All Chapters of Crimson Love: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The archives of Zelios were unlike any other place within the fortress. Hidden several levels beneath the command center, they were protected not by armed guards but by thick steel vault doors and mechanical locks that had survived the apocalypse. The walls were lined with shelves of weathered books, handwritten journals, laboratory records, and faded photographs. Digital databases had failed decades ago, but paper endured. Every recruit heard whispers about the archives.Very few were ever allowed inside.Nearly two centuries earlier, Zelios had not been an army. It had been a research institute. Founded by physicians, geneticists, biochemists, and epidemiologists from several nations, Helios was established to study diseases that medicine could not explain.At first, their work was ordinary. Rare blood disorders. Genetic abnormalities. Unusual regenerative conditions. Patients arrived from every corner of the world carrying illnesses modern science struggled to understand. Many were

She hesitated, then answered. "Lieutenant Sera Ward."Silence settled over the corridor. Everyone eyes in the room turned towards Sera, for a moment she didn't understand what she meant by saying her name. Her mind was already processing a lot of thought, another one just turned her blank, until Jonas's voice broke clouds for her mind.Jonas immediately spoke, looking toward Sera. "What?"She frowned. "There has to be a mistake."Dr. Hart shook her head. "We tested every vial twice."She pointed toward a nearby monitor. "The first infection screening was completely normal."Images flashed across the screen. Healthy blood cells. White blood cells. Platelets. Everything appeared perfectly ordinary."Then..." Dr. Hart continued, "...we ran the mutation analysis."The image changed. Magnified thousands of times. Sera's blood cells shimmered faintly beneath the microscope. Tiny crimson strands connected them together.Not permanently. Briefly. Like a heartbeat. Pulse.Separate.Pulse agai

Night settled over the ruins like a heavy blanket. The last traces of sunlight disappeared beyond the broken skyline, leaving the skeletal remains of the old city bathed in moonlight. Wind whistled through hollow buildings, carrying loose sheets of rusted metal that clanged against concrete. Somewhere in the distance, an animal cried before falling silent. The city belonged to the darkness once more.Inside Zelios, the evening shift had begun. Patrol teams gathered in the central hangar, checking weapons, replacing ultraviolet ammunition, and reviewing maps under bright white floodlights.Normally, Sera would have been among them. Issuing orders. Inspecting equipment. Complaining about someone's poorly maintained rifle. Instead, she stood alone on an elevated observation balcony overlooking the hangar. Her patrol armor remained locked inside her room. Below, she watched another lieutenant assign positions to her squad. Her squad. Every order sounded wrong coming from someone else's vo

The city was unnervingly quiet. Sera moved like a shadow through the frozen streets, every footstep carefully placed to avoid loose rubble and sheets of broken glass. Moonlight spilled between the skeletons of abandoned skyscrapers, painting long silver lines across the snow-covered roads.She has patrolled these ruins countless times over the past eight years. She knew every collapsed bridge. Every hidden alley. Every rooftop that offered a sniper's advantage.Tonight...Everything felt different. Almost as though the city itself was holding its breath.She paused beside the remains of an overturned military transport. Its rusted doors hung open, half buried beneath snow. Nothing. No movement. No scent of infected creatures.Only silence.Her wrist tracker blinked softly. 'Observation Tower Twelve 620 meters.'She lowered the device and continued forward. The tower stood exactly where Jonas had described. Or rather... What remained of it. The steel observation platform leaned dangero

The tunnel swallowed sound. Sera advanced slowly, her boots pressing into decades of dust that no wind had disturbed. Her flashlight cut a narrow beam through the darkness, revealing rusted tracks disappearing into an endless black corridor. Water dripped steadily from cracked concrete overhead, each drop echoing through the abandoned passage.She stopped. Something wasn't right. The dust on the floor was undisturbed, except for a single trail of footprints. Fresh. They were neither the shambling tracks of ferals nor the elegant, almost weightless prints vampires often left behind.Human. Someone had walked through here recently. The same person she had chased from the observation tower. Sera crouched, running two fingers over one of the impressions."You're making this too easy," she whispered.Either the stranger wanted to be followed or he didn't care if he was. Neither possibility comforted her. She rose and continued deeper into the tunnel.Nearly twenty minutes later, the tracks