Before the lycanthrope program, before Deville, Kaleb ran a different experiment out of the same Arn Griishank lab – regenerating soldiers hardy enough to survive the worst the Green Hell could throw at them. The test subjects were “Bulldog” veterans, five-year men who’d already lived through more than most, issued medipacks that were, unknown to them, seeded with the actual infection. It worked, in the narrowest possible sense: the regeneration was real, and it exceeded every projection Kaleb had for it.
What it didn’t leave behind was the soldier. The infection assumes control of the brain the way it assumes control of everything else it touches – starting with the autonomic systems, then the motor skills, until the original mind is a passenger inside a body it can no longer steer, fully aware and utterly unable to act. What’s left afterward answers to nothing but hunger, and grows more physically troll-like the longer it feeds – the same crude claws-and-rend brutality, the same absurd resilience, layered over a body that used to take orders.
FILE NOTES
A patrol sent out to retrieve some missing miners and a stolen flask – the same flask later mistaken for an elixir of longevity, and actually containing a young black pudding – was the test group that got away from Kaleb entirely. Primitive hunger overrode whatever training and discipline the Dranathess will had built into them, and by the time anyone caught up with what they’d become, they were feeding rather than following orders. Karver’s lycanthrope soldiers were sent to put them down – true werewolves, damage resistance and all – and still struggled against regeneration that was, by design, outperforming everything Kaleb had hoped for. Even “destroyed,” the patrol kept moving, healing through wounds that should have ended them, and continued its last orders – still hunting for the miners – long after anyone still in command would have called it off.
Nobody has confirmed whether that patrol was ever actually finished off, or whether it’s still out in the jungle somewhere, regenerating past whatever eventually stops it.
STATUS: Filed under The Unknown as a species/incident record, not individuals. A weapons program that outlived its own chain of command, last seen still executing orders nobody alive is still giving it.