A pale-looking boy with black hair walked out of a metal door, exhausted.
There was a huge lab filled with bodies of scientists who were either rotting or dried up like they had been killed for… weeks? Months?
The boy took a step forward but lost his balance and fell on the metal floor.
Right in front of him, there was a scalpel.
It reminded him of the times the Doctors opened him up while he was still conscious.
Then he noticed that his hands had gotten bigger, and his baby-soft skin was paler than usual. His untamed dark hair grew in an instant, growing almost shoulder-length. His black eyes were sharper, as was his jawline on his already diamond face.
He didn't feel like he was in the same body.
Memories flooded his brain in an instant. It rushed in faster than he could process at first.
He recalled that he wasn't nine years old. He hadn't been nine years old for years.
By his calculations, he would be fifteen now. He couldn't believe it himself.
"Why did I stop getting older?" he whispered to himself.
He tried to tug those strings that played the sheet of his memories, but they weren't properly tuned yet. It felt better than the first time, though.
"Perhaps I could be of some help," a woman who looked... exactly like his mother showed up.
"Who are... you?" he said between breaths. His vision was starting to blur.
"You're probably feeling fatigued right now. Your memories are flooding back," the strange woman walked a closer while speaking, "Normally, we would have set you back in the box, but the state of the world has created an opportunity... You are free now. Rest, child."
As if on cue, he collapsed on the floor.
The woman walked up to him and tried lifting him up. But then she felt something strange.
She looked at the reflective surface of the metal doorway and saw something sticking to the side of her neck.
It was a scalpel.
Only part of it was visible. The rest was buried deep in her neck.
She fell backwards on her rear and held her neck, which was already starting to spew blood—a lot.
The boy whom she thought had collapsed rose and stared at her with an indifferent expression. Anyone who saw it, though, could see the malice in those dark eyes.
Jack Hall's eyes.
He had obsessively strategised a myriad of ways to kill Doctor Hall every time they experimented on him. The ever-stoic Doctor Forrest as well. That was what he called him.
"She seems to be the only one alive, though."
Jack hoped that whoever… or whatever was happening outside in the world, whatever caused this massacre, had killed the stoic Doctor.
The man who wore the face of his simulated teacher—Doctor Forrest, the mother—Doctor Marie, and the others in this facility had done terrible things to him and erased it from his memory.
He forgot. But he overheard a lot while pretending to have passed out early.
Jack and a bunch of other kids had been part of a program, designed to enable rapid assimilation of knowledge. They operate on them to greatly increase their neuron speed and then send them into a simulation that writes countless lives for them.
Something had happened in the real world that had him trapped in a simulation for six years.
He didn't know what it was. War? Coup?
He did not care, though. Until today, he had not realised he was in the simulation for six years straight.
"Don't go out there..." Doctor Marie said in a panicked voice. "...I know you're mad at me, but... The Acryons. Don't let them get to you... You can't..."
The light left her eyes before she could complete her sentence.
Acryons.
What simulation did he recognise that name from?
Jack cleaned the scalpel and took a key card from the Doctor's body. If he wanted to leave this place, he would need full access.
"Oh? But Mom, I have decided to take your advice to drop my devices and experience nature," he said with indifference.
Walking out of the room, he moved slowly, avoiding the gaze of the flickering lights. The temperature felt warmer than the lab.
'It must be hot outside.'
Walking down the hallway slowly, he didn't want to alert anyone still alive in the facility. He could see the adjacent pathways leading to dark places.
Loud banging echoed from the deep, which he could only imagine was from monsters trying to get out of a cage.
He switched tactics and decided to run instead.
Occasionally, he would see bodies of men in black overcoats lying on the floor, lifeless.
"Bounty Ravens?" he mumbled, surprised. He remembered a bit about them from an issue of the comic book he used to read.
One of them was smaller in size so he decided to take off his clothes.
When Jack's body had drastically grown, the clothes he had ripped, so he decided to change quickly. With the black outfit, he looked like he was cosplaying some main character in a country movie.
Racing down the straight hall for a few minutes until he saw what seemed to be a metal stairway that led upwards to a large door with a security panel that definitely needed a key card to unlock.
He didn't even wait as he opened the door with the key card in his hand.
The surface.
"I'm in the middle of a desert. What exactly were they doing down there?" He said in a low voice, the harsh wind sweeping dust at him.
He tried to process what he was seeing.
Behind him was a door that led horizontally into the sand.
The sand itself was black. Nothing like he had ever seen or heard. The sky was blue, which was the only thing normal about this terrain.
That was because there were two suns in the sky.
'Two stars… Or halves of a whole?' he thought as he shielded his eyes to gaze at the distance—trying to find anything out of the ordinary.
Surprisingly, he did see something. There was a black dot in the sky getting larger and coming towards him with great speed.
Weirdly, he could make out what it was from this distance.
"That's not like any bird I've known in my iterations. Am I really on Earth?"
At that moment, he felt something pull at his leg. A long tentacle with suckers stuck to his skin.
"An octopus… in a desert?" he said, shuddering a little before his body decided to act.
Jack raised his free leg and slammed down on the tentacle, trying to free himself so he could run. There was no doubt in his mind now that this wasn't Earth. Or at least, not the one he knows.
He was on the floor, being pulled, when he remembered the scalpel in his pocket.
Quickly taking action, he stabbed the tentacle multiple times until it spewed some black blood and let go for a second.
Then, he pulled back. What he noticed next horrified him.
The creature's suckers were dug into his veins, sucking out his blood.
He scrambled to the right.
The black dot was still approaching from the south, the tentacle from the north. East or West—those were his only escape routes.
"Whatever is going on, it is not great. It is not great at all. Maybe I should have stayed inside my simulation because what is this bizarre situation?!" he exclaimed as he limped hurriedly away from a wriggling tentacle.
He hadn't gotten really far when he heard a screeching noise.
"The Bird!"
As he suspected, that wasn't a bird. It was probably a few hundred meters away, but he could see it clearly now. Somehow.
Its elongated beak was longer than anything he had seen in his lifetimes. There were two elongated fleshy appendages on its head, which, at the end, held its eyeballs. Its wings were vast, and it had four webbed feet, which was too bizarre.
Jack remembered the sound back in the facility and wondered if he should go back there. He calculated that he wouldn't make it.
In fact, he knew that he wouldn't make it due to the actual state of his mind being better than that of a normal person.
[SYSTEM BOOT... SUCCESS]
Jack tripped as something appeared at the corner of his vision, startling him.
[BIOSIGNATURE DETECTED: SUBJECT 001 (JACK HALL)]
[SYNCHRONIZING RUNE-NEURAL PATHWAYS...]
[SUCCESS!]
[CONGRATULATIONS. DEVOURER PROTOCOL HAS BEEN LAUNCHED!]
"Is this also a damn simulation?!" he exclaimed in frustration.
Jack was too distracted to notice that the tentacle had wrapped around his leg once more. He had no time to react as the tentacle pulled him slowly towards the opening from which it had come.
He screamed in fear. None of the lives he remembered living had a monster like this.
A window popped up right in his face.
[YOU ARE CURRENTLY IN A DIRE SITUATION.]
[ACTIVATE INSTINCT OVERRIDE? Y/N]
'What is that?' he thought.
He quickly read it in his state of panic and wanted to reach out to touch the Y button. But the button glowed on its own as if it had read his mind.
"What..." he tried to speak, but he noticed his vision blurring.
Then, he blacked out.