Situation at the Academy

"A curse! When?" Mance panicked, his eyes trembling as he frantically tried to remember when he had been cursed.

"Blood. Was it my blood?" Thinking of the blood he had shed during the fight, Mance immediately worked out how his opponent had cursed him.

With his trembling right hand, Mance reached to his waist and pulled out a test tube filled with clear liquid.

Glug. He yanked out the cork and tipped the contents straight down his throat.

The itching in his throat eased a little, and Mance felt a measure of relief.

"Thank goodness he's a student of White House Academy. He wouldn't have come into contact with a particularly vicious curse!" Mance sounded immensely relieved.

But before he had even finished speaking, searing pain swept through his entire body.

"A flesh curse? How could it take effect so quickly?" Mance collapsed to the ground, his terror beyond words. He knew the Flesh-Eating Insect Curse should not take effect this fast against a Wizard Apprentice. The radiation Wizard Apprentices carried could delay the onset of a flesh curse. Besides, he had drunk a Purification Potion. It could not be happening this quickly.

"No... no..." Mance looked down at his body and screamed in despair. Just as in Green's Symbiote experiment, his chest writhed as though something were about to burst out. The movement soon spread across his whole body. His skin rose and fell, as if things hidden beneath his flesh were struggling to break free.

The skin of Mance's chest tore open from within, and a tiny hand like an infant's thrust out of the wound. Sticky blood and mucus coated it. The little hand moved on its own, grasping blindly in every direction like a newborn.

"No... no... no!" Terror filled Mance's eyes, his pupils shrinking to