Chapter 10 – The Traitor’s Mask

Section 1 – The Nightmares

The barracks were quiet, but Nathan couldn’t find peace. The walls felt closer now, as if the steel itself remembered the rage he had unleashed in the Kill Chamber. His cot groaned as he shifted restlessly, sleep tugging him down in ragged waves only to spit him back out, drenched in sweat.

When he finally slipped under, it wasn’t rest that claimed him—it was the familiar, suffocating dark.

He dreamed of his family’s house. The door was still hanging off its hinges, the smell of blood still fresh. But this time, when he ran inside, it wasn’t his parents or his sister he found on the floor—it was himself. Versions of himself, sprawled in grotesque shapes, each one wearing the same hollow stare. Their mouths moved in unison, whispering a phrase he couldn’t escape:

You’re enjoying this now, aren’t you?

Nathan’s hands shook as he looked down, realizing they were coated in blood. Not just blood—thick, tar-like streams that didn’t belong to his family, or even his enemies. It was his own, spilling endlessly, seeping into the cracks of the floor.

The whispers grew louder until the walls themselves seemed to chant, until his ears rang with it. He dropped to his knees, clutching at his skull, but the voices wouldn’t stop.

Then a shape appeared in the doorway—a tall figure with electric veins running beneath its skin, glowing faintly in the dark. The unstable Enhanced from Sector 12. Its smile was calm, knowing, patient.

“You’ll understand soon enough,” it said, the words bleeding into his head rather than passing through his ears. “We were made for this.”

Nathan lunged awake with a strangled gasp, his throat raw as if he had been screaming for hours. His chest heaved, sweat dripping down into the thin mattress beneath him.

For a long moment, he just sat there in the dim blue of the barracks lights, pressing his palms against his eyes. His breathing slowed, but the weight in his chest didn’t lift.

He looked around the room—rows of other recruits, some asleep, some tossing restlessly. No one stirred for him. No one noticed his shaking. Maybe they were too used to it now. Maybe they were afraid.

The thought twisted like a knife.

Across the room, Elara stirred faintly, propping herself on one elbow as if sensing his unease. Her eyes caught his for just a moment. There was no judgment there, only quiet recognition. She didn’t move toward him, didn’t speak—but she didn’t look away either.

That tiny tether of humanity was almost enough to hold him together. Almost.

Nathan lay back down, staring at the steel ceiling until his eyes blurred. The nightmare lingered, a stain that wouldn’t wash out.

And in the pit of his stomach, a truth gnawed at him: the dream wasn’t a warning. It was a memory of something still coming.

Section 2 – The Aftermath of Brutality

The steel gym echoed with every strike Nathan landed. His fists blurred, each punch detonating against the reinforced bag with a thoom that rattled the chain from which it hung. Sweat dripped down his brow, streaking across his jaw, but he didn’t slow. If anything, each strike grew faster, harder, as if some restless thing inside him demanded release.

When the bag swung wide, he followed it with a kick—sharp, explosive, the crack echoing like a rifle shot. The bag swung violently, nearly tearing from its mooring. Nathan reset his stance and launched again, quicker than thought, his body a blur of precision and rage.

On the far side of the hall, two recruits lingered near the dumbbell racks, whispering as they tried not to stare.

“He’s not human,” one muttered. “No one moves like that. Not unless…”

“…unless he’s losing it,” the other cut in. “You saw him last night. He went too far with Raze. What happens when he decides we’re the enemy?”

The first recruit hesitated, watching as Nathan dropped low and delivered a blistering combo to the bag that made the entire frame shudder. “Maybe that’s the point. If he’s on our side, who would be stupid enough to stand against us?”

Nathan caught their glances in the mirror but said nothing. He didn’t need to—he let his fists speak, pounding the bag until the canvas strained, seams groaning under the punishment. His breathing grew heavier, but he refused to stop. There was a gnawing hunger in his chest, a need for more.

He turned abruptly to the weights. The barbell gleamed under the harsh fluorescent lights, plates stacked thick. Nathan gripped the steel and heaved it upward, veins bulging against his forearms. The weight was immense, but he drove it up with raw force, slamming it back onto the rack with a clang that reverberated through the chamber.

Behind him, Corvus had appeared, silent as ever. He watched for a moment before speaking to the instructors gathered nearby. “He’s feeding on it,” Corvus said quietly. “On the strength. You see it, don’t you? Every strike, every rep—he’s not just training. He’s becoming.”

Instructor Veyra scoffed. “Becoming what? A weapon we can’t control? You can’t sharpen a blade by smashing it against stone forever. Eventually, it breaks.”

Raze entered then, her steps deliberate. She glanced at Nathan, then at the murmuring men. Her voice was calm, even, but edged with steel. “Or maybe it doesn’t break. Maybe it becomes something harder than steel. You all want a soldier without weakness. Now that you’re staring at one, you’re afraid of what you asked for.”

Her words hung in the air. Nathan gritted his teeth and pushed into another set, the barbell rising and falling like a pendulum of defiance.

From the corner, Elara—who had spoken in his defense before—leaned toward a fellow recruit. “Look at him,” she whispered. “He’s not like us. But maybe that’s exactly why we need him.”

The whispers swirled around Nathan like smoke. Some feared him, some defended him, others treated him like an experiment under glass. He could feel all of it. And instead of pushing it down like he once might have, he embraced it, letting their words fuel the furnace inside his chest.

The hunger for strength only grew. And with each rep, each strike, Nathan realized something chilling but undeniable: he wasn’t afraid of what he was becoming.

He enjoyed it.

Section 3 – The Furnace Within

Nathan’s body screamed, but he didn’t stop. The training hall was nearly empty now, the air heavy with the musk of sweat, oil, and the faint metallic tang of blood where his knuckles had split. The others had filtered out hours ago, their training finished, their muscles spent. Nathan remained, striking, lifting, grinding through sets as though haunted by something he couldn’t outrun.

His fists pounded against the reinforced combat pads strapped to a dummy, each strike sharp and fast enough to blur. The sound wasn’t rhythmic anymore—it was chaotic, furious, like a storm battering against steel. His body moved in bursts: pivot, slam, kick, lunge, twist, strike. Each motion snapped faster than the last, so explosive that sweat flung off him in arcs that caught the overhead lights.

