Chapter 14 – The Black Cell

Section 1 — Fractured Consciousness

Sound arrived first, before light, before pain. A thin clicking somewhere above him—like icicles knocking together—counted out a rhythm that didn’t match his heartbeat. Nathan tried to swallow and realized his tongue felt heavy, as if it had been sleeping longer than the rest of him. When he blinked, the world came in on delay: a smear of gray, then edges, then the slow creep of definition until the ceiling above him resolved into black plates veined with capillaries of dim blue light.

He was strapped to a table. Not leather. Something smarter—cool bands that tightened microscopically as his muscles tested them, distributing pressure so evenly it felt almost gentle until he tried to move, and the “gentle” became a wall.

He breathed in. Metal. Antiseptic. A colder scent underneath, sharp and coin-bright—ozone thick enough to taste. He breathed out. The clicking above him shifted to a new count, like it was changing songs on command.

“Awake,” said a voice. It came from everywhere and nowhere, like the room had learned how to speak. “Finally.”

Nathan turned his head. It felt like the motion belonged to someone else and he had borrowed it. The room was a long rectangle with corners that refused to be sharp. The walls—the ones that weren’t glass—were matte and hungry, swallowing reflections. On one side, a pane of transparent material tinted the world beyond into smoky shapes. Shadows moved on the other side. Watching. Taking notes.

“Where am I?” he asked, and his voice sounded wrong—too rough, like it had been dragged across gravel.

A face leaned into view over him, a mask of pale composite with a thin vertical seam where a mouth should be. The eyes behind it were human—gray, precise, the color of a storm an hour before it breaks.

“In transit,” the masked figure said. Their tone carried the boredom of a flight attendant explaining exits to people who wouldn’t use them. “You’ll be moved once you stabilize.”

“I’m stable now,” Nathan said.

“Not by our definition.” The figure lifted a hand; the lights sank a degree lower, the blue veins in the ceiling pulsing once, twice, like the room was breathing with him.

He tugged again at the restraints, more to measure than to fight. He counted the banding, the anchoring points. Left wrist, right wrist, forearm, bicep, chest harness. Hips. Thighs. Ankles. The rig wasn’t designed to defeat strength; it was designed to confuse it, to spread his power so thin across contact points that no single surge could break the whole.

“You heal fast,” the figure observed, attention flicking to a screen Nathan couldn’t see. “Faster now than when you arrived.”

“How long has that been?” Nathan asked.

A pause. “Long enough.”

Memory rose like a bruise—Selene shouting his name; the executioner’s blade arcing blue; the world tilting; boots. A corridor closing like a throat. The smell of sparks. The dark. He tried to find the moment he had fallen, the exact second the fight had gone from almost to no, but his mind refused to set the piece back into the right groove.

“You could’ve killed me,” he said.

“Unwise,” the figure replied, matter-of-fact. “You’re more valuable unbroken.”

“Funny,” Nathan said. “That’s exactly what I am.”

A second face joined the first beyond the glass—tall, spare, shadowed enough to read as silhouette more than person. A hand lifted and the wall spoke again, a new voice this time. Female. Measured.

“Subject is responsive,” she said. “Neurological signature trending toward hypervigilant. Recovery arc sustained. Proceed to baseline.”

The masked attendant adjusted something out of sight. The bands around Nathan’s arms warmed. The table softened around his spine in millimeter increments, as if re-learning the shape of him.

Baseline. He swallowed, tasted metal again, and realized some of it was his own blood dried at the back of his throat. His body cataloged what his mind was still catching up to: a deep slice along his left side, clean and cruel. He braced for pain and found only a dull ache, the kind that belonged to yesterday.

“Who are you?” he asked, to the glass, to the voice in the wall.

A soft sound that might have been a laugh. “Names are for when we want to be remembered. You can call me Architect.”

“Of what?”

“Continuity.” Another mild pause. “And endings.”

“You with Iron Veil?” Nathan asked.

A second of silence filled itself with three meanings. Then: “We are what comes after illusions.”

“I like my illusions numbered,” Nathan said. “Makes them harder to sell me twice.”

“You’ll like ours,” the Architect said, unfazed. “They’re made of facts.”

Nathan closed his eyes for a breath and opened them again to prove the room would still be here. He looked past the masked attendant, beyond the glass into the smoke-shadow antechamber. More figures stood there now: a woman with her hair shorn close, a man whose posture announced old injuries, two others who wore boredom like armor. The tall silhouette remained the anchor. Even blurred, the posture radiated decision.

“When I tore your hunter’s mask,” Nathan said to the glass, “I saw his eyes. He looked impressed. That felt new for him.”

The Architect’s answer came back with clinical interest. “Executioners don’t feel impressed. They record anomalies.”

“And I’m an anomaly.”

“Not quite. You’re a convergence.” A gentle click as if she’d just set down a pen. “We’ve been waiting for you for a very long time.”

He almost laughed. “You sound like the ones who made me.”

“We didn’t,” she said. “They bungled you into existence. We intend to finish the work.”

Anger rose and he let it rise, then parked it just behind his teeth. “Say their name,” he said. “The ones who ‘bungled’ me. Say the word.”

“Later,” she answered. “Names have weight. Yours is heavier than you realize.”

He turned his head slowly to test the range in the brace and found the window behind his shoulder. A reflection gave him himself in pieces—cheekbone, the sweep of a curl darkening even darker now, the iris a brown so deep it almost caught no light. He didn’t know when, exactly, that shift had tipped from “change” to “result.” Elara had said his body was learning a language. Maybe this was what fluency looked like.

“Baseline complete,” the masked attendant announced, not to Nathan but to the room that listened. “Autonomic ranges: elevated but consistent. Tissue regeneration: eighty-four percent closure at lateral laceration. Microfractures: resolved. Latency: reduced.”

“Reduced to what?” Nathan asked.

“To the part of a second most people don’t notice,” the attendant said.

He stared at the ceiling and found the click again. It was not random. It stepped and paused and stepped, a metronome throwing its beat against his heart and daring it to match tempo. He let his mind walk with it and watched how the room arranged itself around the rhythm: how the blue veining brightened a fraction before each click; how the attendant’s shoulders eased imperceptibly at the downbeat; how the shadow beyond the glass tipped their head not in time but inside it. The whole space was a body. He was on a table in a throat.

“You said ‘finish the work,’” Nathan said to the dark window. “Tell me what that sentence costs.”

“Pain,” the Architect said mildly. “Purpose. A reordering of loyalties you think are absolute and are not.”

“Not recruitment, then,” Nathan said. “Reconstruction.”

