Chapter 116: Road to Power Part 6
Lucien’s plan was sound. Unfortunately, he underestimated just how intelligent his opponent was. Francis had expected it.
After all, his actions from the very beginning had been designed to force them to use few alternative.
The orbital cannons were a powerful deterrent, but they could not be fired indiscriminately.
The next city remained completely unaware of what was coming. The government had kept the information classified, fearing that any public warning would trigger mass panic.
Francis arrived from below.
A crack formed in the concrete floor of a maintenance tunnel, thin as a knife’s edge, three levels beneath the city’s central water treatment facility.
No explosion. No tremor that the seismographs would flag as anything worth noting.
Pipes ran above him, pressurized and groaning softly with the weight of a city’s thirst.
Water moved in every direction. Left, right, down, deeper down. Infrastructure built over decades by people who never imagined something like him would ever stand at its center.
"There’s no better place to test that ability.".
Wasting no time, his skin began to peel. Small microorganisms, each the size of microscopic worms, broke free from his body. They were transparent, almost invisible in water, dissolving into the surroundings as they moved.
The water received them without knowing. The treatment system above filtered bacteria, pathogens, chemical contaminants. It screened for everything but it failed to detect this.
The current took them. Millions of them, too small to be named, moving through pressurized channels toward every tap, every pipe, every fountain and school dispenser and restaurant kitchen in the city.
Then he waited.
Above him, the city functioned as normal. Unlike the other cities, this one had sustained minimal damage and still maintained nearly 80% of its operations.
Unfortunately, it did not know it was being seeded.
School three blocks east of the treatment facility had children lining up at water dispensers during their morning break.
A restaurant on the commercial boulevard was filling stock pots.
An old man on the fourth floor of a residential tower ran the tap while he waited for his coffee to brew, filling a glass automatically, without looking, the way people who have never feared their water do.
Francis felt it.
Each parasite was a signal too faint to read in isolation. Together, as they found bodies and crossed membranes and began settling into tissue, they resolved into something he could feel.
Dozens of contact points. Then hundreds. The thousands. Spreading.
He did not move.
This was the part that required patience.
Rush the infection and the body would expel the parasites before they rooted.
Biology was efficient that way. Impatient invaders died in the body the same way impatient soldiers died on the field — by moving before the ground was ready to hold them.
So he waited.
He let the hosts drink their coffee. Walk their dogs. Sit at desks and argue about things that would not matter tomorrow. He let them forget the glass of water they had swallowed at breakfast.
The parasites were not harmful. This was not mercy. Mercy was irrelevant to the calculation. A host that fell sick became a host surrounded by doctors, surrounded by scanners and observation, exactly the kind of attention he did not want.
Healthy hosts went unexamined. Healthy hosts kept moving, kept climbing stairs and riding elevators and going about their business without ever being placed on a table under bright lights where something sensitive might notice what they carried.
Days passed, and the parasites he had seeded across the population grew more connected. Their link strengthened as they matured.
Unfortunately, those with special abilities eliminated them almost immediately. The parasite only took hold in ordinary humans.
He extended his awareness along the network as it grew. It was strange, this sensation. He had existed as a singular thing since the beginning — one body, one mass.
But this was different. His awareness had no single center. It was spread across millions of separate points, each one a faint pressure of biological contact, each moving through the city according to its own logic.
He could feel the shape of the city through them.
Streets appeared as dense currents of points, clusters where people gathered, faster pulses where the morning rush moved through.
He could feel one contact point sitting still at a workstation, barely moving for an hour.
Another moving quickly, short sharp footsteps, someone late for something. A third ascending — elevator, he estimated, the sensation of rising unmistakable.
The ascent.
He tracked that one. Felt it rise past the ground floor. Past the second level.
Then he shifted his focus to a single point. His perception snapped.
He found himself inside an elevator, remotely controlling a male human body.
But the sky had never encountered this.
The sensation was surreal. He began testing the ability, jumping from one person to the next, then attempting to split his consciousness across multiple hosts.
He discovered his limit was around a thousand individuals. He could push beyond that, but their motor control degraded significantly. Even simple actions like walking became difficult to coordinate.
’What if I inject a command first?’
Instead of actively controlling thousands of people at once, he would implant a command into their minds and let it trigger at a set moment.
That way, in theory, he could extend his influence to a million people simultaneously.
Of course, it was easier said than done. So he began experimenting.
Five people. A test group, nothing more. Gang members who had gathered in a warehouse — the kind of men who had already chosen violence as a language, who understood it the way other men understood money or prayer.
He found the part of each mind that received commands.
’In ten minutes, fight. Fight until only one remains standing. ’
He withdrew to the sixth gangster, whose main purpose was to observe.
He counted the time.
Eight minutes passed.
Nine.
The men were still laughing, shoulders loose, voices echoing off the corrugated walls. One of them was smoking near a stack of crates, tapping ash onto the concrete without looking down.
Then it started.
A small shift in posture. A pause in speech that lasted half a second too long.
The first punch came from the man leaning against the wall. No warning, no argument. He pushed off the concrete and struck the nearest target in the jaw hard enough to snap his head sideways.
The second gangster moved before thinking. His chair scraped back violently as he grabbed a metal rod from the floor and swung. It clipped ribs. A dull sound echoed through the space.
Five men, each suddenly carrying the same buried instruction, broke into motion at once.
They retained their motor skills normally because they were still in control of their own bodies. What changed was the pressure behind their thoughts — a sharp, intrusive urge to kill one another.
To Francis’ surprise, it escalated further.
They began cursing each other while fighting, voices rising with personal accusations. One accused another of betrayal. Another spat that his "best friend" had been sleeping with his wife.
Francis was certain he had not included that command.
This led him to believe that his parasite command acted more like a form of semi-hypnosis rather than direct remote control. In one way or another, that worked in his favor.
When only one of them remained, Francis issued a final command.
The man didn’t hesitate. He raised the blade and cut into his own neck.
What was interesting was that Francis had never specifically told the man how to die. The man just reached for the nearest weapon, and chose the most efficient way to end it.
’Good. I need more testing to understand the limits of this ability.’
More days passed, and Lucien’s group was losing direction. They did not expect their target to simply disappear, remaining inactive for days without any sign of movement.
Worse, Glakor broke through the coastline and pushed inland, leaving widespread damage in its wake, exploiting the gap created by their earlier decision.
They attempted to eliminate it with orbital strikes, but the surrounding ice storm made precise targeting difficult.
In addition, waves of flying beasts in other regions stretched their forces thin.
"Sir, we have a problem!" an analyst shouted, his eyes fixed on the screen.
"What is it?" Lucien asked.
"It’s the ground, sir. We’re detecting abnormal seismic activity along the southern coastline. The data suggests a large-scale subterranean entity has breached our territorial substrate. It’s causing localized tectonic displacement—earthquakes and rapid sinkhole formation across multiple zones."
BANG!
Lucien’s composure broke. He had believed the net would finally allow them to eliminate all the Kings, but the situation was worsening day by day.
If they didn’t find a solution quickly, everyone on the ground would face extinction.
"We are going to change strategy. Relocate six sub-orbital cannons in that area. We will eliminate that thing first."
"But sir, it will leave more gaps in our net."
"There’s no other way. We have to sacrifice our coastlines and eliminate the Kings quickly before the damage spreads further."
Comments