Dark Parasyte
Chapter 32: Dear Bob, You’re the Prototype

Chapter 32: Dear Bob, You’re the Prototype

The laboratory pulsed with a low, steady hum. Arcane lamps flickering across steel tables and rune scribed slabs. Crystalline tanks cast warped reflections against basalt walls, filled with dormant shapes submerged in faint blue liquid. The scent of blood, salt, and burning bone ash clung to the air.

Corvin stood over a massive Bearkin body, its dark fur shaved along the shoulders to reveal muscle like carved marble. The creature two and a half meters tall and broad as a siege door lay still under necromantic stasis. It had taken three of his summons to lift the corpse onto the arrayed slab, and five separate runes to stabilize its returning essence.

But this one wasn’t just another test subject.

Corvin had named him Bob.

There was something in the Bearkin’s wide set, almost gentle eyes. Even when dulled by death and return, it was still in it’s gaze. That, sparked a memory from another life. A face that belonged to another war. Another world.

Bob, back then, had been a legend within his SAS unit. He was a titan among men. Tall, wide, and terrifying to look at under full gear, but among the kindest human beings Corvin had ever met. Bob always carried a bag of candy in his vest pocket. Gummy bears, mints, chocolate drops. Anything to offer to the local children in operational zones. Corvin could still remember the grin on Bob’s face as he gave a lemon chew to a nervous boy in a bombed out village outside Al Khazir, Iraq.

He was gentle to the innocent. Always careful not to trample a garden or knock over an old market stall. But to targets, to enemies? Bob was an animal. A force of nature. He tore through fortified rooms like a wrecking ball wrapped in soft laughter.

Corvin couldn’t help but chuckle under his breath as he gazed down at the Bearkin. "You’d look hilarious in tactical gear," he murmured. "HK36 slung across the chest, ... you’d snap the sling in one step."

There was more than memory in his amusement. There was an odd sense of comfort. Bob wasn’t just a specimen. He was a connection to who Corvin had been.

And he was a milestone.

Among the dozens of failed arcane viral trials, this Bearkin was the first genuine success. The infused strain had bonded with his body completely. Raw physical strength had increased more than fivefold, and health regeneration had risen beyond even Corvin’s upper expectations. Wounds that should’ve required sutures and spells vanished in seconds. Bone regrew faster than natural limits. No sign of feedback surge. No organ rupture. No affinity collapse.

As part of the proving, Corvin had forced the Bearkin to wrestle ten of his own kind, some undead, some living test subjects.

Bob had emerged without injury, leaving only silence and scorched training circles behind.

Others had not fared so well.

Previous Bearkin and Lionkin test subjects often suffered from internal explosions of mana veins, collapsing from affinity misfires or sheer physical burnout. Some screamed as their muscles grew out of proportion, turning them into malformed giants. One Jackalkin had begun regenerating endlessly. new tissue sprouting uncontrolled until he was smothered by his own living mass. Another had simply disintegrated, flesh turning to jelly, veins smoking from overcharged arcane buildup.

Corvin learned from each failure. He modified strain anchors, adjusted resistance nodes, and reconfigured mana pathways to adapt to different biological rhythms.

But Bob.. Bob held steady.

He was not just a success. He was a foundation. The first successful strain.

Corvin moved toward a suspended schematic, fingers tracing the blood etched diagrams in the air. Floating sigils adjusted as he narrowed the new strain. One focused not on physical power, but on mana amplification. Greater arcane reservoirs, faster internal circulation, and the possibility of controlled affinity shifting.

Bob would remain untouched.

He had become the standard, the completed equation for phisical strain.

As Corvin turned to check the Bearkin one last time, he found the resurrected giant seated on the slab, blinking slowly. Still docile. Still quiet. No need for chains or psychic dampeners.

His hand, massive and clawed rested lightly against his own thigh.

Corvin felt something rare stir in his chest.

Not pride, it was familiraity.

Bob wasn’t just another resurrection.

He was memory made flesh.

And perhaps, in this new world, a second chance at building his unit again. As himself the HQ and Logistics divisions.

--

Corvin shifted focus to more delicate and potentially fruitful specimens. Dark Elves, High Elves, and humans. All different ranked Mages. Each possessed more intricate arcane conduits, finer magical threads woven through their nervous systems. Perfect candidates for the new strain... at least in theory. Their bodies held promise, but promises in his laboratory had a price.