“You do recruit the steel before you forge it,” she said. “You speak to it while it’s hot and hope it remembers your hands when it cools. But no—this is not a slogan you can repeat to sleep at night. This is honesty: you’re dangerous half-formed. Complete, you could decide outcomes.”

He let the word complete sit like a dare. Incomplete, the Sector 12 prisoner had said. Changing. He had hated the helplessness in that word even as he recognized its truth. He did not want to be finished by anyone’s hand but his own.

The bands hissed and loosened in one place—his right wrist—then tightened everywhere else. A small mercy to test irrational hope. He flexed his fingers. Nerves answered cleanly, no static, no pins. The restraint re-sang its pressure; the table sighed.

“Why not kill me?” he asked again, because repetition sometimes found different answers. “If you fear what I become for them.”

“We don’t fear your becoming,” the Architect said. “We fear waste. Their use for you is blunt. Ours is… elegant.”

Rage prickled, quick and bright, at the implication. “I’m not a use.”

“No,” she agreed. “You are the first of something that was supposed to fail a generation ago.” A pause, as if she was choosing which card to show. “Do you want your mother’s name spoken in a room that won’t lie to you about it? Or would you prefer to keep her as a memory unsullied by context?”

The table might as well have been the only thing keeping him from floating off the world. He swallowed through a throat that felt tight. “Don’t touch her with your mouth,” he said evenly.

Silence. Then a softer tone, unexpected. “We already did,” she said. “A long time ago. Not her body. Her file.”

Something cracked in his calm that wasn’t noise. His first instinct was to break something that could bleed. The second was to listen so that when he broke something, it would matter.

“You drugged her for tests,” he said. The fact arrived whole, because the shape had existed in him for months and only needed the word. “Without consent.”

“We’ll discuss the ledger when you can stand,” the Architect replied. “For now, we require your body’s truths.”

The overhead click sped up. The bands warmed again. Cold pins traced along his side where the wound had closed, a quiet constellation of needles that didn’t pierce skin yet told his nerves the story of piercing. His breathing tried to quicken; he refused it permission.

A new pair of footsteps entered his hearing: soft rubber soles, deliberate. The masked attendant stepped away. A presence replaced them at Nathan’s shoulder, close enough he could feel the heat shaped by a human body.

“Hello, Nathan,” said a third voice—male, younger than he expected, with a curiosity he didn’t trust. “I’m here to measure the spaces between your breaths.”

“People usually introduce themselves with names,” Nathan said, eyes still on the ceiling.

“They usually haven’t earned one in this room,” the voice replied. Tools clicked, fabric whispered. “You can call me Bellwether.”

“Because you like being first over the cliff?” Nathan asked.

“Because I tell the flock which way the weather breaks,” Bellwether said cheerfully, and his fingers pressed two pads below Nathan’s ribs, left of center. “Breathe in, please.”

Nathan obliged. The pads vibrated, a hum pitched just low enough that the bone felt it before the ear did. Bellwether made a small pleased sound.

“You’re healing while I watch,” he said. “The curve in the numbers is beautiful.”

Nathan pictured punching that smile into a different expression and let the picture sit like a painting on a gallery wall he had decided not to damage yet. “Glad to be your art.”

“The difference between art and war is audience,” Bellwether said, moving to the side of Nathan’s throat. “Don’t clench. This part feels like drowning but ends before the panic tips.”

Cold trickled under Nathan’s skin, spreading in precise lines that mapped arteries and nerves with cruel intimacy. His vision tunneled and widened and tunneled; he kept his breath to count, an anchor between clicks. Four in. Hold. Four out. He chased the rhythm from campus hallways to basements that breathed murder and back again. It held.

“Good,” Bellwether murmured. “Your body loves orders.”

“It loves surviving,” Nathan said.

Bellwether’s hands hesitated the smallest fraction at that, then resumed. “We share interests, then.”

Across the glass, the tall silhouette turned its head a degree, a gesture that might have been approval or boredom. The others drifted, whispered, recorded. Nathan marked heights, gaits, the way one of them always set their weight on the outside edge of their foot like an old sprain that had never been permitted to heal. He stored the data like he always had, filing it where the new parts of him could reach for it when motion turned to math.

The pads withdrew. The table cooled. The bands sighed.

“Baseline plus stressor complete,” Bellwether announced. “Subject maintained coherence. Recommend escalation.”

“Approved,” said the Architect, smooth as water over stone.

Nathan forced his jaw unclench. “I hope your escalation is more interesting than what the last people tried,” he said, hearing his own voice and recognizing the calm as defiance and the defiance as fear with a better suit.

The door behind the glass opened with a hush. The tall silhouette stepped through into his room at last. Up close, the details congealed: a woman in a fitted dark coat, no insignia, hair braided close to the scalp like she had no time for things that didn’t serve a purpose. Her eyes were not gray. They were the clear, rinsed blue of ice that has learned how to wait.

“Nathan Reyes,” she said. “I prefer history to charades. We’ll skip the latter.” She rested her fingertips lightly on the edge of his table, the gesture intimate without being kind. “The Chimera wasn’t supposed to live. Which means myths are bad at math. We’re here to correct that.”

“You’ve got a room for math,” he said. “And a room for pain. Which one is this?”

“They’re the same room,” she said. “But not for the reasons you think.”

He stared up at the black plates and the blue veins and the metronome that had learned his lungs. Above him, the click changed again, a new timing—faster, closer to the rhythm he had found in himself these past days, when the world opened its seams and let him step a half-second ahead.

He smiled without humor. “You’re going to try to make me choose you,” he said. “Between the ones who lied to me badly and the ones who are lying better.”

The Architect’s mouth shaped an almost-smile. “No. I’m going to show you a future where you never have to be used by people too small for your scale.” Her eyes didn’t move from his. “And then I’m going to ask you to build it.”

Nathan’s hands, trapped but not stilled, curled on reflex against the restraints. He felt the give and the refusal and the precise way his tendons wrote the pressure back into the bands. He felt his side ache and quiet. He felt the click. He felt the hunger that had become a part of his breath.

“You took my family,” he said softly, every word a nail hammered into a promise. “Whether you did it with hands or with a file, you did it. I’m going to take something back.”

“Good,” the Architect said, and to his surprise, she sounded honest. “Because men who want nothing are easy to buy. Men who want everything are easy to break. But men who want one true thing are inevitable.”

She straightened. “Bellwether, escalate.”

Nathan closed his eyes once, not to hide but to sharpen, and when he opened them the room had learned a new beat. The bands warmed again. The lights sank and rose. The table breathed under his spine.

