[KAISER -- POV]
The interior of Tartarus looked exactly like every nightmare about institutional cruelty made manifest—reinforced concrete walls etched with suppression runes that pulsed with sickly light, the air thick with ozone and fear, corridors stretching into darkness like the throat of some vast beast designed to swallow hope.
Rex the 3rd walked ahead of us with the casual confidence of a man touring his own personal kingdom, guards flanking him in perfect formation. Behind me, I could feel the weight of eyes—dozens of prisoners in cells watching the new arrival, calculating whether I represented opportunity or just fresh entertainment.
"Your reputation precedes you, Kaiser," Rex said without turning around, his voice echoing off the walls. "The trait-thief who toppled Baron. The ghost who turned an entire zone into a cautionary tale about ambition."
"I have my moments," I replied, keeping my tone casual despite the suppression cuffs making my traits feel like they were buried under molasses.
Rex stopped, turning to face me with an expression that mixed amusement with something colder. "And yet here you are. Captured. Brought to heel. Delivered to my facility like any other piece of merchandise."
From the shadows flanking Rex, movement resolved into form.
Rambo emerged first—and the intelligence reports hadn't done him justice. Seven feet of augmented muscle and weaponized violence, his frame bristling with enough hardware to level a city block. Bandoliers crossed his chest, each loop filled with ordnance that probably violated several international treaties from the old world. His face was weathered stone, eyes hidden behind tactical visors that glowed with targeting data.
But it was Irene who made my hindbrain scream warnings.
She moved like liquid death given human form—beautiful and terrible in equal measure, twin swords extending from her forearms in elegant curves that seemed to drink in the light rather than reflect it. Her eyes held the kind of bloodlust that had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with hunger, the absolute certainty that violence was coming and she was going to enjoy every second.
"The famous Kaiser," Rambo rumbled, his voice like gravel being crushed under tank treads. Rough, harsh, carrying the weight of a thousand battlefields. "Don't look so dangerous up close. Just another punk who got too cocky."
"Cocky enough to walk through your front door," I pointed out, unable to resist the opening even though prudence suggested silence. "Name one other person who's managed that particular feat recently."
The temperature in the hallway dropped several degrees.
"You didn't walk through anything," Rex corrected, voice sharp as a scalpel. "You were dragged here in chains after being captured like a common criminal. There's a difference."
"Is there though?" I shifted my weight, testing the cuffs again while maintaining eye contact with Rex. "Because from where I'm standing, I'm still the only fucker who managed to get in and out of this hell. Past tense matters less than track record."
Irene's laugh was sharp and brittle, like breaking glass given voice. She stepped closer, her blades extending another few inches—the metal writhing like it was alive, hungry, eager for contact.
"Oh," she purred, and the sound made my skin crawl in ways that had nothing to do with attraction. "I wish you'd try that again. I really do. It's been so long since I've had something interesting to cut, and you..."
The blade came up to rest against my throat, not quite touching but close enough that I could feel the wrongness radiating from it—that consuming hunger that Kane had warned about.
"...you look like you'd taste delicious."
Clara, I thought urgently. How close can she get before that blade becomes a problem?
Current distance is three centimeters from lethal contact, Clara's synthesized voice was clinical in my mind. Recommend not antagonizing further.
Where's the fun in that?
"Personal space," I said aloud, keeping my voice steady despite the proximity of instant death. "It's a real thing. You should look into it."
Rambo moved with speed that shouldn't have been possible for someone his size—one moment standing beside Rex, the next directly in my face, augmented hand gripping my jaw hard enough to make bones creak.
"Don't make me edit your face, boy," he growled, the threat delivered with absolute certainty. "I've got tools that can reshape you from pretty to abstract art, and trust me—nobody down here's gonna object to the remodeling."
His other hand gestured to one of the guards, rough and dismissive. "Get the girl to processing. Cell block seven, standard containment. Make sure she understands what happens to prisoners who cause problems."
No.
The word echoed through my mind with desperate urgency as two guards moved toward Tara, their intentions clear. This was the plan—we'd discussed it, prepared for it, knew that separation was inevitable if we wanted Rex to believe the capture was genuine.
But watching them grab her small arms, seeing her look back at me with eyes that tried so hard to be brave despite the fear underneath—
Stick to the plan, Clara's voice cut through my rising panic. She has her emergency beacon. I'm monitoring her vitals. The moment danger exceeds parameters, extraction protocols activate automatically.
Tara met my eyes as the guards pulled her away, and I saw her mouth move silently: I'm okay.
Then she was gone, dragged into the depths of Tartarus while every instinct I had screamed to break these cuffs and follow.
"Now then," Rex said, satisfaction coloring his voice as he watched my expression. "Let's discuss your former associate. Baron Varn. I understand you had quite the productive conversation before he was contained."
I forced my attention back to the immediate threat, filing away Tara's location for when the plan moved to its next phase.
"Varn was chatty," I said. "Turns out torture and impending death make people very forthcoming with information."
"Indeed." Rex began walking again, his warlords falling into formation around us. "And what information did our dear Baron share before his... retirement from active operations?"
The question carried weight—not casual curiosity but active intelligence gathering. Rex wanted to know what I knew, what threats I represented, what advantages I might have gained from Varn's cooperation.
Time to feed him exactly enough truth to be believable while keeping the important parts buried.
"He told me about the summit," I said. "The Manhattan Accord. Five kingpins meeting in two months to discuss the continued balance of power and territorial agreements."
Rex's stride didn't falter, but I caught the slight tension in his shoulders. "Varn had a loose tongue. That information is supposed to be contained among the upper echelons."
