The Binding Vow of Lazarus

Chapter 57

She sneered, pitching her voice into something sickly sweet. "Oh, no thank you," Then she rolled her eyes hard enough to hurt.

Suguru's lips thinned for a moment before he turned away, facing forward again.

Boe clicked her tongue, smirking. Got him.

Small victories.

Yuki shot her an amused look but said nothing as they reached the heavy door at the end of the hall. Beyond it, something stirred.

Boe's smirk faded.

This was going to suck.

Lily arrived quickly, almost as if the shady bitch was waiting for this call. She joined the three of them with a menacing toothy grin, pushing past without a word to get to work on each of the victims that lay on the the experiment chamber. It was cold, the air thick with the metallic sting of blood and the acrid air of cursed energy. Nine human vessels lay sprawled across the stone floor, their bodies twitching as if gripped by unseen seizures.

Their skin had taken on a sickly gray pallor, veins bulging black beneath the surface like creeping rot. Then—

It began.

One by one, the vessels' stomachs rippled, then split—not with blood, but with thick, tar-like ooze that pulsed as though breathing. From the gaping wounds, their bodies began to change.

Limbs, becoming too long and too thin, fingers tipped with jagged nails that scraped against stone as they dragged themselves free. Faces stretched like melted wax, features sliding into place—eyes rolling wetly in their sockets before locking forward with eerie awareness. Mouths dropped unhinged, rows of needle-teeth glistening as they gasped their first breaths, vocal cords producing only wet, guttural clicks.

The largest of them—Eso—was the first to rise, his torso elongating like pulled taffy before snapping into a more humanoid shape. His skin, mottled with patches of decay and smooth, doll-like flesh, gleamed under the flickering torchlight. Twin horns curled from his temples, still dripping with afterbirth.

Kechizu followed, his form bloated and asymmetrical, one arm swollen to twice the size of the other, his grin stretching ear to ear. His laughter came out in wheezing, broken hiccups, like a drowning man finding humor in his own demise.

The others were no less grotesque—some with too many joints, others with limbs fused at unnatural angles, their bodies caught between human and something rotting.

They did not stand so much as unfold, limbs cracking and popping as they adjusted to their newfound consciousness. One crouched on all fours, its spine arching like a feral beast, head tilting too far to the side as it studied the humans before it.

Another dragged itself forward, one leg useless, its fingers digging into the stone hard enough to leave grooves. The smallest merely sat, rocking back and forth, humming a tuneless song through a mouth that split vertically down the middle.

Yuki watched with detached fascination, arms crossed, her lips quirking as if she were observing an interesting experiment rather than the birth of horrors. "Huh. They're uglier than I expected."

Boe's face was a mask of quiet revulsion. Her fingers twitched at her sides, her breath shallow, but she said nothing. The Kamo blood in her veins recognized these things—not as family, but as mistakes. Monuments to a clan's hubris.

Suguru's jaw was tight, his usual composure strained. He had expected monsters, but seeing them wake, seeing the way their eyes—human eyes—flickered with awareness, made his stomach turn. This was necessary, he reminded himself. This was the cost.