Chapter 166: Elias' Breakthrough

Chapter 166: Elias' Breakthrough

Elias descended the narrow stone stairs that led deep beneath the fortress. The air grew colder and thicker with every step. There were lamps on the walls, powered by an old generator at the pack warehouse.

The smell of chemicals stung Elias' nostrils but he barely paid attention to them as it wasn't the first time and he had gotten used to the smell.

He pushed the heavy iron door to the main laboratory open. Inside, the room was wide, but had a low ceiling. There were long tables at every corner of the room, covered with glass tubes, glowing vials, tools and stacks of books.

In the center of the room was a large cage, inside it was a young werewolf and a sleeping human girl. The wolf was one of the rogues, a new member that had run away from his pack.

He was barely twenty, and was wearing torn clothes from the night they forced him from his camp and dragged him here.

His exhausted eyes remained sharp, despite the danger he was in, and the chains around his hands rattled every time he moved.

Elias stared at the young boy for a moment then he walked straight to his personal table at the far end of the lab.

Spread across it were a dozen maps displaying the closest human towns and packs, Cain's included and Marcus's home town, where the Valiant Fleet came from.

There were notes on the right all in his handwriting, rough, hurried and some neat, and dozens of photographs of Lena, mostly from before she met Cain.

The other showed her running in her armour, during the time the Crawlers were very active, and others were when she was with Cain

Those pictures were nearly impossible to gather considering how hard and expensive it was to get a perfect camera from across the sea.

He stared at the latest one the longest and it was from the time she returned with the other pack members to the pack.

She looked tired, but he could still see that stubborn determination in her eyes. Just looking at it made him smile.

Taking his eyes away from the picture, he picked up a small notebook and flipped through the pages. His latest tests that had failed were recorded.

The second generation crawlers he created were still unstable and the fact he was trying to use rogues was also dangerous because the human crawlers were already unpredictable and uncontrollable, imagining the threat the Rogue type crawlers would pose only made him reconsider.

However, another downside which he had not told anyone, not even Johan about was the fact the crawlers were extremely weak in the day.

And the mistake he made last time to increase their energy during day time ended up horribly.

The fifteen regular type crawlers he sent out with a team of rogues lost their minds and attacked one another. Which resulted in a clean wipe of the entire group, thanks to Cain's soldiers and he had to clean up the mess and gather samples.

He slammed the book down as the memory played freshly in his mind. “There had to be a way to perfect the transformation and make them obey."

The young werewolf that had been silent for a while finally scoffed. "A mere power hungry human like you can never control those things. Especially when not even the gifted wolves in our pack and witches can't.”

Elias turned slowly, his eyes glowing faintly in the dimmed space. “Witches no longer exist though.”

The young wolf nodded in agreement. "Yes, but the last one made it clear to us that no one can tame those things. All we have to do is wait for the Silver Crescentmoon and their halfbreed to handle it.”

Elias tilted his head, "You know about the half-breed too?”

The boy nodded, smiling proudly. “All fifteen packs residing on this land knows about her,” he paused. “Once they are ready they will destroy those things before you even think about controlling us."

“You think you’re still one of them?” Elias stepped closer to the bars. “If you leave your pack and move with the rogues you're nothing but an abandoned pup waiting for that ugly transformation the rogues take on.”

The boy growled and lunged, but the chains snapped him back. “Shut up! You know nothing about me."

Elias smiled. He reached through the bars, not close enough to be grabbed and pressed two fingers to the werewolf’s forehead. A faint pulse of energy flowed from his hand and the boy froze. His eyes rolled back into his skull for a second before he slumped to the ground.

Elias pulled his hand away. “Be grateful that's the limit of what I can learn about magic.”

He walked back to his table and opened one of the thack books laying there. It was an old record of his old failed experiments, notes from when he first tried to copy the werewolf's ability to shirt using human subjects.

He knew humans possessed the rare gift to assimilate and adapt, and as such he believed they could learn what other races could do, and as such ensure they…himself, remained above the other races.

With the witches he proved that he could learn magic, but..that had a limit.

And when he tried with the werewolves it was too dangerous and ended up killing the humans, but out of that experiment gave birth to the idea of creating crawlers.

However, that idea belonged to his assistant, who was still nowhere to be found after he sent her to spy on Lena.

Now…

He read one line again, “Substance X7 weakens the lycanthrope immune response within 72 hours and weakens their healing abilities.” He moved to the next line. “However with substance Y7, the human subject remains in a partial shift state, retaining all sense of reasoning and self control, but the subject lacks ability to make decisions and as such develops the baby duck syndrome.”

Elias frowned at the last line, hating the fact what was written there was by him. He scoffed, but then reread the line again.

A thought suddenly came to him.

If he took a human, any human, forced the first stage of the werewolf change, the painful bone expansion and the hunger, then injected the Crawler serum within the first three days… the two creatures might bind together.

The human body, still soft, yet always adapting, could accept both and the result, a permanent Crawler-wolf hybrid.

Stronger, faster and most important obedient to the person they consider the ‘mamaduck’.