The axe on the tray was both a promise and a sentence. Artur understood that the moment his fingers closed around the oiled handle. The familiar weight was comforting—but the context was terrifying. He was no longer a prisoner to be studied.
He was an asset to be deployed.
The shift was immediate. He ate not for pleasure, but for fuel. Every piece of meat, every bite of potato, was a resource to rebuild what had been broken. The praetorian soldier remained silent throughout, a monolith of purpose, his thoughts hidden behind an opaque visor. When Artur finished, two more soldiers entered. They carried no needles, no monitors. They brought clothes: a dark gray jumpsuit, seamless, pocketless, made of a synthetic material both flexible and unnervingly durable. The uniform of something valuable.
They escorted him out of the white room.
The journey was long—a descent into the intestines of the DAO complex. Polished concrete corridors stretched in inhuman perspectives, punctuated by heavy steel doors that hissed open and shut with the finality of bank vaults. The air was cold, thick with the scent of metal, ozone… and something else. Something Artur recognized from his darkest memories—the subtle smell of reality bending under powerful technology. He felt like an animal being moved from a transport cage into the main enclosure of an alien zoo.
At last, they reached a massive double door. It opened to reveal his new world.
A plaque beside it read:
ASSET EVALUATION WING – GYMNASIUM 01
"Gymnasium" was a cruel joke.
The space was colossal—a subterranean hangar with a ceiling thirty meters high—but there was nothing recreational about it. It was a brutalist fusion of particle physics lab and torture chamber. The floor was covered in black rubber that swallowed sound. Concrete walls were laced with miles of cables and sensors. Weightlifting equipment stood beside human centrifuges, high-speed treadmills that ended in ballistic gel walls, and at the center—a "ring," surrounded not by ropes, but by a barrier of force-field emitters.
And along one wall, stretching nearly its full length, stood a floor-to-ceiling mirrored panel.
Artur didn't need to see through it to know.
He was being watched.
He could feel the eyes. The weight of analysis.
Dr. Thorne was waiting at the center of the room, beside a mobile data console. The curiosity that once defined her expression was gone. In its place—impatience. The look of an engineer about to test an expensive prototype.
"Welcome to the Gymnasium, Artur," she said without ceremony. "This will be your work and evaluation environment. Here, we will establish your baseline capabilities. Strength, speed, endurance, reaction time. Every aspect of your enhanced physiology will be measured, quantified, and—if possible—replicated."
Artur looked around at the cold geometry, the mirrored wall. He felt exposed. Stripped bare. His entire body ached—deep, bone-deep pain in muscles still healing, still reforging. The idea of being forced into a battery of tests was absurd.
He had won the war.
And now the bureaucrats wanted to perform an autopsy on the victorious soldier.
"The first evaluation is an isometric strength test," Thorne continued, gesturing toward a modified lifting station bristling with sensors. "Simple. Lift the weight."
Artur didn't move.
He looked at her. Then at the mirrored wall. A deep exhaustion settled into his face—mixed with something older. Something stubborn.
"No," he said.
Quiet. Final.
Thorne raised an eyebrow. "I'm afraid that wasn't a request. You are a DAO asset now. Your cooperation is not optional."
"I'm not an asset," Artur replied, voice low and dangerous. "I'm not one of your experiments. I'm a man who survived hell while you hid in your holes. You took my axe. Now you've given it back. Our transaction is complete. I want out."
"That is not an option," Thorne snapped, patience fraying. "You don't understand your importance—"
"No," he cut in, stepping forward. "You don't understand. You think you can control me, point me at your problems. But you don't know what I am. I don't know what I am. And I'm not going to be your lab rat while I figure it out."
The refusal—firm, absolute—created a deadlock.
Thorne stared at him, frustration plain. She was a scientist. Logic and data were her tools. She was not equipped to handle raw human defiance. She turned, speaking quietly into the microphone on her wrist.
Seconds later, a large monitor flickered to life.
Agent Barros appeared—not in person, but as a digital specter. Somehow, that made him more imposing. More inescapable. His eyes seemed to pierce straight through the screen.
"We've heard your reluctance, Artur," Barros said, calm—but heavy, like stone. "And I understand. You're tired. You're in pain. You want this to end. But you need to understand your new reality."
The camera zoomed slightly on his face.
"You are in a facility no one leaves without permission. You can cooperate—help us understand what makes you special, help us use your 'gift' to ensure what happened on 26th Street never happens again. We can give you purpose. We can give you a chance to fight."
He paused.
Let it settle.
"Or… you can keep saying no. And we will put you back in the white room. No windows. No axe. No purpose. Just you and the walls—for the rest of your life. We will respect your decision not to cooperate. But you will never see sunlight again. You will never smell rain again. And your forest…"
A beat.
"Forget it. It will become just another hallucination. A memory that fades."
The threat was surgical.
No pain. No violence.
Just absence.
The removal of everything that defined him—freedom, identity, connection to the real world he clung to.
The forest.
The promise of never seeing it again—that was the final blow.
Artur stood there, chest rising and falling, a silent war raging inside him. Rage against helplessness. The desire for freedom against the certainty of confinement.
He looked at Barros.
At Thorne.
At the mirrored wall—at the unseen observers.
He was cornered.
A beast in a cage.
And they had just found the right collar.
He said nothing.
He turned and walked to the lifting station.
Cold, dense anger settled in his gut—heavier than any weight.
If they wanted a lab rat…
They would get one.
"The starting load is 180 kilograms," Thorne said, her voice more cautious now, sensing the shift. "It's the deadlift record for a DAO field agent. Just lift it off the ground, hold for three seconds. Baseline test."
Artur looked at the bar.
180 kilograms.
Formidable. The peak of human strength.
He thought of Barros's threat.
Of the forest he might never see again.
The anger sharpened.
Became fuel.
He stepped forward.
Ignored the grips. The stance. Every rule of proper lifting technique.
Instead, he bent down—and grabbed the center of the bar with one hand.
His right hand.
Behind the glass, scientists leaned forward.
Confusion.
"That's impossible," one whispered. "He'll tear the bicep."
Artur inhaled.
And pulled.
There was no gradual lift.
There was an explosion.
With a scream of protesting metal, the 180-kilogram bar ripped off the ground. Muscles in his arm and shoulder coiled beneath the gray suit—not like human fibers, but like steel cables winding on a drum. He didn't just lift it.
He snatched it to hip height.
One arm.
Violent. Effortless.
The plates rattled. Groaned.
He stood there, holding the impossible weight in one hand. His body trembled—not from strain, but from contained fury.
Three seconds passed.
Five.
Ten.
Behind the glass—silence.
Stunned.
Thorne stared at her console, frozen. A red warning blinked violently.
WARNING: TORQUE FORCE EXCEEDS SENSOR LIMITS BY 270%
Beside it, another number stabilized—calculated from the deformation of the steel bar.
270 KILOGRAMS.
"My God," an analyst whispered. "That's… that's fifty percent above Commander Rex's record… with both hands."
Artur held it one second longer.
Staring at his distorted reflection in the mirrored wall.
Then, with a growl that was more animal than human—
He let go.
The 180 kilos crashed down with a cataclysmic BOOM, shaking the room, forcing the scientists to recoil instinctively.
Artur stood there, chest heaving, rage burning in his eyes.
He had cooperated.
In his own way.
And the message—like him—was unmistakable.
I am not your lab rat.
I am the monster you just locked inside the cage.