Unholy Player - Chapter 510

Chapter 510: More Than a Commander
This room was far bigger. More than 3 times the previous room.

The design stayed the same. It carried the glass-cage theme, but instead of animals, the cages held strange-looking beings.

Huge slimes, some green and some gray, with mucus-like bodies that slowly reshaped themselves against the floor of their cages. Things as small as a fist, sitting unnaturally still until they twitched. Things that looked like ordinary stones, yet when you looked at the glass cages they were trapped in, you got the unsettling sense they weren’t ordinary stones at all, as though something alive was hiding behind the stillness.

The entire room was packed with these things. A room full of Sparks, each one with a different shape and ability, each cage labeled and monitored like a controlled threat.

Rhys looked around at the cages, noticing a few new Sparks added since yesterday. Then his focus slipped to a group of elderly men and women in white coats approaching him with quick steps.

“Oh, Mr. Rhys, you’re here for today’s check?” The woman leading them asked in a kind tone, stopping at a polite distance.

“Yes.” Rhys answered casually. “I also brought something from your favorite supplier. He hopes you use it well to finally finish the serums.”

“Mr. Adyr?” The woman immediately understood, with excitement slipping into her voice.

Shortly after, a few personnel came from another door, carrying the buckets filled with red powder toward her, handling them carefully like unstable evidence.

The woman and the researchers examined the powder with visible excitement, their attention narrowing as if the rest of the room had vanished, and while they did, Rhys added, “I consumed some of it already, half an hour ago.”

At his words, the chatter died instantly. Silence snapped into place, and then the woman’s voice cut through it. “Quickly, prepare the operating room.”

She turned to Rhys. “Mr. Rhys, that’s a reckless move. Please follow me to the operating room so we can check if it had any harmful effect on your body.”

Rhys watched her expression, listened to the worried tone, and chuckled. “I said you can drop the act already.”

He could see their excitement beneath the worried looks, the kind they tried to bury under professionalism, because for them, checking what this miraculous resource Adyr gave them did to a human body mattered more than any life.

“What are you saying, Mr. Rhys?” the woman said, her voice rising slightly. “Of course we are worried for your health, as you are our only test subject.”

She turned away, not seeming ashamed of how blunt it sounded, and led him onward while a larger group of researchers gathered behind them.

As Rhys followed, he kept glancing at the Sparks in their cages, and then he came across humanoid bodies.

A few glass cylinder tubes revealed bodies suspended in liquid, their pale shapes floating in a clinical stillness. Upon closer inspection, it became evident that these bodies, surgically cut up for examination and preserved like specimens, belonged to the Umbraen race.

He also noticed five fresh arrivals, none of whom had been present the previous day; their distinct appearance set them apart from the Umbraens, yet their features bore a familiar resemblance.

“Who are these new lucky ones?” he asked, though he could already guess to whom these bodies belonged.

The woman and the researchers paused, then turned to look where he was looking, and the leading woman spoke without hiding her excitement.

“They are from the Lunari race Mr. Adyr brought to us recently. They are related to a path called the Blood Path, according to the information we were told.”

“I see.” Rhys smiled, stopped looking, and continued following the researchers.

The fact that even the almighty Lunari race’s ancestors had ended up in this laboratory as test subjects was strangely comforting to him, like proof that no one was untouchable.

After passing the section where samples and Sparks were kept, they entered a pure white room that was empty except for 1 piece of furniture. A padded medical operating chair, adjustable and angled like a hybrid between a chair and a table, with restraint straps fixed along the armrests and leg supports.

Segmented padding suggested it was built to keep a patient still during procedures.

Rhys, already familiar with the process, began removing his uniform without being prompted, unfastening and shedding each layer with practiced ease until nothing remained, not even his underwear.

When he finished stripping down to his birth suit, fully exposed to everyone present, he turned toward the researchers, who were staring at his body with undisguised shock.

