{{Trigger Warning: Child Abuse, Blood}}
The room was white. Too white.
Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting a sterile glow across the walls. A young child—about the age of ten—was chained to a metal-framed bed—ankles, wrists, even her neck.
Cold restraints bit into raw skin. Her body ached down to the marrow, every breath a cruel reminder she was still alive.
Dozens of wires and needles pierced her skin, linking her to surrounding monitors. Their blinking lights and beeping tones measured her heartbeat, oxygen levels, and pain thresholds.
Red and green lines danced across glass screens, as if her suffering could be quantified.
She wanted to scream. To thrash. To beg.
But her voice was long gone. Exhaustion rooted her deeper into the bed, her body too battered to fight. Only her eyes moved—dull, resigned, and yet... still aware.
Then, the shadows in the far corner of the room twitched.
Her heartbeat stuttered. The shadows coalesced, and from them emerged a tall, impossibly beautiful woman. Blonde hair fell like silk past her shoulders.
Piercing green eyes met trembling ruby ones. Her lab coat was pristine white, her blue heels clicking on the tiled floor with every step.
Click—
Click—
Click—
Each sound stabbed down the little girl's spine like ice.
The woman held a thick syringe. Inside, a vivid purple liquid churned, glowing faintly like it was alive.
The girl's eyes widened in familiarity, her expression that of horror and dread. Her body refused to move, but her soul screamed. Broken sobs spilled from her lips, her head shaking in desperation.
The woman reached her bedside and offered a smile—one that promised kindness, yet no such thing existed in this godforsaken place.
"Don't look at me like that," she murmured. "You should blame your brother. If he hadn't died so uselessly, we wouldn't be in such a rush."
The words hit like a punch to the gut.
The girl's breath hitched. Grief surged. Rage boiled. But most of all, guilt drowned her.
He had died saving her.
The woman didn't wait for a reply. She plunged the syringe into the girl's arm.
Agony exploded.
A bone-deep cold rushed through her veins, sharp enough to freeze her soul. She screamed. Her spine arched against the restraints. The cold only lasted a few minutes, only to take an abrupt shift.
It felt like molten metal had replaced her blood—searing, boiling, burning her alive from within.
Her screams turned hoarse, then soundless. Her throat gave out, her lips still forming silent cries. Blood—dark red, nearly black—poured from her mouth.
Her skin flushed red. Her body convulsed.
And the woman? She merely put on a pair of glasses, as she observed the monitors with clinical fascination. She took notes on a sleek glass tablet, eyes never leaving the data.
The girl wanted to die. Anything to end the pain.
Then—
Ding.
An all too familiar translucent screen flickered in her vision.
[Mental Barrier (Beginner)– Mental Stability Increased 27% —> 28%]
And just like that— The room vanished.
No bed.
No pain.
No chains.
No shadows.
Only darkness.
A void so complete, even her hands were lost in it.
Then came warmth. Golden like the sunlight. Gentle and enveloping, like a protective embrace around her soul. Her breathing slowed. A familiar mechanical hum echoed softly, like a lullaby.
And she woke.
Her eyes flew open.
A dimly lit room. White marble ceiling. A soft bed. Warm linen covers. The subtle scent of lavender. A comfortable room temperature—
Every single facet thoughtfully prepared to ensure she'd have a restful sleep.
And yet, her body was drenched in sweat. Her chest heaved as if she'd just escaped drowning. Tears blurred her vision.
"Good Morning, Nadia."
The system's voice was soft—almost tender.
She let out a shaky breath. Her body was trembling. For a long moment, she lay there, an arm draped over her eyes.
And in the darkness of her room—
She allowed herself to cry.
Silent, aching sobs that no one would ever hear.
A few hours later—
The girl who had awoken in tears now stood poised at the entrance of the Argyros Library. Her composure did not possess a single flaw.
As she walked the now familiar path towards the crystal grove of virtual knowledge, Nadia's jade green dress clung to her silhouette like it had been stitched onto her skin, accentuating a quiet elegance that matched the cool detachment in her expression.
Her long silver hair shimmered beneath the filtered sunlight that spilled in through the massive glass body of the building. Her movements were precise—fluid, almost mechanical.
She paid no mind to the subtle rustles in the shadows. To the eyes trained on her every breath. Surveillance had become as natural to her as the air she breathed. She neither welcomed it nor resented it.
She simply endured.
Her fingers trailed along the barks of the surrounding crystal trees with light feathery caresses, but her feet didn't falter as she passed by rows and rows of them with a single destination in mind.
After all the time she had spent in the library—exploring, discovering, memorizing—it was no surprise that she knew the layout like the back of her hand.
Nadia finally came to a stop in front of a specific tree. It was one that she had visited so many times the past three weeks that she could recognize the etched chrome markings across its roots from a mile away.
