Ex-Human Morphus [A Mutant Evolution Apocalypse LitRPG]
Chapter 229 – Interlude IV – Catalina

Chapter 229 – Interlude IV – Catalina

She was about to start her bike when a sudden commotion at the gates made her look up. She could see that the guards posted on the walls were agitated as they watched something on the other side of the perimeter walls. Dismounting her bike, she started to walk to the gates.

“What’s going on?” she called out to the guards.

One of them turned his head to shout back, “Someone’s coming back. It doesn’t look good, though.”

Catalina wanted to ask a clarifying question but decided to wait and see for herself. The gate was already swinging open. Shortly afterward, a battered SUV entered the base. Its windows were mostly shattered, and the body was covered in scratches and dents. Despite its damaged state, she instantly recognized it—it was one of the two SUVs sent out earlier that morning to hunt down the morphus.

Where’s the other car? she wondered. A possible answer immediately popped into her mind—it likely had been destroyed, and all its occupants had been killed by the morphus. The fact that this vehicle had survived and returned to the base felt odd, because all previous teams sent after the morphus had been slain, and there had never been any survivors.

The battered SUV rolled to a stop. The driver’s door swung open, and a man with a haunted look in his eyes jumped out. He spotted her and made his way over.

“What happened?” she asked, even though the answer was pretty obvious.

Rather than give a direct answer, the man said, “I need to talk to our boss.”

“Why?”

In lieu of answering her, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his PDA. After unlocking the device, he showed her the screen. She frowned as she looked at it. The display showed the map of the city with three pins, each labeled with a brief text. The first read, Let me be or you die. After reading it, she shot a questioning look at the man, but he remained silent. She turned her attention back to the screen. The second message said, Shw it 2 ur boss. The final pin bore a single word, Undstnd?

“What is this?” she asked.

“It’s something our boss needs to see,” he said, urgency creeping into his voice as he glanced toward HQ behind her. “It’s important.”

“Alright,” Catalina responded. “Let’s go.”

She led the way to HQ. As one of Ryder’s closest subordinates, Catalina was among the few people with access to the main building of the base. As they walked across the compound, she stole another glance at the man. He still wore that haunted look in his eyes. His clothes were torn and bloodied in several places, but he seemed uninjured, likely having used a few stims to heal himself on his journey to the base. An unpleasant odor wafted from him. Had he peed himself?

Once they arrived at HQ, she entered the code into the touchpad and swung the door open. As they entered, two guards quickly approached them. Catalina explained they needed to see the boss, and the guards allowed them to pass. They climbed the stairs to the second floor and walked down a corridor to the security room, which was watched over by another armed guard.

Just as they reached the door, it suddenly slid open into the wall, and Ryder himself stepped out. He blinked in surprise at the unexpected visitors, but then a smile spread across his face as he recognized Catalina. However, as soon as his gaze shifted to the man beside her, his smile vanished, and his expression turned serious. He looked back at Catalina. 

“What’s going on?” he asked. 

“This guy,” she began and immediately went silent, casting a quick frown at her companion. Suddenly, realization struck her. “Jeremy, isn’t it?”

He nodded in affirmation.

“Jeremy wants to show you something,” she explained, then nodded at Jeremy. “Go ahead and show him what you showed me.”

Jeremy nodded and held out the display of his PDA, which he still clutched in one hand, to Ryder. The leader’s expression darkened as he scanned the text.

“What’s this about?” Ryder asked.

“It’s from the morphus,” Jeremy explained. “It wrote this message and instructed me to show it to you.”

Ryder raised an eyebrow. “To me?”

“Well, to whoever my boss was meant to be, I suppose,” Jeremy replied, shifting awkwardly as nerves began to take over.

“So you didn’t manage to kill the freak, did you?” Ryder said after a tense moment.

Jeremy held his tongue, likely interpreting the question as rhetorical.

“Where are the others?” Ryder’s voice turned low and menacing. “You can’t be telling me the morphus killed them all!”

Jeremy stayed quiet. He was the only survivor, which meant he would have to bear the brunt of his boss’s wrath.

“For Christ’s sake,” Ryder snapped, his frustration boiling over. “I sent two full teams to hunt down the freak this time. Two full teams! You’re telling me it managed to kill them all? Just how powerful is it?”

Catalina and Jeremy exchanged glances but said nothing.

“Why didn’t it kill you too?” Ryder pressed.

“I suppose it needed someone to deliver a message to you,” Jeremy answered softly.

“Right,” Ryder muttered, his tone laced with disdain.

Ryder looked like he was about to pose another question but reconsidered. Instead, he commanded, “You two, follow me inside. We need to show this to Skullface.”

Jeremy’s complexion shifted to a ghostly white. Skullface, the gang leader, was infamous for his brutality. The mere mention of his name sent shivers down the spines of even the toughest members. Catalina, on the other hand, felt her heart pound relentlessly. She hated that man with every fiber of her being.

They stepped into the security room, and the door slid closed behind them. Ryder guided Catalina and Jeremy to a wall where a bank of monitors was mounted. He made a call, and moments later, Skullface’s ink-laden visage appeared on one of the screens. The sight of the man she hated fueled a storm of emotions in Catalina. She had to summon every ounce of willpower to prevent her face from revealing the hatred and anger churning inside her.

Skullface glanced between the three of them for a moment, his gaze pausing briefly on Jeremy, scrutinizing his torn, bloodied clothes. Jeremy felt a shiver run down his spine as Skullface’s piercing eyes examined him. Then the gang leader shifted his attention to Ryder and growled, “What the hell is going on? Judging by your faces, I assume the morphus is still breathing.”