"Surprise—contained information has a way of leaking when you're rotting from the inside out and facing an eternity of suffering." I smiled, sharp and unfriendly. "He also mentioned some interesting theories about trait evolution, forbidden research, and the kinds of experiments that even kingpins won't acknowledge publicly."
"All very fascinating," Rex replied, his tone suggesting it was anything but. "Though ultimately irrelevant, given your current circumstances. Whatever plans you might have had are now thoroughly derailed."
We arrived at what appeared to be a central hub—multiple corridors branching off like spokes from a wheel, each one leading deeper into Tartarus's labyrinthine structure. At the center sat an actual throne, because apparently some kingpins had no sense of irony or restraint.
The throne was carved from what looked like human bones fused with metal—artistic and horrifying in equal measure, a statement piece that screamed "I'm definitely compensating for something but have enough power that nobody's brave enough to point it out."
Rex settled into it with practiced ease, guards arranging themselves in perfect formation around their master.
"Take him to interrogation block three," Rex commanded, waving one hand dismissively. "Standard processing—verify his trait profile, confirm his identity, ensure he's not carrying any surprises I should know about. And gentlemen—" His smile was serpent-cold. "—be thorough. The infamous Kaiser deserves our very best hospitality."
Rambo's massive hand clamped on my shoulder, steering me toward one of the branching corridors. "Come on, pretty boy. Time to introduce you to some friends who specialize in answering questions."
As they led me away, I caught one last glimpse of Rex on his throne, already turning his attention to other matters—secure in the knowledge that another threat had been neutralized, another anomaly contained.
He has no idea, I thought with grim satisfaction. No fucking idea what's coming.
Behind me, Irene's laugh echoed through the halls like a promise of violence deferred but never forgotten.
[MORGANA -- POV]
The cell had long ago stopped being a prison and become something closer to a tomb—a place where time went to die, where moments stretched into eternities and eternities compressed into heartbeats, all at the whim of suppression fields that kept my power contained but never truly dormant.
I'd learned to exist in the spaces between seconds, to feel the flow of temporal currents even when I couldn't properly manipulate them. Three years of captivity had taught me patience, had shown me how to wait and watch and remember every single person who'd used me as a weapon.
Rex thought the wards made me helpless. Rex was an idiot.
The walls of my cell were covered in writing—scratched into concrete with fingernails and improvised tools, painted in blood when necessary, etched in languages that predated the apocalypse by millennia. Not desperate prisoner's tallies counting days. Something else entirely.
Temporal mathematics. Quantum probability calculations. The kind of theoretical framework that would take conventional scientists decades to comprehend, if they ever could.
I was writing the future. Literally.
My fingers traced another symbol—ancient Sumerian, representing the concept of "inevitable convergence"—when I felt it.
A ripple.
Not in the physical space of Tartarus, but in the temporal currents that flowed beneath reality like underground rivers. Something had changed. Some variable had entered the equation that shouldn't exist according to the mathematical models Rex's people used to predict and contain me.
An anomaly.
I stopped writing mid-symbol, hand frozen as I extended my senses as far as the suppression fields would allow. Feeling for the source of the disturbance, tracing probability streams that branched and merged and branched again in fractal patterns too complex for baseline human consciousness to process.
There.
Three levels above, currently being escorted to interrogation. A presence that made the temporal mathematics sing—like reality itself was excited to see what would happen next.
And beside him—or near him, the spatial relationships were difficult to parse through the wards—something else. Something small but radiating power in frequencies that made the suppression fields stutter and struggle.
Mythic-tier.
I hadn't felt mythic-tier traits since before my capture, since the days when I'd been free and the world had seemed full of possibilities instead of just Rex's commands and the screams of people I was forced to hurt.
The temporal streams crystallized for just a moment, showing me fragments:
—golden eyes that had seen too much—
—a child who teleported through space like it was suggestion rather than law—
—chains breaking, not through force but through inevitability—
—my cell door opening and a voice asking "partners?" instead of commanding obedience—
The visions faded, probability reasserting itself into quantum uncertainty. But the core remained: change was coming. Radical, violent, beautiful change that would reshape Tartarus's carefully maintained order into something new.
A smile spread across my face—the first genuine smile in three years.
I returned to my writing, but the words were different now. Not calculations of escape or revenge. Something else.
He comes, I scratched in ancient Greek. The one who breaks chains and rewrites rules. The anomaly that probability has been waiting for.
My hand moved almost of its own volition, drawing symbols that represented concepts baseline humanity didn't have words for. Convergence. Liberation. The death of old patterns and birth of new possibilities.
And finally, in English—because some things deserved to be acknowledged in the language of the present rather than buried in dead tongues—I wrote:
My prince charming is here.
The words felt absurd and perfect in equal measure. A fairy tale trope applied to the most unsuitable circumstance imaginable. But then again, what else would you call someone who broke into maximum-security prisons to free captive time-manipulators from kingpins who collected powerful trait-users like trophies?
If that wasn't a rescue fantasy made manifest, I didn't know what was.
The temporal currents swirled and eddied around my cell, carrying whispers of what was coming—violence and liberation and the spectacular failure of Rex's carefully maintained control systems.
I settled back against the wall, surrounded by my writing and my calculations and the absolute certainty that time—which I understood better than anyone in this godforsaken facility—was finally, finally on my side.
"Welcome to Tartarus," I whispered to the anomaly three levels above, knowing he couldn't possibly hear but saying it anyway. "Let's see if you're everything probability suggests you might be."
The suppression fields hummed their usual song of containment and control.
But underneath that sound, if you knew how to listen properly, you could hear something else:
The countdown to their failure.
END OF CHAPTER