Ever After #7: Waves of Scales

Chapter 13.1 The Plan

In the darkness of the environment, Asceia managed to navigate the waters through her enhanced vision. She fought with the currents and just followed the trails of bubbles the speedboat was making. Her crescent-shaped tail granted her speed. It didn’t take her long to catch up. In a minute, after passing through the coral reefs, she swam down to the depth. There she positioned herself to put the boat directly on top of her and continued swimming following its trails.

When she finally found the perfect time, in one burst of her tail, she charged to the surface and swam upwards in a diagonal manner. She poured all of her strength as she calculated the moment of impact. Instantly, she smashed her head the hull of the boat, flipping it over in the process. The passengers fell to the water and the bubbles they were making clouded her eyes. Asceia stopped for a second and distanced herself. But she witnessed something unexpectedly. Epifanio, the kids, and a woman, who were supposed to go to the surface, swam to her and breathing perfectly fine.

Asceia was baffled to see them surround her. Their eyes were different, it wasn’t like any of the humans. They were comfortably breathing water through their noses like they were still on the land. In a snap, they swam and attacked her, but she was quick to sweep the kids away with her tail, slit the throat of the woman beside her with her stinger, and repeatedly stab Epifanio’s chest. Their blood mixed with the water and clouded her sight for a second. Epifanio was incapacitated, just like the woman, he sank to the depths. Asceia, for a second, looked around and saw no sight of the kids. She swam down and pulled his arms and dragged his dying body.

••°°••

AFTER THREE MINUTES of Epifanio’s escape, Troy, Fatima, and her men arrived at the resort. They took over the whole place and started investigating; picking up crumbs of evidence Epifanio could have left. Troy, on the other hand, chose to look around. Reaching the beach, he saw Asceia emerge from the darkness, her whole nude body was exposed to light and dragging a corpse through the sand. She was indeed strong, she walked normally and dragged the body as if it was just a lightweight.

For a second, he was mesmerized by her beauty and brawn. She was one of a kind. She has a beauty that you will never see from anyone and unfathomable power that can turn this world around. Realizing that she was naked, Troy immediately got back to his senses and took off his oversized shirt. When Asceia stopped in front of him and dropped the body near her foot, he handed over his shirt.

“Wear this.”

“Thank you,” she telepathically uttered and wore it right away. “Let’s get inside. I know what is going on.”

Asceia continued dragging Epifanio’s body that left tracks of blood mixed with seawater in the hallway. She kept pulling his body until they reached the theater room where Fatima, his men, and other experts were gathered. She came down, dragging the body through the stairs, whereas Troy just followed him from behind. Asceia stopped beside the newly built pool that was full of seawater, she dropped the body to the floor, and shifted her focus to Fatima who was approaching her.

“This is not Epifanio anymore. This is a host for a sercean mind,” she telepathically said to everyone.

Fatima’s brows furrowed. “Come again?”

Asceia kneeled beside Epifanio and turned over his body. She drew out her barbed stinger from her right hand and stabbed his back, in between his ribs. Through her serrated stinger, she sawed his flesh open, giving way to the blood and seawater to flow out.

“What the fuck...”

“How did this happen?”

“I can read his mind. Just before he died, I was able to run through his memories since the day he encountered a sercean.” She retracted her stinger and stood. “His brain is wrapped with memrae, an organism designed to change his insides, turning him into a perfect sercean host. This is a puppet of Yrevia. This is also the reason why they are collecting seawater. To preserve the life of memrae inside them, they need to keep drinking seawater, so that, in return, the memrae can help them evolve into something.”

“Like a human and sercean hybrid,” Troy uttered.

“Then what does Yrevia wants with him?”

“Yrevia is building an army. She is turning humans against their kind.”

“What about those tanks?” Marko asked, pointing at the glass tank sitting in the corner filled with water.

“It’s filled with active memraes. Human eyes can’t see memraes, for you, they will look transparent, like a cellophane. But for us, it’s glowing in different colors due to the memories they ate.”

“We will bring those back to the laboratory,” Fatima said.

“Be careful, they are unpredictable,” she warned.

Fatima nodded. “Now that we know what is going on. We can decide on a strategic plan for how to stop the attacks.”

“We can do that by tracing all of the sercean hosts and killing them.”

“Hey, Asceia. Sorry to interfere but...these are innocent people that we are talking about,” Marko said shaking his head in disapproval. “We can’t just go killing them like they are not innocents.”

“Tell that to the thousands of humans that are going to die in this war. Right now, the most logical thing we need to do is to uproot the problem before it spreads.”

“Can’t we have an alternate solution? Maybe Fatima can produce a cure to this, an extraction method that can take this memrae thing out of their body,” Troy suggested.

“The moment their mind was owned by a memrae, it is over. We can get their body back, but it is just a body, a human meat.”

“Okay, stop arguing. We need to leave now and continue this later,” Fatima ordered. “I will leave my men to clean up this place. We will take a rest and let us pick this up tomorrow.”