Pharmaceutical Rewrite! Episode 8: Vial of Infinity
Return to the Ruins
Snow blanketed the night in endless silence. It fell in uneven waves, heavy and wet, coating the skeleton of the world in pale oblivion. Akio Hukitaske trudged across the drifts, each step dragging as though the earth itself resisted him. The wind groaned through the streets, weaving voices out of the past—familiar, broken echoes that seemed to whisper his name.
The pharmacy stood before him.
Once, it had been his sanctuary. A place of warmth. Of purpose. Of healing. Now it was nothing but a carcass. Its sign hung by a single rusted chain, creaking against the gale. Windows were shattered, blackened by fire. The bricks bore scars of time and violence. Glass glittered across the threshold like the remains of broken promises.
Akio paused at the doorway, staring at the ruin. His heart ached with the weight of memory. He pressed a hand to the inside of his coat, feeling the shape beneath the layers of leather and cloth.
The vial.
Not just any concoction. The vial. The prototype serum that pulsed faintly like the heart of some ancient god stuffed inside a bottle. Its liquid glowed with a subtle blue radiance, casting shadows against his ribs when he pressed it close. One drop could shear open the veil between realities. One drop could unmake everything he knew.
His boots crunched as he stepped inside. The air reeked of rot and dust. Shelves sagged against the walls, tilted like tombstones. His old consultation counter was toppled sideways, wood warped and half-burned. He crouched, brushing his gloved fingers across the cracked tile.
Every tile here remembered. The floor still held the laughter of people he had once healed. The tears of parents. The sharp curses of patients who had refused their medicine but returned anyway.
Now it was silence.
Akio moved to the back of the pharmacy, toward the cabinet that once held his emergency stock. Behind it, in the corner of the wall, a single tile was loose. He pried it open with trembling fingers. A hollow cavity yawned back. He slid the vial into it, hidden from the world.
When he sat down, his whole body fell as if gravity had doubled. He let his head rest against the shelf, eyes staring at the ruined ceiling. The silence crept back in, smothering him. The storm outside felt far away. Inside here, despair lived louder than the wind.
For the first time since he had uncovered the truth, Akio let his stomach heave, let despair coil back around him like a serpent. Alone in the pharmacy, he felt almost ready to let it all end.
The Hunters Arrive
But the snow outside shifted.
Footsteps crushed the drifts. Heavy. Rhythmic.
Two figures moved through the whitened streets, their silhouettes cutting sharp against the night. The Uki Brothers. Yatsumiya walked with a vial in each hand, his movements elegant, deliberate. Beside him, Bradzi lumbered forward like a storm given flesh, syringes glinting between his fists.
They had been tracking Akio for miles. Their blood sang with enhancements, senses sharpened beyond human tolerance. What pushed them wasn't vengeance anymore. It was obsession, a hunger to pull him down into the abyss they had been forced to call home.
"He's here," Bradzi muttered, steam puffing with his breath. "I can feel it."
Yatsumiya smiled coldly, snow catching in his hair like crown jewels.
"Then let's give the good doctor his final house call."
Chemical Warfare Begins
The pharmacy's silence was obliterated by an explosion.
The right wall caved in under the force of a shattering vial. Shards of plaster and brick erupted into the room, dust clouding like ash. Akio rolled instinctively, glass raining across his coat. He ducked behind the collapsed counter, already fishing vials from his inner pocket.
Smoke bomb. Nerve-burn serum. Mirror-hallucinogen. Old tricks, but the only weapons he had left.
"Still at your little games, Akio?" Yatsumiya's voice carried through the dust like a blade. "Let's see if illusions can hide you now."
Bradzi bellowed as he charged, his bulk smashing through a toppled shelf. Akio hurled the mirror vial. It shattered midair, spraying crystalline fragments across the room.
Suddenly, Akio's image split into six, illusions flickering between the shelves. Bradzi swung wildly, smashing phantom after phantom, his punches and kicks shaking the dust loose from the ceiling.
From behind cover, Akio threw a second vial. It burst against Bradzi's side, flooding his nervous system with fire. The giant staggered, collapsing to one knee, clutching at his heart.
"I never stopped inventing," Akio rasped. His voice shook, but his eyes burned.
"You just stopped healing."
The Price of Memory
Yatsumiya's answer came fast—a corrosive vial lobbed across the counter. It shattered against the wood. Smoke hissed upward, gnawing into Akio's lungs. He choked, stumbling backward behind the racks of old medicine.
And in that choking haze—memory struck.