He transitioned seamlessly from striking to grappling drills, tackling the heavy dummy and slamming it to the ground with bone-jarring force. The mat squealed under the impact. Nathan’s breath came in ragged pulls, yet he felt something strange: not fatigue, but momentum. Every time he thought his body would fail, a new surge of strength coursed through him, urging him to keep going.

Somewhere in the shadows of the room, a pair of instructors lingered. Nathan could feel their eyes on him, their hushed words slipping through the pounding in his ears.

“Look at his reflexes,” one whispered. “The way he anticipates the movement—he’s reacting before the body even moves.”

The other’s voice was sharper, uneasy. “That’s not anticipation. That’s something else. Something unnatural. And if he keeps feeding it like this… it’ll eat him alive.”

Nathan dropped the dummy with a thud, grabbed the weighted bar again, and pushed until the plates rattled. His face twisted, veins bulging in his forearms, teeth clenched until his jaw ached. When the weight clanged back down, the echo filled the hall like the toll of a distant bell.

That night, Nathan couldn’t sleep. When he did, the nightmares clawed their way through his mind.

He saw his mother’s face, her lips forming words he couldn’t hear, her hands reaching out before dissolving into ash. His sister’s laughter warped into a scream. His father—already gone—stood over him with hollow eyes, saying nothing, just watching. And behind them all, a shadow loomed: tall, inhuman, its outline flickering with the same crackle of energy he’d fought in Sector 12.

The dream shifted, and suddenly Nathan wasn’t watching death. He was causing it. His fists tore through faceless enemies, his speed leaving streaks of fire in the dark. The people around him—friends, allies, Raze, Elara—flinched from his touch as if it burned. Their eyes weren’t filled with admiration. Only fear.

Nathan jolted awake, chest heaving, sweat cold against his skin. He sat in the dark of his quarters, staring at his trembling hands. They didn’t look like his own anymore—scarred, bloodied, foreign.

And yet, as the trembling stilled, a thought rose unbidden.

They’re strong. Stronger than before.

He flexed his fists, the knuckles aching but steady now. He remembered the whispers, the fear in the others’ voices, the way his blows had shaken even the reinforced pads. He remembered the Enhanced enemy’s words: incomplete… changing.

Was this what the change meant? Was the rage not a weakness but fuel? A furnace he could draw from?

Nathan leaned back against the cold wall, closing his eyes. For the first time, he didn’t recoil from the darkness inside him. He studied it. Weighed it.

And a quiet, dangerous truth began to settle in his bones.

If this rage made him stronger… maybe it wasn’t something to fight at all.

Section 4 – Whispers in the Training Hall

The next morning, the training hall was alive again—boots slamming on mats, the hiss of blunted weapons slicing through air, shouts of effort ringing out beneath the steel rafters. Yet as Nathan entered, every head seemed to turn his way, eyes narrowing, words falling quiet. It wasn’t subtle. The memory of his previous night’s storm—his fists, his fury—hung over the room like smoke after a fire.

Nathan ignored the stares and moved toward the combat stations. He wrapped his hands in cloth, flexing his bruised knuckles. The pads were slick against his skin, the familiar burn of anticipation rising in his veins. He began slow: jab, cross, pivot. But soon the rhythm picked up. His strikes landed harder than they should have, the bags swaying wildly on their chains, clanking against their hooks as though trying to break free.

Instructors lingered at the edges, exchanging uneasy glances. He caught fragments of their whispers.

“He’s different now.”

“…doesn’t hold back anymore.”

“Too much rage in him. If it turns inward…”

Nathan slammed his fist into the heavy bag, the chain rattling hard enough to make the frame tremble. He spun on his heel, glaring. “If you’ve got something to say, say it to me. I’m right here.”

The room fell silent.

Raze, ever blunt, stepped forward first. Her dark eyes narrowed, but there was no fear in them—only concern edged with steel. “They think you’re losing control,” she said flatly. “That maybe you’re not fighting for the same reasons we are.”

Nathan’s jaw tightened. “And what are those reasons? Because mine were ripped away from me the night my family was slaughtered. I didn’t choose this. I’m not some battle-hardened veteran like you. You’ve had years to bleed and harden yourselves into soldiers. Me? I’m still counting the days since I watched everything I loved die. And now you expect me to stand here like a machine? Emotionless? Stoic?”

A ripple went through the group. Some looked away, ashamed. Others hardened, unwilling to yield.

Nathan’s voice dropped, quieter but sharper: “I fight because I have nothing left. If you want a machine, look somewhere else. But if you want someone who won’t stop until his enemies are ash, that’s me.”

The words hung heavy, vibrating in the still air.

It was Elara who broke the silence. She stepped forward, her soft brown hair pulled back, her eyes bright with something warmer than caution. “He’s right,” she said, her voice carrying. “He’s not like us. And maybe that’s what makes him valuable. You all saw him in Sector 12. Without him, half of us wouldn’t be standing here. We should be thanking him, not whispering like cowards in corners.”

Another ally—Kaelen, the youngest among them—nodded. “He doesn’t hide what he feels. That’s not weakness. That’s strength we can count on when it matters.”

Raze’s gaze lingered on Nathan, weighing his words. For the first time, Nathan saw something flicker in her expression—respect, perhaps, or understanding buried under her harshness.

But the instructors weren’t so easily swayed. Corvus stepped forward from the shadows, arms crossed, voice deep and even. “Emotions are double-edged. They make you fight harder, yes. But they can blind you. Rage can win you battles… and cost you wars. Which edge are you, Nathan?”

Nathan held his stare, unflinching. “I’m the one who doesn’t break.”

The silence that followed was broken only by the rattle of the bag’s chain, swaying gently as though echoing his words.

Section 5 – Shadows and Confessions

The training mats were slick with sweat, the air heavy with the musk of exertion. Nathan’s fists thudded against the bag in a relentless rhythm—boom, boom, boom—until even the chain groaned with the strain. The others had drifted away, leaving him alone with his fury, and yet he kept going. Every strike was a memory. His father’s hand going still. His mother’s scream cut short. His family’s faces—gone. He drove his fist through all of it, until the ache in his knuckles blurred into the ache in his chest.

He didn’t hear her approach until she spoke.

“You’re going to tear the bag off its frame,” Elara said softly.