He counted four in.

The Black Cell answered back.

Section 2 – The Interrogation

Time lost its count inside the Black Cell. There was no sunrise or meal, no sleep deep enough to call rest—only the sterile rhythm of machines whispering under the floor. Nathan marked the hours by the subtle changes in temperature, by the moments when the blue veins overhead dimmed for maintenance, by the sound of boots passing beyond the glass wall.

They fed him through the wall: tasteless nutrient gels that felt more like medicine than food. He ate them without complaint; every swallow was energy to heal, and healing was resistance.

The Architect didn’t return for three cycles. Instead, a new pair of visitors came. The first was a man wrapped in the authority of rank—his uniform black but marked with the narrow silver bars of command. His face was carved from calm brutality, the kind that didn’t need to shout to command death. The second wore a lab coat so pristine it almost glowed against the gloom. She carried no clipboard, only a small silver cylinder that pulsed gently in her palm.

Nathan watched them approach his table. “Changing staff already?” he said. “Must be running low on volunteers.”

The commander smiled faintly, the expression brittle. “Mr. Reyes, your humor survives. Good. It means you’re still human enough to talk.” His voice carried the clipped edge of a man trained to make even kindness sound like threat. “I’m Commander Varric. This is Dr. Rin.”

The woman inclined her head slightly. Her eyes were dark, patient, and terrifying in their curiosity. “We’ve been briefed on your… condition. We need to verify its parameters.”

“I’m not a specimen,” Nathan said.

“No,” Rin answered softly, “but you are something rarer—proof.” She lifted the silver cylinder. “This will read your regenerative lattice. If the data is correct, your body is performing adaptive synthesis at rates we believed impossible.”

Varric folded his hands behind his back. “If that’s true, the Iron Veil will need to reconsider its entire doctrine of enhancement.”

Nathan smirked. “So I’m rewriting your religion. Nice.”

Rin pressed the cylinder lightly against his forearm. The contact was cold, then unbearably hot. A fine hum spread through his veins; light traced under his skin like molten rivers. He clenched his jaw until the taste of iron filled his mouth.

“Pain threshold remains remarkable,” Rin murmured, eyes flicking over the data projection hovering above her wrist. “Even under full-spectrum stimulus.”

“Pain,” Nathan said through his teeth, “isn’t the same as obedience.”

“Of course not,” she said. “But it’s an excellent translator.”

The cylinder disengaged with a hiss. Nathan’s skin smoked faintly for a heartbeat, then sealed itself. Varric stepped closer, close enough for Nathan to see the faint scarring at his temple—old grafts from cybernetic implants.

“You’ve been fighting a war you don’t understand,” Varric said. “Your mentors told you the Iron Veil is an enemy. That we want destruction. But destruction is just the first step of correction. You and your kind are the error.”

“My kind?” Nathan asked.

“The Enhanced,” Varric said. “Half-made soldiers with borrowed bones. You were designed to serve, not to question. To be a weapon, not a witness.”

Nathan’s laugh was short and raw. “Funny — you sound exactly like the people who built me.”

Rin’s gaze flicked toward Varric. “He’s stabilizing faster than expected. The inhibitors aren’t suppressing him anymore.”

“Let them burn through,” Varric said. “I want to see the limits.”

The restraints tightened automatically as Nathan’s pulse spiked. He could feel the nanofibers reacting to his muscles, trying to anticipate his struggle before it started. They didn’t understand that he wasn’t fighting them; he was learning them—counting the micro-seconds between the band’s flex and the power-surge correction, memorizing every delay.

Varric leaned down so close Nathan could smell the sterilized air in his uniform. “Tell me what they promised you for your loyalty. Freedom? Redemption? Or the illusion that your rage could serve something holy?”

“They promised me nothing,” Nathan said. “I took what I needed.”

“Then take this truth,” Varric said. “Your handlers at Aegis lied. The Chimera Program wasn’t created to defend humanity—it was built to cull it. You were bred from failure. Every enhancement you carry was stolen from Iron Veil research twenty years ago.”

“Lie,” Nathan spat.

Rin tapped the cylinder again. A holographic image bloomed in the air above him: archival footage, grainy but clear. Rows of pods. Children. Labels etched in mirrored script: Project Chimera – Division IV.

In one pod—number 23—a small boy slept beneath a mesh of electrodes. His hair curled slightly even then. The tag at the base read: Reyes, N.

Nathan froze. His mind rejected it instinctively, but the scar at his collarbone tingled in confirmation—the same pattern visible on the child’s chest. He wanted to scream, to deny it, but the truth pressed against him like a hand over his mouth.

“You’re not a myth,” Rin said gently. “You’re a remnant.”

The hologram flickered out. Varric straightened, studying Nathan’s face for cracks. “Do you see now? We didn’t hunt you. We came to reclaim you.”

Nathan laughed again, hoarse and bitter. “That’s the worst sales pitch I’ve ever heard.”

“Yet you’re listening,” Rin said.

He was—and he hated that he was. The world felt off-axis, reality shifting around questions he’d buried. His mentors had said the Chimera was a failed rumor. That no survivors existed. And yet the video had his scar, his file number. How many lies did the Aegis Council feed him in the name of purpose?

“Why show me this?” Nathan asked.

“So you understand that your power doesn’t belong to them,” Rin said. “It never did. It belongs to what created it — to us.”

“No,” Nathan said quietly. “It belongs to me.”

The bands tightened, reading the spike in his vitals as aggression. Varric stepped back as a precaution. Rin didn’t move; she simply observed as faint dark lines crawled under Nathan’s skin, the sign of his cells accelerating beyond regulation.

“Remarkable,” Rin whispered. “His body’s responding even to psychological stress cues. He’s… adapting.”

“Enough,” Varric snapped. “Sedate him.”

Rin hesitated. “Commander, we risk losing the continuity—”

“Do it.”

She pressed a command on her wrist. A hiss released from the table, flooding Nathan’s senses with chemical frost. He gasped, his vision fracturing into shards of blue and black. The world tilted sideways.

Varric’s voice followed him into the darkness. “Sleep, Chimera. When you wake, you’ll remember who you serve.”

The last thing Nathan felt before consciousness broke was his own pulse refusing to slow, as if his body was already learning how to ignore their poisons.

Section 3 – The Infiltration Revelation

The sedatives didn’t hold.

Nathan’s body burned through the chemical fog like wildfire through dry leaves. His heartbeat refused to flatten, and the blue haze that should have lulled him into stillness only deepened the static in his mind. When his eyes finally opened, the world was darker, quieter, and colder—but not empty.

