While the news of Mr. Elias's disappearance sent a cold shockwave through the DAO's spine, turning an artifact investigation into a potential extradimensional abduction case, Artur was subjected to a different kind of violation. He was no longer in the sterile hospital room, but in an observation chamber that tried far too hard to look normal. A comfortable armchair (bolted to the floor), a coffee table (also bolted down), and a wall displaying a serene image of a forest—a cheap, insulting imitation of the world he had lost.
Across from him, seated with legs crossed and a tablet resting on his lap, was Dr. Marcus Vale, the DAO's chief psychologist. Vale was a man with a calm smile and eyes that seemed to understand everything—a combination Artur found instantly detestable. It was the calm of a man who had never felt the ground vanish beneath his feet.
"Let's talk about your life before 26th Street, Artur," Vale began, his voice soft and measured, designed to soothe skittish animals. "Fourteen years of isolation. That's a long time for a man to be alone. Did you feel lonely? Angry at the world that forced you out?"
Artur remained silent, arms crossed over his chest. He stared at the forest image on the wall, contempt plain on his face. He felt like a caged bear being questioned about its feelings regarding the size of the cage.
"Your file says you registered as a Level Two Dreamer at nineteen," Vale continued, unfazed. "Smells, sounds, minor visual distortions. For most, a curiosity. For you, it was enough to abandon society. Why? What frightened you so much?"
"I wasn't scared," Artur replied, his voice low and rough. "I was a problem. And real men solve their problems. I couldn't stop the leak, so I moved somewhere it wouldn't flood anyone else's house."
"A noble solution. Or perhaps an escape," Vale mused, making a note on his tablet. "Repressed anger, the frustration of being 'different,' can manifest in unexpected ways. The violence you displayed on 26th Street… it was extreme. Lethal. Is it possible that years of accumulated resentment found a release valve?"
A flare of hot anger stabbed through Artur. This man was trying to turn his act of survival—the sacrifice he made to save a child—into a symptom of mental illness. He was trying to paint a hero as a repressed monster.
"I'm not violent," Artur said through clenched teeth. "I'm a lumberjack. My job is to apply force precisely to bring down something big and dangerous. That's what I did."
"But you described the blows with a… disturbing intimacy," Vale pressed. "'I forced it to obey the rules of steel.' 'I dismantled the machine.' That's not the language of a man acting in self-defense. That's the language of a predator dominating its prey. Did you enjoy it, Artur? For a moment, did you feel in control—powerful?"
The question was a probe, cold and precise, designed to pierce his defenses.
And it did.
The implication—that he was a monster reveling in carnage—unbalanced him. His mind, scrambling to reject the idea, recoiled, seeking refuge anywhere else. And in doing so, it stumbled upon a door that had been locked.
The room around him began to dissolve.
The forest image flickered, replaced by a sickly purple sky. The steady beep of the heart monitor beneath his clothing twisted into the oppressive hum of Thalassoma. The smell of recycled air gave way to ozone and rotting flesh.
"What's happening?" Vale asked, noticing the shift. Artur's eyes had lost focus; sweat beaded on his forehead.
Artur didn't hear him.
He was back.
Lying on the asphalt of 26th Street. His body, a symphony of broken bones and torn muscle. He could taste blood and vomit in his mouth. Above him, the colossal silhouette of the second Alpha was materializing, its massive head tilting, magma-bright eyes burning with triumph.
"Artur?" Vale's voice was a distant echo.
He was reliving the fight—but not the fury of the blows.
The pain.
The agony of his leg being crushed. The sensation of being thrown through the air like a rag doll. He felt the impact against the asphalt, the darkness threatening to swallow him whole.
But then the memory deepened, slipping into a place his conscious mind had sealed away—a fragment of trauma so intense it had been buried beneath layers of physical pain.
He was lying there, broken, and the beast had seized him.
The memory wasn't visual. It was tactile.
A sensory agony.
He remembered the jaws closing around his injured leg. Not just the crushing pressure, the sound of his own tibia snapping—
Something else.
Something he had forgotten.
A sting.
Amid the overwhelming pain, there was another kind. Sharp. Penetrating. Like a hypodermic needle the size of a railroad spike being driven into his flesh.
It wasn't a cut.
It was an injection.
Artur began to tremble uncontrollably in the chair. His body arched.
"Sting…" he gasped, eyes rolling back. "It wasn't just… crushing. It… stung me."
In the adjacent control room, separated by a one-way mirror, Dr. Thorne and Barros watched the session. Thorne monitored Artur's vitals on a console, brow furrowed in concentration.
"His stress markers are off the charts," she murmured. "Vale's pushing too hard."
"He needs answers, Aris. We need them," Barros replied, arms crossed, gaze fixed on Artur's convulsing form.
"A spider bite…" Artur continued in the other room, voice now a broken moan. He clutched his arm, then his leg, as if trying to rip something out of himself. "But not… not a spider. It was… ice. Burning ice. Climbing up my leg. Burning… a venom… going in…"
Dr. Vale leaned forward, fascinated by the collapse. "What did the venom do, Artur? Tell me what you felt."
"COLD!" Artur screamed, the sound tearing through his throat. He threw himself back in the chair, body convulsing. "A cold that burned! Trying… to take over! Freeze my blood, steal my breath… I felt… I felt my body fighting it! A fever… a fever that burned the cold from the inside! A war… inside me!"
He gasped for air, sweat streaming down his face, eyes still shut, trapped in the memory. He was reliving the microscopic war Thorne had witnessed in the lab—the battle of his immune system against the invading symbiont.
Dr. Vale, calm as ever, made a note on his tablet.
His interpretation was simple. Textbook.
The trauma of the crushed leg, the helplessness, the infection that followed—his mind had translated it into a sensory metaphor. A tactile hallucination to make sense of unbearable pain.
He wrote: Complex tactile hallucination ("sting," "venom"). Manifestation of physical violation and loss of control. Recommend desensitization therapy.
He had his answer.
Artur's mind was, indeed, broken.
But in the control room, Dr. Thorne wasn't writing.
She was frozen.
Her eyes were wide, locked on the audio feed. She heard the words: sting… venom… burning cold… a fever that burned the cold from the inside.
"Chitin Parasite Class-G," she whispered, the pieces snapping into place with terrifying speed.
The attempted symbiosis.
The failure.
The "venom" was the parasitic symbiont trying to fuse with him. The "fever" was his hyper-aggressive immune response—a war he had felt at the cellular level.
Vale's hallucination wasn't a hallucination.
It was a report.
A testimony of a battle no human should be able to feel—let alone survive.
She turned from the console, her eyes blazing with a manic urgency that made Barros take a step back. She didn't say a word to him. She ran for the lab door, slamming her palm against the release panel.
"Security!" she barked into her comm as the door slid open. "Sedate the patient now! And pull more samples!"
She sprinted down the corridor toward her main lab, already shouting orders to her stunned team through the communicator on her wrist.
"Isolate Artur's blood sample again! Run full-spectrum antibody analysis! I want every anomalous protein sequenced and identified! Look for alien antibodies! NOW!"