With Arnold's body still cooling on the cold steel floor, Alex's gaze swept across the sprawling laboratory—a cathedral of cold technology and twisted ambition. The mission was no longer about revenge alone; it had evolved into something far more critical: erasing the threat at its root. The antidote to the APEX weapon was not a cure but destruction—the annihilation of the data that birthed it.
His eyes locked onto the central database drives, humming quietly in their reinforced racks. Nearby, Arnold's personal computer sat dormant, its screen flickering faintly with encrypted secrets. On a cluttered table lay a stack of paper diagrams—detailed, intricate blueprints of the facility's internal structure, painstakingly drawn and annotated by Arnold himself.
Alex moved swiftly, snatching the paper blueprints with a surgeon's precision. He knew the digital data was labyrinthine—complex, encrypted, and networked across multiple fail-safes. To navigate the facility's deepest recesses, he needed the physical path, the tangible map of conduits, structural weaknesses, and hazard zones.
For five agonizing minutes, Alex subjected his mind to an intentional, high-pressure information overload. He forced his intellect into an unprecedented hyper-Gamma state—a rare neurological condition where his cognitive processing accelerated beyond normal human limits. Every line, every conduit, every hazard warning printed on those sheets was seared into his long-term memory with photographic permanence.
His mind became a living archive, the blueprints internalized and ready for immediate use. The knowledge was no longer external; it was part of him.
His immediate destination was clear: The Radioactive Containment Chamber, the heart of the base's power grid and central data core, buried 300 vertical feet below in the facility's deepest sector. The chamber was a fortress within a fortress, protected by layers of radiation shielding, reinforced steel, and automated defenses.
The alarms had already begun to wail—a piercing, unrelenting scream triggered by the absence of Arnold's biometric signature. Security teams would converge quickly, but the time saved by memorizing the blueprints was his only advantage.
"The slaughter begins" he thought darkly
Alex exited the lab, the sterile white corridors bathed in the harsh glow of emergency lighting. He no longer moved with stealth; he moved with lethal velocity—a force of nature unleashed.
His evolving physical prowess, honed and enhanced by the brutal Arctic mission, was now fully unleashed. Guards appeared in his path, weapons raised and voices shouting orders, but Alex did not hesitate. They were not targets to be subdued or captured—they were obstacles to be obliterated.
His superhuman strength shattered reinforced bones with a sickening crunch. Composite armor, designed to withstand high-caliber rounds, crumpled under his crushing grip. Bullets and plasma bolts fired at him were rendered useless as he twisted and dodged with impossible speed, closing distances in the blink of an eye.
Alex was not merely fighting; he was orchestrating a symphony of destruction. The blueprints guided him like a ghost through the facility's veins. He slipped into air ducts, using the confined spaces to ambush guards with brutal efficiency. Maintenance tunnels became kill zones where he trapped enemies in crushing choke points.
He exploited every structural weakness memorized from the blueprints—weak ceiling panels, brittle support beams, and pressure-sensitive floors. With a calculated kick, he brought down a section of the ceiling onto a squad of guards, their screams muffled beneath tons of rubble.
A Gray Blur in White Corridors
To the security teams, Alex was a nightmare made flesh—a gray blur darting through the pristine white corridors, unstoppable and adaptive. Every move was precise, every strike calculated. He was a force beyond human limits, a living weapon honed by trauma and sharpened by vengeance.
As he descended deeper, the air grew colder, heavier with the scent of ozone and radiation shielding. The facility's defenses grew more desperate—automated turrets, reinforced lockdown doors, and chemical deterrents—but Alex was already beyond their reach.
Three hundred feet below, the Radioactive Containment Chamber awaited. The heart of the base's power and the vault of its darkest secrets. Alex's mind raced, muscles coiled, senses sharpened to a razor's edge.
He was no longer just a man. He was the reckoning.
Alex traversed the intricate, three-hundred-foot descent in mere minutes, his every step a calculated defiance against the chaos erupting around him. The shrill screams of alarms echoed like a death knell, and frantic gunfire ricocheted through the steel corridors, but Alex was beyond distraction. His mind was a razor's edge, honed by trauma and sharpened by purpose.
