Emerald was dead.
No. He had just killed Emerald.
The horrific reality of those two sentences warred violently in Devin's mind, a brutal collision of desperate denial and absolute, blood-soaked truth.
How? Why? He had just woken up to this nightmare. Devin stared down at his hands, his chest, his legs—all of it painted in a thick, drying crimson that was rapidly turning a sickly rust-brown in the pale morning light. The heavy muscles in his stolen forearms twitched. It wasn't a shiver of fear; it was a residual, feral energy buzzing beneath the skin that he entirely didn't recognize.
This wasn't him. He was Prince Devin Trangdar. He didn't tear innocent, kind-hearted girls apart in the dark. He didn't feast on the flesh of his friends.
Who in the name of God was Zain Ricky?
Panic, cold and sharp as a shattered icicle, pierced through the suffocating fog of his trauma. He couldn't just sit here on the floor, drowning in a pool of gore. He had to know what kind of vessel he had hijacked. He had to know what the hell he was wearing.
Devin pushed himself off the wooden floorboards and began to frantically scavenge the cramped room, searching for absolutely anything he had left untouched during his initial hunt for Zain's identification.
He moved like a madman. His bare, blood-slicked feet left terrifying, sticky red footprints across the wood. He tore up the remaining, untouched sections of the mattress, ripping the cheap fabric apart with a raw, physical strength that felt entirely unnatural to his royal soul. He dropped to his knees and checked under the bed, plunging his bloody hands into the dusty darkness.
He threw open the small, rotting wooden cupboards, carelessly shattering the few ceramic plates Zain owned against the far wall.
Devin was completely consumed by a manic, desperate need for answers. He was totally forgetting—or perhaps deliberately, desperately ignoring—the fact that there was a violently maimed person lying in the room with him.
He had to completely detach his humanity to function. If he looked over his shoulder, if he looked at Emerald's ruined, unrecognizable face for even a fraction of a second, he knew his mind would shatter permanently. He would just sit down and scream until the guards came to cut off his head.
He searched the rotting apartment until his fingernails were splintered and bleeding, mixing Zain's fresh pain with Emerald's drying blood.
And then, he found it.
It was a thick, heavy black leather folder. It was wedged impossibly tight in a narrow, hidden gap between the rotting headboard of the bed and the damp stone masonry of the wall. Devin practically clawed it out of the crevice, his bloody fingerprints permanently staining the dark, expensive leather.
He fell back onto the floor and flipped it open. The heavy parchment pages crackled loudly in the dead, silent room.
Subject: Zain Ricky.
Kingdom of Origin: Cypris.
Devin's breath violently hitched in his throat. The air in the cramped room suddenly felt twenty degrees colder.
Cypris. The nation lost to the dark. The venomous, cultish nation of Count Sapien.
He rapidly scanned the dense, highly clinical handwriting filling the pages. It was a comprehensive medical and tactical log. Everything in this stolen, quiet life led directly back to the very monster who had orchestrated the slaughter of his family.
As his eyes darted across the horrifying details, the jagged puzzle pieces of Zain Ricky clicked together to form a picture of unimaginable, systemic cruelty. It turned out Zain wasn't just some commoner who had quietly migrated North to find work as a barista.
He was one of the many young children given up—or violently stolen—to be part of Cypris's darkest, most highly guarded military endeavor: the venom experiments.
According to the heavily redacted files, Zain had been administered highly volatile, experimental venom shots since he was little more than a toddler. But it wasn't just a crude attempt to make him a stronger soldier. The logs detailed a grotesque, highly specific chemical reaction. The Cyprian venom had mixed violently with his DNA, causing severe, permanent cellular mutation brought on by close exposure to the Holy Gene.
But it didn't make any sense. Devin frowned, leaving a bloody smear across the parchment. Zain, like Emerald, was a sub-human. Why would the cultish, zealot nation of Cypris—a nation that actively, religiously hunted and eradicated sub-humans from the face of the earth—spend decades meticulously experimenting on one?
He turned the heavy page, and the sick, twisted logic of Count Sapien stared back at him in cold black ink.
Cypris experimented on sub-humans specifically to create the ultimate biological weapons against sub-humans. They weaponized the anomaly itself. The engineered venom in Zain's bloodstream actively fed on the Holy Gene, aggressively twisting the innate, miraculous faith of a sub-human into a feral, uncontrollable bloodlust.
Zain wasn't just an 8.5 Star UEI student. He was a sleeper agent.
He was a ticking, biological time bomb designed to infiltrate, observe, and eventually slaughter his own kind when triggered by prolonged proximity, high stress, or perhaps just the sheer, intoxicating scent of another sub-human's blood.
He had been placed in Reignn, right under the nose of the UEI, right inside Marinakas—a known sub-human haven. And last night, alone in the dark with a sub-human girl, the bomb had finally gone off.
Devin's hate for Count Sapien grew exponentially. It was a dark, suffocating inferno that threatened to burn him from the inside out. What a vile, irredeemable man. Sapien was the absolute bane of this new world, a parasitic nightmare orchestrating symphonies of suffering from his shadowy, venom-soaked throne.
Devin squeezed the heavy leather folder until the binding audibly cracked.
But his righteous, apocalyptic fury was abruptly cut short.
The heavy, metallic smell of coagulating blood quickly, violently brought his attention back to the present reality. He slowly turned his head, the muscles in his neck stiffening. His eyes locked onto the disfigured, bloody remains of the sub-human that lay on the bed.
Zain's bed.
The grotesque, immediate reality of his situation crashed down on him, crushing the breath from his lungs.
He was a dead prince trapped in the body of a Cyprian sleeper agent. He was completely covered in the blood of an innocent barista in the middle of a foreign city. He had to do something, and he had to do it fast.