Chapter 146: Malakov’s Plan

Chapter 146: Malakov’s PlanSomewhere In New York

The room cracked.

It wasn’t an explosion. It wasn’t a quake.

It was pure rage.

Malakov slammed his fist into the arm of his obsidian chair, and the reinforced alloy fractured down the middle. The veins on his hand bulged, glowing faintly violet—his synthetic blood reacting to emotional overload.

The monitors in front of him flickered.

Each one showed a different angle of the failed ambush—the ghouls shredded, the Crimson Grimoire ripped from Calen’s corpse, Lucifer walking through the smoke untouched. Unbothered. Victorious.

Mocking him.

Malakov’s eye twitched.

He stood suddenly.

The chair scraped violently against the polished steel floor.



"He took it..." he whispered. "He took it like it was nothing."

His voice wasn’t calm.

It trembled.

Not with fear.

With insult.

He turned to the central screen and hurled the nearest metal datapad at it.

CRACK!

Sparks flew. The screen shattered in a wave of static and glass. The others blinked, glitched... then recalibrated.

One of the advisors—a thin man with cybernetic implants along his skull—stepped forward cautiously.

"Sir... we still have the others. The lesser tomes. The binding protocols—"

"SHUT UP!"

Malakov’s voice echoed through the war room like a gunshot.

The advisor flinched. The guards at the back didn’t move. They knew better. They’d seen what happened last time someone spoke during a moment like this.

Malakov grabbed the edge of the table, fingers digging into the reinforced alloy. His breathing was sharp. Heavy. Not from exhaustion. From restraint.

"Do you know... what that book was?" he muttered.

The advisor didn’t answer.

Malakov looked up—slowly, eyes glowing with a deep, poisonous red.

"Do you have any idea what I gave up to get it? How many monsters we had to harvest... how many humans we buried just to decode the first seal on that cursed thing?"

He walked forward.

Each step was controlled. But his body twitched.

"There were eight... eight lost artifacts created by the First Fang. The Grimoire was the core. The brain. The map. Without it, the others are just bones and ash."

He stopped inches from the trembling advisor.

"I had it in my hand," Malakov whispered. "We were going to turn every supernatural creature on this planet into a product. A tool. A feedable, programmable unit of power."

He sneered.

"And that thing... Lucifer... just waltzes in and takes it like it was his."

Silence.

Then—

He screamed.

A primal, guttural roar of frustration that shook the lighting panels above. His aura flared. It wasn’t mystical—it was scientific. Radiated from his chest like unstable plasma, burning with modified blood-particles.

The metal console warped under the pressure.

The guards stepped back instinctively.

He didn’t stop.

He grabbed the war table and flipped it. It smashed into the wall with enough force to dent the steel bulkhead and crush two of the lower-screen projectors.

Glass. Sparks. Silence.

Breathing hard now, Malakov turned toward the center of the room again.

Then he froze.

Staring.

Not at anyone.

At the empty crimson pedestal near the back.

The one where the Grimoire used to sit.

His hand clenched into a trembling fist.

"...It was meant to be mine," he said. "I deserved it. I made it possible."

He stepped closer to the pedestal, his boots splashing in shards of broken crystal on the floor. He ran a hand across the velvet-lined mount.

Nothing left. Not even a trace of power.

"He said I’d be able to control it..."

He trailed off.

The room tilted a little.

Not physically.

Emotionally.

Malakov looked... smaller now. Like the weight of the failure was finally setting in. The silence became heavy. Thick.

Then one of the black-suited aides approached carefully.

"Sir... there’s still the Resonant Fang. If we calibrate it using the—"

Malakov raised a hand.

The man stopped talking.

The hand didn’t lower.

It glowed.

A single, narrow beam of violet energy lanced out of Malakov’s palm—so fast the aide didn’t have time to scream.

Just—pop.

His upper torso vanished in a mist of liquified meat. His legs dropped. Twitched. Then fell.

The other staff stood still.

Malakov turned back toward the pedestal.

"I don’t want substitutes," he said flatly. "I want the original."

He took a breath.

Long. Slow.

Then turned back to the room, brushing blood off his shoulder.

"Pull all resources from Project Hive. We’re moving full force to Protocol: Crimson Eclipse. If Lucifer wants to parade around with our artifact... fine."

He smirked now.

"Then we’ll make the entire world bleed for it."

He turned to the technician near the back.

"Contact Viktor. Wake the other units. I want the Lazarus Protocol online in twenty-four hours. And send a message to that backstabbing mongrel Vladimir."

The technician swallowed. "What should it say?"

Malakov’s eyes narrowed.

"Tell him... next time he stays neutral, he’ll stay buried."

He began walking toward the exit.

But paused near the control panel.

He pressed his hand against the reader. A hidden vault opened near the side wall, cold air hissing out.

Inside were six tanks.