His path led him into the low-level maintenance tunnels—a cramped, claustrophobic maze where steam pipes hissed dangerously and high-voltage cables snaked like serpents along the walls. The air was thick with heat and the acrid scent of burning insulation. Every step was a gamble; one wrong move could mean electrocution or scalding steam.
He stopped abruptly.
Waiting for him was Adrax, —the brutal warden of this subterranean hell. His face was a grotesque landscape of scars, the most prominent being the empty socket where Alex had taken his eye months ago. Adrax's heavy, reinforced armor gleamed dully under the flickering lights, and in his hands, he wielded a massive sonic stunner, humming with lethal energy.
"The little mouse came home to die," Adrax grunted, voice thick with satisfied malice. "I knew you wouldn't leave without paying for this eye, Draugr."
Alex's eyes narrowed, cold and unyielding. "I am not paying," he said, voice low and steady, "I am collecting."
Adrax fired first. The sonic stunner unleashed a wave of crushing sound, designed to incapacitate instantly. The blast should have shattered Alex's equilibrium, but his X-gene—exposed to the chaotic frequencies of the Oracle's monitoring—adapted in real time. The wave hit him like a hammer, staggering him, but the pain was manageable.
Alex's mind raced, calculating the thermal discharge from the exposed steam pipes overhead. Instead of meeting Adrax head-on, he shifted tactics.
With a powerful leap, Alex vaulted toward the ceiling supports—key load-bearing struts he had memorized from the blueprints as structurally compromised. His fists, enhanced by metahuman strength, struck with the force of a wrecking ball. The metal groaned and snapped, and within seconds, tons of concrete and steel crashed down in a thunderous avalanche.
Adrax was caught beneath the rubble, stunned but alive.
Alex didn't hesitate. Reaching through the debris, his fingers found the warden's neck. With a brutal squeeze, he crushed the windpipe, silencing the architect of his physical agony. The sound of Adrax's final breath was drowned beneath the roar of collapsing concrete.
Alex burst into the ante-chamber of the Radioactive Containment Unit. The room was a stark contrast to the tunnels—gleaming white panels, humming machinery, and the cold, clinical presence of the Arctic Tactical Team. Standing at their center was Dr. Rourke, Arnold's last remaining senior collaborator, flanked by the now-terrified Oracle.
"Stop! I-039! Your command module is being initiated!" Rourke shrieked, fumbling with a remote device.
The Oracle stepped forward, eyes rolling back as she unleashed a devastating psychic attack—a chaotic barrage of noise designed to scramble Alex's brain.
But Alex met the psychic wave head-on. His Project Mute held the line, maintaining a paradoxical Gamma-Delta state. This internal conflict created a wall of unreadable, non-sentient static that the Oracle's focused psychic assault could not penetrate. Her scream was abruptly cut short as her own power overloaded, flooding her system with debilitating feedback.
The tactical team opened fire. Bullets tore into Alex's limbs, but he ignored the pain, using the distraction to grab Rourke and hurl him into the path of his own team's fire. Rourke fell, and the tactical team briefly stalled, caught in the chaos of friendly fire.
In that precious moment, Alex reached the main console of the Containment Chamber. Slamming his hand onto the emergency override, he entered the precise access codes memorized from the blueprints.
The Containment Failure Sequence was initiated.
Alarms shifted from warning to catastrophic. The core began to overload, the air thickening with charged energy. The chamber's light turned a sickly, pulsating green.
Alex turned to watch the tactical team scramble in panic. He felt no remorse as the chamber's pressure ruptured, venting superheated steam that instantly flash-boiled the air.
He stepped into the lethal zone, his suit steaming, his skin blistering. The radiation spike hit immediately and terminally, tearing through cellular structure at an unstoppable rate.
His body convulsed violently, seized by agonizing seizures.
His last conscious thought was not of fear, but a command to his X-gene: Adapt.
He had destroyed the base, eradicated the data, and silenced the architects of his suffering. Now, his survival was entirely up to the weapon they had created.
Alex's entire system convulsed in an unprecedented spasm of evolution, attempting to synthesize a defense against immediate terminal radiation poisoning. He felt his body dissolve into pure, agonizing heat, nerves screaming a desperate plea for life.
Then, the overwhelming darkness of radiation consumed him.
He blacked out.