The Host

Chapter Two

Three days had passed since the bite.

Alina Reyes hadn’t told a soul about the thing that happen to her, the insect that bite her, on how it looks terribly different from the other insect.

The first thing came to her mind is, what if that insect is spreading a virus. She shook her head as if removing those words into her mind.

What is this a zombie virus, she laughed at it. Because if it is indeed a zombie virus, she should be a zombie already eating human and losing her mind.

She’d washed the blood from her neck in silence that night, trembling beneath the low stream of cold water from the pump. She’d stared at her reflection in a cracked hand mirror—the faint, star-shaped scar glowing faintly for just a second—then disappearing beneath her skin like a secret.

She told herself it was just a bite. Maybe a strange insect. Maybe a nightmare.

But she knew.

Something had changed.

At night, she felt it humming beneath her ribs. When she blinked too long, she’d find herself blinking across the yard—literally.

She’d reach for a glass and it would already be in her hand. When she cried in frustration, the sky rumbled as if trying to soothe her.

When she panicked, the ground responded with tiny quakes.

So she stopped panicking.

She started pretending.

Pretending nothing was wrong. That she was still the girl who scraped coins to buy her lola medicine, who helped teach neighborhood kids math in exchange for snacks, who walked three kilometers to school every day. The world didn’t care if a girl like her had a secret.

But the world had started watching.

Thousands of miles away, hidden beneath layers of encrypted military systems, satellite images flickered on the screens of a control room labeled Section 9 - Covert Bioweapons Division.

A team of four scientists and three military agents stood behind a glowing panel.

“Still no visual on the host?” asked Commander Braxton, a man whose face looked like it had never learned to smile wearing his uniform with full of authority and a presence that no one can disobey.

Dr. Elisa Graves, head of mutation analytics, pointed to a pulsing red dot on the map.

“Every time we try to focus in, the signal distorts. It’s like... she’s unconsciously jamming us.” One of the soldiers explained in confusion.

“Impossible,” muttered a tech. “None of the other EXO hosts developed that level of interference.”

“She’s not like the others,” Graves replied flatly. “That insect wasn’t from our last batch. Something in the wild mutated it. She’s the only recorded subject with all signature markers.”

Braxton narrowed his eyes.

“All elemental control. Time displacement. Spatial folding. Regenerative core. The complete profile.”

Graves nodded slowly. “She’s Host Zero. The prototype that nature made better than us.”

“And she’s in a province with no known resistance, no support network, no clue what she is.”

“Yet we can’t see her,” Graves said softly.

A tense silence fell over the room. Until another voice cut in from the shadows.

“Then we stop watching from afar,” said a man in a black tactical coat, his ID badge turned over, face obscured. “We send a team. Infiltrate quietly. Gain her trust if we can. Extract her if we must.”

Braxton didn’t question the authority. He just nodded.

“Deploy the Watchers.”

In San Mateo, Alina sat outside her lola’s house on a wooden bench, hugging her knees to her chest. The late afternoon sun was beginning to bleed orange across the rice paddies. Chickens clucked nearby. A tricycle rolled by in the distance.

Everything looked normal. As if nothing will happen, the cold wind of the afternoon hums it’s a peace she wants to have as long as she live.

But she felt it. Something is shifting and it keeps on changing, she still doesn’t know what it is but it makes her shiver from within.

A weight. A ripple.

Like the world around her had shifted.

And the feeling that Someone is always watching.

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Inside a small bakery two streets away, a man in a blue cap pretended to examine the bread. His eyes, however, were trained on Alina’s direction through the reflection in the display glass.

One block farther, a woman selling vegetables watched from beneath her umbrella, the lens of a microscopic camera disguised in her earring blinking once.

In a van parked near the barangay hall, a man in civilian clothes adjusted a screen showing biometric readings.

Heart rate elevated.

Neuro-activity spiking during moments of emotional stress.

Mutagenic levels: stable.

Power use: undetectable, but present.

“Girl’s a ticking bomb,” one agent muttered.

The lead agent in the van, a cold-eyed woman known only as Hawk, sipped from her cup of kapeng barako and stared at Alina’s live thermal feed.

“She doesn’t even know what she’s capable of yet,” Hawk said, voice low.

A long pause.

“Good. That gives us time.”

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That night, Alina dreamed of fire.

Of oceans that listened to her screams. Of storms she called down with her fury. Of men in black uniforms locking her in glass rooms. Of wires in her veins. Of pain.

She jolted awake in a cold sweat.

And then she heard it—a faint click behind her window.

Her heart froze like the time stop from moving.

She slipped out of bed, creeping barefoot across the bamboo floor. She reached for the curtain—and froze. Her hand hovered mid-air.

Something was there.

Breathing.

Watching.

A whisper of a shadow.

Then—it vanished.

Like it was never there.

But she knew.

They had found her.