Nathan froze, sweat dripping from his brow. He turned, eyes narrowing as if bracing for more judgment. But her face wasn’t hard like the others. There was no fear in her gaze—only concern, warm and stubbornly steady.

“I need the strength,” Nathan muttered, turning back to the bag.

Elara stepped closer, close enough that he could feel her presence just behind his shoulder. “Strength isn’t only in your fists, Nathan. Sometimes it’s in knowing when to stop.”

The words prickled. He wanted to argue, to push her away. But then her hand brushed his arm—light, tentative, as though testing whether he’d pull away. He didn’t.

“You think you’re the only one carrying ghosts?” she whispered.

Nathan’s breath caught. He turned fully now, searching her face. For the first time, Elara wasn’t just the sharp-eyed fighter, the one who always had his back in training. Her expression cracked, and he saw something raw underneath.

“My brother,” she said, her voice trembling but strong. “He didn’t make it out of the trials. He was faster than me, braver. Everyone thought he’d survive. But he gave me the last vial when I collapsed. He chose me, Nathan. And every day, I wake up wondering if I’m strong enough to be worth his sacrifice.”

Nathan stared, the words sinking into the hollow spaces inside him. Her pain was different, but it was still pain. Still loss. For the first time, he didn’t feel so alien in his grief.

“Elara…” His voice cracked despite himself. He swallowed, forcing steel back into it. “I don’t know how to be what they want me to be. They see me as a weapon. You saw me last night. That rage—it’s all I have left.”

She didn’t flinch. Instead, she stepped closer, close enough that he could see the faint freckles across her nose, the shimmer of moisture in her eyes. “Then don’t fight it alone. Don’t let it eat you from the inside. Let us carry some of it. Let me.”

The words shattered something inside him, something he hadn’t realized he’d been clinging to—a belief that he was utterly alone, condemned to fight with nothing but rage. He closed his eyes for a moment, letting the silence between them stretch, and when he opened them again, his voice was quiet.

“I don’t know if I can,” he admitted.

“You don’t have to know,” she said, a faint smile ghosting across her lips. “Just don’t push me away when I try.”

Nathan let out a long breath, his shoulders sagging. For the first time since the night of his family’s murder, the weight on his chest lifted—just slightly, but enough to feel the difference.

Behind them, the hall was quiet. For that brief moment, it was just the two of them, standing amid the echoes of fists and grief, daring to let walls crack open.

Section 6 – The Weight of Loyalty

The next morning, the training hall was alive with the sounds of sparring. Fists cracked against pads, wooden staves clashed, and the sharp calls of instructors echoed through the steel rafters. Nathan stood at the center mat, his hands wrapped, his body coiled like a spring. The others had come not just to train, but to watch. Word of the Sector 12 fight—and of his brutal explosion during the last test—had spread like wildfire.

Corvus had arranged the sparring himself. Nathan could tell. This wasn’t just training—it was a showcase. A test.

“Pair him against me,” one of the veterans called. The man was broad, shoulders like slabs of stone, his grin wolfish as he tightened his gloves. He had years in the field. Nathan knew it. The entire hall knew it. This was supposed to be a lesson.

Nathan met the veteran’s eyes and said nothing. He just stepped forward.

The fight began with a lunge, the veteran throwing a heavy hook meant to test Nathan’s guard. But Nathan didn’t block. He slipped the punch before the man’s fist was halfway through its arc. In the same instant, Nathan’s elbow drove into his ribs with enough force to stagger him backward.

The room fell silent for a beat, the crowd realizing that the “rookie” wasn’t flinching, wasn’t hesitating.

The veteran snarled and came back harder—combinations of hooks, knees, and elbows. Nathan flowed around them, each dodge and counter impossibly fast, like he was already inside the man’s head, reading every move before it was born. When he struck, it was precise, brutal. A kick that knocked the veteran’s legs out. A palm strike that snapped his head back. A final slam into the mat that rattled the steel floor.

Gasps rippled through the crowd.

Raze, arms crossed at the edge of the mat, didn’t hide her smile. “You all wanted to know if he belonged here. Well, you’ve got your answer.”

But Nathan wasn’t done. His chest heaved, rage still thrumming through his veins like wildfire. He looked down at his opponent—dazed, gasping for breath—and for a terrifying heartbeat, he wanted to keep going. To break him. To let the darkness inside finish what it started.

Only Elara’s voice pulled him back. “Nathan,” she called softly, but the weight in her tone anchored him. “Enough.”

He froze. Then, slowly, he stepped back, releasing the fury with a long, shuddering breath.

Around him, the others whispered—about his speed, his brutality, his control (or lack of it). But under their caution, Nathan caught something else in their eyes: relief. Gratitude. They were glad he wasn’t against them.

As the murmurs spread, Corvus finally spoke from the back of the hall. “Remember this moment. With Nathan on your side, you survive. Without him, you don’t.”

Nathan’s gaze swept across the group. For the first time, he saw it clearly: respect. Fear, yes, but respect all the same.

And deep inside, he began to feel it too—that the monster inside him could be more than rage. It could be power. Power his allies needed.

Section 7 – Nightmares in the Quiet

The training hall emptied slowly, the metallic clang of weights and the echo of footsteps fading into silence. Nathan stayed behind, still dripping with sweat, his chest heaving. His gloves lay discarded at his feet. The mat smelled of leather and salt and blood, a reminder of the storm that had just passed.

When the last door hissed shut, he sank onto the bench in the corner. The quiet pressed against him like a weight. His knuckles throbbed, raw and red, but he barely felt it. What he did feel was the gnawing inside him—the hunger that training couldn’t satisfy. Rage that no sparring session could burn away.

That night, in his bunk, sleep didn’t come easily. When it did, it brought no peace.

The dream began like so many others: his family at the dinner table, faces warm in the glow of a single light. His mother’s gentle laugh. His sister’s teasing grin. Then, in an instant, silence. The room shattered into smoke and screams. The smell of fire filled his lungs. He ran, but his legs were heavy, each step through ash and blood. He saw his father’s hand reaching for him, only to be torn away in the chaos.

Nathan woke with a strangled gasp, sweat soaking his sheets, heart hammering against his ribs. The dormitory was still, his comrades asleep in their own bunks. He pressed his palms against his eyes, trying to blot out the images. But they clung to him, feeding the fire in his chest.

