My body felt like a bag of broken glass as the elevator hummed its descent into the bowels of Cadmus. They said it was the 52nd floor, but I stopped counting floors a long time ago. Here, down where the walls pulsed like veins and the air smelled like something dead pretending to be clean, numbers didn't matter. The deeper you went, the more you lost yourself.
I'd heard whispers about what lived down here—genomorphs. Cadmus' monsters. The failed, the spliced, the ones they said were artificial.
Artificial my ass.
I knew better. I'd seen enough in two years to know the truth: the genomorphs weren't made. They were forged. In vats. On tables. In agony. They were people once. Subjects like me. The ones who didn't die fast enough got recycled—scrubbed, sewn, and repurposed until nothing of them remained but the scream.
Now I was joining them.
The elevator opened with a hiss, and I nearly vomited.
The walls weren't metal anymore. They were flesh. Not figuratively—literally. Organic tissue wrapped around pipes and panels, twitching like muscle under a layer of skin. Cables pulsed like arteries, glowing with a dim, bioluminescent sickness. The air was wet. Sticky. It smelled like rot wearing perfume.
The floor squelched.
I tried to lift my head as the guards dragged me forward, but the sedatives hit like lead in my veins. My mind fought the fog. My memory burned every detail into the prison of my brain.
Every sound. Every footstep on wet tissue. Every blink of unnatural light.
When we reached the chamber, I expected a table. I was wrong.
This room was a cathedral to suffering.
Massive tubes lined the walls, pumping a viscous purple fluid through glass arteries that pulsed with each beat of the machinery. In the center of the room stood a tank—cylindrical, eight feet tall—filled with swirling, iridescent liquid. It moved like it was thinking. Like it wanted out.
My stomach turned.
"Strap him down," Hamilton said.
Same voice. Calm as ever. It didn't matter where we were—he was always the surgeon, never the patient.
The guards dragged me forward, locking my wrists and ankles into place. Cold restraints. Too tight. I didn't bother struggling. Not yet.
Hamilton loomed into view, hands folded behind his back, glasses perfectly perched.
"You've come further than anyone else, Lucas," he said like he was offering a blessing. "Two years, and now... this. The only one who survived. You should be proud. You're not just an anomaly. You're more than that. proof."
I tried to spit at him. My mouth was too dry.
"Go... to hell," I croaked.
He smiled like I'd just told a joke. Then he turned to the tank.
"Do you know what this is? Of course you don't. But you will."
He gestured toward the liquid. "It's not from this world. We call it the Artifact. Found near Themiscyra—Wonder Woman's cradle—but older. Far older. Prehistoric. Pre-everything."
One of the scientists—Desmond, I think—spoke from behind a console. "It's a biomechanical lifeform. Crystalline. Adaptive. Sentient, maybe. But incomplete. It needs a host."
"Until now," Hamilton said. "You were always meant to be that host."
I wanted to scream, but my voice was dust.
"The prototype—the liquid crystal—was just prep work," Hamilton went on. "A primer. Your body absorbed it. Adapted. You're already something more. But this?"
He leaned in, voice low. Like it was sacred.
"This is the resurrection."
Lin's voice cracked across the room. "Subject is stable. Neural activity spiking."
"Expected," Desmond replied. "The Artifact triggers total synaptic activation. It's rewriting him as we speak."
"We're building an exoskeleton from the inside out," Hamilton said, turning toward me like I was already gone. "The Artifact responds to thought. Emotion. Rage. He'll be able to shape crystal at will."
Lin hesitated. "What if he rejects it?"
"He won't," Hamilton said. "He doesn't know how. His rage won't let him die."
Desmond snorted. "Resilience or hate?"
"Both," Hamilton said. "That's what makes him perfect."
My chest rose and fell, fury swirling through the sedatives. I couldn't move, but I felt every word like a nail driven into bone.
"You're preparing him for Project Kr," Lin said.
Hamilton nodded. "Superman is a god. But even gods fall. And when he does, it will be by his hand."
He looked at me again, softer now. Like a father watching a son walk into fire.
"You're not Lucas anymore," he said. "You are Titan. And it's time you brought fire to the gods."
The restraints clicked.
I slid into the tank.
The liquid closed around me like a coffin of mercury—cold, viscous, unnaturally heavy. It pressed into my skin, slithered down my throat, filled my lungs. My instincts screamed to panic, to thrash, to breathe. But I didn't drown.
It absorbed me.
And then—
The world shattered.
Not around me. Inside me.