Reality was colder.

The first several Dark Elves convulsed the moment the viral strain hit their systems. Their veins illuminated like braided lightning, skin rupturing in vivid lines of cerulean flame, and their screams were cut short as their eyes burst into twin gouts of light. The aftermath was always the same: stillness, the sour stench of mana scorched tissue, and bloodless corpses with steaming sockets for eyes. A few didn’t even last long enough for feedback to trigger. Their auras shattered like crystal under a hammer.

One female subject displayed something different. Her blood, mid transfusion, turned into a glowing blue stream and began to crystallize within her veins. It branched out like frost across her skin before her heart exploded in a muted pulse of glittering dust. It was horrifying and mesmerizing. Corvin extracted the residue and stored it in reinforced flasks. He suspected it might be some form of raw, liquid mana. An alchemical mystery not yet documented.

He experimented, feeding the substance, nicknamed "Blueblight" to other test subjects, both living and undead. The result never varied: seizures, screaming, blackened veins, and violent death. It was poison. Brilliant, arcane, alchemical poison. But it had potential, even if lethal.

Failure continued to mount.

A human subject’s bones had turned translucent within minutes of exposure, creating a vibrating lattice that resonated with every arcane pulse in the lab. It collapsed in a heap of dust after fifteen minutes, unable to bear the strain of its own frequency. Another’s skin became porous, absorbing ambient mana like a sponge until the subject swelled grotesquely and exploded against the far wall, painting it in violet gore.

A High Elf began to hum mid process, voice rising in perfect harmonic pitch with the mana cycles. Then, he erupted into hundreds of delicate bone shards, every piece singing a dying note before crumbling into silence. One human’s hair turned to smoke, his eyes flickered with six pointed glyphs and then his skull imploded inward, consumed by his own unstable thoughts.

Another specimen, a young High Elf noblewoman, seemed to take to the strain well... until her skin hardened into a smooth, glass-like substance and her heart simply stopped. Her final expression was serene, as if unaware of her own transition into a fragile statue.

Corvin took note of everything. Modified channeling gradients. Softened the strain’s elemental resonance. Delayed the neural fusing until blood saturation reached stability. Even then, it wasn’t enough.

His tables were emptying faster than they were being replenished.

By the end of the third day, nearly half of his total test pool was gone. bodies wasted, broken beyond resurrection, or too volatile to risk in undeath. Some were raised, those with mostly intact bodies and no memory linked to trauma. They shuffled silently in the corners of his lab, constant reminders of how close he hovered to failure.

But then it came. The pulse of a stable strain. The rhythm of success.

The new sequence stabilized in a mixed subjects. A High Elf scribe with a long magical history. The subject’s mana pool expanded over 280%. Recovery rate doubled. Spell latency halved. Even better, there were no rejection signs.

Encouraged, Corvin introduced the strain to other specimens. A Dark Elf spellwright showed impressive resistance and full absorption. A human magister from a failed guild took to the change with only mild tissue trauma.

Then came the true challenge: Aetherborn. These creatures were not made of flesh, blood and bone. Therefore Corvin make the subjects inhale the strain.

He kept them separate. Rare, magically resonant by birth, and born of ambient aether fusion. He had feared contamination or overreaction. But when he finally introduced the new strain to an Aetherborn female tall, silver eyed the response was beyond expectation.

She absorbed the strain within seconds. Her elemental form flickered with light. Her casting cycle surged.

Five mid tier spells, cast without rest, without fatigue, in under ten seconds. No signs of burn. No psychic fragmentation. No aura collapse.

It was perfection.

Corvin didn’t smile. He didn’t even move at first. He just stared at the readings, cross checked the glyph trails, and reviewed her again.

Three times the mana pool. Twice the regeneration. Accelerated casting speeds. Stability across all readings. No mutation. No decay.

The design was complete.

Reliable. Potent. Scalable.

And now, he would no longer experiment on others.

It was time to apply the work to himself.

He was no longer testing a theory.

He was building a future. Only one thing to test before applying it on himself.

--

Corvin stood at the edge of transformation. He had tested the limits of the arcane virus’ separately. First physical, then magical. But now, he was ready to try something uncharted: combining both. One body. Two perfected strains. One destiny reforged through pain.

He began with rigorous testing.

