847 kilometers north in Cagayan Province...The village had been called San Miguel before the Blessing. Now it was called nothing, because there was no one left to call it anything. Dr. Leona Rizal stood at the village's edge, her hazmat suit sealing her off from the humid jungle air, and studied what remained.
Seventy-three houses, one church. A small marketplace that had probably bustled with life a week ago... all empty. Not destroyed, not burned, just... abandoned.
"Doctor." One of her team members approached, his voice crackling through the suit's radio. "We've found blood."
"How much?"
"Trails, leading into the jungle. Hundreds of them."
Leona followed him into the village center. The marketplace was the worst, stalls still set up with produce rotting in the heat, money scattered across counters, a child's toy lying in the dirt. Everything suggested people had simply stopped mid-action and walked away.
But the blood told a different story. It started at the marketplace's edge, small droplets at first, then larger spatters, then trails leading into the dense jungle that surrounded San Miguel on three sides.
Her team had marked them with fluorescent stakes. 237 individual blood trails, all leading in the same direction... into the dark.
"Analysis?" Leona asked. Her lab tech checked his portable scanner. "Human. Multiple blood types, some trails are old... maybe four, five days. Others are fresh, hours old."
"Survivors came back," Leona said slowly. "Or something brought them back." She'd been with the Department of Blessing Research for two years now, ever since the phenomenon had awakened powers in 40% of humanity. She'd seen strange things, impossible things. But this was different... this felt wrong.
"Doctor, you need to see this." Another team member was standing near the church, pointing at the white-painted wall.
Leona approached and felt her stomach tighten. Words scratched into the paint by dozens of different hands, overlapping, desperate...
"The Swarm calls we must feed hunger hunger he is coming Blessed are the consumed."
And beneath it all, drawn in what looked like dried blood. A symbol, astylized mosquito with wings spread wide, like a religious icon.
"Jesus," Leona's tech whispered. "What the hell happened here?"
Leona didn't answer. She was already pulling out her phone, taking photographs, documenting everything. This would need to go straight to Manila, to the Bureau, to whoever was coordinating the response to...
Her radio crackled with static. Then a voice, faint but clear.
"...feed... must feed... He calls and we answer..."
Leona spun, trying to locate the source. The voice was coming from her suit's external microphone, which meant someone was out there, in the village, broadcasting.
"Who's there?" she called. "This is Dr. Leona Rizal with the Department of Blessing Research. If you need help---"
Laughter. Multiple voices, overlapping, creating a chorus that raised every hair on the back of her neck.
"Help? We are beyond help, we are beyond pain. We are blessed."
Movement in the jungle. Leona's team was already backing toward their vehicles, hands reaching for weapons that seemed pathetically inadequate against whatever was out there.
And then they emerged. People, or things that had been people.They came from between the trees like a tide... dozens of them, hundreds maybe, moving with an eerie synchronization. They wore the clothes of villagers, farmers, shopkeepers. But their skin had taken on a grayish pallor, and their eyes...their eyes were compound multifaceted insectoid.
"Oh God," someone on Leona's team said. "They're all Blessed, they're all mosquito-aspects."
But that was impossible. The Blessing didn't work that way. Aspects were individual, unique, determined by personal affinity. You couldn't have an entire village manifest the same power. Unless... something had evolved them. The swarm of former villagers stopped at the marketplace's edge, as if held back by an invisible barrier. They stood there, swaying slightly, their compound eyes fixed on Leona and her team with an intelligence that was distinctly inhuman.
One stepped forward, a middle-aged woman who Leona vaguely recognized from the village's missing persons report. Her name had been Mae Garin, she'd been a school teacher. Now she was something else.
"Why do you resist?" Mae asked, her voice carrying that same overlapping quality, as if multiple throats were speaking in unison. "The Blessing is a gift, the hunger is purpose. He showed us the truth."
"Who?" Leona forced herself to stay calm, to keep her voice level. "Who showed you?"
Mae smiled. Her teeth had elongated into something resembling a proboscis, retractable but visible when she opened her mouth.
"The First," she said. "The Progenitor, the one who understood what we could become." She gestured to the swarm behind her. "We were weak... he made us strong, united."
"This isn't evolution," Leona said. "This is infection, we can help you. There are treatments---"
"Help?" Mae laughed again, that terrible chorus sound. "You think we want to go back? To be alone in our own skin, trapped in individual weakness?"
She took a step forward. "No. We want to share the gift, starting with you."
Leona's team was already in motion, three of them grabbing her, pulling her toward the vehicles. Her security detail opened fire with tranquilizer rounds designed for hostile Blessed. The darts hit home, three villagers dropped. The rest didn't even flinch, they charged. Not like a mob, like a liquid. Flowing around obstacles, moving with perfect coordination, each individual part of a larger whole.
Leona saw her security detail go down under a tide of bodies, saw hazmat suits tear, heard screaming that cut off too quickly. She was in the vehicle... the door was slamming. They were accelerating, dirt spraying from the tires as the driver gunned it toward the dirt road that led back to civilization. In the rearview mirror, Leona saw the swarm standing at the village's edge, not pursuing. They'd already fed. They'd gotten what they needed. She looked at her team, four survivors out of twelve. One was bleeding from a gash in his suit, another was hyperventilating, her eyes wide with shock.
"Drive," Leona said. "Don't stop until we reach the military checkpoint."
But even as they fled, even as San Miguel disappeared into the jungle behind them, she couldn't shake the image of Mae's compound eyes. The intelligence there, the satisfaction. This wasn't random Blessing manifestation, this was deliberate. Someone had done this, someone had converted an entire village into... into what? A hive mind? A swarm-organism?
Her phone had signal now that they were clear of the jungle's interference. Leona pulled up her secure line and dialed directly to the Bureau's emergency response.
"This is Dr. Rizal, research team seven," she said when someone answered. "I'm invoking Protocol Red. We have a Class-A Blessing event in Cagayan Province. Multiple hostile conversions, unknown infection vector, and evidence of a coordinating intelligence."
"Confirmed, Doctor. Classification?"
Leona looked at the photographs on her phone. The mosquito symbol, the message scratched into church walls... the swarm moving as one.
"Potential emergence of a Progenitor-class threat," she said quietly. "Mosquito-aspect. Designation, The First."
There was silence on the line, then...
"Understood! We're dispatching a Hero response team. ETA four hours."
Four hours. Leona wondered if that would be fast enough. In the vehicle's side mirror, she could see the jungle receding behind them. Dark and dense... somewhere in there, something was evolving, something was learning.
And it was hungry...