A sound like shattering glass roared through my skull, and then silence—impossibly loud. My nerves screamed. My chest burned. My blood turned to fire laced with ice. It wasn't pain.
It was unmaking.
The tank vanished. The world dissolved. I floated in something that wasn't space, wasn't void. It pulsed with memory and malice—a suffocating dark, alive with sentience. And then the visions began.
A thousand voices erupted—languages I'd never heard, but somehow understood. They screamed in unison. Not speech. Judgment. Accusation. Condemnation.
And then—flashes. Rapid, brutal.
My mother's scream, mangled into digital feedback. My father's face disintegrating into Hamilton's, mouth gaping, eyes hollow. My own body, burning from the inside. Cities reduced to glass. A thousand corpses, all wearing my face.
Then the world changed again.
I stood in a world of crystal—silent, perfect, monstrous. No air. No warmth. Just towering spires of golden light and jagged symmetry. A place where even the concept of mercy had been bled out.
And then I saw him.
Me—but not me.
Taller. Heavier. Armor of burning gold and crystal that shimmered like a star about to implode. Eyes like twin suns, hollow and endless. A sneer that was almost... sympathetic.
"This is the end," he said. "This is what you survive to become."
He stepped forward, dragging a golden chain through the crystal ground, and I collapsed. My knees buckled as if gravity remembered me again. My bones screamed. My chest ignited. My blood turned to molten weight.
It is not fusion, the voice said. Not his. Not mine. Something older. It is trial.
Then my body betrayed me.
Fire surged through my spine, blooming outward like a nuclear sunburst. My ribcage flexed and cracked. My muscles convulsed as golden veins burst through my flesh. I felt heat radiate from within—thermal energy building to an unbearable peak. My skin rippled, golden light bleeding out through my pores.
A roar exploded from my throat—raw, guttural, not human. I was burning alive and freezing to death all at once.
But I didn't die.
Kinetic energy surged through my arms. My fists clenched with seismic force. Sparks danced along my knuckles. I flexed—and golden spikes of hardened energy exploded from my wrists like claws.
Screaming. My scream. And not mine.
Weapon.
No... Titan.
Golden spears jutted from my forearms. My back arched as kinetic plates layered across my spine like living armor. Heat curled around my heart—living, responsive. Ready.
I saw flashes—using this power. Punches that shattered walls. Chains that wrapped around tanks. Armor that glowed like a dying star. Every impact released a golden shockwave, ripping through the air like a god's heartbeat.
The voice returned.
Flame-bearer. The force born of will. The furnace of memory.
My mind snapped back. The pain hadn't stopped—it had deepened, refined into something sacred. The Artifact didn't overwrite me.
It became me.
I wasn't in a tank.
I was in a crucible.
The metal around me groaned. The glass warped, pressure building like the air itself had decided to scream. I felt every molecule of the Artifact syncing to my breath, syncing to my pulse. My skin buzzed with kinetic tension, like the moment before a lightning strike.
"Contain him!" Desmond's voice cracked through the speaker, brittle with panic.
The tank trembled.
Hamilton didn't move. He didn't blink. He stood rooted, eyes fixed on me like a zealot witnessing a miracle.
"Fascinating," he whispered, almost reverently.
My eyes opened.
A sharp golden glow bled from my irises.
The tank shattered—not exploded, not ruptured—rejected its own purpose. Glass, metal, fluid—everything turned outward in a violent bloom of pressure and light. It threw me forward like a cannonball, a pulse of kinetic energy rippling across the lab like a shockwave.
I hit the floor, rolled through slick shards and pooling fluid, came up kneeling. My body crackled. Vibrated.
I stood.
Crystal jutted from my forearms like jagged, molten stone—dark gold pulsing with each beat of my heart. Heat shimmered from my skin, a visible distortion in the sterile air. My fists curled. The constructs flexed with me.
My breath came out in clouds. Steam.
I looked down at myself.
No blood. No breaks. No more chains.
I wasn't broken anymore.
I was something else.
We are not done, the voice murmured again—inside, but not mine. Deeper. Ancient.
You are awake.
And I could feel it—more than rage, more than memory. A raw, new truth roaring in my bones.
They didn't made a weapon.
They forged a reckoning.
And I was ready to reach for it.
Author's Note:
If you're enjoying the story and want to read ahead or support my work, you can check out my P@treon at [email protected]/LordCampione. But don't worry—all chapters will eventually be public. Just being here and reading means the world to me. Thank you for your time and support.