"Kain my boy, I am sorry that you ended up like this due to an ipetent supervisor like me."


    Kain looked up weakly from the bed through his blurred vision at his research supervisor who was covered head to toe in a hazmat suit. This summer "job" was really supposed to be more like a reward for Kain who had lost his parents.


    An all-expenses paid trip to another country while working under a prestigious professor, which would look great on future job applications.


    However, Kain knew that there was no hope of him ever leaving this country. If even his professor, Dr. ckwell, couldn''t figure out what exactly this thing was, then there was truly no hope for him.


    What''s even more strange is that up until this point they couldn''t even get a hint of if the perpetrator was a bacteria, virus, or something else.


    "Ah…" Kain tried to offer some words offort to the professor, but was too weak for more than a faint gasp to escape his lips. The bandaged hand he raised was also promptly lowered since he realized that seeing Kain with only 3 fingers on his hand would likely only make him feel worse.


    Thankfully, Dr. ckwell didn''t seem toe here to receive words offort. He seemed to just want to get some words off of his chest and rify some of his jumbled thoughts by saying them aloud to a student he was close to.


    "We figured out that patient zero was in an expedition group studying a recently found temple in the Amazon Rainforest. Previously, there was no indication of any advanced ancient civilization like the Mayans, Aztecs, or Incas having expanded into Brazil, so they were extremely excited.


    The architecture was also slightly different from temples previously found, so they had thought that maybe they''d identified the remains of apletely unidentified civilization."


    "This belief was further bolstered by the fact that after entering the temple, the carvings seemed to be in worship of some kind of god of death whose image had never been seen before."


    "Sigh. However, everyone in that team is now dead. It''s possible that the so-called ''God of Death'' is really some kind of devastating disease that they locked away to keep from spreading."


    "Unfortunately, since everyone who entered is now dead, we have no first-hand ounts of what the inside of the temple looked like, and nobody dares to re-enter it to find out more. Thankfully, they at least took some photos of the inside of the temple that we can maybe get some clues from about the origin of this thing. I figured you''d be bored and like to maybe look at them.


    You don''t exactly have ess to the inte in here."


    Kain professor then handed over someminated images of what looked to be photocopies of images taken from within the temple and the dead archaeologists'' journals.


    After handing over the images and offering some more words offort and empty vows to find a cure, Dr. ckwell left.


    Kain used his remaining good hand to weakly raise theminated sheets of paper. Likely due to the poor lighting within the relic, the quality of the images was not ideal.


    However, Kain could still make out some details from the temple.


    The images depict wall paintings of a ck star falling from the sky—the God of Death, Kain assumed. But based on his modern sensibilities, Kain would be more inclined to call it a meteor.


    The so-called God of Death then began to torment the locals, and so to appease him, they built a grand temple over where he descended from the godly realm to Earth—which Kain assumed to be the location where the meteornded.


    Then to further appease the god, all individuals who had been marked by the god were then sealed within the temple as sacrifices—Kain assumed that considering the ''marked'' individuals all had ck bumps, they were likely the infected.


    Therefore, based on their superstitious beliefs, this ancient civilization actually found an effective way to prevent the spread of the disease.


    They built a massive temple over thending site so that future humans couldn''t reach it, and then all the infected were essentially quarantined and left to die within the temple, thus preventing a devastating epidemic—that was until their curious descendants happened upon it centuriester.


    ''Based on this story, is the disease something that originated from outside of the Earth? Humans had been looking for some evidence of life beyond just us, but this is really not what we wanted…''


    ''I wonder where it came from? Sigh…but it doesn''t look like I''ll live long enough to receive any answers to that question.''


    ------


    "Kain!"


    "Kain!"


    Kain felt a hard shove that practically sent him reeling to the floor. He turned to see Serena''s typical cold expression, and returned to his current reality.


    ''That was dangerous. I can''t afford to get distracted like that in the middle of a battle.''


    He turned to look at the battle''s current progress. The attacks they''dnded on the dragon had barely even left a scratch, however thankfully their new ally was still keeping the dragon away from them.


    The senior who''d recalled his infected contract was now lying dead on the floor, and Serena ordered her contract to light his body on fire to, Kain assumed, prevent the spread of whatever had killed him.


    In the few seconds Kain was lost in his thoughts, another contract, this one resembling a floating jellyfish, had its iridescent and translucent appearance ruined by specks of ck dots that were gradually spreading—likely another victim.


    A girl, who Kain assumed to be the contractor of the jellyfish, was howling in grief as she felt its fading life force.


    They''d just started the battle not long ago and were suffering devastating casualties, Kain hoped that the loss to their group wouldn''t get much worse.


    He looked around for the core of the relic. While the dragon was being held off they had also been looking for the core. After all, even if they couldn''t defeat the dragon but could take off with the core, it''d be considered a sessful mission.