“What?” He gestured casually below his waist, a mocking edge to his tone. “It’s not the first time you’ve seen it.”

But that wasn’t what shocked them. It was the deformities on his body.

From his neck down, Rhys looked like he was rotting. Patches of skin had peeled away. The exposed flesh had softened and sagged into a sludge-like consistency, wet and uneven, resembling decayed tissue that refused to hold its shape.

In some places, his flesh had darkened, with whitish pus clinging to it in irregular blotches, giving his body a deeply diseased and rotten appearance.

His whole body looked like it belonged to a corpse. Even the researchers, accustomed to this kind of sight, felt a dull pain form in their minds as they looked at him.

“Mr. Rhys, don’t you feel any pain?” the woman asked, her voice tightening when she remembered that his body hadn’t looked like this yesterday.

Sure, his body had been near its limit for a while, breaking apart slowly with each passing day, but today it was worse. So much worse. It made anyone looking at him wonder how a body like this could walk around at all.

“Pain? Of course I do. It hurts like hell. Why do you think I came rushing here this early?”

The woman stared at his face. Not even the slightest reaction showed there. She couldn’t understand what kind of mentality could endure the pain a body like this should have been producing.

Then she turned to the others. “Prepare the anesthesia, quick.”

They were researchers. Hearts made of stone. Emotions are like steel. Their true feelings belonged to their work. But she still wanted to dull the pain he was feeling, at least reduce it.

They were about to move but stopped when they heard Rhys reject it. “No need. I can endure it. Just start whatever you need to do.”

He walked to the chair. With every step, skin and flesh dripped onto the spotless floor in sluggish pieces, leaving wet stains across the white surface.

The staff quickly averted their eyes, focusing on their instruments instead.

When he finally sat down, he did it without hesitation, treating his ruined body like nothing more than a tool. “Just collect the data you need. Finish that serum.”

Seeing his determination in that state, the researchers felt a tightness in their chests.

They all knew what was driving that crumbling body forward.

It wasn’t a hunger for power, nor greed, blinding him until it dragged him toward death.

And it wasn’t love for research, not the kind of obsession that would push humanity forward.

There was only 1 motivation for him. He was pushing his body to become the best test subject for the researchers, aiming to be both the first and the last test subject for the new serum they were trying to create.

After the nuclear war, it took humans decades to create the first mutation serums. Decades to produce 2nd-generation mutants and refine the process until it was suitable for human use.

And now, to bring the serum into this new form, to reach this level, it took only a little more than a month. The difference in time was unbelievable.

The only reason it progressed that fast was that they had a volunteer, someone who let them test the serum’s effects directly on a living human body.

Rhys knew this too. If he died during the process, the researchers would need another suitable test subject from the second-generation mutants. The first place they would look would be the STF. Rhys didn’t want that, so he was doing everything he could to make sure it never became necessary.

In the end, running every stage of the process on a living subject was the fastest way they could improve the serum right now.

There was another reason Rhys was so impatient, downing the product like it was water and pushing the researchers to speed up the work. He wanted a way to make the STF members stronger as soon as possible, the ones he saw as family.

In the Beyond, danger existed everywhere, not only from Sparks, but mostly from other races.

Among the humans, only a handful were lucky enough to awaken as Players. They gained power day by day, growing stronger with no limit in sight.

But for regular soldiers to adapt to this new world, they needed something, too.

Even a little power-up would help them survive and defend themselves. They depended on the equipment the researchers produced, and especially this new serum, which could become a lifeline in the future.

And Rhys, the best one to understand all that, was sacrificing himself right in front of everyone’s eyes for those lives so they could get the finished product and catch up to the lucky Players in strength.

So they wouldn’t fall behind. So they wouldn’t be pushed into wars as pawns, their lives treated as expendable, nothing more than pieces on a chessboard.

***

A/N: Wishing you a 2026 where your worries fade and your wishes finally come true.