Pain first.
A deep, throbbing ache that radiated from her skull down through her entire body. The kind of pain that came from a hard impact—she knew it well. Had catalogued dozens of variations of it over years of hunting and months of surviving in hell.
Cold next.
Not the natural cold of a forest at night or the bite of winter air. This was artificial. Controlled. The sterile, recycled chill of a space that had never seen sunlight.
Then the voices.
Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. A cacophony of sound that washed over Nana as consciousness dragged her upward from the dark. Growls. Screams. People crying out in terror and pain. The clash of bodies fighting. The wet, final sounds of things dying.
For one disorienting, heart-stopping moment, Nana thought she was back in Avalon.
The sounds were exactly right. The atmosphere was exactly right. The feeling of being surrounded by death and chaos and the desperate struggle to survive—it was all there, pressing against her senses with suffocating familiarity.
She opened her eyes.
And froze.
Monitors. Hundreds of them. Thousands.
They covered the wall in front of her—an entire surface, floor to ceiling, filled with screens of varying sizes. Each one showing a different view. Different angles. Different locations.
And every single one was showing Avalon.
Nana's breath caught in her throat as her eyes darted frantically across the displays. District after district after district—she recognized every one. The abandoned clinic where she'd hidden with Zayne during his fifth rebirth. The rooftops where they'd shared their first kiss. The tunnels beneath Tao's gang territory. The underground station in District 22 where he'd died for the sixth time.
The Ancient Tree. Its massive trunk filling an entire screen, vampires hanging from every branch in their sleeping cocoons.
All of it. Every inch of the realm that had consumed nine months of her life, that had taken everything from her and given back something she couldn't explain—all of it was playing on screens in front of her like a television program.
Like someone was watching.
Had been watching. The entire time.
Nana's hands began to shake.
She lifted one and slapped herself across the face. Hard. The sting of it was sharp and real and immediate. She pinched the back of her hand until tears burned in her eyes.
Still here. Still seeing the monitors. Still watching Avalon play out on a wall of screens in a room that smelled like recycled air and industrial cleaning solution.
Not a dream.
Not a hallucination.
Real.
"No," she whispered. The word came out cracked, barely audible. "No, no, no—"
She'd spent over a year believing Avalon was supernatural. A phenomenon beyond human understanding—an ice portal to another realm, a death cycle governed by forces no one could explain. She'd believed it because nothing else made sense. Because the evidence pointed to something impossible, something that existed outside the boundaries of normal reality.
She'd believed it because the alternative—that anyone could have done this deliberately—was too monstrous to consider.
But the monitors were right there. Thousands of screens showing every corner of Avalon in real time, from angles that made it impossible to deny what she was seeing.
Someone had cameras inside Avalon.
Someone had been watching everything that happened there.
Everything that happened to her.
Nana stumbled backward, her legs threatening to give out. She caught herself on the edge of a console—a massive bank of controls, buttons and switches and displays that she didn't understand but that clearly operated something. The room stretched out around her in every direction, larger than she'd initially registered. Not just a monitoring station.
A laboratory. A control center. A factory floor filled with equipment she couldn't identify and screens she could, and the overwhelming, crushing realization that nothing about her life was what she'd believed it to be.
She ran.
Not toward anything specific—just away. Away from the monitors and the voices and the screaming that was still coming from somewhere she couldn't locate. Through corridors that branched off from the main room, past doors that were sealed shut, past more screens showing more footage of Avalon, past equipment that hummed and blinked and processed data she couldn't begin to interpret.
She had to find the door. The iron door she'd fallen through. Had to get out, get back to the surface, get to Zayne and tell him what she'd found before—
The door at the end of the corridor was sealed. Not locked with a keypad or a handle—sealed. Flush with the wall, no visible mechanism to open it from the inside.
Nana slammed her fist against it. Then again. Then again, her aether core flaring blue with each impact as she poured her desperation into the blows. The metal dented but didn't give. The seal held.
"Let me out!" Her voice echoed off the corridor walls, raw and ragged. "LET ME OUT!"
Nothing. The door didn't move. The seal didn't break.
Footsteps behind her.
Nana spun, dropping into a combat stance, her gun drawn and aimed before the first figure had fully rounded the corner.
Captain Jenna stepped into view.
