The Outbreak

Milo gritted his teeth, raising his throbbing head upwards to look at the cause of all this, but his pupils started to change, and the pain nearly drove him crazy.

His circle pupils seemed to bleed into his irises, becoming elliptical like the woman's. The previously dim night grew brighter, brighter until he could barely stand to keep his eyes open.

"Since we're nocturnal, we gain the ability to see in the dark as if it were a sunny day. I'd recommend covering your ears." The woman looked down at Milo with a calm expression.

Unlike the gradual changes with his eyes, Milo heard too many things at once. The sound of the wind blowing against whatever they were in, the sound of his own breathing and the woman's.

Water dripping somewhere. His own racing heart. The buzzing of a fly. The low hum of electricity. Individually he might have been fine, but with all the noises overlapping, he let out a low screech.

"I did tell you to cover your ears. Not that it would have helped much." Milo couldn't listen to the woman anymore, not of his own volition either.

A sense of vertigo ceased him, and his bones felt like they were being ground into powder. His teeth cracked and shattered, crumbling out of his mouth like fragile rock.

Then he wished he had died. The muscles all over his body started to undulate. Tears spilled from his eyes as Milo struggled to endure.

"We are stronger and faster than humans, but it isn't magic. Well, maybe it isn't. I'm not entirely sure." Milo could feel his bones and muscles changing, healing at an accelerated pace, and he could somehow feel an immense strength inside him, waiting for him to tap into it.

His gums bled as new teeth poked through, ignoring common sense that dictated teeth couldn't regrow after coming out as an adult.

Milo felt his nails grow loose, and fall off, and new ones grew. Unlike before, these were sharper and harder, and with his wild thrashing, he left grooves in the thick wooden floor beneath him.

He raised his head and locked eyes with the woman, and a sense of caution filled his mind. As if something was warning him of the danger the woman emanated.

Just when Milo thought he was through the most drastic ones, he started to bleed from his pores. The scent made him gulp a few times as an ache wracked his throat, but his mind became occupied with something else.

"Almost done. While the virus normally just alters the strength, durability, and speed of the person, it seems I was right about you being interesting." The woman smiled as Milo's blood started to crystallize around him like a cocoon.

If the Milo before had been remodeled by the virus, then what happened next could be said to be him being broken down and recreated, erasing the human defects left behind.

His original height of five feet ten inches shrunk to five feet six inches. His brown hair turned darker until it resembled a moonless night's sky. His arms and legs, fingers and toes adjusted to his new size as well.

The tips of his ears grew pointed, and his sclera darkened into black while his irises turned red. His pupils narrowed a bit and his originally large fangs turned narrower and more elegant.

The biggest changes were the ones he could feel. He felt a certain emptiness between his legs, as if what made him a man had simply up and vanished during the transformation.

His chest bulged slightly, not growing overly large, but it would now be impossible to think of him as a man going forward because he had the bits that men didn't. He needn't even look to know what was between his legs now either.

Milo's face grew softer and more feminine, losing it's rigid masculinity. The hair on his body with the exception of his scalp withered and turned to dust, leaving his rapidly changing skin smooth and hairless.

The biggest change happened to the blood in his body. Unlike a humans normal red color, his own was a darker shade of red, bordering on black. If a human managed to come into contact with Milo's blood, they'd either die horribly or end up being infected.

Milo felt and heard his heart beat irregularly, skipping a beat then beating twice in the time it took for one beat to occur. His lungs halted and remained that way, but even after a few seconds passed, Milo felt no hints of suffocation.

As Milo's heart stuttered precariously, the ever present foreign feeling in his mind started to fade. The crystallized blood started to crumble to dust, falling from Milo's body.

"I'm jealous, you're so beautiful." The woman smiled at Milo who felt his heart on the verge of stopping. Milo gingerly placed a hand on his chest over his heart, wincing at the sudden softness he felt.

"Now comes the worst part. As a normal human, while you can experience a bit of an infected's blood thirst, you'll now have to bear the entirety of it."

Milo felt his throat drying up. The closer his heart got to stopping, the drier his throat became. A few seconds passed, and Milo couldn't hold it in anymore.

Feral hisses and low growls echoed from his throat, and the last vestiges of his sanity held him back from looking for what he somehow knew would sate his hellish thirst.

"Eh, there's enough time." The woman crossed her arms and looked at Milo who had fallen silent, getting to his feet and sniffing the air. His irises were crimson, and much like the woman previously, no sense of self remained.

It was almost like someone looking at a husk of a person fueled by one thought, one desire, one need. Milo narrowed his eyes when he smelled the woman because she smelled like himself, but he took no action against her.

As his senses expanded further, Milo's head snapped in a certain direction, and in under a second, he crossed two meters and crashed through the sturdy wooden wall.

If he were human, he'd have undoubtedly hurt himself, gotten scrapes if he were lucky, and breaking bones if he weren't. But Milo's skin didn't even have a scratch.

Using his hearing, Milo headed towards the cause of the sounds he had heard. A heartbeat thumping wildly, several in fact. Instead of going around, Milo simply went over the obstructions or through them.