The inside of the Nordak bank is a sight to behold. They walk their way up a dark, narrow corridor surrounded by steel panes and louvered vents. After what felt like miles, they step into an incredibly large space with fluorescent lights and bright white walls. The contrast from dark to bright is so jarring that it takes Noah half a minute to adjust, momentarily blocking his eyes.

When his vision stops blurring, he notices that the walls are made of ice. They’re in a mansion-sized refrigerator – a quite beautiful one, too, with the snow that accumulates on the bottom and the ceiling lights that reflect crystals in every corner of the dome.

“Amazing,” Walker breathes out. “I’ve seen the blueprints but visiting the cryobank in person is surreal. The architecture of it is both minimal and convenient. Past this entrance dome are corridors that lead to tens of different vault rooms. The main chamber is where laboratory personnel reside. Perhaps we can find them on break right now. The embryotic rooms are to the left, where they’re preserved in liquid-nitrogen tanks. The middle vaults are where DNA samples are stored and neatly filed. The experimental room is—"

“Save your breath, buddy,” Hannes interrupts his monologue. “Just tell us where to go to collect the… ah, whatever it was that they want us to bring back. What’s with our terrible luck… Every single gatherer has died in this expedition and now we’re forced with quadruple the workload.”

“Oh yes, the specimens are in the rightmost chamber. Please do follow me.”

Noah hadn’t signed up to be in this tour, but he welcomes it regardless. Truth be told, the things he’d wanted to find in here are relatively specific and obscure. He wouldn’t even be here if he hadn’t been told, very sharply, that his body might just give up on him if he keeps inhaling pills like cocaine, upping his dosage every time he feels his heat near.

He only needs suppressants, for heaven’s sake, and not the kind that the average omega intakes. They’re ineffective on him so what better method than to break into a cryobank, the largest reserve of rare reproductive material, to find a single pill, needle, or something that’d finally stop giving him dangerous heart palpitations and splitting headaches that will actually kill him sooner than later?

It really is the most feasible plan, someone had told him, because not only are suppressants rare and not often in production (omegas are only kept and expected to bear children, after all), Noah himself is a special case.

Noah sighs and thinks that if this doesn’t go as expected, he’d really have to conduct blind experiments on himself.

“What’s wrong?” Yang Rong whispers to him, some amusement brimming in his eyes. “Not a visually appealing tourist destination?”

Then there’s the esteemed colonel, who’s highly suspicious of him despite Noah’s very trivial, personal reason of wanting to go to the gene bank.

“Not up to standards,” he replies anyway.

The sheer amount of material in this bank can give him a headache. While the researcher, Orlando Walker, goes rambling about how tidy the area is, Noah’s eyes are flickering to all the unorganized shelves and unlabeled jars. They pass through vials of clear liquids, blood and other substances. Even with how quickly he can skim through and filter the motley of glycerol, liquid nitrogen, dietary supplements and every mineral in existence, it’s incredibly straining.

There’s a strange buzzing noise too, extremely faint, but perhaps it comes from an electrical short. Electromagnetic interference is very common even in sealed-off areas like these.

Noah’s brows tighten when they reach a section with crates of frozen spermatozoa in tiny vials. He’s subconsciously uncomfortable and even more so when he sees cryopreserved embryos, sealed tightly in ten-liter opaque tanks. There are so many of them, enough to reach tens of thousands, all packed in a gargantuan laboratory.

“Please allow me a moment,” Walker says as he unloads his cargo bag on the floor with a heavy grunt. “I would be grateful if I had some assistance.”

The buzzing gets louder. Nobody seems to hear it except Noah, and he frowns as he turns to identify the source. Colonel Yang trails behind the whole group, alert and active, yet he’s too far to notice anything off. It’s not the ceiling lights – Noah had filtered them out. It’s not the low hums coming from the adjacent room nor the autoclaves, the hissing and clanking, small whispers from the personnel in another chamber. He’s also certain he doesn’t have tinnitus.

“So slow,” Hannes tsks and crouches low to help Walker with his luggage.

Noah identifies the sound as soon as the sergeant unzips the bag. Yang Rong too, immediately pushes the closest person, Li Jiayun, toward the entrance door, and tells the rest of his men to run.

“Get the staff to evacuate the premises immediately.” The colonel rushes out orders as he reaches inside his pockets and grabs a box of matchsticks. “Yoo Seok, Jae, Hannes, secure the exit routes, take as many materials as you can carry, and get the hell out of here. We are burning this place down.”

“Fuck!” Hannes steps back as a horrific flock of insects fly out of the small zipper opening, accumulating in massive numbers. Each of them is no bigger than an inch, but in only a second, they have clumped into ugly blobs of black and red. There are thousands of them and they’re still multiplying in a speed visible to the naked eye.

The larvae stick onto the cargo bag, the viscous liquids oozing from the seams, the stitching, every opening they could find. It is now that the bag bulges out even more – there is a whole swarm of them inside and they will be breaking free maybe in a minute, two minutes, or even two seconds.