In the silence, he whispered to himself. “I’ll never be powerless again.”

It was a promise. A justification.

Over the following days, Nathan threw himself into training harder than before. He ran until his lungs burned, lifted until his arms shook, struck the bag until the skin split across his knuckles. Every bruise, every ache was fuel. His movements grew sharper, faster, more brutal. The instructors whispered, questioning if they had awakened something they couldn’t control.

But Nathan didn’t care. The nightmares carved away the hesitation inside him. Each flash of fire and blood in his dreams reminded him why he couldn’t stop. His rage wasn’t a curse—it was strength. And he would use it.

Section 8 – The Test in the Field

The night air carried a damp chill as the team assembled at the edge of the derelict industrial zone. What once had been a sprawling hub of steel and flame now stood silent—its furnaces cold, smokestacks black against a bruised sky. Shattered windows caught the moonlight like jagged teeth, and every hollow gust through the skeletal beams made the ruins sigh like a restless graveyard.

Nathan adjusted the straps of his combat harness, his palms flexing restlessly against the worn grips of his gauntlets. His breathing was steady, but underneath, a storm rolled. This wasn’t just another patrol. He could feel it in the way Corvus’s eyes lingered on him before they split into squads, and in the way Raze’s hand hesitated on her blade for a moment longer than usual.

They were watching him. Testing him.

“Sector perimeter is clear,” came the murmur over the comms. The voice belonged to Kara, one of the scouts—a lean, wiry veteran with eyes sharp enough to cut glass. “But something feels wrong. Too quiet.”

“Wrong is what we live on,” Raze replied, her tone clipped but not unkind. She gave Nathan the briefest glance, a flicker of challenge and reassurance entwined. “Stay sharp.”

The team moved in, boots crunching over broken glass and scattered rivets. Nathan’s senses were alive—every drip of condensed water from rusted pipes, every scrape of vermin claws on steel, every flutter of moth wings against cracked sodium lamps. It was as if the city whispered directly to him, its dead heart still beating faintly.

Half an hour into the sweep, the trap was sprung.

The sound came first: a metallic shriek as something tore through a sheet of corrugated steel overhead. Then the shadows moved—three, no, four figures dropping into their path. Enhanced, unstable, eyes glowing faintly with erratic energy. Their movements were jerky, animalistic, as if their bodies didn’t quite belong to them.

Nathan felt the heat surge in his chest. The storm broke.

“Contact!” Corvus barked.

The world narrowed to sharp edges and violent intention. Nathan exploded forward before anyone else could move, his body a blur across the cracked pavement. His shoulder smashed into the first Enhanced, lifting it off its feet and driving it into a wall with bone-snapping force. The impact echoed like a thunderclap.

The second swung low, claws raking for his legs, but Nathan pivoted mid-stride, heel whipping around with surgical precision. His boot connected with the creature’s jaw, the sound of shattering bone mixing with its gurgled scream.

“Holy hell,” one of the rookies whispered, voice cracking through the comms.

But Nathan didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. His fists were meteors, each strike faster than thought, each impact spraying arcs of blood against rusted walls. He moved with terrifying grace, his reflexes not just reactions but premonitions—anticipating attacks before muscles twitched, countering strikes that hadn’t even fully formed.

From the edge of the fray, Raze’s voice cut in: “He’s not fighting… he’s hunting.”

The words were half warning, half awe.

Corvus’s silence over the comms was louder still.

The fourth Enhanced lunged from behind, jaws snapping for Nathan’s neck. He twisted, grabbed it mid-air by the throat, and slammed it so hard into the pavement that cracks spiderwebbed outward from the cratered impact. For a moment, he didn’t let go—his grip tightening, eyes burning, his lips curling into something dangerously close to a smile.

“Nathan!” Raze’s voice snapped him back.

He blinked, the haze thinning just enough to remind him where he was. The enemy thrashed weakly, choking, before going limp. Nathan released it and stood slowly, chest heaving, blood spattering his armor like a grotesque pattern.

The comms were heavy with silence.

“Efficient,” Kara said finally, her tone measured but tinged with unease. “Maybe too efficient.”

Another voice, one of the younger recruits, whispered almost reverently: “If that’s what he can do on our side… I don’t want to be on the other.”

Nathan looked down at his hands, still trembling from the adrenaline, still itching for another strike. And deep inside, he realized with a sharp, cold clarity—he had enjoyed it. The violence, the dominance, the raw certainty of power.

And his comrades had seen it too.

The silence after the skirmish didn’t last long. The broken factory seemed to shiver, as if the very walls had recoiled from what Nathan had just done. Moonlight cut hard angles across the ground, picking out the blood-slick cracks in the pavement, the twitching forms of the unstable Enhanced, and Nathan himself—standing in the middle of it all like some figure carved out of violence.

The squad had seen battles before. They’d cut through nests of ferals, held lines against Enhanced insurgents, and buried their dead with calloused hands. But this was different. Nathan hadn’t fought like a soldier, disciplined and calculated—he had fought like a storm given flesh.

“Did you see his speed?” whispered Eron, one of the newer recruits, voice shaking through the comms. “He moved before they did—like he knew.”

“Not speed,” Kara corrected, her tone flat but uneasy. “Prediction. Anticipation. That’s something else entirely.”

From the shadows, Raze’s gaze followed Nathan with surgical intensity. Her lips parted, and though her words were clipped, they carried weight. “He’s on the edge of something. If it tips the wrong way…” She didn’t finish. She didn’t need to.

Nathan, meanwhile, stood breathing hard, the copper tang of blood heavy in his nose, the sting of torn knuckles reminding him of the cost. Yet the truth he didn’t want to admit sat like fire in his chest: it had felt good. Each strike, each brutal takedown had filled the void that gnawed at him since his family’s deaths.

Inside his head, the justifications tumbled fast: They’re monsters. If I hesitate, they’ll kill me. If I go soft, someone else dies. Better them than us. Better them than me.

But beneath that shield of reason, another thought pulsed darker, sharper: I like this power. I like knowing I can end them. I like that they fear me.

From the comms, Corvus’s voice finally broke the silence. His tone was unreadable, but those who knew him could sense the tight coil beneath it. “Sweep the rest of the sector. Don’t cluster. Eyes open.”