The hum of the Black Cell persisted, layered with faint voices that bled through the ventilation system. It took him minutes to realize the words weren’t hallucinations. They were coming from somewhere down the corridor.

He focused, filtering the noise, the way Raze had taught him back at Aegis Base: find the pattern in the chaos.

“—transfer logs confirmed?”

“Yes. Sector Theta received the data cache from the embedded.”

“How deep was he in their ranks?”

“Long enough. They trusted him.”

Nathan’s muscles stiffened. Embedded. The word carried the weight of betrayal. He strained his hearing further, ignoring the pounding in his temples.

“What about the handler?”

“Eliminated. The embedded burned the bridge himself before extraction.”

“Good. We can’t risk the other cells finding out. The Chimera’s team will implode once the truth surfaces.”

A harsh laugh followed, low and satisfied.

“The boy doesn’t even realize half his allies were never his.”

Nathan’s stomach twisted. Half his allies? The air seemed to thicken. Faces flashed in his mind—Selene, Corvus, Dr. Elara, even the quiet engineer who used to fix his armor plating. Any one of them could have been compromised.

He flexed his fingers against the restraints again, testing the fibers’ give. His skin itched where the bands met flesh—an irritation that wasn’t just physical. His body wanted to move, to fight, to act.

The voices drifted away, replaced by the click of metal boots approaching.

The door to his cell hissed open. A different soldier entered—lighter steps, less rigid, the kind of movement that belonged to someone pretending to be confident. The uniform was Iron Veil issue, but the way the man’s gaze darted to the corners betrayed nerves.

“Reyes,” the soldier said, voice low. “You awake?”

Nathan didn’t answer. He just watched.

The man knelt beside the table, glancing toward the camera mounted in the ceiling. “Listen carefully. I don’t have much time. You need to know—what they told you about the infiltrator—”

“Was true?” Nathan interrupted, voice cold.

The soldier froze, eyes wide. “You heard?”

“Enough to know someone sold us out.”

The man swallowed. “It’s worse than that. There wasn’t one. There were three.”

Nathan’s breath caught.

“Three infiltrators,” the soldier whispered, trembling as though saying it aloud might summon punishment. “Iron Veil embedded them into Aegis Base two years before you even joined. They’ve been feeding intel, recording movements, cataloguing your upgrades—everything. One of them was on your strike team.”

Nathan’s mind reeled. Two years before he joined meant every training mission, every combat simulation—monitored, catalogued, compromised.

“Who?” Nathan demanded.

“I don’t know all the names,” the man said. “I was just the courier. But I know one of them—they called him Specter. He reported directly to Commander Varric.”

Nathan’s blood ran cold. Specter. The name meant nothing at first—until memory hit him like a recoil blast. During his first month in the unit, there had been a scout named Avery Solas—quiet, almost invisible in the field. He’d vanished after a recon op, presumed KIA. No body ever found.

“Where is he now?” Nathan asked.

The soldier hesitated. “Here. He’s one of them now.”

That was when Nathan noticed the soldier’s hand. It shook—not from fear, but from something mechanical. A faint tremor in the wrist that wasn’t natural.

“Who are you?” Nathan asked quietly.

The man’s gaze flicked up, caught between guilt and resignation. “It doesn’t matter. I was supposed to keep watch on you until the transfer. But you… you don’t deserve what’s coming.”

He slipped something small and metallic under the edge of the table restraint—a shard of carbon steel no longer than a nail. “They’ll move you at next light cycle. If you want a chance, you’ll make your own.”

Nathan studied him, weighing the lie and the truth in his face. “Why help me?”

The man smiled sadly. “Because once, I believed in what Aegis stood for too.”

Before Nathan could reply, the man straightened, saluted sharply toward the corner camera, and left. The door sealed behind him with a hiss that sounded almost like regret.

Nathan waited. One breath. Two. Ten. Then he shifted his wrist, pressing the hidden shard against the fiber band. It didn’t slice—yet—but it cut enough to loosen the edge.

The voices from the vent returned. New ones this time—less confident, sharper.

“He’s regaining consciousness too fast again.”

“Increase the dosage.”

“No. The Architect wants him lucid for Phase Two.”

“She’s playing with fire.”

“That’s what we built him for.”

Nathan stilled. He could feel his pulse syncing again with the rhythmic hum of the walls, but this time, the pattern wasn’t foreign—it was familiar. He could sense where each wire ran, where the power lines pulsed behind the plating. The cell was no longer just a cage; it was a map.

He began to plan.

Every minute, he worked the shard a little deeper, cutting through microlayers of restraint. Every breath, he memorized the rhythm of guard rotations—the boots outside, the pauses, the electronic chirps that marked the end of a shift.

When exhaustion tried to creep in, he saw flashes of his family—the laughter, the warmth, the light before it was stolen. The rage didn’t frighten him anymore. It steadied him.

Somewhere beyond these walls, his allies might still be fighting to reach him. But if the Iron Veil had infiltrated that deep, he couldn’t be sure who would come through the door when it finally opened—friend or enemy.

He whispered into the silence, “Then I’ll come for them first.”

And for the first time since waking, Nathan smiled. It wasn’t the smile of hope. It was the calm grin of a man who had stopped waiting to be saved.

Section 4 – The Surgeon of Flesh

They came for him in silence.

No alarms. No heavy footsteps. Just a soft hydraulic sigh as the door to his cell dissolved into the wall. Two Iron Veil guards entered—one holding a pulse rifle, the other an injector filled with something that shimmered like mercury. They didn’t speak. They didn’t need to. Their movements were rehearsed, mechanical.

Nathan didn’t resist. Not yet. He let them unlock the restraints, pretending his body was still sluggish from sedation. When they hauled him upright, his muscles burned—but the pain was clean, sharp, alive.

They guided him down a long corridor lined with obsidian panels. The air felt recycled, stripped of scent, too sterile to be real. Every few meters, the blue veins of light pulsed beneath the floor, following them like a heartbeat.

At the end of the hallway waited a single door marked with an engraved sigil—a circle split by a diagonal line. He’d seen it before. It was the insignia stamped on the executioner’s blade that nearly took his life.

The guards shoved him through.

The room beyond was massive—a cathedral of glass and steel. Tables covered in instruments formed a ring around a central dais. Suspended above it, a mechanical arm array hung like the spine of some industrial predator. Monitors displayed faint silhouettes of human anatomy rendered in shifting code.

And there, standing in the center, was her.

Dr. Rin.

