"Shit."
Subject 19 dropped, spine folding in a brutal, snapping hinge that sent his torso knifing toward the floor as a tentacle screamed through the space his head had filled a heartbeat before. Air split around the limb with a wet, chopping sound. Grit bit into his palms as he hit the stone and rolled his weight to the left, boot scraping and skidding, leather squealing against the ground while another tendril scythed past his ear, close enough that the air it displaced rasped hot along the side of his face.
The third one didn't miss entirely.
A line of agony opened along his flank, a burning drag as if someone had pressed a red‑hot wire into his skin and drawn it slow. The wound seared instead of stinging, the sensation raw and wide, refusing to blur at the edges. Flesh tried to knit, tissues shuddering and dragging together with the familiar tug of his regeneration—but this time it stuttered, pulling closed with a reluctant, crawling slowness that felt wrong. Wrong for a body that had been healing like a glitch in reality ever since the transformation, each injury usually erased before his nerves finished reporting it.
"What the hell are you?"
The words came out flat, scraped dry of curiosity.
It wasn't really a question. He had never stood across from anything like this—not in all the fights, not in all the dungeons he had entered. Not just in terms of brute strength; he'd taken hits from things that could fold steel and walk away bored.
This was something else. 'This was presence...'
She filled the chamber without moving, her existence pressing against him from every direction. It was a pressure that lived in more than muscle and mass, something that pushed against skin and bone and thought all at once. Being near her felt like standing at the foot of a titan that the world had agreed to pretend didn't exist.
Nia still hadn't shifted from where she stood.
She didn't need to.
The tentacles moved for her.
They uncoiled from behind her like lengths of living cable—cords of deep, almost black green, slick with a glossy, almost liquid sheen that caught and smeared the chamber's bioluminescent light. They snapped through the air with the pent‑up violence of something that had been chained tight and was now, finally, allowed to stop pretending at restraint. Each motion came with a hiss of displaced air and a faint, unpleasant stickiness in the sound, like meat torn from bone.
They moved with their own logic, an alien choreography that didn't map to any combat form he knew. They reached, probed, tasted the space. The tips brushed stone and air like tongues, like fingers counting the edges of the world. What they reached for either survived by pure instinct and luck, or it simply ceased to be part of the ledger of existing things.
She had only looked at the others once.
Jones. Sylvie. Venia. Marcus. Henry. Ares.
Their bodies lay scattered across the stone in an ugly, careless constellation, as if some furious god had flung them and forgotten to pick them back up. Limbs pointed in directions joints were never meant to go, angles that made the eye want to skid away. Blood had poured out in frantic, uneven spreads, soaking into the cold floor in jagged pools that already crusted and darkened at the edges where the dungeon's chill touched them.
Some of their eyes were still open.
They stared without seeing, glassy and unfocused, the soft bioluminescent glow catching across the surface of each pupil and turning them into pale, dead mirrors. It made them look less like people and more like discarded props left behind after a scene wrapped—shapes posed roughly, the illusion of life stripped out.
It was the kind of scene no one sane would willingly look at twice.
They had died.
Just like that.
A before and an after, sliced apart by only a handful of breaths.
Nia let her gaze rest on them and waited for the weight that was supposed to follow. She waited for the heavy stone to drop into her chest, for the crack behind her ribs, for the internal shatter—that muffled, breaking sound inside that was meant to happen when movement stopped in people you knew.
She waited for the rush to hit: grief flooding the veins, horror clawing its way up her throat, something.
Nothing came.
What she felt instead was absence. Not numbness—numbness still carried the ghost of sensation—but a clean, sterile void where the reaction should have lived. A cold, hollowed‑out patch in the middle of her that registered as less than silence. It was as if whatever sound her emotions were supposed to make had been erased at the source, the tape cut and removed.
She recognized it; she always did.
The shape of it.
The temperature of it.
She had felt null like this once before—exactly once—and the memory of that moment slotted into place like a trauma lasting for a lifetime.
Wrong.
Wrong.
Fix it.
Her attention cut back to Subject 19 with knife‑edge focus.
By the fourth dodge, he had the beginnings of a pattern mapped in his head. The tentacles committed hard to their chosen vectors; once they fired, they locked in.
No feints, no late corrections. Just brutal, straight‑line speed. Fast enough that the world blurred around them, but fixed. That gave him a window—maybe a second, a shaved sliver of time between intention and impact...Barely a breath.
Then the pattern broke.
He stepped in instead of away, closing on one of the lunging appendages. The motion was tight, economical, born from a dozen other fights where miscalculating meant waking up in a new cage. He drove his blade‑arm down and across into the oncoming tentacle.