As they moved deeper into the ruins, signs of more instability became clear. On the walls, crude symbols had been scratched—circles intersected with jagged lines, all drawn in some dark, half-dried substance that wasn’t quite paint. The air thickened with a low-frequency hum, not from machinery, but from the Enhanced themselves. Unstable ones flocked here, drawn to some resonance none of the humans could feel.

Kara muttered, “They shouldn’t be gathering this close to the city edge. Something’s pulling them here.”

“Or someone,” Raze countered, her eyes sweeping the rooftops.

Nathan trailed his fingers against one of the etched symbols as they passed, and for a brief second, his vision stuttered. He saw not just the mark, but a memory not his own: ragged voices chanting, hands dripping red, eyes wild with energy. He blinked, snapping back, sweat breaking out across his brow. He didn’t tell the others.

The group pressed on. The deeper they went, the more Nathan felt the whispers of the ruins pressing against him, feeding his growing hunger for violence. He clenched his fists, nails biting into his palms, and forced himself to stay silent.

Behind him, he heard two rookies speaking in hushed tones, voices carrying just enough through the ruined air.

“Do you think he’ll snap on us?”

“If he does, do you think we could even stop him?”

Nathan’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t turn. He didn’t need to. He already knew the answer neither of them wanted to say aloud.

When the second ambush came—six unstable this time, spilling out of a collapsed catwalk—Nathan didn’t wait for orders. He launched forward again, not just fighting, but destroying. His fists cracked ribs, his kicks shattered joints, his movements a blur of rage harnessed into perfect execution. And as his squad watched, none dared intervene.

Because for the first time, they weren’t sure if he was saving them—or showing them what he might one day do to them.

They fanned deeper into the complex—catwalks spindling overhead like rib bones, conveyor belts snarled with wire and ash, vats yawning like drained cisterns. A faded mural on the back wall showed a factory line of faceless workers holding torches aloft. Someone had defaced it, scrawling the same circles-and-lines symbol over every face until the mural’s blank eyes bled black.

“Markings again,” Kara whispered. “Same geometry as Sector 12. Frequency nodes?”

“Or liturgy,” Raze said quietly. “Don’t pretend you haven’t heard the rumors.”

“What rumors?” Eron asked, voice pitched too high.

“That some of the unstable aren’t wandering,” Raze answered. “They’re being called.”

Nathan touched the nearest glyph with two fingers. Cold radiated from the metal, not temperature-cold but resonance—like the after-vibration of a struck chord. For a heartbeat, the factory dissolved. He saw a circle of ragged figures in a different ruin under a different sky, whispering in unison while a low drone thrummed under the earth. Their mouths moved to a beat he almost recognized. You were made for this. The words were not spoken, but they were heard all the same.

He blinked, the vision severed. Sweat prickled his hairline. He didn’t tell them what he’d felt.

“Push on,” Corvus ordered. “We’re burning time.”

They moved in staggered files: Kara and Eron forward, Raze and Nathan center, two rookies covering rear under Corvus’s watch. The open expanse of a collapsed assembly floor stretched ahead—rusted rails, a skylight shattered to serrated teeth, a maze of toppled scaffolds casting long prison-bar shadows.

The second ambush came like a choreographed confession.

First the sound: that thin, high ping of tensioned cable snapping. Then three catwalks fell in sequence, dragging nets of chain and debris down in sparkling arcs. Shapes rode the collapse—six unstable Enhanced, more intact than the first wave, their movements queued like a broken music box. Their eyes flickered with that sickly, unfinished light.

“Nets!” Kara shouted, diving aside. A rain of chain screamed down where she’d stood.

Nathan had already moved. He saw the pattern the way other people saw color. Six attackers, two high, four low. Left-most would feint high then scissor-step to expose the stomach; center-right would take the blind flank created by the chain splash; the rear two would—

He was there before the thought finished.

He ripped forward, a blur among falling steel, boots sparking. His shoulder smashed the first attacker mid-drop, redirecting its descent so it obliterated a railing instead of Kara. Before gravity reclaimed him, Nathan rebounded off the buckling rail, flipped, and corkscrewed a heel down into the second one’s sternum. The crack was a drumbeat. The body skipped across concrete like a skipped stone.

“Holy—” Eron started.

“Breathe,” Raze snapped. “Cover angles. Let him cut.”

Nathan landed in a three-point crouch. Dust geysered. The world narrowed to clean lines—the geometry of violence. He cut left. A forearm like a steel beam swept at his throat; he ducked, stepped inside the arc while the limb still committed, and broke the joint with a rising elbow. He felt the pop more than heard it. Pivot—his palm speared the throat, his hip torqueing the body into the other two like a battering ram. They pinwheeled, startled, off-balance.

“Is he reading them?” one rookie breathed over comms. “Or controlling the tempo?”

“Neither,” Kara said, but her voice had thawed from fear into something like respect. “He’s dictating it.”

The fourth came low, slashing at Achilles. Nathan didn’t hop; he dropped, flat into a slide that shaved his back against grit and glass, then kicked upward from the ground with both feet. The force snapped the attacker’s head back. It hung for an obscene second, caught between signals, then slumped, legs folding under it like wire cut.

Two remained. They were smarter—no rush, no roar, only a measured circling to split his attention. Nathan’s vision flickered again—possibilities goose-stepping across his mind. Strike high. He counters low. Back-step bait. Hook the neck. They hadn’t chosen a path yet, but he watched the moment choices solidified into action—tiny pre-movements in ankles, in pupils, in the flare of a nostril that told him where oxygen would go a half-second before it did. He was moving when they were still deciding.

He drove forward between them, through the fork of their approach, a ghost skimming between two blades. His hands shot out opposite directions like twin meteors—one hammer-fist crushed a carotid with surgical malice while the other hooked behind a knee and ripped it sideways. The first toppled into the second, their bodies colliding in a graceless knot.

“Down,” Nathan said—he wasn’t sure to whom. Maybe to himself.

He finished them quickly.

Silence descended in a ragged curtain punctured by the tinkle of settling glass. The squad exhaled as a single organism. Somewhere overhead, a strip of sheet metal creaked and then clanged loose with the tired sigh of a dying thing.

“Damage?” Corvus asked.

