Maya sat in the corner of her white cell, but she was no longer just sitting. She was folded into herself, a broken origami of a human being. The stump of her arm, now neatly sealed by a medical-grade synthetic skin graft the Architects had applied after their "test," rested limply in her lap. The physical wound was closed. The psychological one was a gaping, infected chasm.
For days, or weeks—time had lost all meaning—the voice had come through the walls. Not the sterile, genderless command voice. This was a soft, whispering, insidious voice that knew her.
"You are the noise, Maya. Your fear, your grief, your silly human attachments… they are the static drowning out the beautiful silence. You are the flaw in your own design."
It showed her images on the white walls—perfect,高清 memories. Her father's lab, exploding not with chemicals, but with a silent, black dust. Leo's face, his eyes pleading, dissolving into nothing. Derek turning to ash under her own fingertips. Each vision was a tailored poison, each whisper a screw turned in her mind.
They weren't testing her body anymore. They were dismantling her sanity, brick by brick, to see what was underneath. To see if they could reach the entity by breaking the girl.
She began to rock, a slow, rhythmic motion. She hummed a tuneless song, a childhood lullaby her fractured memory could only half-remember. Tears streamed down her face, but she made no sound. The humming grew louder, clashing with the whispering voice. She was building a wall of noise to block out the noise. The irony was lost on her. She was disappearing into a psychosis of her own making.
In the observation room, the Architects noted the data.
"Subject Maya-07. Psychological fragmentation is proceeding at an accelerated rate. Ego boundaries are collapsing. The entropic partition remains inactive. The core consciousness is retreating. Hypothesis: the partition may re-activate to protect a vacuum, not a personality."
They sent the report to their Superior. Subject was breaking. The monster remained dormant. Next phase: escalate stimuli.
---
One hour earlier, in the cryo-containment chamber, Wolfen Welfric opened his eyes.
The monitors in the observation room, which had shown flatlines, suddenly screamed to life. Thermal signatures spiked from absolute zero to human norm in a nanosecond. Brainwave activity became a chaotic, brilliant storm.
The two Architects on duty scrambled back from the window.
Inside, the ice imprisoning Wolfen didn't melt. It sublimated. It turned directly from solid to a superheated steam that filled the chamber with a blinding, scalding fog. When it cleared, Wolfen was standing on the floor, the stasis field gone, the frost on his clothes and skin simply gone as if it had never been. He stretched, cracking his neck.
He walked to the observation window, a wall of reinforced, transparent alloy ten inches thick. He could see the blurred, panicked shapes of the silver-masked figures on the other side.
He leaned close to the glass, his breath not fogging it. He smiled, a friendly, terrifying smile. "Look at my face," he said, his voice clear through the audio pickups. "Go on. Take a good look. Because it's the last thing you'll see."
He pulled his fist back and drove it into the center of the window.
The impact was thunderous, a shockwave that rattled the observation room. The window didn't crack. It didn't even shudder.
Wolfen looked at his unmarked knuckles, then back at the glass. "I really thought that'd work," he mused, shrugging. "Ah well. This will."
He raised his right hand. Flame ignited around it, not the white plasma of battle, but a deep, crimson-orange fire that burned with a quiet, ancient rage. He drew the fire back into a fist-sized orb of concentrated destruction.
Before he could release it, the ceiling of his chamber reacted. Dozens of hair-thin filaments dropped down, not attacking him, but spraying the entire surface of the observation window with a hyper-coolant. The temperature differential was instant and catastrophic.
The super-heated window, stressed by Wolfen's punch and now flash-frozen on one side, did the only thing it could.
It shattered.
But it didn't shatter outwards. It scattered. The entire sheet of transparent alloy fractured into millions of diamond-hard, razor-sharp crystalline shards that exploded inward, filling the chamber with a blizzard of frozen knives.
Wolfen threw up an arm. Most of the shards deflected off a hastily conjured plate of Umbralite, but dozens found their mark. They sliced across his chest, his arms, his face, leaving a lattice of fine, bleeding cuts. One jagged piece embedded itself in his shoulder. He grunted, more in annoyance than pain, plucking it out and letting it clatter to the floor.
Through the now-empty frame, he saw the two Architects frozen in terror.
Then, a new figure filled the doorway behind them.
It was Eva.
But it was an Eva they had never seen. Her simple white clothes were drenched in blood, not all of it hers. Her hair was matted with it. A fierce, wild light burned in her eyes, the calm Prime utterly consumed by the fury of a cornered animal. In her right hand, she held a jagged piece of broken pipe, its end glowing red-hot and dripping molten metal. She looked less like a subject and more like a raging Valkyrie who had clawed her way out of a grave.
Wolfen took her in, a flicker of something like approval in his golden eyes. "Come on," he said, stepping through the shattered frame, glass crunching under his boots. "We're leaving."
"Okay," Eva said, her voice a hoarse rasp.
They turned to go. Eva took one step and her leg buckled. Wolfen caught her before she hit the ground. He looked her over. Beneath the blood, he could see the puckered, angry holes of projectile wounds in her thigh and side. They weren't healing.
"What happened?" he asked, his voice low.
"They have… guns," Eva gritted out, pain etching her face. "New ones. The bullets… they hurt. And I don't heal. Not from these."
Wolfen didn't hesitate. He looked at his own hand, at the blood welling from the countless glass cuts. He focused on his index finger. With a sickening, deliberate crack, he twisted and tore the finger off at the second knuckle.
"R U MAD?!" Eva shrieked, recoiling.
"Oops, sorry," Wolfen said blandly, as if he'd stepped on her toe. He hadn't told her what he was doing.
Before she could protest further, he shoved the severed end of his bleeding finger directly into one of the bullet wounds in her side.
Eva gasped, expecting agony. Instead, a wave of impossible, volcanic heat flooded the wound. It wasn't healing like her Prime biology healed. This was… replacement. The shredded tissue, the foreign material of the bullet, the damaged cells—they were being incinerated and rewritten from the inside out by a primal, furious energy. The pain vanished, replaced by a scalding, powerful fullness. The wound sealed over, leaving fresh, pink skin.
Wolfen's own severed finger stump ceased bleeding instantly, the flesh knitting over in a second. He wiggled his newly regenerated fingertip.
"Let's go," he said, pulling her to her feet. She felt stronger. Different. A strange, hot energy simmered under her skin, unfamiliar and terrifying. "Where's the rest?"
"They're getting the others out," Eva said, her voice stronger. "The survivors from the other cells. I came to find you."
"Do you know where the lab's leader is? The Superior?"
Eva shook her head. "No."
"You go that way," Wolfen pointed down a sterile white corridor. "Get everyone you can to the main hangar. I'll go this way." He pointed in the opposite direction, towards the heart of the facility. "I have a debt to collect for a ruined door, and now for a window."
They split up. Eva moved down the corridor, the strange fire from Wolfen's blood coursing through her, a key turning in a lock she never knew she had. She could feel it now, a reservoir of raw, destructive power just beneath her calm Prime surface, waiting to be unleashed. She had found a new kind of constant: not stfriends. but conflagration.
And somewhere in the depths of the white hell, she would find her friends.