-CRACK.
The impact shuddered up his limb, a bone‑deep tremor that rattled his joints. The tentacle buckled under the strike, flesh folding and denting in a way that didn't match the annihilating force it had been exerting moments earlier. Under his blade, the texture felt dense, packed, but not built to absorb that kind of direct collision. There was resistance, yes, but the wrong kind—like hitting something designed to cut, not to block.
It was like bringing a hammer down on the razor edge of a sword and feeling the metal warp, the weapon's own strength turned against it.
The data clicked into place with the smoothness of a puzzle piece dropping into a waiting gap. Subject 19 felt the calculation settle, cold and exact.
"It seems your tentacles aren't as strong in defense," he said, drawing in one measured breath, then another, letting his stance reset, his boots squeaking into a firmer grip on the stone.
Nia's gaze slid to the damaged appendage. A faint tilt of her head. "Well," she said, voice almost thoughtful, almost bored. "They're only for offense. Fast. Defense was the flaw, I guess."
Confirmed.
"Your strength is the tentacles," he said, lowering his center of gravity, weight settling evenly between his feet. The blade‑arm hovered, poised. "Get inside them, and you're still the same person I put on the floor."
He moved.
This time he didn't hold back.
Speed bloomed through him like a detonation, the world telescoping as he accelerated. The distance between them turned into a lie, collapsing in the span of a blink. It was the same speed that had let him appear behind her before her brain could finish processing the first twitch of his step. The chamber smeared at the edges of his vision into streaks of stone and dim light as he closed the gap.
Unlike last time, she reacted.
Every tentacle snapped back in a single, synchronized whip of motion, collapsing inward toward her. They folded in tight, arcing curves that curved and overlapped, converging around her body like a forest of spears curling home in reverse. The air around her thickened with motion and threat.
"Trying to wrap yourself?" he said, voice dropping low as the space between them vanished. "Thought that was the flaw."
He drove the blade‑arm forward and plunged it toward the converging mass.
-CLANG.
His face showed confusion.
The sound that rang out wasn't the wet, yielding noise of flesh, nor the brittle crack of bone giving way. It was sharp and metallic, a hard, ringing note that did not belong in anything living. The shock of his own strike ricocheted back through the limb, a vicious rebound that ran up through his elbow into his shoulder and detonated along his spine in a numbing vibration.
He staggered back in heavy steps, boots gouging small furrows into the stone as he fought for balance.
Dust shook free from the impact point and drifted down in lazy, swirling strands, each motelike fleck catching the pale light.
The tentacles were no longer eight separate limbs.
They had fused, compressed into a single, massive structure—a layered, interlocking column of the same dark flesh that rose in front of her like a shield hewn from organic steel. It was a barrier built entirely from the same material he had just proven weak under direct pressure, now reorganized into something that ate his attack and answered with a ringing laugh of metal.
"How," he said, eyes narrowing to slits. "It was weak in—"
"I lied," Nia said.
The shield shivered, then unravelled like a time‑reversed explosion. The mass peeled apart in smooth, practiced segments, resolving once more into eight independent tendrils that fanned behind her, drifting through the air like the ghosted afterimage of the shield they had been.
Then she wasn't there.
The space she'd occupied a second earlier just emptied, the air collapsing inward on the vacancy. A heartbeat later, a heavy impact boomed from the far side of the chamber, a crater blossoming in the stone.
Subject 19 spun in place, rotation tight and efficient, eyes knifing across every slice of the chamber.
Nothing.
"I'm right here."
The whisper brushed his ears from below.
He looked down.
Nia crouched directly beneath his chest, nested in the blind spot his own frame created. From above, she might as well have been erased. From here, she was all intent. Her fist was already drawn back, knuckles angled with surgeon‑precise alignment, shoulders and hips stacked, her weight sunk low and locked into the floor. The strike line through her arm and torso was fully committed, the blow already written.
One tap.
-CRACK.
The world snapped sideways.
He left the ground as if plucked up by an invisible hand and flung. For a disorienting instant there was no up or down, only spinning stone and streaks of light. Then his back met the chamber floor in a long, grinding skid that scraped sparks from the stone beneath him. He slid, bounced, then slammed into the far wall hard enough that the sound reverberated like a bell struck deep underground.
The impact wasn't like the ones Jones had driven into him, all raw force and bone‑on‑bone. It wasn't like Ares's sharp, jarring elbows that snapped the world into jagged flashes.
This hit different.
It felt deeper.