“Unfortunately, it is,” Ryder murmured, his voice barely above a whisper. The leader of this base inspired fear in his subordinates, but he himself was terrified of Skullface. Despite his efforts to maintain an air of control, a tremor seeping into his voice betrayed the anxiety that gripped him.

“So, you called me just to say you failed again in taking down that freak?” Skullface growled, his fury escalating quickly.

Worried that his boss might explode at any moment, Ryder grabbed the PDA from Jeremy and held the screen up to the webcam. “The freak instructed Jeremy to show you this message,” Ryder said, his tone steadier than he felt. “I thought you’d want to see it.”

Ryder resembled a schoolboy anticipating his teacher’s approval for providing a correct answer. After reading the text displayed on the PDA’s screen, Skullface locked his piercing eyes on Jeremy and in a low and menacing growl, demanded that he recount everything that had happened.

In a quiet and trembling voice, Jeremy recounted that he was on one of the teams Ryder sent after the morphus that morning. They tracked it to the forest area that used to be the city park. There, they encountered an enormous wood golem, which commanded numerous plant monsters. The morphus was also there. Since they couldn’t defeat them all at once, they decided to retreat. Unfortunately, the monsters chased them and killed some of his companions. Jeremy and a few others managed to get out of the forest and make it to their vehicles. Jeremy and another person jumped in one car, while the rest of the surviving men piled into another. With Jeremy behind the wheel, they sped away, but several plant monsters managed to latch onto their vehicle. The others weren’t so lucky—the wood golem stamped on their car, crushing it before they could get away.

Jeremy and his companion didn’t drive far because the plant monsters clinging to their vehicle suddenly died. In the rearview mirror, he saw that the morphus had killed the wood golem. He quickly brought the car around and sped back to confront the morphus. However, even after the battle with the wood golem, it was still brimming with power. It killed his companion, who manned the machine gun mounted on the roof and then dragged Jeremy out of the vehicle. However, instead of killing him, the morphus took his PDA, used Jeremy’s fingerprint to unlock the device, and then typed a message. After that, instead of ending his life, it let him go so he could deliver the message to his superiors.

Once Jeremy finished recounting his ordeal, Skullface nodded thoughtfully but didn’t say anything for a while. Finally, he broke the silence, his voice steady and authoritative. “Get out of here,” he instructed Jeremy.

Jeremy was more than eager to comply. But then it struck him that his immediate supervisor was Ryder. He turned his head, searching for Ryder’s approval. Once Ryder nodded his consent, Jeremy bolted to the exit, relieved to escape the situation unpunished. Just as the door slid aside and he was about to step out, Ryder called out to him.

“Change your clothes, will ya?” Ryder remarked, a smirk playing on his lips. “You fucking stink. Did you piss yourself?”

Jeremy’s face flushed with embarrassment as he looked down at the dark stain on his crotch. Mumbling something incomprehensible in reply, he exited the room, and the door slid shut behind him.

“Do you want to pass the mission to somebody else, boss?” Ryder asked cautiously, shifting his attention back to the monitor.

“Not now,” Skullface replied, his tone firm. “I need some time to think.”

Seeing that his boss was in a surprisingly calm mood, Jeremy mustered the courage to say, “Maybe we just should leave the freak alone, boss.”

Skullface shot him a glare that could freeze fire, causing Ryder to visibly pale.

“Let it be, huh?” the gang leader sneered.

“I mean, it seems to fight back only when attacked,” Ryder added hurriedly. “Maybe if we just let it be, it’ll mind its own business and won’t cause us any more trouble. Plus, the deadline for the legendary reward for taking out the freak has long worn off. We won’t even earn a decent reward for killing the morphus now, will we?”

“It’s not about the reward anymore,” Skullface replied, his tone dripping with menace. “That motherfucker has caused us too much trouble to just let it go. Killing the freak is a matter of principle now, got it, dumbass?”

You wouldn’t be in this mess if you’d just left it alone in the first place, Catalina mused silently, but she knew better than to voice her thoughts.

Ryder simply nodded, afraid to say anything else that might provoke his boss further.

“I need to think this over,” Skullface declared. “I’ll get in touch later.”

When the call ended, Catalina cast a quick look at Ryder. He usually tried to hit on her, but the tension from his exchange with Skullface had him too rattled for that now. He waved her off without meeting her gaze. It was obvious he needed some time to himself. Catalina left.

As she made her way out of HQ, her mind drifted back to the last encounter with the morphus, when it was chased by a pickup truck and an SUV. The truck pursued the morphus into a building, but once inside, the creature turned on its occupants, mercilessly killing them. It then seized control of the machine gun mounted in the truck’s bed, using it to kill those in the SUV. Then the morphus emerged from the building and finished off the wounded. As she watched the horrifying scene unfold from a distance, Catalina found it hard to believe that such a bloodthirsty creature could be intelligent.

However, the morphus writing a message and having Jeremy pass it to his superiors confirmed that it was indeed intelligent. Despite its terrifying appearance and the brutality with which it killed its enemies, the morphus appeared to be sapient. Although it struggled with writing, its ability to understand and communicate was unmistakable. This lent credence to the rumors that it had once been human and had mutated into its current form at some point.

Catalina promised herself that the next time she encountered the morphus, she wouldn’t let her fear and doubts get the better of her. She would try to communicate with the morphus. And if she succeeded in gaining its trust, it might very well spell the end for Los Demonios.