There is a house atop a hill, about the foot, laid in clay and mortar, housing one Shiro Isha and his… family. The house itself is quite small, one room divided by a pechka wall, and a cellar hiding under the length of the house. An incised cubby hides the hinged outside door. Aligned aside, there is the kitchen assembly: triplet cupboards, a wooden table, and the furnace itself. There’s also a table mirrored to the other side, surrounded by 4 stools, and a chest in the corner.

  On the other side of the pechka, a wardrobe, his bed, his son’s bed, and the carpet hiding the cellar meekly be.

  S hooks, exquisite wines, enlivened jerkies cluttering the near wall, and stacks of barrels cluttering the next, the cellar looks to be of a wealthy man. And on those S hooks, adjacent to them at least, lay the vulnerable Lisha…

  Well, not that vulnerable.

  “?i? lupu l’ra jaigy mo’an xu? ?e?e vey, vey, ol?o’iv so ?iki elei…”

  The mad cook is bleeding. His equalizer could only do so much in aid of his deep wound. Perhaps his fate has been sealed: to be slain by the hands of his supposed daughter.

  Jul jolted back as if something lunged at her.

  “She can see the future, Lish. Don’t act so confused; you probably knew that already. But because of her incompetence, she can see only one at a time. And whenever she acts, the future she focuses on changes. As for me, I can accelerate any process or act… Wanna know something funny? I’ve never tried evolving a human. As I lie here, I wonder, what’s the worst that could happen?”

  Metamorphosis.

  “The angel’s body is perfect.”

  However, it is the soul inside that corrupts and corrodes the body into the likes of utter uselessness, like that of a human. Angels are perfect, the only things directly governed by the all-knowing design. They have not the willpower to diverge from such perfection; hence, the closer your fate—your actions, your reactions—are to the predetermined will of the design, the more perfect your body will be. As such, as it is their obligation, Lish and Isha have the weakest carcasses out of the named ones.

  Though now, only Lish has such a weakness.

  A soft cry, a weeping of sorts, followed by a flurry of erratic tentacles spiraling out of Isha, the thunderous beating of the tendrils against the cellar walls deafened, and the dust it set blind Lish and Jul.

  “I’d reckon five legs before he breaks everything in the basement and out.”

  The two got out of the basement just in time; Lish, though, was yanked out from the left shackle quite aggressively. Jul seemed to be fine, no cuts, bruises, or any signs of intoxication.

  “Let’s get out of this place first, then-”

  “What about the infant?”

  “What ‘what’? Take and go, easy. Do you think this crazy bastard’s going to come back to his sanity?”

  “Your arm, though.”

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  Tapping Jul’s shoulder, signing to look at the crib and pick up, “hup!”, Lish postures to move out. The cellar and the ground itself are shaking violently from the morphed Isha’s scuffling.

  With all her will, she gestured: “Please, no.”

  In times of need, adrenaline kicks in, and the wounds and pain of battle cease to matter. Even a broken arm couldn’t be cared for.

  Outside the house, the three catch their breath for a beat. The surroundings and the walls crawl in mold. Like the grasp of Kraken engulfing the trader’s ship, the house falls prey to Isha’s cultivation.

  “Back when you were asleep, I conducted a full scan. I found your anti-poison properties when you were blacked on the foxberry, and now, the official ‘equalizer’ bestowed upon you by the person who summoned you. Wanna know what it’s called? It’s etched onto your meter: Split.”

  The night is near. Lamplighters are scattered across the city, lighting the streets around and near the neighborhood. The low rumbling of Isha in the basement is the only sound in the quiet side of town.

  Splash.

  Perhaps Jul didn’t have the guts to withstand the burden of taking a human life. All in that time held up on the hooks, she scoped the future on how to kill Isha before Lish does. Yet, even in those hundreds, if not thousands, of variants where she killed him—in some hundreds of different ways—she couldn’t have seen further to see such action’s fruitions.

  Black mold, spore swarms blooming from the foundation as Isha, or what has become of him, emerges from the wreckage. Spirals of tentacles, impossibly overgrown fungi, and even the sweet scent of wine engulf the house and its surroundings. He has become a monster.

  “?o xui, r’ka elei!”

  “If you touch him, you die. Normally, his equalizer would accelerate the rate at which a culture is grown. But now, after his metamorphosis—his complete metamorphosis—he can only grow the pathogens around the area he touches, specifically fungi. And you don’t have an antiseptic property, mate.”

  The tendrils of Isha begin to spread: first the fence, then the adjacent houses, then the street lamps. Jul still can’t move; Lish isn’t leaving her either.

  “Yeast infection.”

  “What?”

  “Yeast infection. Can’t we just toss a bunch of berries at him, and the yeast infection could suffocate it, by chance?”

  “Are you mental, bruv? Yeast infection? Yeast? Sure, it’ll spread quickly, but then what? How about the neurotoxic berries? Somehow get him to eat some and pray it’s enough to kill it.”

  “Hey, hey, don’t pull that on me now. I can see the method, but just exactly how do I exploit it?”

  In moments of crisis, adrenaline takes over, making distress and depression irrelevant. Even the trauma of causation couldn’t be cared for. Or perhaps a revelation has been reached.

  Jul ran. Past the head split Lish and the monstrous Isha, past the boys lighting the lamps, past the market street on which the stain of the berries still lay, Jul ran into the forest.

  “At least.”

  “At least.”

  …Lish eases up a bit.

  “Well then… infinite tendrils, but the brain can’t divide past a certain point, no? To think I’d fight a Hydra…”

  “It can’t grow indefinitely, surely. Evolution still abides by the laws of this world. Unless infinity is achievable here…”

  …

  His unluck is a factor in this situation. However, however so it may be, Lish shall do with whatever he has…

  And as it would have it, he had caught a viral infection.

  Lish is now spiraling into madness. The infection is held at bay by Glass’s Anti, but the pathogen's effects are not invisible.

  Loose tentacles litter the street; about 4 octets have been cut off. Amidst the rubbish, lay Isha’s boy, as well as a delirious Lish, hysterical and suffocating, laughing and crying, yet the monster still looms over the failure.

  “Do you remember our daughter, Lishe?”