Her white coat gleamed under the sterile lights, now sleeved with a translucent membrane lined with moving data streams. “Welcome back, Nathan,” she said with clinical warmth. “We’re past introductions now. I need to see what you really are.”

Nathan scanned the room. Dozens of cameras. No exit without being seen. Still, his pulse stayed steady. He could feel it again—the hum of the building, the rhythm he had memorized in his cell.

Rin gestured to the dais. “Lie down. If you cooperate, you might even walk out of this.”

“Walk?” Nathan’s voice was a low rasp. “After you cut me open?”

Her smile was thin, academic. “You misunderstand. I’m not here to dissect you, Nathan. I’m here to evolve you.”

The guards pushed him forward, forcing him onto the table. He didn’t fight. Not yet. The restraints reformed around his wrists and ankles, magnetically sealing into place.

Rin stepped closer, examining him like a painter studying a masterpiece. “You’ve accelerated far beyond your baseline. Cellular restructuring, neural conductivity, tissue memory—all enhanced. But your adaptation has limits. You burn too fast, too bright. I intend to correct that.”

Nathan met her gaze. “You mean control it.”

“Control is another word for survival,” she replied. “You should thank me.”

He laughed softly. “I’ll save that for when you grow a conscience.”

She didn’t flinch. “Pain unlocks potential. I’ve learned that the hard way. You’re about to learn it too.”

With a motion of her hand, the armature above him descended, each appendage ending in a different tool—scalpel, injector, electrode, and something that looked disturbingly organic, like a tendril of translucent muscle.

Nathan’s breath slowed. His eyes tracked every movement, every pattern of light reflected in the mirrored ceiling.

When the first incision cut into his shoulder, the pain was instant—but not as devastating as Rin expected. His flesh parted, then began closing almost as quickly, leaving only the faintest mark.

Her eyes widened. “Fascinating. Even your cells reject observation.”

The arm adjusted, the tendrils pulsing with blue light as they entered his bloodstream. Nathan’s body arched involuntarily—his veins illuminated from within, glowing like cracks in obsidian. His vision split, the world flickering between reality and something deeper: a pulse of data, light, and thought.

He saw flashes—files, images, the faces of soldiers, test chambers, burning cities. His own face on a lab screen marked Chimera 23. Then the symbol of Iron Veil, paired with another sigil he didn’t recognize—half of a circle with seven smaller marks orbiting it.

He gasped. The vision cut.

Rin leaned closer, her expression rapturous. “You saw it, didn’t you? The network. The source. You’re connected to every prototype they buried. You’re their map.”

Nathan’s voice was a growl. “You’re out of your depth, doctor.”

Rin tilted her head, curiosity flickering like static. “Maybe. But if I’m right, you’re not the end of Project Chimera. You’re the beginning.”

The pain surged again—but this time, Nathan embraced it. The restraints strained, metal creaking under the sudden pressure of his muscles. His pulse became a roar in his ears.

Rin stepped back, realizing too late. “Contain him—!”

The lights shattered. Power flooded through Nathan’s limbs like lightning through copper. He ripped free from the table as alarms screamed to life. The mechanical arm lunged, striking sparks across the floor, but he caught it mid-swing and tore it free with one motion.

Rin stumbled backward, eyes wide, disbelief cracking her composure. “That’s impossible—”

Nathan loomed over her, breathing hard, body steaming from the energy surge. His eyes, once brown, now burned a molten gold edged with black. “You wanted to see what I really am?” he said quietly. “Look.”

She froze. For the first time, fear found her face.

Nathan turned toward the observation glass, where Iron Veil soldiers were already scrambling to contain the breach. He hurled the torn armature into the glass—it shattered in a rain of silver dust.

“Alert the Architect!” someone shouted.

But Nathan was already moving—faster than human, faster than the room could react. He disappeared into the hallway, alarms chasing him like echoes of a storm.

Behind him, Rin staggered to her feet, watching the broken restraints twitch and spark on the floor. Her lips parted, whispering a single line that the cameras barely caught:

“He’s not a subject anymore. He’s the prototype perfected.”

And deep within the Iron Veil’s command hub, the Architect smiled as the alarms reached her ears.

“Good,” she murmured. “Let him run.”

Section 5 – The Hunt Within the Complex

The alarms howled like living things, the mechanical shriek reverberating through the Iron Veil facility’s arteries. Emergency strobes pulsed red and white, turning the corridors into a nightmare of color and shadow.

Nathan sprinted barefoot over the cold metal floors, his movements fluid and brutal all at once. The energy coursing through him didn’t fade—it built, feeding on his pulse, on his fury, on the primal instinct to survive. Each step felt faster, heavier, more precise. The sedation they’d pumped into him was gone, burned to ash by the storm inside his veins.

He moved like lightning given flesh.

Behind him, gunfire erupted—plasma bolts slicing through the air. Nathan ducked low, the shots slamming into the walls in sprays of molten metal. His hearing, sharpened to an animal’s precision, caught the subtle hum of recharging rifles, the rustle of armored feet shifting position. He didn’t think—he reacted.

He grabbed a fallen guard’s rifle in one hand, the man’s arm still twitching beside it, and hurled it like a spear into the corridor’s corner. It struck another soldier in the chest with such force it cracked armor.

Nathan didn’t stop. He dove through the steam and shadows, leaping over barriers, sprinting toward the flickering blue light ahead—the faint sign of an exit.

“Containment breach! Target moving through corridor delta-seven!”

“Seal the lower wings!”

“Negative—Architect orders containment alive!”

Alive.

The word hit Nathan like a taunt. They didn’t want him dead. They wanted him contained. That meant they still underestimated him.

He darted into a maintenance shaft, the dim tunnel barely wide enough for his shoulders. The metal burned his palms as he crawled, but his body healed faster than the heat could scar him. He moved silently, the alarms dimming behind him, replaced by the hum of power conduits and the distant rumble of automated defenses.

The shaft opened into a narrow junction—a web of intersecting tunnels that led to different wings of the complex. He paused, breathing shallowly, scanning the space. That’s when he heard it—a voice through the static of the intercom, faint but deliberate.

“Nathan. Stop running.”

He froze. The voice wasn’t Iron Veil’s. It was familiar.

“You’re not safe out there. There are drones ahead, triple-armored. You won’t make it through the eastern corridor.”

Nathan turned his head toward the nearest speaker. “Who is this?”

“A friend. From inside.”

“Define friend.”

A soft laugh. “Let’s just say we share enemies.”

“Then show me.”

“You’ll have to trust me first. Go left. Down into the coolant deck. And stay low.”

