The air inside the Training Room was thick—not with smoke, not yet—but with tension. The kind that buzzed behind your teeth, static before a storm. No one could tell what was happening—not the test subjects, not the guards, not even the researchers who had seen strange awakenings before like Q-001 and Z-007. But Scoff Karios knew.
And he laughed.
Behind reinforced glass, as the chamber trembled from the sudden spike in power signatures, he leaned forward with a grin stretching too wide, too sharp.
"Truly rare," he said, his voice like oil on ice. "Two awakenings… at once. Who scheduled this spar? Give them a reward. They've done well."
Beside him, Halgen stood silent. His eyes weren't on the screens, but on the door behind him, quietly opening it. As the chaos surged, he stepped back and disappeared into a shadowed hall, his mind screaming one name from memory:
Q-001.
Inside the training room, the chaos had bloomed into violence.
Guards were shouting, trying to corral subjects into exit halls. Children were screaming, bolting in every direction. A few froze, too afraid to run, others pressed against the corners of the chamber, hoping not to be noticed.
Y-906 stood far from the sparring ring, her blue eyes like clear sea waves locked on the erupting firestorm at the room's center. She hadn't wanted to be part of this spar. She hadn't asked for combat. The trembling in her hands wasn't from power—it was fear. Raw, pure, familiar.
She took a step back, desperate to vanish.
"This is becoming slaughter," she whispered to no one.
At the center of it all, AB-774 remained still.
He was watching.
Q-889—once just a pale boy with sharp eyes and faster reflexes—was now dodging coordinated attacks from the Special Units. Nanite shells screamed through the air, electro-spectrum harpoons flared with blue heat. But he danced between them like a ghost, always just out of reach, his regenerated body rippling with new, unnatural motion.
Then came the fire.
S-410 had changed.
No longer weeping, no longer human, she had become something elemental. Her body—a blaze given shape—moved with grief-wracked fury. Red-black flames poured from her form, her eyes twin voids of rage. Her feet never touched the ground, her motion carried by jets of searing mana.
The Special Units hesitated. They were trained for many things—but this was not one of them.
Q-889 looked at her.
"So… the same happened to you? That feeling. That surge of power." He tilted his head. "But you lost something. No control. You look like a—"
The words died.
S-410 turned to him, and her face—what little was left of it—reflected nothing but hollow hatred. Behind her, her sister's broken body lay limp and headless in a puddle of blood.
She raised her hand.
And the fire came.
Q-889 was fast. Faster than before. His body flashed to the side, narrowly avoiding the brunt of the firestorm. But the edge caught his shoulder.
He screamed.
It took five full seconds to heal—a delay longer than ever before. The fire clung to his mana, ate it.
That was no ordinary flame.
And it was just beginning.
S-410's fire didn't stop; it kept pushing forward until it consumed something. It reached the end of the training room, burning through steel rails and walls alike. There, it found a boy—T-134—newly arrived, just eight years old, with glassy eyes and pale blond hair. He never moved. He never had a chance.
In less than a second, he was ash.
Even the concrete beneath him evaporated.
The test subjects watching from the distance panicked. What had started as a spar had turned into slaughter. They rushed toward the chamber doors in a stampede, shoving, shrieking, clawing their way to escape.
Q-889 moved again—this time not to dodge, but to kill.
He surged toward S-410, weaving through fire and debris, ignoring the Special Units. His intent was to kill this new, unknown danger. He aimed for her head, his palm glowing with kinetic force, the floor fracturing beneath every step.
He struck.
But what he hit wasn't flesh.
His hand passed through the flames—no flesh, no resistance. It was like striking a ghost made of fire, not a body, but heat and fury given form.
Her head flickered out—then reformed—above his reach.
He hesitated, confusion clouding his thoughts as he tried to pull back—desperate to understand what was happening. But before he could retreat, S-410's blazing hand drove into his gut.
Flames burst through his abdomen. He howled, staggering back, clutching his gut as his organs blistered, melted, and reformed in a relentless cycle of searing agony. He stumbled, one leg already failing, when—
Boom!
A nanite shell struck his left thigh. It vaporized instantly. His healing couldn't keep up—the nanites devoured his cells as fast as they regenerated. The limb was gone.
Another hit. His left arm tore apart—shredded, then dissolved into nothing.
He had no arms now—both stumps struggling to regenerate, but failing. The nanites devoured every new cell like venom, turning each attempt at healing into an endless loop of pain and torment.
The nanites clung to him like wasps, chewing through everything he regrew.
