Chapter 427: Clean Cut

Helena’s body did the gesture well enough for them to understand. The gesture was convincing enough reason to pass, that it was just because Helena wasn’t well.

But it was a gesture the real Helena would never do.

So, Chronos did not buy a single bit of it. The corners of his smile hadn’t moved, but the smile itself had cooled a full ten degrees.

His gaze swept the room once, twice.

Five piles, perfect for the five people who could possibly take turns fighting the zergs outside.

And Helena, who was soaking hard in sweat and pale in complexion.

Helena, who was clearly looking sick right now, took out the heavy equipment from the heavy storage and piled them up quickly in batches.

You’re telling him that Helena did all of it alone, and wearing a full battle suit?

That’s absurd.

"Helena," He said lightly, trying to sound as concerned as possible.

"If you’re that unwell, you should have climbed into one of the medical pods here. Surely, you’ve seen one of them here. If not, it’s probably in the room next door. Why push yourself?"

His head tipped, just a little.

"Why pile the weapons?"

Keres’s heart rate started to spike. He tried to open Helena’s mouth to answer.

However, despite the desperate attempt, nothing had happened.

After one terrible second, Keres finally understood what was happening. He wasn’t just losing control of one part of the body.

He was completely losing control of this body, Helena’s body.

But Keres couldn’t feel that Helena was waking up either to do all of this.

What he could feel, though, was his own shrunken body. It was deeply hidden, inside Helena’s secondary gland. But, somehow, he could feel it moving towards Helena’s collarbone.

The alarm in both Chronos and Grayson’s bodies started ringing nonstop.

Grayson was confused because they couldn’t see any Zerg insight.

Chronos, on the other hand, felt a foreboding feeling.

Keres, feeling humiliated as he lost completely control of the body and was sucked away from the secondary gland towards the collarbone, now felt someone deliberately dragging him away to a certain place.

He had planned contingencies for this problem, but none of them seemed to work. When he had first taken over Helena’s tattered, wrecked body, it would’ve taken Helena months to recover.

After replacing Helena’s medical fluids with Zerg blood, she healed her faster than ever. It was like her flesh, skin, and bones were knitted by magic.

Those who didn’t know didn’t even question how it happened, and Keres managed to adapt to everyday life just like Helena would do.

Those who knew didn’t live to see another day.

Keres even took this contingency plan to another level.

He made it so that if anyone managed to discover him and tried to pull him away from Helena forcibly, like the extraction liquid that the military had, Helena would instantly convert into a zerg hybrid.

Without Keres to control her, she would’ve lost her mind and killed everyone on sight until she naturally died.

But then it would be enough for Keres to ride out, cut Helena’s head off, and escape to Ethan to gain another host or regain his real body.

Because Keres was fundamentally different from those low-level soldiers who died.

Also, the fact that those soldiers didn’t even manage to turn their liquid form into their shrunken bodies on their hosts before dying.

Keres, even though he lost control of the body, could still control the zerg blood inside the body.

He tried to reach out for the zerg blood.

But he couldn’t feel it.

He frantically tried to find it, manually tried to control it. But when he touched the familiar green zerg blood, there was nothing.

He couldn’t feel a thing.

How was that possible?

He was a Zerg, a pure-blood high-class soldier, a female Zerg.

This was impossible.

Then, as he spent time next to the zerg blood that was flowing and mixed amongst the bloodstream, Keres noticed something.

Helena’s body was actively killing, neutralizing, and curing the zerg blood with her blood.

Making her bloodstream clean or at least enough that Keres wouldn’t be able to find a way to control her body anymore.

No.

No no no no—

"Helena."

Grayson called out again; he probably felt Helena losing her grip. The hand on her arm was firm, not letting go.

The alarms were still ringing nonstop.

Chronos even took it out of his device and started testing if it was really reacting to Helena.

Keres felt his own consciousness fading.

It was impossible in his mind, but it was actually happening.