The researcher screams as he scrambles away first, the horror apparent in his ashen face. “The ringlets! They’ve entered the bag a-and… the gene bank! W-What will happen to the gene bank, w—”

“What is going on?!” A young-looking female dressed in a standard white lab coat comes rushing out frantically, still unaware of the situation. She sees the researcher scrambling for his life, waving away the hundreds of bugs flying toward him, screaming and yelling incoherently. The young woman is in utter shock. “Dr. Walker, o-oh my God—”

The mutated Nymphidae are attracted to the blood on his jacket. Walker is wearing all-white as well, a sure target for standing out so brightly among a clutter of black-robed soldiers. He is devoured alive messily, the bugs first biting the exposed areas of his skin then drilling themselves deep inside his eyes and nose. They’re burrowing themselves inside his orifices, treating the host body as a breeding ground.

The researcher’s harrowing screams are drowned by the deluge of insects. There isn’t a single spot uncovered on his body – the blood-colored butterflies seem to expand more and more, their wings growing larger and deadlier. When they fly off to seek for more prey, they leave behind patches of semi-transparent, pink larvae that blend unnoticeably on human skin.

It’s fortunate that the body is still being swarmed by more – Noah doesn’t want to see such a nauseating carcass, still squirming in post-mortem, sucked dry of blood and punctured full of bites and holes. It’s also fortunate he isn’t frozen in disgust or fear, else he’d end up collapsed on the ground like the female staff, shaking and vomiting her guts out.

He acts just as quickly as the First Unit soldiers, but he isn’t as valiant to stay. He has no obligation to stall and act as bait, something Colonel Yang is doing as he lights up fires to burn and attract the ringlets his way. Noah isn’t heroic but he isn’t a downright jackass either, so he quickly grabs a gallon of acetone and doses the shelves, the floors, everything in the near vicinity.

“Colonel Yang,” he says breathlessly, “fire.”

Noah rather appreciates their tacit understanding. The colonel doesn’t so much blink as he tosses a match into the pool of liquid. Their surroundings immediately explode in flames and Noah bolts the opposite direction, wasting zero time as he pulls the female researcher up by her arm.

“Where is the drug room?” He doesn’t ask, he demands impatiently. “Hurry up and tell me.”

“R-Right hallway…” she gasps out fearfully, her eyes still trained on the insects heading their direction.

The Nymphidae are smothered by the heat but there is no way to contain them all, not when they’re still reproducing and flying off into other parts of the bank. Tens of thousands of precious genetic materials have already been lost inside the embryotic room and the casualty will be even more enormous once the inner chambers are breached.

On the other side of the room, the other section cut off by the flames, the First Unit soldiers are split up and running through the other corridors, evacuating the staff and trying to bag as many substances as they can carry. The entire area is hectic of screams, wails, the occasional orders being barked out. The blare of the fire alarms only makes it more dizzying. Someone yells to turn off the sprinklers but his voice is cut off by a pained cry.

Noah can no longer hear the insects’ buzzing in the pandemonium and his senses are being driven to overload. The crashing of more ethanol bottles and beakers on the floor, the intense yells, the red orange, sometimes blue chemical fires that cloud his eyes, the rotten stench of bugs and also of human cadavers being burned.

He pulls the female scientist along roughly – Noah may apologize later, but he’s in a hurry and her muffled crying is not helping the situation. They turn the corner over and he closes the door immediately behind them, temporarily shielding them from the heat. The icy walls are thawing, and the ceilings are dripping water above them. It’s getting more perilous by the second.

Noah releases his grip on her forearm and then settles her against a large, steel shelf. She leans back shakily but tears are brimming under her eyeline, a sign she’s inhaled and been exposed to too much smoke. She might also be having a panic attack. He leans closer and shakes her back to her senses – he’s not great at comforting, but again, they’re both dangerously close to death. The fire rumbles on behind them and the smoke billows underneath the door.

“I need suppressants,” he says quickly. “Where are the medications for omegas?”

“Bottom… b-bottom corner,” she coughs hoarsely. “There is a label on—”

Noah doesn’t wait for her to finish before rummaging through the shelf and stuffing dozens of tablets and gelatin capsule bottles into his – Colonel Yang’s – backpack. He bombards her with the next question instantly.

“The government has been working on inhibitors for anomalies – where are they? Working prototypes are fine. I’d need ones with a higher active ingredient.”

The young woman regains some of her coherency, looks to him questioningly, and stumbles, “Your attire… you aren’t from the force. Who are—"

“There is no time.” He feels the air thinning out. The only reason why they’d stayed alive for so long was the condensation from the ice-coated building. The water vapors still cannot stop a raging chemical fire. “Work with me here.”

“They’re not in this room.” She covers her nose and mouth, desperately trying to not inhale any more fumes. “It’s in the storage behind the door where we came from. By now, it may have already…”

“One more thing,” Noah says before he heads back out the door. The knob is scorching hot now – he needs to be quick and ready. “How about blood samples?”

She shakes her head. “The middle vault is burned down entirely.”

“Thank you.” He examines her frazzled state and decides to add, for her reassurance in case she’d forgotten, “There is an exit directly straight from here.”