Chapter 75: Did I Just Pick Up a Mutant?
The small figure in the undergrowth was wearing a red-and-white dress, barefoot, eyes glowing a flat white.
"Nikki?"
Matthew looked at the child in front of him, something uncertain moving through his expression.
Nikki. The little girl he had pulled out of Hell's Kitchen.
He studied her condition and the space around her carefully. It didn't take long to reach a conclusion: the anomaly spreading through the Nursery had originated with this one small person.
A mutant.
Matthew's eyes narrowed slightly.
After confirming that vampires existed in this world, he had made his own attempts to find information about mutants. The search had turned up traces of them, but nothing with a clear direction. It felt like the trail had been deliberately erased by someone.
That had been the end of his mutant-finding efforts.
Until now.
He had confirmation. Mutants existed in this world. He was looking at one.
He took out his phone and called Ada.
"Ada. Do you have any sedatives on you? Bring them if you do."
"Sedatives? Who carries those around..."
"Do you have any or not?"
"Yes."
"...Then I'll wait."
He hung up.
Shortly after, Ada emerged from the trees with her usual unhurried composure, a syringe of high-potency sedative in hand.
She saw Nikki standing beside Matthew and something flickered in her expression.
"From the look of it... she caused all of this?"
"What else?" Matthew reached out and took the syringe.
He was about to administer it when Ada spoke up quickly. "Boss. That dose is enough to put down an elephant. If you want her to survive it, I'd suggest using a very small amount."
Matthew looked at the syringe in his hand. Then he held it back out to Ada.
"You do it."
"Me?" Ada blinked.
She had a comprehensive skill set for handling enemies. Small children were a different category entirely, and one she had no particular experience in.
"Boss. Are you sure?"
"Yes." Matthew nodded. "You mixed it. You know what it'll do."
Sure of herself?
She was absolutely not sure of herself. The thought process that had gone into preparing this sedative was: one shot, target goes down. Whether the target survived had genuinely not factored in.
But Matthew was looking at her with the steady certainty of someone who had already decided, so Ada did the only thing available to her and attempted a careful injection.
The sedative worked very well.
Two drops. Nikki folded immediately.
The moment she went limp in Ada's arms, every frozen thing in the air resumed. The birds hanging motionless in the sky snapped back into flight. The wind, which had stopped entirely, began moving again.
Matthew watched the world around them return to normal and looked at Nikki unconscious in Ada's arms.
"So it really was her." He said it quietly to himself, then gave Ada her instructions. "I'll have a new place arranged for you in the next few days. Somewhere quiet, low foot traffic. Until we understand what's happening here, she stays with you."
"One reason is to keep her safe. The other is..."
"Monitoring. I know." Ada looked down at the small figure in her arms.
She understood his thinking. Nikki was young, but an uncontrolled mutant ability at this scale was a ticking problem. What had just happened here was manageable because it had occurred outside the city. The same event inside Manhattan would have triggered a mass panic and almost certainly drawn government attention, the kind that ended with someone being taken apart in a laboratory.
Everything had returned to normal, but neither of them was in a rush to leave. To prevent Nikki from losing control again the moment she woke, Matthew had Ada stay in place with her while he stepped outside the Nursery's perimeter. He waited there until Ada confirmed Nikki was awake and stable, then came back in and collected both of them.
In the car.
Nikki looked at Matthew sitting beside her, completely lost.
She had no idea what had happened.
Matthew noticed the look on her face and reached over for the tablet, pressing it into her hands. "Explaining it would take a while. That's the security footage from earlier. See for yourself."
Nikki took the tablet.
Her eyes dropped to the footage on the screen.
Some time passed.
She looked up. Her voice had something complicated in it. "Sir... did I do all of that?"
"As much as I'd prefer the answer were no, yes. You did."
"So..." Nikki looked down. Her hands had closed around the hem of her pajamas and were holding on tight. "Sir is going to get rid of Nikki now?"
The time she had spent at the Nursery had been something she had no previous frame of reference for. Real food every day. Friends her own age to play with and learn alongside. An actual understanding of what it meant to be cared for, to feel like being alive was something worth doing.
Until today.
That life had broken apart again.
It felt exactly like the last time: lifted somewhere she had never expected to be, and then dropped.
She was still working through all of it, already halfway back to Hell's Kitchen in her head, when the person beside her said something that pulled her out completely.
"You've misunderstood, Nikki."
Matthew's voice was even.
"Every child in the Nursery is like my own. That includes you."
"I'm not going to let anyone hurt you. But I also can't let you hurt them. To keep everyone safe, I need to keep you close until we've worked out how to handle this." He put a hand briefly on her head.
"The things you're worried about, being left behind, being discarded, none of that is going to happen. Your life continues the same as before. The setting changes from the Nursery to staying with me. That's all."
The brightness came back into Nikki's eyes.
[System: +10 points. Nikki has found reason to hope again.]
Matthew registered the points and waited for the reward that usually followed.
It didn't come.
With some puzzlement, he opened the Pass.
[E-Type Mold Theme Pass]
[Stage 1 Reward: Megamycete x1 -- requires 20,000 accumulated points.]
[Stage 2 Reward: Eveline x1 -- requires 25,000 accumulated points.]
[Stage 3 Reward: Heisenberg x1 -- requires 30,000 accumulated points.]
[Stage 4 Reward: Cadou x5 -- requires 40,000 accumulated points.]
[Stage 5 Reward: Mold Lycan Legion x1 -- requires 60,000 accumulated points.]
[Stage 6...]
If his memory was right, the T-Virus Pass Stage 1 had only needed ten System points. The E-Type Mold Pass required twenty thousand just to reach the first stage.
The rewards made up for it, though. The Megamycete alone was extraordinarily rare. Twenty thousand points for something like that was a reasonable exchange by any measure.
Turning this over, the group arrived back at Umbrella Corporation.