He could now feel that he was being squeezed out of her left shoulder like toothpaste out of a tube.

Keres’s body was compressed into his grasshopper body, wriggling, struggling.

Then he found himself down from Helena’s shoulder joints into Helena’s biceps. He was frantically trying to find his way out before Helena’s body disintegrated him from the inside.

However, his attempts made Helena’s left hand twitch uncontrollably.

Chronos and Grayson were startled. They were about to check on the left hand when Helena’s right hand, the one Grayson was holding, firmly grasped Grayson’s elbow.

She grasped it so hard that her fingernails were practically digging into Grayson’s skin.

Helena’s eyes snapped open; they were bloodshot, exhausted, but one hundred percent Helena’s eyes.

"Cut."

Her teeth were chattering, which made the word come out in pieces.

"My. Left. Arm. NOW."

Without even waiting for Grayson to say anything, Chronos was already moving.

He did not ask.

He did not hesitate.

He just did what was asked of him.

As soon as Helena said now.

His hand immediately grabbed the closest weapon beside him. It was a laser blade that was on the top of the pile.

Chronos raised it into the air in one single, swift arc. He brought it down to make a clean cut from the shoulder joint.

CHACK!

SPLURT!

URGGHH!

Although it was cut clean, the laser blade should’ve also instantly closed the wound with its burning properties, but the blood still splattered everywhere.

Helena’s head snapped back, groaning as her body tried to process the pain in the nerves. Her mouth opened, soundless as her brain processed the fact that her body was now missing an arm.

With the red blood still flowing out from most of the nerve vessels that weren’t burned or sealed, a darker liquid was flowing with it.

It was green.

Too thick, slimy, and bright to be that of humans.

The detached arm, lying on the floor, was even worse. It was not bleeding human red at all.

Its severed end pulsed sluggishly with viscous jade-green blood. The stuff bubbling up against the cauterized flesh.

"Zerg," Grayson said flatly

"I know," Helena rasped, extremely pale in complexion. Her chest was heaving. "I know, I know, I know—"

She clenched the stump at her shoulder with her remaining hand and visibly concentrated. She was doing something with her pheromones and spiritual power.

It was something Chronos had only ever seen Helena do in training when she wanted to demonstrate a technique to him. For example, how to use her spiritual power to control her alpha pheromones.

This time, she was using a mix of her alpha pheromones and spiritual power to make a control flush. It would force the white blood cells to quickly recognize their enemies inside her body.

After all, the most important thing in the ABO body was the secondary gland. It was so important that it would ignore everything else in the body just to help the secondary gland form properly during the period of differentiation.

However, once it was fully formed, the secondary gland had its own mechanism that white blood cells couldn’t just arbitrarily check.

Hence, the emergence of this problem, the Zerg exploited this gap and hid in it.

But no one knew it, not even right now.

Now, by controlling the circulation of the pheromones using the spiritual power, the white blood cells would recognize that there was a problem and do their work.

Helena was sweating hard as she did this, but it was necessary to flush out any remaining green blood in her blood vessels. It was to prevent mutation and to survive.

She was sweating with green slimy substance and gushing out black, red, and green blood in her nerves.

"Extraction," Helena said through gritted teeth.

Because she desperately needs a little help from the extraction liquid. She couldn’t continue with sheer will and technique only.

"Yes," Chronos said, digging through his pocket. "Hold still."

He had stuff three of them earlier when he met Colonel Vane halfway through the corridor.

"I’m holding," Grayson said

Chronos pressed the ampoule1 to the side of her neck. He cracked the seal with his thumb, and the auto-injector discharged with a quiet hiss.

The extraction formula went in cold. Helena’s shoulders shuddered as it hit her nerves and began its work.

"Easy," Chronos murmured. "Easy, Easy."

"Don’t you easy me, you little shit," Helena growled through her teeth.

a small, hermetically sealed glass vial containing a single dose of liquid