The snow began before nightfall, soft at first fine crystals dancing weightless in the twilight air but by the time Akito reached the outskirts of the mountains, it had thickened into a relentless cascade. The sky was a pale, featureless gray, the color of ash, pressing down with the weight of silence. Trees stood like sentinels along the path, their skeletal limbs coated in ice, their shadows long and distorted beneath the moonlight that struggled through the clouds.
He moved through the woods without sound, his coat drawn tight around him, every step deliberate. Tracks vanished seconds after he made them. Wind howled between the trees, a shrill and shapeless cry, too organic to be just the wind. But he didn't slow. He had found what he was looking for.
The shrine stood alone atop a crumbling ridge, a forgotten structure whose stones had been left to erode with time. Snow clung to its eaves, softening the cracked wood and shattered lanterns, but even in its decay, there was a kind of reverence to it. As though the land itself still remembered what had been buried beneath it.
The entrance was hidden in plain sight an ancient wooden altar that slid back with the press of a concealed switch. Beneath it, a narrow stone staircase spiraled downward into a dark no natural light had touched in decades. The air that rose to meet him was stale, metallic, tinged with a faint, acrid rot that didn't belong to the natural world.
Akito descended without hesitation.
Each step took him deeper into the bones of something long dead. The walls changed from stone to steel, the air thickening with static and memory. Faint lights flickered above old emergency fixtures powered by failing generators. The corridor bent and twisted like a serpent, leading him past locked doors, shattered glass, and discarded equipment. Bloodstains had turned to rust, fingerprints fossilized in dust.
The place hadn't been abandoned so much as it had been erased.
But not everything had decayed. Not everything had been forgotten.
He found the central chamber behind a vault door, long since forced open. The room was cavernous, lit by flickering strips embedded in the ceiling. Rows of cryogenic pods lined the walls, recessed into curved alcoves like tombs in a mausoleum. Some were shattered, the glass fractured outward from within. Others were dark, lifeless, power drained, or worse. But several still hummed with cold energy, monitors faintly glowing, condensation running like tears down their sealed surfaces.
Akito stepped inside, snow melting off his shoulders, pooling quietly beneath his boots. He moved between the pods like a ghost walking through his own graveyard. Faces blurred behind fogged glass. Some peaceful. Some twisted in frozen expressions of pain. All of them unfamiliar. And yet...
They felt like mirrors. As if something in each one reflected back a version of himself.
Then he saw it.
Near the far wall, isolated from the rest, stood a pod with a name etched into the plate beneath the display screen. The letters were clean, precise, and final:
AKITO KANZAKI.
He didn't react, not at first. Just stood there, eyes locked on the frost-covered surface. The hum of machinery filled the silence. The snowstorm raged above, distant and muffled by layers of earth and stone.
He stepped closer, his hand rising without conscious thought. His fingers brushed the cold glass, and for a moment, his reflection merged with the figure inside. His face drawn, hollow-eyed, a man shaped by violence and time overlaying that of the one sleeping in cryostasis.
The other Akito looked… untouched. Young. Asleep in a dream that had refused to end. The skin was unmarred. The chest rose and fell with slow, regulated precision. Wires and tubes snaked into the arms and chest like roots into soil.
Something twisted inside him. Not recognition. Not exactly. But a fracture of memory, a splintered sensation that tugged at the edges of consciousness. He didn't know this version of himself, but he understood it. Understood what it represented.
The screen above the pod flickered. Static gave way to a grainy recording. A woman's voice, clinical, emotionless, played from hidden speakers:
"Subject Zero remains unstable. Memory retention inconsistent. Reconditioning unsuccessful. Containment protocol initiated. Authorization code: Black Veil."
Akito's jaw tightened. He lowered his hand.
The voice continued, but the words blurred into white noise. He heard none of it. He was seeing instead, images that came in flashes. A surgical table. Lights too bright. Screaming without sound. Cold beyond comprehension. A hand reaching for him through water. Or was it glass?
Then nothing. Emptiness swallowing memory whole.
He turned away.
His footsteps echoed louder now, the weight of what he'd seen pressing against his spine. He walked back through the chamber, through the corridors that pulsed with quiet life, and into the heart of the facility. Past old terminals, rusted tools, and containment cells sealed with warning signs. Every step was an act of refusal, refusing to look back, to think, to feel.
In a room marked "Command", he found the controls.
It took only minutes. The generators were failing, but the failsafes still worked. He disabled them. The containment systems. The coolant regulation. The fire suppression. All of it. Then he accessed the purge sequence, manual override only. Red lights flared to life as alarms shrieked in protest.
Flames erupted first in the lower chambers. Slow, then fast. Fire kissed the edges of the facility, licking through cables and vents, devouring forgotten data and dead wires. The shrines above shook, timbers groaning as smoke seeped up through ancient cracks.
Akito stood in the center of it all, watching as the past began to burn.
He didn't flinch.
The pod bearing his name was the last he passed on the way out. The frost on its glass had begun to melt, revealing the pale skin beneath. The eyes inside never opened. They never would.
He left it behind.
Back above ground, the wind howled louder than before. Snow whipped across the clearing, swirling in frenzied arcs as flames erupted behind the stone altar. Smoke bled into the sky, black against white, staining the storm.
Akito paused at the edge of the shrine, silhouetted by fire. His face was unreadable. A statue carved from ash and resolve. The world behind him burned with the fury of things no longer denied.
He clenched his fists.
The cold bit into his skin, wind carving its way beneath his collar, but he didn't move to shield himself. He let it slice through him. Let it remind him that he was alive. That he was still this Akito... scarred, weathered, unfinished. Not the one in the glass.
Not the one they tried to keep.
Somewhere deep below, the pod systems failed. Metal buckled. Glass shattered. The fire reached the heart of the place, consuming all that had been buried and all that had been made to sleep.
Akito walked away without looking back.
Behind him, the snowstorm swallowed the flames, smoke rising like the last breath of a buried god. The shrine collapsed in on itself with a sound like memory breaking. The mountain exhaled ash.
And Akito disappeared into the storm.
The cold would erase his footprints before anyone could follow.