Silence.
Not the kind that meant peace — the kind that pressed on the skin until even breath felt like defiance.
Only the hum broke it.
It wasn't mechanical anymore. It had rhythm. Pulse. A false heartbeat echoing through steel and glass.
Containment breathing.
Leo lay beneath it, eyes open, his vision burning white. The ceiling blurred, too bright to focus on.
The taste of metal sat thick on his tongue.
He had lost track of time — maybe hours, maybe days. It didn't matter. The lab never changed. The lights never dimmed. The machines never blinked.
He was still here.
The restraints around his wrists pulsed faintly every few seconds — a quiet reminder.
They were alive in their own way. They tested his pulse, drained the resonance, sent back whispers of pain when his heartbeat climbed too high.
He flexed his fingers. The cuffs didn't move.
A faint tremor rippled through the metal, and he felt it down to the bone — the same vibration as the Bracelet buried under his skin. Once it had glowed with life. Now it throbbed like a dying ember, flickering behind his veins.
Felix's voice replayed in his head, too clear to be memory and too cold to be human:
"You were never the experiment, Leo. You were the proof."
Proof.
That was all he was now — data wrapped in flesh.
A number on a console.
He shut his eyes, but it didn't help. The white light behind his lids only grew brighter.
"Proof," he whispered, his throat raw. "You made me into this."
The hum didn't answer, but something in it seemed to tighten — as if it understood.
He tried to steady his breathing. One. Two. Three.
The way Felix had taught him once. Back when control meant survival, and trust meant something.
The memory came uninvited: Felix standing beside him, hand on the control panel, voice calm. "Don't fight the current. Guide it."
That same voice now echoed in his mind like static.
"You think morality survives progress."
Leo exhaled slowly, a bitter laugh scraping up from somewhere hollow.
"You think you are progress."
No reply. Only the endless hum, pulsing through the air like breath caught in machinery.
He stared at the ceiling until the brightness blurred into something else — a field of shifting white, alive and moving.
The longer he looked, the more it seemed to tilt, as though gravity itself had forgotten which way was down.
He shut his eyes again, and in that darkness, the lab flickered back to life the way it used to be — warmer, quieter. Felix's laugh echoing under the blue light of the monitors. Two silhouettes, teacher and student, side by side.
Then the image warped.
Same lab, same hum. Only this time, Felix's face was distant, voice stripped to command.
"Containment stable."
Leo's chest burned.
The cuffs responded to the change in his pulse, tightening slightly — a reminder. A warning.
He felt the faint electric sting bite into his wrists, urging calm.
He didn't obey.
The energy under his skin stirred.
Not a spark, not yet — but a low, coiling pressure. Like heat trying to find a way out.
It wasn't gone. It had never been gone. Felix had only buried it deep enough to make him believe it was.
Leo's breathing grew uneven. "Don't," he muttered — to himself, to the hum, to the machines watching him. "Don't you dare."
But the resonance heard him.
It pulsed again, harder.
A faint blue glow crawled along the seams of the cuffs.
"Warning," the synthetic voice murmured from the ceiling. "Containment fluctuation detected. Stabilization in progress."
Leo watched the light dance across the steel. It should have terrified him. It didn't.
It felt warm.
"Stabilization failed," the voice announced. "Power surge imminent."
A thin smile split his face.
"Good."
The hum changed pitch. The air thickened.
The cuffs smoked.
Alarms burst alive — red lights flashing across the lab. The voice grew louder, more urgent, less certain.
"Containment breach risk. Manual override recommended."
Then another voice cut through — not real, not live, but recorded. Felix, preserved in the machine:
"Maintain control of resonance. Do not resist."
Leo's breath hitched. For a moment, everything froze.
Then his voice, low and shaking, filled the silence.
"I'm done listening to you."
The hum rose — no longer steady, but screaming.
The light flared white through his restraints. The air itself vibrated until the sound became something else — a pressure behind the eyes.
The lab came apart in light.
Monitors burst. The floor shuddered. Steel warped.
Leo's back arched as the energy broke through his skin, radiant and wild. It poured out of him — not fire, not lightning, but something that didn't belong to this world. Something that burned without heat.
The restraints cracked like glass.
Fragments hung midair, frozen in the light before dissolving.
He gasped — a sound torn between pain and release. The hum became his heartbeat.
Every pulse slammed against the walls, rattling the bones of the room.
The lights overhead exploded, showering sparks that froze mid-fall.
For one suspended instant, the world held its breath.
And then gravity returned.
The floor buckled. The metal table groaned under his weight. Cables whipped like serpents, screaming sparks. Screens liquefied into puddles of mirrored glass.
Leo's hands glowed down to the fingertips. His body trembled with too much life.
He tried to speak, but his throat closed around the sound.
"Stop," he whispered to himself, to the thing inside him. "Stop."
But it didn't. The resonance no longer belonged to him.
It was using him.
The door hissed open.
Felix stumbled inside through the chaos, shielding his eyes against the white glare. His coat whipped in the current, hair flung wild. The storm pushed against him as though trying to erase him.
"Leo!" His voice echoed through distortion, warped like sound underwater.
"Listen to me! You have to control it—"
Leo lifted his head. His eyes were blinding white. "You said control meant surrender."
"Not like this!"
The air warped. Sound folded in on itself. Felix's voice shattered into echoes. He forced himself toward the console, one step at a time, fighting the current.
"Leo, please—"
He never finished.
A shockwave ripped through the floor. Felix was thrown backward, slamming into the wall. The concrete cracked near his shoulder. Blood streaked down his temple.
The lab howled — a living storm of light.
Every color vanished into one.
Leo's voice cut through it, ragged and breaking. "You did this!"
Felix tried to move, but the console was already melting into molten glass. "Leo," he shouted, barely audible, "if you don't stop, it'll burn everything!"
Leo looked down at his hands. They were shaking.
The glow crawled up his arms, devouring flesh, turning skin into light.
He saw it now — the energy wasn't surrounding him anymore. It was eating him.
His breath hitched. "Make it stop."
"You have to!" Felix cried, his voice cracking. "You have to end it!"
"I can't!"
The words came out like a scream that tore something open.
He wasn't lying. He couldn't.
Felix crawled toward him, half-blind, reaching through the light. "Then let me—"
He never reached him.
The white engulfed the room in one instant of impossible silence.
It wasn't light anymore; it was the absence of everything else.
Then came the detonation.
It wasn't an explosion — it was an implosion, a collapse inward. The world folded into itself, then erupted outward in a single soundless breath that shredded air, glass, and steel.
The walls caved. The ceiling peeled away.
Everything became dust and light.
At the center stood Leo.
He didn't look human. He didn't look divine. He was something caught between — the outline of a boy sculpted from pure radiance, his edges unraveling into the storm.
Felix lifted his head just enough to see him.
"Leo," he whispered, voice breaking — a plea swallowed by brilliance.
For one heartbeat, Leo's gaze flicked toward him.
There was fear there. Fury. And something else — regret.
Then his eyes vanished into white.
The lab disappeared.
The last thing Felix felt was the air being sucked out of his lungs, and the faintest warmth — not from fire, but from the memory of a hand once steadying his.
Then nothing.