CHAPTER 39: ACCIDENTS

At first, the world laughed.

The chatter on the networks was light, dismissive, people tossing theories across message boards with the casual cruelty of those who had never seen the dark up close.

"Urban legends," they scoffed.

"Another conspiracy theory."

But within weeks, the tone changed.

The laughter died when the attacks began.

By February, five regions were under emergency alert. Entire villages near forest boundaries were evacuated under the pretense of safety protocols. The government claimed it was a rabies outbreak, wild animals gone feral, a crisis to be managed and contained.

But the footage that leaked online told another story. Creatures walking upright, their limbs grotesquely human, eyes burning with a predatory awareness that no animal should possess. People whispered again, but not with mockery this time, with fear.

Ahce watched it all unfold from the isolation of her study. The glow of her monitors painted her face in cold, flickering light as streams of chaos played out before her. Panicked citizens rushing through smoke-choked streets, military blockades sealing entire towns, and officials delivering statements so carefully worded they could have been written by algorithms.

On one broadcast, experts debated the origin of a supposed "viral mutation." On another, a defecting researcher claimed it was a government bioweapon gone rogue. Ahce, however, needed no speculation.

The intercepted data sprawled across her console told her the truth. Every attack site aligned near decommissioned Division facilities, those same laboratories her husband’s team had once investigated before vanishing.

Coincidence?

Impossible.

When she decrypted the restricted archives of Zeiren’s system, the map unfolded before her like a diseased organism, coordinates glowing, connecting, and forming a pattern.

A line of outbreaks traced itself across the continent, veins spreading from a single, malignant heart. The epicenter pulsed red, City E7. From there, the infection branched toward City D and City L, the route Richard had taken before he disappeared.

Her chest tightened until she could scarcely breathe. If these monstrosities were remnants of that accursed experiment, if they were failed subjects, then this was only the beginning.

"Miss Nine," came a trembling voice behind her.

Ahce turned slightly, meeting Shina’s reflection in the glass wall. The younger woman’s face was pale, her tablet shaking in her hands.

"The headquarters requests your presence," she said quietly. "They think the situation may escalate into a nationwide emergency."

Ahce powered down the monitors one by one, the room dimming to the faint hum of machines. When she finally stood, her composure was unyielding, carved from something colder than fear.

"Tell them I already know," she said. "And tell them I’m going to the source myself."

Shina hesitated. "Alone?"

Ahce’s gaze slid to the window where the city lights flickered like dying stars.

"Not alone," she murmured. "With every trace of information we’ve gathered on the Tainted Blood Project. This time, I’m going to drag the truth out of its grave."

Deep down, she knew this wasn’t random violence. It was a message. A warning written in blood and terror. And somewhere in that darkness, the man she had once called her husband might still be alive, or worse, one of the monsters the world now feared.

Then came the deaths.

They did not trickle in, they poured.

At first, the incidents were isolated. A farmer mauled on the outskirts. A group of travelers was torn apart near a riverbank. Then the numbers surged, climbing like a fever chart. Whole villages emptied overnight. Marketplaces turned into ghost squares. People lit bonfires in the streets, watching through sleepless nights as shadows prowled beyond the light.

Hospitals overflowed. Morgues failed to keep count. Mass graves were dug on the outskirts of every city. The language of the crisis evolved, first "unusual animal attacks," then "national emergency," and finally something bureaucratic, heartless.

Mitigation, containment, and population optimization.

Ahce read through the policy drafts that circulated through restricted channels, documents prepared long before the crisis began. Behind the sterile technical jargon and ecological projections lay an unthinkable calculus: reduce population, ease resource strain, stabilize governance.

They called it sustainability. She called it slaughter.

Charts spoke of food security and climate thresholds, of "adaptive control strategies." But beneath the data was a single, horrifying truth, this was no accident. The outbreaks were designed. Engineered epidemics to justify the erasure of the "expendable." The Tainted Blood Project was not a mistake. It was an execution dressed in the language of progress.

The revelation hollowed her. Nights turned sleepless, days consumed by digital trails, procurement logs, financial transfers, coded memos. She found evidence of shell corporations funneling funds into front laboratories, of research contracts rebranded as "biocontrol studies." The pieces fit together too neatly to be a coincidence.

The architects of this horror weren’t hidden in shadows. They sat in offices, wore suits, and lectured about global stability. They had allies in every sphere, the industry, academia, and even the military. Some nations quietly applauded the idea of a "reset," a world easier to police, easier to feed, easier to rule.

Ahce’s public life, the speeches, the bookstores, the foundation dinners, was nothing but camouflage. Her real power lived in encrypted networks, black pipelines that pulsed beneath the global web. With Zeiren’s system and the connections she had cultivated over the years, she began her counterstrike.

She gathered proof. Laboratory reports from E7. Surveillance footage. Transaction ledgers. Confiscated memos. Every piece of evidence was duplicated, encrypted, and sent to watchdogs, journalists, and rogue intelligence agents who still believed in truth.

She did not release the files to the public. That would have been suicide. Instead, she built a network, a web that could act even if she were silenced.

At home, her compound evolved into a fortress. The greenhouses became sanctuaries stocked with biofilters and emergency rations. Her autonomous sentries learned evacuation routes by heart. Medical bays were refitted to treat chemical exposure and infection.

She created safe houses across borders, shelters disguised as agricultural centers. She offered asylum to defectors, scientists, and officers who wanted out. The epidemiologists she hired under false contracts believed they were developing food resilience programs; in truth, they were building early detection systems for the next wave.

But what kept her awake was not logistics, it was morality.

The "reset" doctrine thrived on secrecy and plausible deniability. Her mission was to strip that away, to expose the horror until the world could no longer look away. To force justice where law had rotted.

Every leak she made shifted the narrative. Every revelation was met with new disinformation, new laws, new silences. The faction known as Black Cross, the same shadow network that had once seized the E7 site, worked tirelessly to erase the traces she uncovered. It wasn’t a battle of armies, but of patience and persistence, of truth against machinery.

And then, just when exhaustion had dulled her edges, her console flickered.

A dead channel came alive for the first time in years.

The message was short. A corrupted data packet, no headers, no sender signature. Just a fragment of audio and a string of coordinates.

The voice that broke through the static was ragged, low, unmistakably human.

"Boss. It’s me..."

Her breath caught. Her hands trembled so hard she nearly dropped the device.

The coordinates pointed to the borderlands between City D and E7, right along the scar where the first outbreaks began.

It could have been a trap. A simulation. A recording meant to lure her in. But Ahce didn’t care. Because no matter how faint, no matter how impossible, she knew that voice.

It was his.