Chrome Construct Defense—the crystal tree contained all recorded public knowledge on chrome-integrated security.
And in this world, that meant a lot.
Since the day the rifts tore the sky open and poured Chrome into the world like divine wrath, humanity had changed. Adapted. Survived. Thrived.
The energy was no longer just a miracle—it was a necessity. Chrome powered everything: technology, construction, medicine, weaponry… and of course, protection.
Chrome security systems, in particular, were virtually unbreakable. Not because of complex passwords or codes, but because they were imprinted with the unique energy signatures—PCE—of the strongest Overlords.
In Argyros, all security apparatus still operated under one signature: Demien Argyros, the man with the highest recorded PCE in history.
There were two ways one could access such a system directly. The first was to be appointed as administrators of the system. Demien had once passed that mantle to his son. His son had passed it to Caelum.
Now, only Caelum could access the estate's most sensitive infrastructures, and without his permit, not a single soul could wound up in places where they weren't meant to be.
The second way—only existing in theories—was to possess PCE far stronger than the current signature and bypass the structure altogether.
And that's where Nadia's strategy came into play.
She had spent the last three weeks internalizing every detail—absorbing every nuance to better learn such a complex security network.
Progress was slower as she had to divide her attention between other knowledge trees to avoid suspicions, but she didn't really mind.
She gradually understood why she had been able to bypass the security protocols on the raw cores powering the library on the first day. Her PCE surpassed the original signature embedded in the system by over 100,000 En.
Still, there was a price.
Each intrusion triggered a retaliatory defense: mental attacks launched by the security system itself to deter intruders. When she'd broken through the library's wards, the attacks had been drowned out by the sheer chaos of the raw cores.
The vault would be different.
Its security was layered. Dense. Focused.
This was why she had asked to visit the vault in the first place. Not for sightseeing. Not out of curiosity.
But so the system bound to her could scan it—locate traps, map defenses, and identify every layer of the chrome security.
And it had.
Fortunately, all the security layers the system detected were publicly documented. Their blueprints were right there, within this tree of knowledge.
Nadia had strategically memorized every known construct the chrome energy was capable of producing in defense. From energy-based seals to neuro-targeted mirages, she understood them now—if not in theory, then in instinct.
She placed a hand on the bark of the same tree with the intention of absorbing more knowledge. All she got this time were more theories on how far the security network could be advanced with the energy signature of an Overlord even more powerful than Demien.
While such theories were discussed extensively, they were also dismissed swiftly by critics, as people found it nonsensical for anyone to surpass the strongest Overlord in history.
Such was the nature of human beings. Critical and narrow-minded. Most found it hard to accept, or even imagine irregularities beyond the borders of what they had already deemed as 'normal'.
Nadia found it quite silly, but she also appreciated the existence of such simpletons in the world.
Had they taken those theories seriously and imposed stricter access to the knowledge of the ins and outs of the security structure, things would have been a bit troublesome for her.
A soft chime echoed in her mind. As always, a system prompt slid into her vision, summarizing her latest absorption.
Nadia barely glanced at it.
Instead, she pulled away from the crystal tree and made her way across the knowledge grove—toward one of the resting benches nestled along the pyramid's glass edge.
These benches looked like they were sculpted from nothing more than solidified air—transparent, faintly luminescent, with a surface that gave ever so slightly beneath her weight. The material was firm, but soft, like sitting on cool jelly.
She had discovered them during her second visit to the library. Set out at even three-meter intervals along the inner base of the glass walls, the benches offered silent reprieve for those enduring the mandatory one-hour cooldown between learning sessions.
Since then, it had become a habit—resting here to let her mind recover from the faint strain of knowledge absorption.
The seat beneath her molded comfortably to her frame as she leaned back, gaze lifting.
Beyond the inner grove of crystal trees, light filtered down from the multi-faceted ceiling in cascading beams.
The chrome energy inside the walls refracted the sunlight into prism-sharp rays that painted the grove in spectral colors.
Reds bled into gold. Blues flickered like running rivers over bark and stone. The greens brought a sense of vitality to the contrived thicket.
It was beautiful.
Almost deceptively so.
Being at the edge of the library, the space was open. Exposed. No trees to cast shadows. No hollows for others to hide in. The eyes that constantly trailed her steps could not follow so closely here—not without being seen.
Nadia basked in the illusion of solitude. She closed her eyes for a second. Just one. Let herself breathe.
Then she opened them and spoke softly into the empty space.
"Was that the last of it?"
"Yes. All known defensive constructs applied to the chrome vault have been archived. No additional security measures were detected beyond public records."
A pause.
"Do you really feel up to the task?"
Nadia's lips curved up in a small smile. She didn't respond, instead going over her accumulated knowledge several times in her mind to ensure she hadn't missed anything. Then she finally spoke—
"The preparations are done. Let's move tonight."