“Scrapes,” Kara answered. “Pulse steady. Eron?”

“Fine,” Eron lied.

Raze didn’t answer. She was watching Nathan. Not the way you watch a weapon—though there was that—but the way you watch a fuse, learning its length, guessing at the speed of the burn.

Nathan stood among the bodies with the afterimage of movement still twitching in his muscles. He looked down at his hands. They trembled. Not from fatigue. From want. The fight had filled the hollow spaces. For a second he was ashamed of that. For the next second, he decided shame was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

Better them than us. Better them than me.

And underneath: I like what I am when I don’t hold back.

“Eyes up,” Kara said suddenly. “We’ve got more sign.” She pointed to a stairwell gutted by fire. The soot around the handrail was smudged in a pattern—not random, but rhythmic, like fingers had dragged in beats. Beside it, more glyphs, cleaner than the others, newly scored into the metal with something hot. At the center: not the circle-and-lines, but an opening eye—iris split by a vertical stroke.

Raze sucked her teeth. “That’s not Sector 12 iconography.”

“No,” Corvus said, and his voice did something rare—it tightened with something almost like recognition. “That’s Choir work.”

Eron swallowed. “The—the Choir? I thought that was a rumor.”

“Everything is a rumor,” Corvus said dryly, “until it kills someone in front of you.”

They followed the smudged cadence down, guns up, senses strung tight. The hum thickened as they descended—no longer imagined, but audible, a low, subharmonic pulse that set the railings quivering to touch. Nathan felt it through his bones like a second heartbeat, too slow, too heavy.

The stairwell emptied into a maintenance sublevel. Rows of breaker boxes lined the walls, their innards ripped out and rewired into something that wasn’t power. In the center of the room stood a crude altar built from pallets and welded scrap, its top ringed by old transducers wired to a jury-rigged processor stack. In the middle: a palm-sized device that looked like somebody had taught a tuning fork to hate itself. Its tines were bent, asymmetric, and they were singing—too low for ears, but not for marrow.

Kara moved to circle the construct. “Beacon?”

Raze nodded once. “Resonance lure. It hums on the frequencies that agitate the unstable. Calls them like moths.”

“Why here?” Eron asked.

“So we’d come,” Nathan said before he could stop himself. The certainty arrived fully formed, not an idea but an echo. “So I’d come.”

The others looked at him. He didn’t say more. Couldn’t. The thought tasted too true.

“Grab the core and the processor,” Corvus ordered. “I want a decompile on my desk by sunrise.”

Raze stepped forward, then stopped. “Wait.” With the tip of her knife, she levered a sliver of metal from the altar’s lip. It wasn’t scrap. It was a badge plate—half-melted, the logo just legible. Velmont Utilities. A local crew had either been turned or built this under duress.

“They’re getting bolder,” Kara said tightly.

“Or closer,” Raze said.

Nathan drifted to the edge of the light and stared down a corridor crowded with pipes like ribs. The hum breathed in and out of the metal. For a moment, dust shifted at the far end of the hall—not a draft, not random. A silhouette. Tall, narrow, still as a blade standing upright in sand. He lifted his chin, listening. The hum modulated, barely, like someone had put a finger on a string.

“Nathan?” Raze’s voice.

“I think we’re—” He broke off. The silhouette was gone, the hum settling back into its original drone. Had he imagined it? Or had it chosen to be seen for only that heartbeat-long?

He keyed his comm anyway. “We’re not alone down here.”

“Extraction route?” Corvus asked, unruffled.

“Surface access through the north egress,” Kara answered, already mapping. “We can move with the load in two.”

They moved. Nathan took rear guard this time by choice. He wanted the corridor at his back. He wanted to feel anything that followed. The hum faded as they climbed, replaced by the familiar and almost-comforting chorus of a dying factory: drip, tick, groan.

At the ground-level hallway, the night air knifed back in—wet and metallic, an iron-laced relief. The team pushed into the lot, boots crunching glass, breath fogging faintly. The moon had climbed, bleaching everything into a silvered negative.

“Contacts?” Corvus asked.

“Clear,” Kara said, scanning rooftops. “For now.”

They crossed the lot in practiced formation. Nathan lagged a pace, eyes on the upper lines. A water tower perched two blocks over like a crown. For a fraction of a second, it had a halo: a ring of faint light that wasn’t there the next blink. A trick of the eye. Or—

“Nathan.” Raze again, closer now. “You with us?”

He dragged his attention down to her. “Yeah,” he said. He didn’t add for now.

By the time they reached the rendezvous alley, they’d settled into that brittle, wired quiet that follows too-much adrenaline. Kara handed the processor to Raze; Eron kept his head on a swivel like it might come loose if he didn’t. Corvus checked lines, checked angles, checked faces. His eyes stuck on Nathan, not critical, not kind—measuring.

Then a voice bled through the comms—no channel, no origin. It wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be.

“Brother.”

Nathan’s spine iced. Not spoken, not quite heard; it arrived the way the hum had, skirting his ears and landing in the part of him that reacted before he thought. The team froze in the same heartbeat, as if an invisible trigger had been pulled.

Kara hissed, “Trace it.”

“Nothing to trace,” Raze said. Her jaw set hard enough to creak. “Piggybacked on the resonance and whispered into our bones.”

The alley remained empty. The city breathed. Somewhere far off, a bottle broke and then went quiet as if ashamed.

Nathan turned slowly, scanning rooftops. No movement. But he felt it: the way you feel eyes on the back of your neck when a predator is too patient for footsteps.

Eron swallowed audibly. “Did anyone else—?”

“We all did,” Corvus said. “Move.”

They moved. Not fast. Deliberate. The kind of pace that told anyone watching that the squad knew the rules of being hunted and was willing to play anyway.

At the exfil point, Raze leaned in close enough that her breath ghosted his ear. “You heard it clearer than we did,” she said. Not a question.

“I think it was meant for me,” Nathan said.

“I know.” She straightened. In the thin light, her scar caught a knife-edge of silver. “Good. Let them call. Let them think you’re the one following.” A beat. “Then when they step into the open, you end it.”

He didn’t nod. Didn’t need to. The agreement sat between them like a loaded chamber.