Nathan hesitated. Every instinct told him it was a trap. But the alternative—staying here while reinforcements closed in—was suicide. He moved.

The tunnels grew colder as he descended. Condensation dripped from the ceiling, gathering into rivulets that ran down his arms. The air smelled faintly of ozone and coolant fluid. When he emerged into the coolant deck, his breath came out in white clouds. Rows of massive cylindrical tanks loomed above him, each one filled with a shimmering blue liquid.

Then he saw her.

Selene.

She stepped out from the shadows between two tanks, her dark hair tied back, her uniform smeared with soot. The same Selene who had defended him after the Raze incident, who had believed in him when the others doubted.

For a moment, Nathan couldn’t move. “You—how—?”

She raised a hand quickly. “Keep your voice down. They’re tracking heat signatures. I jammed the sensors for a few minutes, but it won’t last.”

He closed the distance in two long strides, eyes searching hers. “Selene… how did you get in here?”

Her expression was grim. “We never stopped tracking you. The moment Iron Veil moved you off the grid, Corvus mobilized a covert cell. We’ve been inside the complex for weeks.”

Nathan blinked. “You’re saying Aegis infiltrated them?”

“Not just infiltrated,” she said. “We embedded deep enough to get intel on their leadership. But things changed when they captured you. They started accelerating their research. You’re their centerpiece now, Nathan. The key to something they call The Genesis Core.”

The name hit him like static across his mind. He’d heard it whispered in his hallucinations during the experiments. A pulse in the dark—seven sigils orbiting a single sphere of light.

“What is it?” he asked.

Selene shook her head. “We don’t know yet. But the Architect does—and she’s obsessed with you. The spy in our ranks gave them your full biological data. That’s why they were able to track your regenerative cycles.”

Nathan exhaled sharply. “So it’s true. We were compromised.”

“Yes,” she said. “And it’s worse than we thought. One of them—Specter—he’s not just alive. He’s here. He’s their lead hunter.”

Nathan clenched his fists. “Then I’ll find him.”

Selene stepped closer, eyes fierce. “Not alone. You’re strong, Nathan, but the Architect has been preparing for you since before you knew her name. We have to move carefully.”

He looked at her, the flickering blue light painting her face in fractured glows. “Careful doesn’t work for me anymore.”

Selene’s hand brushed his arm—gentle, grounding. “It has to. We didn’t come this far to lose you now.”

Something in her touch softened the storm inside him. For a heartbeat, the cold air didn’t bite so hard. He nodded once. “Where do we go?”

She glanced toward the far end of the deck. “There’s a secondary freight lift behind those tanks. It leads to the old transport tunnels. If we can reach them, we’ll regroup with the others and plan extraction.”

They started moving—quiet, fast. Nathan’s instincts tracked every sound: the hum of machinery, the hiss of vents, the distant echoes of marching boots. The world had slowed to his rhythm again, his senses stretched thin across every vibration in the air.

Halfway across the deck, he stopped. Something was wrong. The rhythm of the machinery had changed.

“Selene,” he whispered. “We’re not alone.”

The air shimmered near the far tank, like heat distortion—and then the distortion took shape.

A figure stepped out of nothing.

He was tall, lean, clad in segmented armor that rippled with light. His face was half-covered by a visor of black glass. When he spoke, his voice carried the weight of old betrayal.

“Hello, Nathan.”

Selene froze. “Specter.”

He tilted his head. “Still clinging to ghosts, I see.”

Nathan stepped forward, every muscle ready to strike. “I should’ve known you’d be here.”

Specter smiled faintly. “And yet, you still walked into my kill zone.”

From the ceiling, two drones uncloaked, targeting lights snapping on. Selene pulled a pulse pistol from her belt. Nathan crouched low, the air around him humming.

Specter raised a hand, signaling the drones to hold. “The Architect wants you alive,” he said. “But she didn’t say in what condition.”

Nathan’s lips curved into a dangerous grin. “Then you’d better make it interesting.”

Section 6 – Collision Course

The silence that followed Specter’s words was more suffocating than any alarm. The humming coolant systems seemed to fade into the background, leaving only the thrum of blood and electricity in Nathan’s ears.

He didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe. The faint blue light from the tanks flickered over Specter’s armor, giving him a ghostly edge that fit his name too well. The traitor’s visor reflected Nathan’s face—tired, furious, and alive.

Nathan stepped forward, bare feet slapping the metal floor. “You sold out everyone who trusted you,” he said quietly. “Do you even remember their names?”

Specter tilted his head slightly. “Names are illusions. Attachments slow us down. You should know that by now.”

“Funny,” Nathan said, voice low. “My attachments are the only reason I’m still standing.”

The words hung between them for a moment before Specter moved—too fast for a normal human, but Nathan wasn’t normal anymore.

The first strike came low and precise, a spinning kick that could have crushed ribs. Nathan dropped to a knee, blocking the impact with his forearm. The shock still rippled through his bones. He countered instantly, sweeping Specter’s legs with brutal precision, but Specter twisted mid-fall, landing light as smoke.

The two circled each other, the hum of their enhanced bodies vibrating through the air.

Selene shouted something—Nathan barely heard it. The world had narrowed to this: the rhythm of the fight, the pulsing red light, the scent of ozone.

Specter lunged again, blades snapping from his gauntlets, glinting blue with plasma edges. Nathan caught one wrist, forced it sideways, and drove his knee into Specter’s chest. The armor cracked—but not enough.

Specter grinned beneath his visor. “You’re faster than before.”

“I learn quick.”

“And you’re angry.”

Nathan’s next punch broke the floor plating.

Selene ducked behind a coolant tank, exchanging fire with the drones that now reactivated, their targeting lights sweeping across the deck. Sparks cascaded through the air like falling stars.

“Go, Nathan!” she yelled. “Take him down!”

Nathan barely needed the encouragement. Every strike came easier, heavier. He could feel his muscles responding before his brain gave the command, his body predicting movement in fractions of a second. It was like seeing the future in motion.

He caught Specter’s next strike midair and twisted. The traitor’s arm snapped at the elbow, and Specter hissed in pain but didn’t fall. He countered with a spinning backhand that carved a burning line across Nathan’s jaw.

The scent of scorched skin filled the air.

Nathan didn’t even flinch. The wound was gone before the next breath.

Specter stumbled back, eyes widening behind the visor. “You’re healing faster. That shouldn’t be possible—”

Nathan advanced, relentless. “You should’ve stayed dead.”

