The puzzle pieces of the zoonotic spillover—the jump from animal to human host—snapped into place with the cold, satisfying clarity of a perfect diagnosis. Tomas, the young boy, while diligently stacking the wood, must have disturbed the creature. In its panic, it had scratched or bitten him. It would have been a minor wound, perhaps not even noticed. But in that fleeting, fatal moment of contact, the viral army had been transferred from its dormant host into the warm, welcoming, and utterly unprepared environment of the boy’s human system. Inside Tomas, free from the bat's natural immunities that kept it in check, the virus had awakened. It had mutated, its replication sequence kicking into overdrive. It adapted to its new host with terrifying speed, becoming the hyper-aggressive, airborne killer that was now consuming Oakhaven. The diagnosis was complete. The method of transmission was confirmed. A natural, if statistically improbable and deeply tragic, disaster. He could report this, and the mystery would be solved. They could focus on containment and finding an antidote based on the bat's own antibodies. It was a clean, logical conclusion. But the general in him, the man forged in a lifetime of paranoia and the cold calculus of war, was not satisfied. There was one more detail, a loose thread that his analytical mind couldn't let go of. The sheer, perfect efficiency of the mutated virus still felt… unnatural. Natural mutations were messy, chaotic, and often inefficient. This was elegant. This was a scalpel. He pushed his perception deeper, a feat of immense concentration that made his head ache. He began to analyze the very genetic structure of the virus itself, placing the dormant version from the bat and the mutated version he had scanned from the dead healer side-by-side in the laboratory of his mind. He began to compare their code, line by line. And that’s when he saw it. The thing that turned his blood to ice. The differences between the two strains were not just the random, chaotic errors of a natural mutation. There were subtle, elegant, and terrifyingly deliberate modifications etched into the virus’s core programming. A protein spike on the virus’s outer shell had been artificially enhanced, its shape subtly altered to achieve a perfect, high-affinity bond with human ACE2 receptor cells. Its replication sequence contained a tiny, synthetic marker, a biological signature that was as out of place in a natural virus as a steel gear in a flower. It was an artist’s signature on a weapon of mass destruction. A wave of cold, absolute fury washed over Lloyd, so intense it was a physical sensation, a burning pressure behind his eyes. He felt a low growl rumble in his own chest. This wasn't an accident. This wasn't a tragedy. This was murder. This was an act of war. Someone had engineered this plague. Someone with a level of bio-alchemical knowledge that was centuries ahead of this world had taken a dormant, relatively harmless animal virus, and in a secret, unholy laboratory, they had refined it. They had perfected it. They had turned it into a weapon of mass destruction with a near-perfect transmission vector and a terrifyingly high mortality rate. They had loaded this perfected weapon into a biological missile in the form of this bat and had deliberately, with cold, calculated intent, fired it into the heart of this innocent, unsuspecting village. The entire context of his mission shifted with the force of a seismic event. He was no longer a doctor fighting a disease. He was a soldier, a hunter, standing at the scene of a bioterrorist attack. The questions were no longer medical; they were strategic, geopolitical. Who had this level of scientific and magical knowledge? What was their motive? Was Oakhaven the intended target, or was it a test site, a gruesome field trial for a weapon destined for a larger stage—the capital, the army, the Arch Duke himself? Was this the work of a rival house, the long arm of the Altamiran kingdom, or something else entirely, something darker and more insidious? The weight of this new reality was a crushing, suffocating thing. He could not reveal this truth. He couldn't walk back into that command tent and announce that the plague was an engineered weapon. To do so would be to ignite a panic that would dwarf the fear of the blight itself. It would shatter the duchy’s morale, incite a witch hunt, and perhaps even trigger a premature, disastrous war based on suspicion alone. He was utterly, completely alone with this terrible, world-changing knowledge. He carefully, reverently, wrapped the desiccated bat in a piece of clean oilcloth from his medical kit. It was no longer just a biological sample. It was Exhibit A, a piece of evidence for a crime so monstrous that no one else in this world even knew it had been committed. His face, hidden behind the impassive, bird-like leather of his mask, was a cold, hard mask of absolute resolve. He would play the part of the humble, brilliant healer. He would find a "natural" cure for this "natural" plague, using the antibodies he would "discover" in the bat’s blood. He would be the hero Oakhaven needed. But in the silent, hidden, and now-burning corners of his soul, the hunt had begun. The general had been given a new, singular mission. He would find the architect of this horror. He would find the monster who had signed their work on the very soul of a virus. And he would introduce them to a form of justice that was as cold, as precise, and as absolute as the weapon they had just unleashed upon his people. The war had been declared, and only he had heard the trumpet call. The general’s mind, now fully engaged, ruthlessly overrode the immediate impulse to return to the quarantine camp and begin the charade. A single infected bat, found by chance in a specific woodpile, felt too neat, too localized for a weapon of this magnitude. It was the point of contact, yes. The bullet that had killed the first victim. But an airborne virus this aggressive, this efficient, suggested a wider, more concentrated source of contamination. A good commander never trusts his first report from the field, even if he wrote it himself. He needed to confirm the full scope of the initial deployment before drawing any final conclusions. The single bat was a clue, not the whole story. He stood, the oilcloth-wrapped evidence a cold, hard lump in his satchel. Instead of heading back toward the distant camp, he began to walk toward the center of the village, his mind a cold, calculating machine processing probabilities and potential vectors. He needed a larger, more common point of contamination, a location that could have exposed a significant portion of the population simultaneously and created the explosive outbreak he was witnessing. The communal water source? Possible, but less likely for an airborne pathogen. The grain stores? Unlikely to harbor bats. The village longhouse, where they held their gatherings? A possibility. He expanded the field of his [All-Seeing Eye], turning his perception from a high-powered microscope into a wide-area, multi-spectrum sensor array. The gray, desolate world of Oakhaven dissolved into a shimmering, ethereal schematic of energy and matter. He began a systematic sweep of the village, his gaze passing over the cottages and through the very earth beneath his feet. He was filtering out the background noise of rock, wood, and the fading, flickering life signatures of the sick and dying. He was hunting for a specific anomaly, a concentrated, resonant echo of the unique, malignant energy signature he now knew belonged to the engineered virus. He scanned the village’s main well, the one used for their daily water. It was clean, its heavy stone cover and solid construction having protected it. The food stores in the central longhouse were likewise uncontaminated. His scan continued, a silent, invisible sweep of divine reconnaissance, a god’s-eye view of a tragedy. He felt like a drone flying over a silent battlefield, searching for the enemy’s hidden command bunker. And then he found it. Get full chapters from 𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹•𝑓𝑖𝑟𝑒•𝙣𝙚𝙩 Near the dilapidated, weed-choked village square stood an old, forgotten well. Its stone lip was crumbling, its wooden bucket-and-winch mechanism long since rotted away to nothing. It was a relic, a scar from a previous, poorer generation of the village, abandoned when the new, deeper well was dug. It was a place no one would ever look. But from its dark, deep, and open maw, his [All-Seeing Eye] detected a faint but undeniable concentration of the viral signature. It was a whisper of the same malevolent energy he had found in the bat, but it was a chorus, not a solo. It was a weak signal, but it was a clear and definite source. This was the epicenter. He approached the abandoned well, a sense of cold, professional dread growing with every step. The air around it was colder, the oppressive silence of the village somehow deeper, more profound here. He peered over the crumbling stone edge into the absolute blackness. A faint, foul, musky odor rose from the depths, the smell of rot and something else, something cloying and sweet and utterly alien. Using his power, he pierced the darkness, his perception plunging down the thirty-foot stone shaft.