They boarded the transport in silence. As the doors sealed and the city slid backward into patchwork shadow, Nathan stared out through the slit of reinforced glass. The water tower’s crown was dark again. No halo. No watcher. Just the aftertaste of a word that hadn’t needed sound to hurt.

Brother.

By the time the hum of the engine settled into a steady lullaby, Nathan had convinced himself of two things that did not agree and could not both be false:

They are baiting me.

I want to be baited.

He flexed his busted knuckles until pain lanced up his arms. It felt honest. It felt like the only honest thing left.

And in the hollow behind that pain, something purred—low, patient, pleased.

Section 9 – The Aftermath and Whispers

The base greeted them not with comfort, but with sterility. The transport bay doors parted to the same amber light that had seemed mundane only hours ago but now felt surgical, dissecting. Their boots struck the polished deck in uneven rhythm—fatigue layered over tension, each soldier wrapped in silence.

The captured data core from the resonance beacon was whisked away by technicians in grey coats, their hands almost reverent around the warped processor stack. They didn’t speak to the squad. They didn’t need to. The hushed way they moved said everything: whatever had been pulled from that ruin was already classified beyond their clearance.

Nathan lingered at the edge of the bay while the others stripped their armor and stowed their weapons. He could still feel the phantom hum vibrating under his sternum. Each heartbeat carried its echo, as if the factory’s drone had grafted itself into him.

Raze noticed. She always did. “Don’t carry it out here,” she muttered, brushing past him as she unclasped her chest plate. Her scar caught the light again, silver and sharp. “Leave it in the field. Or it’ll eat you alive.”

But how do you leave something behind when it follows you into your bones?

Later that night, as Nathan walked the mess hall corridor, he caught the sound of voices—low, urgent, not meant for him. He slowed, steps muted against the steel floor.

“…I’m telling you, it spoke through comms. Not interference. It chose him,” one voice said.

“Maybe they’re exaggerating,” another answered. “Or maybe Corvus let him see more than the rest of us.”

“Doesn’t matter. Point is, if they’re targeting him, they’re targeting all of us by proxy. You want to be on the squad carrying bait?”

The first scoffed. “He’s not bait. He’s… something else. Did you see him out there? That wasn’t training. That was—” The voice lowered further, almost reverent. “—like watching the fight decide to end.”

Nathan’s chest tightened. He forced himself to keep walking, as if he hadn’t heard. But the words chased him down the corridor, nipping at his thoughts. Target. Bait. Something else.

By the time he reached his quarters, sleep was already impossible.

The bunk room was too quiet. He lay on the narrow mattress, staring at the vent in the ceiling where air hissed faintly, steady and mechanical. Every time he closed his eyes, the factory returned—chains crashing, glyphs burning, the word Brother dripping like tar into his mind. His body replayed the motions of the fight unbidden—shoulder impact, joint break, the want that had come afterward.

He sat up abruptly, swinging his legs to the floor. His reflection in the darkened glass of the door startled him. The expression was not exhaustion—it was hunger. For what? For more fights? For release? For power?

At 0300, the gym was empty. Nathan threw himself into it anyway—bags shuddering under blows that came too fast, too sharp. He moved station to station: heavy bag, speed bag, pull-up bar, bench press. Every rep carried a whisper of rage. Every strike said what his mouth couldn’t.

He didn’t realize he wasn’t alone until Kara’s voice cut through the rhythm of his punches. “If you keep hitting like that, the bag’s going to split.”

She leaned against the doorframe, arms folded. There was no accusation in her tone, only observation. Still, he froze mid-swing, breath heavy. “Couldn’t sleep,” he muttered.

“None of us could,” she said, stepping into the room. “But you look like you’re trying to outrun it.”

Nathan turned back to the bag, driving one more punch into it. The canvas wheezed. “Maybe I am.”

Kara hesitated, then added, “You’re not the only one who lost someone, Nathan. But you’re the only one who keeps pretending you’re made of iron.” Her eyes softened, a rare crack in her soldier’s mask. “You don’t have to be.”

The words landed heavier than any blow. He wanted to tell her she was wrong, that he did have to be. But his throat closed, refusing.

From the corner, another voice intruded. Elara, the medic, had come quietly, her hands still smudged from late-night lab work. “She’s right,” she said gently. “The rest of us… we’ve had years to build walls. You haven’t. No one should expect you to.”

The sincerity in her tone rattled him more than whispers in corridors or glyphs in ruins. Because it felt like something he could break if he leaned too close.

By dawn, Nathan hadn’t stopped moving. The punching bag swayed, torn at its seams. Sweat soaked his shirt, his hands were raw, but the restless gnawing inside hadn’t dimmed. If anything, it had sharpened.

And through it all, the whispered word still clung to the edges of his mind. Brother.

He wondered—not for the first time—if he was losing himself. Or if this was who he had always been, only now revealed.

Section 10 – Breaking Point

The training floor smelled of metal and sweat, the air sharp with disinfectant. Nathan was already there when the others filtered in, pounding the bag in rapid bursts. Each strike cracked like a gunshot, his movements too precise, too fast, as if some unseen metronome drove him. The canvas sagged under the assault, seams splitting from the force.

Whispers had grown louder in the base since Sector 12. People didn’t speak to Nathan directly—they spoke around him. Too fast. Too brutal. He’s not like us. What if he turns? Every rumor seemed to echo in the corners of his mind until they blended with the pulse of his fists slamming into the bag.

That morning, the tension snapped.

“Tell me something, Nathan,” drawled one of the older recruits, Veyr, leaning against the wall with arms folded. He’d always carried a smug edge, but now his eyes glinted with malice. “What are you training for? Another chance to lose control? Or just waiting for the next mission to remind us you’re not stable enough to be here?”

Nathan’s fist froze mid-swing. The bag swung lazily. Around the room, heads turned. Raze stiffened near the doorway, lips pressing into a thin line, but she didn’t intervene. Corvus wasn’t there—he’d left Nathan to “work it out” on his own.

Veyr smirked. “You think we don’t see it? The way you enjoyed that fight. Like you wanted it. Like you’re one step away from tearing into us just as easily.”

Something in Nathan cracked. Weeks of silence, of bottling rage, of fighting shadows in his own head boiled over. He pivoted, eyes blazing, and his voice rang out like a strike.