Specter raised both hands, the air around him crackling with dark energy. His suit emitted a shriek as it overloaded, and the next instant, a concussive blast sent Nathan flying into the coolant tanks. The impact shattered the nearest cylinder, flooding the floor with freezing liquid.

The chill bit deep, but Nathan’s body reacted instantly, his skin steaming against the cold. He rose slowly, hair plastered to his forehead, water dripping from his jaw. His eyes burned molten gold again.

Specter took an involuntary step back.

“I warned them about you,” he muttered. “Told them you’d become unstable. That they’d built something they couldn’t control.”

“You’re right,” Nathan said, voice calm. “You can’t control me.”

He moved faster than sound.

One second Specter was standing; the next, Nathan’s hand was around his throat, slamming him into the wall so hard the panels fractured. The drones fired, but Nathan pivoted, using Specter’s body as a shield. The blasts ripped through his armor, lighting him up like a dying star.

Selene shouted his name, but Nathan didn’t stop.

His knuckles met Specter’s faceplate—once, twice, again—until the black visor shattered, revealing a man beneath. Younger than Nathan remembered, with hollow eyes that had long forgotten how to be human.

“Do it,” Specter rasped. “End it. You’re no different than me.”

Nathan hesitated, his breathing ragged. For a fleeting instant, the rage faltered. Selene’s voice reached him again—softer now, trembling.

“Nathan… stop. Please.”

He froze.

Specter, gasping, smiled through blood. “She doesn’t understand what you are.”

Nathan’s grip tightened—but not to kill. He slammed Specter unconscious instead, dropping him to the ground.

Selene rushed forward, weapon still smoking. Her hand trembled when she touched Nathan’s arm. “You were going to kill him.”

Nathan’s chest heaved. “He deserves worse.”

“But you don’t,” she said firmly. “Don’t let them turn you into what they want.”

Nathan looked down at Specter’s limp body, then back at her. For the first time, the golden fire in his eyes dimmed. “I’m not sure that’s still my choice.”

Before she could answer, the intercom crackled—Rin’s voice, cold and sharp.

“Bravo, Nathan. You’ve exceeded even my calculations. But let’s see how you handle a real test.”

The floor vibrated. From the far end of the coolant deck, reinforced blast doors slid open—and something stepped out.

Tall. Inhuman. A fusion of steel and organic tissue. Its limbs were lined with circuitry that glowed the same color as Nathan’s veins.

The Surgeon’s other creation.

Selene whispered, “Oh, no.”

Nathan cracked his neck. “Stay behind me.”

The creature’s roar shook the deck as it charged, its eyes burning with the same gold light that had once belonged only to him.

Nathan smiled, savage and unafraid. “Finally,” he muttered. “A fair fight.”

Section 7 – The Prototype War

The creature that stepped out of the dark was wrong in every conceivable way. It was human in outline only—a towering amalgam of sinew, steel, and circuitry. Its movements were too smooth to be mechanical yet too deliberate to be organic. Each motion produced a wet, grinding sound, as though machinery and muscle warred for dominance beneath its skin.

Nathan’s pulse didn’t quicken. His breathing didn’t change. He simply studied it, eyes tracking the way its chest expanded, the rhythm of its steps, the electric glow pulsing faintly in its neck. Every sound and vibration in the air slowed down in his mind, forming a pattern.

Selene, crouched behind a fallen coolant pipe, whispered, “What is that?”

Nathan didn’t look at her. “Something they built from me.”

He wasn’t wrong. The creature’s veins glowed the same molten gold as his. The same color that had begun spreading through his own body like a contagion.

It turned its head toward him, expression unreadable—if it could be called an expression at all. Its mouth was a seam of flesh and steel that twisted open only enough to speak two words, in a voice that echoed with broken frequencies:

“Kill… prototype.”

Nathan smirked. “Try it.”

The floor cracked under his first step.

They collided in a flash of light and motion that shattered the nearest coolant tanks. Ice-cold fluid sprayed through the air, fogging the room as metal screamed against metal. Nathan struck first—a palm strike that sent the creature reeling. But it recovered instantly, slamming a massive hand into his side and launching him through a reinforced wall.

Nathan hit the floor hard. His ribs should’ve snapped, but his body was already repairing, muscles knitting with a heat that scorched the air. He stood, rolling his shoulders, every nerve burning with fury and exhilaration.

The monster came at him again, faster this time. Nathan ducked under its swing, swept low, and drove an elbow into its chest. The impact cratered the steel plating—but it wasn’t enough. The thing didn’t bleed. It just hummed.

It grabbed him by the throat and lifted him off the ground, its fingers digging into flesh. Sparks jumped between them, gold and blue, merging, rejecting each other.

Nathan spat blood and grinned. “You hit harder than your maker.”

With a roar, he slammed both fists into the creature’s arm, snapping bone and metal in one brutal motion. He fell, rolled, and came up swinging. The next punch tore half of the thing’s face away, revealing a network of glowing nerves and pulsing wires.

Selene fired from behind him, her shots carving holes through the monster’s side, but it kept moving, faster now, more desperate.

“Get out!” Nathan shouted. “I’ve got this!”

“Not without you!”

He glanced back at her—just long enough for the creature to drive a fist into his spine, sending him crashing into a support column. The metal buckled with a deafening screech.

He screamed—but not from pain. From rage.

When he stood again, something in him had changed. His body pulsed with gold light. His shadow split against the wall. His voice came out low, feral, resonating through the floor.

“You wanted your weapon,” he said, eyes blazing. “Here it is.”

He moved faster than he ever had before—faster than the human eye could follow. His fists struck like thunderclaps. The creature tried to counter, but each movement Nathan read before it happened, his world slowing to a crawl. He was predicting—not thinking.

He wasn’t fighting anymore. He was destroying.

He grabbed the monster’s head, slammed it into the ground once, twice, three times, each impact shaking the deck. Circuits sprayed sparks like arterial blood. The creature shrieked, its voice breaking into layers of static.

Then Nathan did something he didn’t know he could do—he pushed, willed the energy inside him outward. His veins lit like molten glass, and the air rippled.

The creature convulsed. Its body began to disintegrate, the golden light spreading from Nathan into it, like a contagion that rewrote the code of its existence. In seconds, the monster collapsed into ash and shrapnel.

The room went silent except for the hiss of ruptured coolant lines.

Nathan stood in the center, chest heaving, steam rising from his skin. His eyes glowed like burning metal, reflections of the ruin he had created.

Selene approached slowly, weapon still raised. “Nathan…”

He turned toward her, expression unreadable. “It’s done.”

“You—” She stopped, staring at the devastation. “You killed it like it was nothing.”