He felt the force of it pulse out from his body into the stone behind him, a wave shuddering through the chamber itself. The room seemed to flex around the strike, as if the dimensions of the space had bent for a moment and then failed to snap fully back into place. Even the silence that followed carried weight, thick and waiting, as if the dungeon had drawn in a breath and was refusing, deliberately, to exhale.
What is happening?
A few minutes ago, he'd stood over seven bodies, the undisputed apex of the room, the only thing in it still moving with purpose.
Now the chamber felt both larger and smaller at once. The walls seemed too close and too far, crowding in and stretching away in the same heartbeat. The thing watching him from the center of the room no longer fit inside any category he had for problems. His healing factor—the constant, comforting background hum of tissue knitting and nerves rethreading—had dulled to a sluggish crawl, like something wading through molasses.
Get out.
The thought arrived clean this time, stripped of adrenaline, pride, all the stupid noise that clothed instinct. Get out. Go below. Don't come back.
He planted a palm against the floor and pushed himself up, orienting toward the yawning dark of the third‑floor tunnel entrance, every fragment of intention aligning toward motion, toward retreat, toward survival.
"You shall not leave."
The voice did not come from the chamber. It unfolded inside him, rising through his ribs like smoke, vibrating in his marrow. It threaded through his bones with intimate familiarity, wearing a tone Subject 19 knew all too well.
His legs stopped.
Muscles froze mid‑command.
He had not told them to.
"You shall fight. You shall ease my hunger, my rage, my amusement."
"Do you not understand," Subject 19 said, keeping his gaze locked on Nia because the idea of looking away from her felt like suicide, "the situation I'm currently in?"
His body ignored the logic. Muscles unwound and rewound into a stance pointed back at Nia, every fiber primed toward confrontation despite the clear, screaming calculation in his mind demanding retreat.
"I'm talking to you," he said, the words gritted between his teeth.
"I don't care."
The reply carried an undercurrent like distant, echoing laughter—old, amused, absolutely unconcerned. "Fight."
Nia moved.
Blitz wasn't the right word, but it was the only one he had. Reality seemed to smear around her acceleration. The air itself warped, bending in the wake of her motion. A tentacle hammered down at the spot his body had occupied a heartbeat earlier, smashing the stone and blooming a crater with pulverized, powder‑fine edges. He cleared it by inches, his body lunging ahead of conscious thought, ricocheting off the broken ground to the far side of the chamber.
He didn't stop.
One exchange. Two.
He wove between the strikes, body tracing narrow paths through lethal geometry, but the dance was changing. The tentacles weren't repeating their earlier, simple trajectories. Each near‑miss fed some invisible calculus. With every dodge, their paths grew subtler, tiny mid‑flight curves bending toward where he was about to be rather than where he was.
They were learning him.
Her.
'She's learning faster than I'm moving,' he thought, boots skidding as he hit a patch of clearer stone and forced himself to a halt.
He lifted his head.
Not toward Nia, but toward the ceiling, toward the segment of the chamber wall where the clean lines of the architecture broke, just slightly, like a poorly patched scar.
"Hey," Subject 19 shouted, his voice cracking across the room.
Nia froze, mid‑step.
"I know you can hear me," Subject 19 said, not lowering his gaze. "I know you can see me."
The chamber's flat bioluminescent wash painted everything in the same sickly pallor. Every body, every drying smear of blood, every shard of shattered stone was sharp and exposed, no shadows deep enough to hide in.
Nothing moved.
"This," he said, "would be a good time to save your potential experiment here."
Seconds stretched thin, each one pulled to the point of snapping. Nia held her position, chest rising and falling in measured breaths. She was still processing the absurdity of it.
'Does he really think they would help him?'
The thought formed with a bitter edge—and then, without warning, an answer arrived.
She felt it before she saw it: a presence blooming at the edge of her awareness. It slid into the chamber like a weight added to a scale, familiar in its shape and temperature. This presence… it was something—someone—she knew all too well.
A man stepped into the chamber.
Not through the doorway but through the wall. Stone that should have been solid simply softened around him, his outline pushing through as if reality itself had decided, briefly, to look away. He emerged with unhurried, almost lazy grace, boots whispering against the floor. His face wore a bored, faintly irritated expression, but his eyes held a thin, unwavering layer of focus.
His hair was a stark, striking blend of white and black that looked less like age and more like some deliberate, impossible pattern. It matched the contrast of his clothes: a long black coat that hung open over simple, regular layers beneath. Strapped to his back, the hilt of a sword rose over his shoulder, the weapon thrumming with a contained presence that cut through the manaforce clashing in the chamber. Its aura felt sharper than the chaos, a clean, cold edge in a room full of storms.