The last patient he had treated here: a child with frostbite. The kids hands had been white and stiff, the skin torn. The mother had begged with eyes red from weeping. Akio had worked through the night, fingers trembling but sure. And when the childs color had returned, when he had opened his eyes—Akio had felt proud. Like a pharmacist, not just a scientist.
That was the pharmacist who had lived here. The man he had let die.
Blood coughed from his mouth. His knees buckled. He pulled another vial from his coat—clear liquid, tinged faintly gold. One of his last inventions from his curious smart mind in his pharmacist fun little experiement days when he was bored and It's name is... Vital Rewind.
He knew the cost.
Akio jammed the needle into his leg.
The serum lit his veins on fire. White-hot pain ripped through him. He cried out, collapsing onto his hands. But then—his vision steadied. The bleeding slowed. His eyes cleared.
Pain for clarity. Hurt for life.
It was the only bargain he had left.
The Chase Through Memory Lane
The pharmacy became a battlefield of glass and fire.
Yatsumiya hurled a sleep-bomb vial. Akio countered with a shockwave disperser, the collision blasting apart half the storeroom.
Bradzi coated himself in an invisibility tincture vial, his footsteps vanishing. Akio smeared heat-paste across his eyelids, his vision burning with red outlines as Bradzi lunged out of thin air. He ducked just in time, countering with a flash bomb that set the shadows ablaze.
Every room bore the war. The exam table shattered under impact. The consultation booths burned. The storeroom walls cracked and collapsed. Each step of their battle desecrated another memory—patients who had once laughed, families who had once prayed here.
Now it was only screams and glass.
Captured Again
Bradzi's bulk finally caught him. The giant barreled through the last shelf, slamming Akio to the ground with the force of a falling tree. His ribs screamed, breath torn from his heart.
Yatsumiya stood above, vial in hand.
"This mutagen will splice you," he said, voice trembling with glee. "Drink it—or we inject it. Let's see what happens when your DNA bleeds into another timeline, all from the labs experiements all in the name of science my dear Akio Hukitaske."
Akio spat blood, eyes burning. "You don't want to see what happens if the vial I hid here breaks."
Yatsumiya's smile faltered. "Bluffing?"
Akio's teeth bared in a dark smile. "Are you sure you want to find out?"
The hesitation was all he needed.
Reinforcements
The front wall exploded inward.
Raka charged through, her fist finding Yatsumiya's chest before he could react. He slammed back into a shelf, glass and powder raining down.
Behind her, Marina stormed in, her weapon humming. She fired a concussive round, the blast throwing Bradzi off Akio's stomach like a ragdoll.
"You two okay?!" she yelled, eyes darting across the chaos.
Akio wheezed, pulling himself up. "Perfect timing..."
Raka cracked her neck, grinning savagely. "We tracked them tracking you. Reverse-hunting 101."
The Truth Revealed
Amid the rubble, Akio staggered to the hidden cavity in the wall. His fingers fumbled against the loose tile, pulling free the vial. It glowed against the ruin, humming with raw possibility.
"This," he said, voice hollow but steady, "is what they want. And what they fear."
Marina's eyes widened. "That's... the multiverse serum?"
"One drop," Akio whispered. "One drop is enough to open a rift to another reality. The Lab nearly perfected it. I stole the prototype."
Raka frowned. "What if it opens the wrong one?"
Akio's grip tightened. "That's why I hid it. And why I'll die before they take it."
The Broken Brothers
Yatsumiya coughed blood from the floor, staring up at him. His sneer was gone. His eyes—haunted.
"We just wanted... to matter," he whispered.
Akio knelt, his own blood dripping onto the dust. "You do matter. But the Lab twisted you. They turned your pain into a weapon."
Bradzi shifted weakly, avoiding his eyes. "Can we... be fixed?"
Akio's gaze fell to the vial. Its glow painted his face blue.
"Maybe," he said quietly. "But not like this."
The Calm Before the Storm
They bound the brothers, leaving them against the wall as the pharmacy groaned under its wounds. Raka kept watch while Marina knelt beside Akio, gently wiping the blood from his face.
"You still depressed?" she asked softly, trying to cut through the silence.
He gave a faint laugh—broken, but real. "Yeah I guess... But I'm not giving up. Not while there's still time... not while there's still a timeline left to save."
Outside, the snow fell thicker, smothering the ruin, swallowing the night.
In his hand, the vial pulsed again—one steady heartbeat, promising salvation or damnation.
The war was far from over.
TO BE CONTINUED...