Nathan shook his head, voice distant. “Not nothing. It was me. Or what they wanted me to become.”

Before she could respond, the intercom came alive again—this time not Rin’s voice, but someone new. Smooth, confident, deliberate.

“Fascinating. I was told you were unpredictable, but this… this is art.”

Selene’s eyes widened. “The Architect.”

Nathan stared up at the ceiling as if he could see her through the layers of glass and steel. “You’re the one pulling the strings.”

“Not strings, Nathan. Threads. Every creation is part of a larger weave. And now, you’ve proven your place in it.”

Nathan’s jaw clenched. “You think I’ll ever serve you?”

“Serve? No. You’ll shape the future with me.”

Her voice was calm. Seductive in its certainty.

Nathan’s hands curled into fists. “You sound like a god who forgot how to bleed.”

“Perhaps. But you—you’re proof gods can be made.”

The line cut.

Selene touched his arm again, voice trembling. “We have to leave. Now. Before she seals the exits.”

Nathan stared at the doorway where the monster had fallen. The light in his eyes flickered once, then dimmed. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “Before I start believing her.”

They disappeared into the smoke and flickering lights, unaware that far above them, the Architect watched through the surviving cameras, her reflection mirrored in ten thousand golden eyes.

“Let him run,” she murmured again. “Every step brings him closer to me.”

Section 8 – Extraction Burn

The world was collapsing around them.

Warning sirens screamed through the Iron Veil facility, a symphony of chaos rising above the grinding metal and bursting conduits. The lights flickered between red and white as emergency systems fought to keep the reactors from melting down. Smoke poured from the ceilings, choking the corridors in shifting veils of gray.

Nathan and Selene sprinted side by side through the main artery of the complex, their boots splashing through the slick coolant that coated the floor. Overhead, warning text scrolled across the cracked holo-displays:

REACTOR INSTABILITY DETECTED. STRUCTURAL FAILURE IMMINENT.

The air was thick with the smell of ozone and burning circuitry. Every few seconds, the floor trembled as the reactors deep below buckled under their own strain.

Selene’s voice cut through the noise, rough and urgent. “We’re running out of time! Extraction point’s ahead—central lift shaft!”

Nathan’s gaze flicked toward her, his eyes still glowing faintly in the half-light. “You’re sure the comm line’s still open?”

She nodded, though her breath came ragged. “Corvus got your signal after you tore the network apart. He’s bringing a strike ship in—thirty seconds tops.”

“Then let’s make it count.”

They rounded a corner and were met with gunfire. Three Iron Veil soldiers poured out of a side corridor, rifles raised, armor gleaming black and crimson. Nathan’s body moved before his mind caught up—his instincts operating on a plane beyond thought.

He twisted sideways, catching a pulse round mid-flight. The shot scorched his sleeve but didn’t pierce the skin. He lunged forward, faster than the soldiers could blink. The first went down with a crushed windpipe. The second he disarmed and threw into a wall hard enough to dent the metal. The third tried to retreat—Nathan caught him by the helmet and slammed him into the ground.

By the time the echoes of the fight faded, all three were motionless.

Selene stared, panting. “You didn’t even blink.”

Nathan wiped the sweat and blood from his brow, his voice quiet but steady. “Blinking’s for people who still hesitate.”

She didn’t answer—just gave a short nod and reloaded her pistol.

They pressed on. The lift shaft was two corridors away now, but the floor began to tilt, a low groan of metal twisting under strain. The explosion that followed shook the walls.

A wave of heat washed over them, followed by the smell of melted plastic.

“Reactor breach,” Nathan said flatly.

“Then we really need to go.”

They sprinted again, ducking under collapsing beams and leaping over burning debris. The world became a blur of smoke and movement—until Selene stumbled. A burst of shrapnel caught her leg.

She hit the ground hard, gasping. Nathan skidded to a stop, eyes flashing gold again.

“Selene!”

“It’s fine,” she lied through clenched teeth. “Just keep going—”

“Not leaving you.”

He crouched beside her, his hands pressing against the wound. Her blood glowed faintly under his touch, reacting to the energy flowing through his body. The wound began to close before her eyes.

Her breathing steadied, confusion flashing across her face. “You… healed me.”

Nathan looked down at his hands, a mix of awe and fear flickering behind his stoic expression. “I didn’t mean to.”

Selene’s voice softened. “Nathan… whatever you’re becoming—it’s saving us.”

Before he could reply, a deafening crash cut through the corridor. A massive door at the far end exploded inward, and through the smoke came a squad of armored sentinels—Iron Veil’s elite. Their helmets glowed crimson, their rifles humming with charge.

“Go!” Nathan shouted. “I’ll hold them off!”

Selene tried to rise, but he was already moving.

Nathan darted forward, using debris as cover. The first shots ripped through the air, carving glowing lines through the smoke. He closed the distance in seconds, slamming into the front line with the force of a hurricane. Armor shattered. Bones broke. The smell of scorched metal filled the air as he ripped through their formation like an unstoppable current.

Selene limped toward the lift controls, her fingers flying over the cracked interface. “Corvus, this is Selene—we’re at the extraction point! Nathan’s engaged—get us out now!”

Static answered her for a long, harrowing moment. Then:

“Hold tight. We’re coming through the roof.”

Nathan kicked the last sentinel into a wall hard enough to leave a dent. The lift doors slid open, the air rushing in with the scent of freedom and burning ozone.

He turned toward Selene, breathing hard, eyes wild. “You good?”

She nodded, and together they stepped into the lift. As the platform began to rise, the floor below them gave out completely, collapsing into molten light.

The lift shot upward through the black steel tower, passing levels of chaos—labs on fire, hallways flooded, bodies of Iron Veil personnel crushed beneath debris.

At the top, the ceiling gave way to open air. A storm raged above—black clouds streaked with lightning. And through the haze came the roar of engines.

The Aegis strike ship—Valkyrion—descended like an avenging god, its spotlights cutting through the storm.

Ropes dropped. Nathan grabbed one and pulled Selene close as they rose into the storm, the heat from the burning facility below warming their backs.

Corvus’s voice came over the comms.

“Welcome home, soldier.”

Nathan’s voice was flat. “This isn’t over.”

Corvus hesitated. “No. It’s just beginning.”

Below them, the Iron Veil facility imploded in a blinding flash, swallowed by the storm.

But as Nathan and Selene disappeared into the clouds, the Architect’s voice whispered through the static one last time—so soft it might have been imagined.

“Run as far as you like, Nathan. I’ll always find you.”