Subject 19 and Nia both watched as Kendrick walked, his footsteps steady and unhurried, until he came to a stop between them.
Subject 19's expression twisted into something complicated—a fraught mixture of relief, apprehension, and something deeper he didn't bother to name. The manaforce radiating from Kendrick rolled over him in slow, heavy waves.
It was strong.
Being a Superior wasn't just a rank or a painted badge but authority backed with the kind of power that bent rooms.
The manaforce that leaked from Kendrick rivaled Nia's—maybe even pressed past it. It had layering, depth, old weight. Sweat beaded at Subject 19's temples and slid down his face, cooling too quickly in the dungeon air. A ragged grin dragged itself across his mouth despite everything.
Kendrick, however, remained a still point between them. The distance separating each figure was considerable, but everyone in the room knew that either one of them could erase it in seconds.
With a bored look and an unlit cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, Kendrick finally turned his attention fully on Nia. He didn't spare Subject 19 so much as a glance.
"Subject 00," he said, voice flat, vowels clipped. "Stand down."
Nia listened, face smooth, every muscle in her jaw held in careful check. Her golden irises locked onto Kendrick, unblinking.
"I will heed to that," she said slowly, each word deliberate, "until I kill that…" Her gaze jerked, a razor flick, straight toward Subject 19. The direction of her intent was unmistakable. He felt it land on him like a mark.
"Yes…" Kendrick exhaled, a humorless hint of a laugh under the word. "I knew you would say."
He vanished.
One instant he stood between them. The next, the space he occupied was empty, the air falling in to claim it. Subject 19 didn't even have time to process the start of the movement before pain and loss exploded through his body.
His mutated arm hit the ground a fraction of a second after his brain registered that it was no longer attached.
Kendrick reappeared in front of him, motion already in progress, one hand buried up to the wrist in Subject 19's mouth. Fingers hooked, and with brutal, practiced efficiency, Kendrick wrenched.
Agony tore up Subject 19's skull as his jaw was ripped open, bone and cartilage parting with an obscene, wet crunch. The world shattered into white noise. Before any scream could form, before any attempt at understanding could catch up, Kendrick's boot slammed into his waist.
The kick folded him in half around it and then flung him away.
He crashed into the wall with a sound that mixed stone, flesh, and something else breaking. For a heartbeat, his body tried to stand, staggered in place like a puppet on severed strings, then crumpled and went slack. Consciousness snuffed out, leaving the chamber without his ragged breaths.
Kendrick stood over the spot where he had been, still holding Subject 19's severed arm and the torn piece of his jaw. His expression hadn't changed.
He flicked his wrists and tossed both grisly trophies toward Nia.
They hit the stone at her feet with wet, heavy impacts, smearing fresh blood across the ground. She didn't look at them. Her gaze never left Kendrick's face.
"There," Kendrick said, voice almost conversational. "They have been avenged. Now stand down, and conceal that pressure you're going about."
Nia's jaw tightened, a tiny, visible tic that cracked her composure.
"They were killed," she said, each word edged with something that wasn't quite rage and wasn't quite grief. "They died. And you think this would be enough?" The pressure she exuded surged, snapping out in a wave. It swallowed the chamber, chewing at the air, making breath feel like something you had to force through a narrowing throat.
"I thought it would," Kendrick replied, almost idly. "But I guess I will go to Plan B."
He reached over his shoulder and drew the sword from his back.
Metal whispered against the sheath. The weapon cleared its housing in a slow, deliberate arc that nevertheless felt impossibly fast. As the blade came free, the air around it seemed to crisp, manaforce tightening until it hummed.
Both of them shifted into stances without needing to speak, bodies falling into the shapes that meant only one thing. Weight set. Lines of attack and defense mapped in an instant. The room contracted around them.
"I will say this again, Subject 00," Kendrick said. "Stand down."
Nia didn't answer.
She moved.
The gap between them vanished in less than a second, her speed more than doubled from what she'd used against Subject 19. The floor blurred under her feet, a dark streak of motion.
Unlike Subject 19, Kendrick met her.
His blade flashed up with impossible timing, intercepting her strike in a collision that cracked the air itself. Manaforce roared off the clash, slamming into the walls and racing along the stone in bright, jagged veins. The ground beneath crumbled as Kendrick blocked Nia's attack.
"I won't stand down," Nia said, her voice steady, focus burning bright and unwavering in her eyes.
And so the battle began.
Superior versus the dangerous experiment.