rick said coldly, and the weight of the phrase rolled over him like a wave.
He looked out over the training ground where men and drones scrambled into formation. The horizon burned with tiny flares signaling mobilization. There was no time to mourn or bargain. The choice had been made for him.
"Deploy all troops," he said, voice steady with an iron calm that had nothing to do with hope. "We are going for war."
Let's play a game 100 collections for 1 extra chapter