A plume of phosphorescent green mist, thick and noxious, erupted from the fragmented vessel, swirling outwards like a malevolent djinn. The air shimmered, tasting of ozone and corrupted bio-matter. Laleh shrieked, dropping the remaining shards with a clatter. Her gaze flickered between the escaping miasma and Roshanak’s face. “Doctor! It… it wasn’t sealed!” Roshanak didn’t flinch. Her gaze, sharp and analytical, tracked the expanding cloud. A faint, low thrum vibrated through the brass floor. Then, the first tremor. Not from the outside, but from the observation habitat built into the far wall. The pane housing the experimental subjects, a colony of white-furred gherbil-rats, began to rattle. One rat, normally placid, twitched violently. Its fur bristled, then began to slough off in patches, replaced by a grotesque, chitinous sheen. Its eyes glowed with an unnerving emerald light. A second, then a third, convulsed. Their teeth elongated into needle-sharp fangs, their claws hardening into obsidian talons. They began to snarl, a sound far too deep for rodents of their size. “The neural regeneration cascade…” Roshanak murmured, her voice level amidst the wreckage. “It’s accelerating their metabolic rate beyond control. Hyper-aggression. Necrotic tissue consumption.” She stalked towards a wall-mounted sterile locker, her movements precise, even as the first blighted gherbil-rat slammed against the enclosure pane, spidering the surface. Behrouz stood frozen for a beat, his aristocratic face contorted in a rare display of alarm. “Bahrami, what in the name of the Prophet’s Scroll is *that*?!” he exclaimed, gesturing wildly at the increasingly monstrous rodents. One of them, now the size of a badger, gnawed through the reinforced brass mesh with horrific speed. “My research subjects, now flesh-eating horrors,” Roshanak replied, her tone dry as she pulled out two long, articulated lancets from the locker. They unfolded into gleaming, razor-sharp whips with a series of sharp clicks. She tossed one to Behrouz, who caught it with an instinctive, if surprised, grace. “And your problem, seeing as you’re my mandatory lab partner.” With a final crack, the panel gave way. Three transformed gherbil-rats, shrieking like miniature daevas, burst into the lab, their glowing gaze fixed on the nearest source of soft tissue: Laleh. Laleh screamed again, scrambling backwards, tripping over a discarded flow-regulator. The vermin lunged, their fangs dripping with tainted saliva. Roshanak moved first. Her segmented whip whistled through the air, a silver blur. With a snap, it severed the head of the lead beast clean from its neck. The dead eyes dimmed as it hit the floor, twitching. Behrouz, for all his arrogance, was surprisingly quick. His own whip lashed out, catching a second rat mid-leap. He didn’t kill it outright, instead expertly coiling the blade around its body, pinning it writhing against the floor. “These are *your* pets, Bahrami! What’s the protocol for a spontaneous contagion outbreak in the Dar-al-Hikma?!” he yelled, struggling to maintain his grip as it thrashed. “Suppression via neural obliteration, preferably without damaging the structural integrity of the lab or yourself,” Roshanak rattled off, already dispatching the third rat with a precise strike to its spine. Its altered form went limp, but its teeth continued to snap reflexively. More rodents poured from the breached enclosure. The lab became a maelstrom of furious snarls and the sharp *thwack* of segmented whips. Roshanak moved with clinical grace, her years of surgical operation translated into methodical butchery. Each strike was economical, each kill absolute. She wasn’t fighting; she was dissecting with extreme prejudice. One particularly large specimen, its fur entirely replaced by overlapping plates of emerald chitin, lunged at Roshanak from a blind spot. Behrouz, still wrestling with his own captive, saw it. He didn’t hesitate. With a roar of effort, he flung his rat aside and pivoted, stepping directly into the path of the larger beast. His body became a shield, his whip a flash of silver that deflected the rat’s charge, forcing it back. “Watch your flank, Bahrami!” he barked, a grimace of effort on his face. Roshanak spared him a single glance. “Noted, Jahandar,” she replied, then with a downward arc, she cleaved the warped beast in two, its tainted ichor splattering harmlessly on Behrouz’s pristine lab coat. The lab fell silent, save for the heavy breathing of the two scientists and the terrified whimper of Laleh. The air still reeked of sulfur, but the immediate threat was neutralized. Roshanak surveyed the carnage, a faint line forming between her brows. “Laleh, fetch the biohazard suits and the neutralizing spray. Then begin the decontamination protocol without delay.” Just as Laleh, still trembling, began to scramble towards the supply closet, a new sound ripped through the sudden quiet of the lab. A discordant, cacophonous blare of brass instruments – tubas, trumpets, trombones – followed by the off-key wail of a hundred bagpipes. It was a bizarre, jarring symphony of pure auditory torment, reverberating through the very foundations of the Dar-al-Hikma. The sound was so overwhelming, so utterly out of place, that even Behrouz paused, staring toward the courtyard in bewildered outrage. Roshanak, however, recognized the tune instantly. Her stomach sank. “The Marching Band of Misguided Romance,” she snarled, her voice low and lethal. “Kavadh.” The vibrations from the colossal noise intensified. Glassware on shelves rattled precariously. A sensitive spectral analyzer, still warm from the recent analysis, sparked violently, its internal mechanisms seizing up. The blaring grew louder, a grotesque apology ballad echoing through the hallowed halls of academia. “My tenure application, which I submitted *this morning*, specifically outlines ‘zero tolerance for major noise violations affecting delicate bio-aether research’,” Roshanak stated, her voice dangerously calm. Her fingers tightened around the hilt of her retracted weapon. “That performance could be grounds for instant dismissal from the Laureate track, if not the Citadel entirely.” Behrouz looked from the ruined lab to the shaking windows, then back at Roshanak, his expression a complicated mix of professional alarm and genuine disbelief at Kavadh’s sheer, unadulterated idiocy. “He’s… serenading you? With a full military band?” “He’s obliterating my career,” Roshanak corrected, her jaw set. “Laleh, go inform the Head Warden of Disturbances. Explain the situation. Tell him it’s an urgent, Tier IV noise violation originating from the exterior grounds.” Laleh nodded frantically, her face pale. She fumbled with the comm-unit, her hands still trembling from the encounter with the feral pack. As she raised it to her ear, she leaned closer to Roshanak, her voice a barely audible whisper above the brass blare. “Doctor… the lab requisition log shows you signed out the defective canister.”

Peer-Reviewed Panic