Target Spotted

"Urgh…" A man in a dirty lab coat groaned in pain as he fled. It was Prof. Requiem.

"Damn it!" He cursed angrily as he entered a dark ally.

He endured the pain and leaned against a ramshackle wall. He had been holding his abdomen in pain for a while now and had to take a short breather.

Escaping the laboratory was no easy task. It was especially so since he hadn't expected to be paid a visit by the government.

Needless to say, he was caught off guard. The officials kindly asked him to go with them but he knew better than to agree. He played it off as calm before secretly grabbing a couple of vials.

He hurled two black vials towards the men that came to pick him up and downed a gray one. Instantly, his presence seemed to have been erased. This was all thanks to the characteristic of a wraith.

Wraiths are tall and slim aberrations with a weak presence and a ghostly appearance. Looking directly at their face could cause one to be entrapped in a nightmare or suffer from other sorts of psychological backlash.

Regardless, Professor Requiem was still willing to secretly experiment with their genes. To him, the scientists that invented the gene exaltation formula were heroes and pioneers. To tread their path meant being innovative, to create new hope for humanity!

Yet apart from the Inquisitive party, no one was willing to take risks. How was he supposed to leave his name down in history?

He had no choice but to secretly conduct experiments. And with the help of these experiments, he managed to create variants for the gene formula as well as potions.

The wraith potion helped him run past the blinded guards. But perhaps having expected such a reaction, one of the officials had randomly lunged at the lab's exit.

Requiem was internally injured by the strike. He was also an altered but as a scientist, he couldn't contend with a trained and altered soldier.

"F*ck..." Requiem cursed as he felt his body grow hot.

He slid down the wall and fell to the ground. He looked at his bloody hand and found it to be colored an eerie black. His fingers were warping in a strange fashion putting him on alert.

Testing the gene formulas was easy since he could try it on expectant residents but the potion was a separate matter. He had no one to try it on without raising any suspicions. Plus, perhaps due to the ancestors who had already laid down the necessary groundwork, the formula was much easier to fiddle with and improve on.

This meant that the potions he had concocted were unstable and dangerous. The mutant characteristics could cause the drinker to turn into a monster.

"Why…?" Requiem started to feel his thoughts grow hazy and was overtaken by fear.

How could such a great scientist succumb to his own invention! No! He had to live on!

He gritted his teeth and tried to forcefully suppress the mutant genes in his body. This was only possible to an irradiate person. That is to say, Requiem had long since tested one of the formulas on himself.

His fingers remained warped and his blood a blackened red hue. Still, he at least managed to temporarily suppress the mutation. As long as nobody interrupted him until he finds a safe place he would be able to revert these changes. He had the confidence of a natural-born genius.

***

We walked for a long time. I checked my phone and three hours had already gone by. I was certain we circled the entire slums at this point. There were also now people casually running around in the streets so the search had become more difficult.

"My stomach is killing me. I didn't have breakfast" I told Seamus who was walking a bit ahead of me.

"Oh, that's right" He stopped and frowned after hearing my words.

The reason was that there were no restaurants in the slums. Illegal ones maybe but there definitely wasn't anywhere safe to eat. This was information he had told me before when he was briefing me on lots of laws and regulations in Termina.

"I don't want us to stop our search, what if we miss him?" Seamus said not keen on the idea. I couldn't eat anywhere without him paying as I didn't have any identity. All of my merits were none existent now.

Most of the people in the slums are also regular people so they wouldn't accept mutational crystals. All in all, Seamus needs to pay for my food.

"We will just keep a lookout and eat in the area. We can stop… over there!" I told him while pointing at a dilapidated building. Eh, no wait that was all of the buildings here. What mattered was the food drawn on its walls via scratch marks. It indicated a restaurant.

"I don't know… I don't have good memories of that place…" Seamus shuddered as he said so. It made me reconsider my decision, I had no choice but to reel in my hand and wallow in disappointment.

That was when I caught sight of a figure in the shadows. My gaze sharpened as I scrutinized the distant figure. Their dirtied white lab coat betrayed their efforts to hide in the nearby alley. I instantly knew this was our target, Prof. Requiem!

He must have been so preoccupied with escaping that he failed to register the fact that he stood out like a sore thumb with a coat on.

The doctor ran across the street in an attempt to hide in another part of the alley. The people around the place for some reason failed to notice him as he did so. Was that the reason why he didn't realize to remove his coat?

"There's the professor" I told Seamus sharply.

"Huh?" Seamus said as he glanced towards the direction I was looking.

He paused for a second dazed before quickly regaining his reasoning.

"Damn let's go!" He loudly told me. The streets were fairly bustling so the professor luckily took no notice.

We both sneakily yet rapidly made our way towards the alley he ran towards. If we ran directly not only would the professor notice us, but so would everyone else! They might compete with us for the bounty if that were to happen.

We turned the corner. It took us a second to register the Professor who was already across the next street into a separate alley. His presence was indeed thin!