He was struggling, screaming—his voice cracking under the weight of agony. Tears streamed down his face as he began to beg. 'I give up! Please, stop! I'll cooperate—I won't do it again, I swear!' His cries were raw, broken, childlike. The once-proud O-889 was reduced to a weeping shell, sobbing like a helpless infant, consumed by unbearable torment.
Scoff watched the scene unfold, laughing with a devil's glee. "Good," he sneered. "The rebellious brat finally realizes who holds the upper hand." He turned to the Special Unit. "Deploy electro-thaumic harpoons. Pin him down. Make sure he can't move—now."
Seeing O-889 struggle, S-410 concentrated more power into her feet and floated upward, leaving a trail of fire behind her. She was like an angel of death forged from flames, her arms drawn inward around a sphere of burning, shrieking mana—a condensed sun, wrath and sorrow made manifest.
She looked down.
At Q-889.
He was crawling, moving toward the Special Unit, fleeing from S-410. Broken. Left leg gone. Both arms completely gone. His gut burned, slowly healing and being devoured in a relentless loop of pain. His lungs seared into silence. His body melted, screaming.
Scoff, seeing her, lost his laugh and barked orders.
"Put her down!" he shouted. "NOW!"
The Special Unit opened fire, but their rounds passed through her as if she were hollow—as if she was just a floating fire.
Nanite shells moved through her like a ghost, racing upward toward the roofs. But they didn't eat through the steel like venom as they did with O-889's body. These nanites were designed only to attack flesh—devouring living cells until nothing remained. They ate nothing more. A terrifying weapon, made solely to destroy genetic power users.
And she let go.
The fireball dropped.
It hit him—no, it consumed him. The training room floor melted. Walls liquefied. Steel groaned and gave way. O-889 became a moving skeleton, flesh regrowing and burning in a torturous loop. Both the nanite shells and S-410's fire tore through him without pause. He couldn't scream—but his body did. The agony was endless, until finally, his healing failed. And he perished. Completely.
And then he was no more.
Ash. All of him.
Not even bones remained.
But watching O-889 die in agonizing torment—burning slowly like he was trapped in hell—wasn't enough for S-410. Despite his horrific death, she felt hollow, unsatisfied. Her soul remained trapped, craving a punishment even worse than his own.
The silence that followed was absolute.
Even Scoff felt it.
A ripple of fear ran through the Special Unit. If she could do this to O-889… what could she do to them?
S-410 descended to the floor again.
She stood over what remained of her sister's body.
Grief returned—not as flame, but as weight.
She knelt.
Her fire touched the corpse. Softly, this time. Gently. Not to destroy—but to free.
And her sister became ash.
Not to be dissected. Not to be dumped in the valley of failures. Not reduced to data.
Ash that rose on her fire.
She stood again.
Her head lifted.
She looked up. No skies. No freedom. Only artificial light.
She whispered, her voice now warped and monstrous through her new form, "Sis… I'll keep our promise."
With one scream of rage and sorrow, S-410 launched herself skyward. Her flames sliced through the ceiling like acid. Reinforced concrete and steel gave way like wax. Scoff cursed.
"Stop her! Don't let her reach the roof!"
Too late.
She was above the labs, melting each layer as she rose—roof after roof, carving a blazing circle through the roof with unending fire.
Until finally—
Sky.
She burst into the open world like a newborn child seeing light for the first time.
Cold air wrapped around her, but it couldn't penetrate the storm raging in her chest. The wastelands stretched beyond—snow, stone, and silence. But farther still, she saw it:
The Great Border.
A jagged wall of energy, rippling like the skin of a dreaming god.It felt endless—a line stretched around the world, cutting it in half.
It gave her goosebumps—a strange, twisting feeling inside, like awe and fear tangled together.
She turned back and looked down at Karnell for the last time—its black roof melting, its walls scarred by fire and death.
Her sister was gone. O-889 was gone. Her peace was gone.
She was… becoming something else.
Alarms blared throughout Karnell. Drones rose in pursuit. Airships took flight. But they were slow—too slow for her speed, which exceeded 1,000 km per hour.
With a final burst of flame, she vanished.
The skies swallowed her. The fire trailed away. Karnell was left behind, smoldering beneath a sky that felt endless—so unlike Karnell's facility locked chambers.
From deep down on the high roof, near the hole that had melted through more than six floors above, AB-774 watched the skies through the opening.
He remembered a line from that same book, the words barely audible beneath the hum of alarms:
"Every time you take a life in hatred, a part of your own soul goes with it. The real enemy may die… but so does your peace."
You may break free from chains and walls, but if your soul remains trapped, no freedom is ever truly yours.
And far out across the snowfields of Karnell, a line of flame vanished into the unknown.
S-410 was gone.
But her fire had only just begun.