"Where the hell are you people getting this stingy poison?" Done neutralizing all the samples from Dominion's body, Merciella didn't want to ever go through it again. "Thank the lord it already has a host or just trying to separate it would've suffocated us all to death."
"How about you stop complaining since you did offer your help unsolicited?" Tired of Merciella's winging, the goblin queen howled through gritted teeth.
Her hands still busy handling the extract vials, the goblin queen fused them with morsels of mana and moved it along to Medusa down the line. Taking the vial from the queen, Medusa set them up individually to be turned into potions for pregnancy. However, only now a great hurdle had presented itself to the research team.
'Fine-tuning potions was Moriyana's forte, but…' Shifting her gaze to the mistress of greed, the goblin queen wasn't too pleased about having to ask for Merciella's help. 'Should I really trust her or-ughhh!'
Hit with a sudden migraine, the queen's body crouched in hurt, and the vials in her hands slipped through her fingers. As the glasses shattered after hitting the surface, Medusa and the other helpers rushed closer to the queen.
"Are you okay?!" Medusa asked, her eyes wide open with terror.
"I-"
Before the queen could reply, Merciella grabbed her by the shoulders and helped her to prop herself back up on her feet.
"Between the elven village and this facility, it seems like you're pushing yourself a little too much. Why not leave things to Medusa and me while you get some rest?" Medusa suggested, looking right into the queen's eyes.
Changing their tint from green to red and then vice versa, the queen's eyes were acting erratic from the migraine. Pinching her nose, she closed her eyes trying to fight the pain. But like a paradise, the hurt kept squirming in her head without any signs of stopping anytime soon.
"Ughh!" Slipping out of Merciella's hands, the queen began stomping her feet as if enraged by her persisting pain. "W-what the…"
Feeling light-headed, the queen fell into Medusa's arms. Held in the lamia's hands, she glanced around her at the world spinning through her vision. Getting worse and worse by the second, she tried to crawl her way up with the help of Medusa's body, but Merciella bound the queen in a conjured wrapping made of paper.
"What are you doing?!" Medusa screamed, having no clue as to what was going on.
"The poison must've affected her, you should spend more time taking her away than yelling at me like that," Merciella responded with a sharp gaze and a light smile. Looking around at the others cramped in the small facility packed with numerous chained test subjects and apparatus, Merciella sowed the seeds of fear even further. "Everyone leave! Staying here is a hazard, especially since the poison got the queen even!"
Following her words, hushed whispers lingered throughout the lab. From one ear to another, from one breath to the next, fear and conjecture spewed into the heart of all present. The queen of goblins was quickly taken out of the room, and into the open, however, while her struggling frame was taken from under the ever-stretching seams of stairs stretching upwards, plenty of rumors began to float everywhere.
No longer confined to just the lab, the news soon made its way to all kinds of facilities. Making it much harder for the management to control everyone's fear along with their desire to distance themselves from the allegedly poisoned laboratory.
Surprisingly enough, the whole ordeal did not take more than a few hours, something neither Merciella nor Klaus had expected when they came up with the plans to steal the demigod's extract to create their own godly army.
Being a demon lord, Merciella was left alone in the lab with nobody concerned for her safety. Instead even Medusa expected her to be the one to cure the ethereal poison spreading instead, when in reality no such outbreak had occurred at all.
"Origami: Puppets!" Summoning an army of thin paper dolls, Merciella had them gather all the extract vials belonging to Dominion.
'Be done quick, I can't control the goblin queen's mind from the village for long.' Hearing Klaus's voice in her head, Merciella opened a teleportation portal with the dragon scale ring and ordered the paper dolls to carry the vials through it.
"I have to admit, when I left for here, I didn't expect you'd be able to corrupt the queen's mind," Merciella muttered, a devious smile curling up her lips.
'Just do as we planned before anyone finds out. I can't keep pretending to be a mindless drone like these three here!' Saying that Klaus cut the mental line between the two.
Letting out a sigh, Merciella began replacing the stolen extract with a clear liquid that closely resembled the extract. With this, the potions were doomed to be failures, but since the queens were in their testing stage to create gods, these failures would easily be explained.
"Now we just need to convert these into potions and use them on someone," Merciella muttered to herself, trying to think of a victim she could use in her secret experimentations far away from here.
Musing through her options, she wandered lonesomely around the whole lab. Hanging loosely from the stair railing, skipping one step to the other, and even teleporting about randomly, all the while in her mind she tried to figure out who to make a god's vessel.
"No way will I choose myself, then who should it be? Azalea, perhaps? Torturing her would definitely be fun." The more thought she gave to it, the more she was inclined to follow through. But even then, Azalea would only be able to carry a single kid, when to make an army they'll need more than a few thousand of the same. "Hmm? Then how should I-"
'Wait…' Stopping her own words, Merciella realized something important. 'Unlike Atlas, Dominion is a demi-god, meaning he's part human. What if anyone can host his child since he's not entirely a god and doesn't need another god to host his children?'
When it came to Atlas, only Destinia could've hosted his kid, given that she was the only other god. And although Asmodia too could've survived rearing his child, being a demon she couldn't possibly get pregnant.
"Very well…" Merciella mumbled to herself.
Holding her hand forward, a storm of small paper shards swiftly flew forward and conformed into a conjoined paper replica of Merciella's own body. Running her hand up and down the clone, the mistress gave it skin, clothes, and organs to properly replicate her body.
"You'll be helping the queens with the experiment and report to me everything that you see at the end of the day," she ordered the clone, and it simply nodded, not possessing much of a will of its own.
Opening the teleportation portal again, Merciella walked right into it, leaving the lab's mess in the hands of her replica clone. Coming out on the other end, she found herself in the same lab that Deus had once used to try and create a body for Haruki with Fay's help. Unsurprisingly, Klaus was already there, setting things up for them to start working on.
"Took your time," he complained, turning around to look at her.
Dressed in an all-rubber suit, he had insulted every inch of his skin to keep away from whatever the extracts were made of. Finding his measures a bit extreme, Merciella let out a laugh. In the meantime, while the two reconciled, the paper dolls made short of the vial placement and laying down of the inked plans.
"What do you say, ready to create an army of gods?" Her hands rested on her hips, Merciella smiled ear to ear.
Heaving a sigh with a dejected gaze, Klaus glanced up at Merciella before replying.
"I hope they can defeat that bitch Helga or else none of this would matter," in his mind, Haruki wasn't even the real hurdle to their conquest. Helga on the other hand, a Valkyrie who could strip their powers away was someone they have to take down no matter whatever it takes.
"By the way…" Moving closer to Merciella, Klaus proposed a question he'd been thinking of since the emperor's death. "What are we fighting for now? The natural order? What even is that anymore?"
Shrugging her shoulders, Merciella relayed her indifference to whatever it was that they'd been fighting for for years.
"Who the fuck knows? For now, it's about our own survival," Getting even closer to him, Merciella wrapped her fingers around Klaus's masked face. "We've lived for who knows how long? Maybe it's time to live for ourselves and not some tyrannical master. What do you say?"
Klaus let the thoughts settle in his mind for a brief moment, but then, feeling a strange pull by the promise of freedom, he couldn't help but nod at the mistress.
"You're right," he muttered, she smiled.
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