Varon, reading her hesitation, screamed over the noise, his voice raw with desperation:
"Lock it down, Maria! Engage the lockdown!"
He clawed at the dirt, trying to free his leg.
"It's just a wild animal! But the science in this machine... this science can rewrite the world! Choose, girl! Use your head, not your heart!"
Maria stared down at Varon. At the cold, calculating greed rotting in his eyes.
Then, she looked up at the center of the cage.
The creature was suffocating, its form glitching in and out of existence, but its ruby eyes were fixed on Maria. It wasn't a look of begging. It was a look of pure, unadulterated trust.
Memories flashed behind her eyes. The cold barrel of David's gun against her temple in her past life. The sickening justification of 'being sacrificed for the greater good'.
No... I'm done sacrificing the innocent.
Maria broke eye contact with Varon and locked her gaze onto the trembling controls.
"Science without humanity is just butchery, Varon."
She raised her fist.
Varon realized what she was doing. The color drained from his face entirely.
"NO! Don't touch that! You fool!"
Maria drove her fist downward.
Not onto the Lockdown button.
Dead-center onto the primary flow-regulating crystal.
CRACK!
The crystal shattered into stardust.
With every ounce of strength in her small frame, Maria yanked the master discharge lever all the way down.
"Be free!"
Bzzzzzzz... BOOOOOOOOM!
A violent mechanical screech tore through the courtyard, sounding like the snapping of steel cables on a god-sized bridge.
The purple beams of the remaining rods abruptly died.
The force field shattered.
The crushing gravity vanished from the shadow creature's shoulders.
A massive backwash of uncontained energy blasted outward, lifting Maria off her feet and throwing her backward into the dirt.
Varon let out a guttural scream:
"NOOOOO!"
The massive console smoked, sparked, and died.
A thick veil of dust blanketed the courtyard.
For a moment, there was nothing but the eerie quiet of the aftermath.
Then... cutting through the smoke and ash... two glowing ruby eyes ignited.
The creature was free.
Towering, lethal, and unbound.
It let out a thunderous roar. But this time, it wasn't a scream of agony; it was the absolute declaration of an apex predator reclaiming its freedom.
Instantly, its massive form liquefied into pure shadow, scaling the high walls of the Academy and flowing over them like a river of black ink.
Varon sat in the ruins, staring blankly at the smoking husk of his life's work. It was over. The specimen was gone. The data was wiped clean.
Maria, lying flat on her back with a warm trail of blood tracing down her forehead, let out an exhausted, painful laugh.
Varon would walk free. Justice wouldn't touch him today.
But an innocent soul survived.
And for Maria, looking up at the sky... that was the only victory that mattered.
But her smile didn't last. It died on her lips in less than a heartbeat.
Varon's machine wasn't completely dead. Massive amounts of residual mana were still trapped in the underground cabling. The three remaining rods—now stripped of their target to absorb the pressure—began to violently vibrate. The trapped energy demanded a release.
CRACK!
All three rods detonated simultaneously.
The resulting shockwave struck the foundation of the equipment warehouse like a battering ram.
A massive, suffocating shadow eclipsed the moonlight over Maria.
She turned her head.
The ten-meter-high stone wall of the warehouse, along with the heavy iron trusses of its roof, had detached. With a sickening groan of tearing metal, the entire structure began to collapse.
Directly on top of Maria. And her body was completely drained; she didn't have the strength to even crawl.
Her mind ran the fatal math in a millisecond:
Distance: Zero. Time: Zero. Escape route: Blocked.
She closed her eyes, accepting the math.
At least... I didn't die for nothing. At least it got out.
Sarah's voice shredded her eardrums from across the courtyard:
"MARIAAAAA! NOOOO!"
The deafening roar of falling masonry consumed the world. Maria braced her body, waiting for the inevitable, bone-crushing impact.
But the impact never came.
Instead... Darkness came.
But it wasn't the cold, empty void of death. It was a fluid, living darkness.
A microsecond before the crushing weight of the stone met her skull, her own shadow violently tore open its jaws.
Like a geyser of black ink, the shadow surged upward from the earth and swallowed Maria whole.
The world went mute.
The apocalyptic crash of the building was muffled instantly. Maria felt as if she had been plunged into the depths of a freezing, starlit ocean. Weightless, her body was yanked through the void at a dizzying, impossible speed.
One second later...
FWUMP!
The shadow violently convulsed, spitting Maria out onto the damp, freezing grass twenty meters away from the blast zone.
She hit the ground rolling, hacking up cold air and dirt.
THUD!
The warehouse was leveled to the ground, obliterating the exact spot where Maria had been lying a single breath ago. A massive, mushroom-like cloud of debris rose into the night sky.
She stared at the rubble, her chest heaving.
Had she been a fraction of a second slower, there wouldn't have been enough left of her to bury.
Maria dragged herself up, looking around in disoriented disbelief.
How...?
Perched high atop the surviving stone wall of the Academy, the black creature stood.
It hadn't fled. It had come back.
Its ruby eyes pierced the swirling dust. Its three tails swayed behind it in a slow, deliberate rhythm.
The feral panic was gone from its gaze. It was replaced by a look Maria knew intimately from her past life. The look of a comrade-in-arms.
The creature stood in absolute silence, locking eyes with her, but Maria received the unspoken message loud and clear: Now, we're even.
The creature raised its head, let out a short, resonant roar, and this time, it truly left. It melted into the absolute darkness of the forest.
Maria slumped back onto the freezing grass. Her hands, usually so steady, were violently trembling.
For the first time across two lifetimes... someone had come back for her. Someone who had every reason to run, had turned around to save her life.
A single, unbidden tear slipped from the corner of her eye, cutting a clean track through the ash and dirt on her face.
"Thanks... buddy."