The dual strain trials had devastated his earlier subjects. Elves, humans, Feralis living and undead. The results were horrifying. Internal ruptures. Madness. One human had survived both injections for less than a minute before melting from the inside out. Another, a Dark Elf, lost all language and cognitive function, reduced to animal instinct. A Wolfkin exploded into flame mid strain merging, the residual energy vaporizing three nearby corpses and leaving a crater of charred runes and bone.

Others screamed until their throats collapsed, some burst from within as two incompatible strains warred in their veins. There were moments when Corvin thought the effort would break him mentally, if not physically.

It took hours and many test subjects, dozens of warded circles and notes scrawled in haste, but Corvin finally mastered the order, timing, and binding ritual necessary to stabilize both strains. Only then did he allow himself to proceed.

He began with the physical strain which he named PHS1.0.

The moment it entered his bloodstream, his pain receptors flared it was volcanic. It felt as though molten iron flooded his veins, igniting nerves, stretching sinew. His muscles swelled beneath his skin, writhing with unnatural heat. Bones cracked, not in breaking, but in dense restructuring. Joints locked, then unlocked. Broader, thicker, reinforced by flesh and arcane pressure. His heartbeat became thunder in his ears, shaking the air around him.

And yet, he remained still.

Corvin sat cross legged in a deep meditative state, his breathing measured, his mind forcing discipline over chaos. The runes carved into the floor beneath him helped channel the agony, dispersing raw arcane buildup through the air. Around him, mage lights flickered, snuffed out, then reignited with every pulse of his aura.

Hours passed.

By the fifth hour, the storm in his flesh began to calm. His body glistened with sweat, skin shimmering faintly with residual magic.

He opened his eyes and stood. Taller, bulkier. He moved with the weight of a siege beast. His limbs felt alien and invincible. At least 13 centimeters taller. His body mass had tripled, but there was no sluggishness. Only power, perfectly distributed, lean and honed like a blade.

Then came the tests.

He drew a ritual blade across his forearm. A shallow cut. The skin sealed in a second.

Next, a deeper slice across the chest. A wound that would have felled an average man. It closed within five.

Finally, he severed the pinky toe on his left foot. He was not going to sever an arm or something vital.

Ten seconds.

That was all it took.

A new toe grew. Identical, seamless, painlessly.

He grinned. This was beyond regenerative healing. This was evolution made physical.

Then came the speed trials.

Corvin dashed through the lab, weaving through rune etched pillars and stone tables. The air whistled past. His movements blurred. No spell. No enhancement. Pure muscle, tendon, and intention. He leapt from platform to ledge, spun mid air, and landed without a sound. In a world that leaned too heavily on magic, this physical dominance was an edge few could anticipate.

He called for Bob.

The massive Bearkin stepped forward, obedient and silent.

They sparred. Bob was powerful, precise but Corvin overwhelmed him. In seconds, the Bearkin was disarmed and thrown against the far wall, dazed but intact.

To escalate the challenge, Corvin summoned more. With each round he called another.

A Wolfkin. A Tigerkin. Two Jackalkins. Another Bearkin. A Lionkin. An Eaglekin.

Eight Feralis in total.

They lunged, struck, clawed. Corvin met them all with raw force. He moved like a storm with intent. CQC training was their bane. A strike to the Wolfkin’s chest dropped him instantly. A backhand sent the Tigerkin sprawling. Elbows shattered ribs. Knees drove deep into midsections. It took all eight to subdue him for a brief seconds and even then, he broke free with a roar and sent them scattering with one massive sweep.

He was satisfied.

Now came the final test: strength.

He punched the stone wall of the lab.

Dust exploded outward. Cracks split the basalt from floor to ceiling.

He kicked. The wall crumbled, stones cascading like a collapsing tower.

He struck again. And again. A dozen punches. A hundred. Each one landed with the weight of a battering ram, echoes pounding like war drums.

He did not feel pain. His knuckles did not bleed.

The wall was less fortunate.

With a thaught, and a whisper of Earth magic, he reconstructed the devastation. Stone knitted back into place, runes reformed, the air quiet once more.

Now, it was time for the final phase.

He retrieved the vial containing the magical strain. He named it MAG1.0. He grinned

His body, now a perfected vessel, welcomed the second virus.

He injected it directly into his bloodstream, then sat again, crossing his legs, hands resting on his knees.

He closed his eyes.

Time to witness the change from within.