Six figures floating inside red fluid.

Each one pale. Unfinished. Mutated.



But familiar.

Each bore parts—pieces—of someone they’d taken samples from.

Lucifer.

His hair. His blood. A shard of his shattered fang.

"These clones," Malakov muttered, eyes gleaming again, "were failures."

He turned to the nearest scientist.

"I want them reworked. Upgraded. Infused with our new strain."

"What strain, sir?"

Malakov smiled.

Not kind.

Not confident.

Mad.

"The Ghoulus strain. The final version Calen survived long enough to show us."

The scientist looked alarmed. "But that could destroy their minds—"

"I don’t need minds. I need monsters."

He walked past them.

"Let’s see if that Lucifer can keep his head high when he’s drowning in a city full of his own nightmares."

The doors slammed shut behind him.

And the war room was left behind—shattered, bloodied, and preparing to burn.

Moments after Malakov’s exit

The steel doors sealed behind him with a deep hydraulic clang.

No more words.

No more screams.

Just the soft hiss of pressure vents and the distant buzz of data lines syncing back into flow.

The war room—once a chamber of command—was now thick with smoke, blood vapor, and broken tech.

For a few seconds, no one moved.

Then one of the younger assistants, barely twenty-two, stepped forward from the shadows beside the wall. Her voice was quiet. Careful.

"...What’s Project Hive?" she asked.

A long pause.

Everyone’s eyes drifted to the lead scientist—the oldest man in the room, grey-bearded, back slightly hunched, skin pale from years of lab exposure. His ID read: Dr. Renlow Halvik.

Renlow didn’t look up. He was staring at the vats.

The six tanks.

Still bubbling. Still glowing.

Each figure inside twitched occasionally, like they were dreaming. Or remembering.

"...Hive wasn’t just a weapons project," Renlow finally said, voice hoarse from age and silence. "It was an attempt to build a new order of sentience. A central mind. Built off harvested vampire instincts—linked. Modular. Global."

He turned, eyes scanning the small group of aides and techs now looking to him for something close to guidance.

"We used the neural strands from over a hundred vampire kills," he continued. "Not just blood. Cognition. Emotion. Fear. Hunger. All filtered, mapped, and encoded into a living core matrix."

One of the guards furrowed his brow. "Living?"

Renlow nodded.

"It thinks. It reacts. It doesn’t dream, because it doesn’t need to. It only calculates dominance. That’s Project Hive."

The youngest among them, the girl from earlier, swallowed hard. "And Lazarus Protocol?"

Renlow’s jaw tightened.

He walked slowly toward the wall to the left of the vats. Tapped a code into a dark console none of them had touched before.

It slid open silently.

Inside was... a screen.

But not like the others.

This one pulsed. Organic. Breathing.

A single heart-shaped core throbbed in the center of the machinery, stitched with glowing veins of red and white. The tech wasn’t fully mechanical. It looked like something that had been grown.

Above the screen, etched in ancient vampire script, were two words: Lazarus Engine.

Renlow exhaled like a man dragging up something he hoped would stay buried.

"Lazarus Protocol is worse," he said simply.

He turned around, face cold now.

"It’s not about power. Or domination. It’s resurrection."

Another tech frowned. "Resurrection of what?"

Renlow tapped the glass of one vat.

"Of what shouldn’t exist."

They all stared at the tank.

The clone inside blinked.

Once.

Slowly.

One of the guards immediately took a step back.

Renlow didn’t move.

"We built this based on the remnants of old vampire resurrection rites—the forbidden kind. Blood magic fused with soul coding. The Ghoulus strain was never meant to just kill. It was meant to remember what it devoured."

Another pause.

He tapped again.

"And Malakov’s plan? It’s to load these clones with enough stolen blood, data, and corrupted soulprints to fool the world itself. These won’t just look like Lucifer."

He glanced over his shoulder.

"They’ll be him. In pain. In rage. In twisted echoes of what he might’ve been if he was born in a cage."

One of the older aides spoke next, tone uneasy.

"You mean... he’s going to send false Lucifers into the city?"

Renlow nodded.

"No. He’s going to release them into the world. Let them go wild. Kill. Burn. Feed."

Another added, "And when the world sees that? The chaos... the horror?"

Renlow’s expression was tired now.

"They’ll beg Malakov to take control."

Another silence fell.

But the vats didn’t care.

The figures inside twitched again. One opened its mouth.

No sound.



Just breath.

Just hunger.

Renlow turned away.

"I need to go stabilize the strain before he pushes the growth rate too far. If these things wake up malformed, we won’t just be dealing with monsters..."

He looked to the youngest among them.

"...We’ll be dealing with Lucifer’s nightmares."

He left the room slowly.

The rest stood in silence.

And behind them, in the deepest vat...

One clone smiled.

Just a little.

Like it already knew who it was going to kill first.