“You think I wanted any of this?” His words were raw, scraped from his throat. “You think I asked to watch my family die? To wake up with nothing? To be dragged into a world where the only thing anyone sees in me is a weapon?” He stepped closer, fists clenched. “You’ve had years to harden. To forget. For me, it was yesterday. And you want me to smile, to be calm, to be a good little soldier?”

The room went dead silent.

Kara moved as if to speak, but before she could, Nathan’s fist lashed out—not at her, but at the steel support beam beside him. Metal warped under the blow, groaning, a fist-shaped crater marking the spot. The sound reverberated through the room like thunder.

Some of the recruits shrank back. A few exchanged nervous glances. But others—Kara, Elara—stepped forward, their voices rising against the tide of fear.

“He’s not wrong,” Kara said sharply, glaring at Veyr. “He hasn’t had the time we’ve had. You can’t expect him to bury it all overnight.”

Elara’s voice was steadier, quieter, but cut through like a scalpel. “Without him, we wouldn’t have made it out of Sector 12. You want to call him unstable? Fine. But he’s the reason you’re still standing here to insult him.”

It was then, in the tense quiet after their words, that Raze’s eyes flicked across the room and caught something—Veyr’s smirk faltering, his hand drifting unconsciously to the inside pocket of his uniform. Too subtle for most to notice, but not her.

“Drop it,” she snapped.

Veyr froze. The room bristled. Nathan’s anger sharpened into something colder, more focused.

Raze strode forward, grabbed his wrist, and yanked. A sliver of black tech clattered to the floor—a transmitter, small and jagged, humming faintly with energy.

The silence fractured.

“How long?” Raze demanded, voice a low snarl.

Veyr’s smirk returned, but now it was poison. “Long enough.”

The weight of betrayal slammed into the room. The spy hadn’t just been watching—they’d been inside for years, feeding information to whoever hunted Nathan, to whoever had whispered Brother in the ruins.

Nathan’s fists trembled at his sides, not with fear but with a hunger that scared even him. Part of him wanted to tear Veyr apart right there, to make him pay in blood. Another part recognized the opportunity: this was proof. Proof that the enemy had always been closer than they realized.

Corvus arrived then, storming in as guards seized Veyr. He gave Nathan a single hard look—assessing, weighing—but said nothing. The instructors exchanged glances that carried volumes. He’s more dangerous than we thought. But maybe that’s exactly what we need.

Nathan stayed rooted, his heart pounding, the cratered steel beam behind him a reminder of what he was becoming. His allies had seen his fury. His enemies had felt it. And now, for the first time, the base knew: Nathan was no longer just one of them. He was something else entirely.

And the spy’s final words echoed in his ears: Long enough.

Section 11 – Trial by Fire

The interrogation room was silent except for the steady hum of the fluorescent lights. Veyr sat bound, sweat dripping down his temple, but his smirk hadn’t faded. It wasn’t the smirk of a man caught—it was the smirk of someone who had already done damage beyond repair.

Corvus leaned against the table, arms folded. “How long?”

“Since before Sector 6,” Veyr answered without hesitation. “I was already inside when your last commander still thought Nathan was a myth. Years of listening, watching, feeding every ounce of weakness to the ones who actually understand what’s coming.”

Nathan stood in the corner, jaw tight. He wanted to hit him. To tear the smirk away. But he forced himself to listen.

“What did you give them?” Raze demanded, pacing.

“Enough,” Veyr said, eyes darting to Nathan with something like glee. “Training logs. Patrol schedules. Psychological evaluations. And, of course…” He leaned forward as far as the restraints would allow. “The fact that your golden boy here isn’t just another Enhanced. That he’s unstable. Dangerous. That he’s unfinished.”

Nathan’s pulse hammered in his ears. The words mirrored what the Sector 12 prisoner had said. Incomplete. Changing.

Corvus’s face didn’t move, but his voice sharpened. “Who are you feeding?”

Veyr chuckled. “You already know. The Brotherhood. The ones who created him. The ones who’ll finish what you started.”

The room went still. Even Raze’s steps faltered.

Nathan finally stepped forward, his voice low and strained. “Why me? Why go through all this trouble just to get to me?”

Veyr’s smirk widened. “Because you’re the only one who matters. With you, they win. Without you, they burn it all down trying.”

By the next day, word of Veyr’s betrayal had spread like wildfire. Conversations stopped when Nathan entered the room. Eyes lingered on him longer than before—not just with suspicion now, but with fear. If the Brotherhood wanted him this badly, what did that make him? A target? A weapon? A liability?

In the training hall, Nathan tried to lose himself in motion. Each strike against the heavy bag echoed through the cavernous room, but whispers still bled through.

“Years… he was here for years.”

“He knew everything about us.”

“And he reported Nathan most of all.”

The paranoia ate at him, worming through his focus. Even his allies looked shaken. Kara, usually quick with encouragement, kept glancing at him with an expression she couldn’t quite mask. Elara stood closer than before, as though silently reminding him he wasn’t alone, but Nathan could feel the distance in the room.

Corvus and Raze watched from the balcony above, voices low.

“We may have pushed him too far,” Raze admitted, her eyes locked on Nathan’s blistering pace. “The rage we’ve seen… it’s not just survival anymore. He’s feeding on it.”

“That’s why the trial has to happen,” Corvus replied. “If we don’t test him now, the next time he snaps, it could be against us.”

That night, they came for him. No explanations, no choice. Corvus and Raze escorted Nathan down the steel corridors to the deepest chamber of the base, a place he hadn’t seen before. The air was colder here, the walls lined with reinforced plating scarred from past battles.

“This is your trial,” Corvus said, his voice clipped. “Not training. Not simulation. You’ll face what we put in front of you, and you’ll either prove you can master yourself… or we’ll know we were wrong about you.”

Nathan’s fists clenched. “And if I fail?”

Raze’s expression was unreadable. “Then we won’t have to worry about the Brotherhood finishing you. We’ll do it ourselves.”

The doors groaned open. Beyond them, darkness stretched—broken only by the faint sound of something moving, something alive, chained, and furious.

Nathan stepped forward, the weight of every whisper, every fear, every betrayal pressing down on his shoulders. He thought of his family. Of Sector 12. Of Veyr’s mocking voice. And he walked into the dark.

The doors slammed shut behind him.

And the chains in the dark began to break.