She looked exactly as she always did—composed, authoritative, her hunter's uniform pristine and her expression carefully neutral. Behind her came two men in white coats that Nana's mind immediately identified as scientists or doctors, and behind them, four soldiers in full tactical gear with weapons trained on Nana.
They were all looking at her with the same expression.
Not surprise. Not alarm. Not the panicked urgency of people who'd just discovered an intruder in a restricted facility.
Calm. Measured. Expected.
Like they'd been waiting for her to wake up.
"Captain Jenna," Nana said, and her voice didn't shake even though everything inside her was screaming. "What is this place?"
"Stand down, Miss Wang." Jenna's voice carried the same quiet authority it always did. "You're not in danger."
"I'm not in DANGER?!" Nana's laugh was sharp and almost hysterical. "I just watched Avalon playing on a thousand screens in what looks like a government laboratory! People are DYING in there! I DIED in there! And you're telling me I'm not in danger?!"
"If you'll calm down, we can explain—"
"Explain WHAT?!" Nana's gun hand was steady despite the fury trembling through her entire body. "Explain why you have cameras inside a death realm? Explain why you KNEW what Avalon was when I tried to tell you about it? When I begged you to believe me and you looked at me like I was having a mental breakdown?"
Something flickered in Jenna's expression. Just for a moment—a crack in the professional composure that might have been guilt. Or might have been the careful performance of guilt.
"Miss Wang. Please put the weapon down."
"Answer my questions first."
One of the scientists stepped forward—an older man, grey-haired, with wire-rimmed glasses and the kind of calm that came from decades of academic detachment. He moved with the unhurried confidence of someone who was accustomed to being the smartest person in any room.
"Perhaps I can help clarify," he said, his tone measured and almost condescending in its patience. "You have questions. We have answers. But this conversation will be much more productive if everyone remains calm."
"I'm perfectly calm," Nana said, and the absolute fury in her voice made it clear she was not calm at all. "Talk."
The scientist exchanged a glance with Jenna, who gave an almost imperceptible nod.
"Avalon," the scientist began, clasping his hands behind his back, "is not a supernatural phenomenon. It never was. It is a constructed environment—an artificial realm that was built eleven years ago, shortly after the Wanderers first appeared in the city."
The words landed like physical blows, each one driving deeper into the foundation of everything Nana had believed.
"Built," she repeated.
"Yes. Built. Designed. Engineered." The scientist's tone was clinical, detached—the same tone Zayne used when explaining medical procedures. Except Zayne's detachment came from professionalism. This man's came from something else entirely. "The government funded the project specifically to prepare for the future threat posed by Wanderers. The initial assessment was clear—standard hunters, no matter how skilled or well-trained, would not be sufficient to handle the escalating Wanderer threat long-term. We needed to understand more about human capabilities under extreme stress. We needed data."
"Data," Nana echoed, the word tasting like ash.
"Avalon was designed to provide exactly that. A controlled environment where human subjects could be tested under increasingly dangerous conditions. Survival scenarios. Combat simulations. Stress responses. The data collected from these tests would inform the development of enhanced hunters capable of handling the Wanderer threat on a scale that conventional forces could not."
He said it the way he might describe a lab experiment. A clinical trial. Something conducted in sterile conditions with proper protocols and ethical oversight.
Except people had died. Over and over and over again.
"The ice portals," Nana said, her voice dangerously quiet. "You made those."
"A necessary component of the recruitment process." The scientist nodded as if confirming a hypothesis. "We recognized that voluntary participation in a death-survival program would attract very few subjects. Humans are not naturally inclined to throw themselves into obvious danger, regardless of compensation. So we designed the portals to appear as anomalous phenomena—curiosity traps, essentially. Placed in locations where people were likely to encounter them. The portals drew in subjects organically, without the need for forced recruitment."
"You LURED people through portals into a place where they would die."
"Where they would be tested," the scientist corrected, as though the distinction mattered. "Death was an expected variable, not the objective. The objective was data. The deaths provided information about human limits that could not be obtained through any other means."
Nana's finger tightened on her trigger.
"Nobody has ever escaped Avalon," the scientist continued, seemingly oblivious to—or perhaps deliberately ignoring—the weapon pointed at him. "The environment was designed to be inescapable. The Wish Bridge, the blood moon cycle, the rebirth mechanism—all engineered. All part of a closed system designed to retain subjects indefinitely while maximizing data collection."
"Nobody has ever escaped," Nana repeated slowly. Something cold was building in her chest—colder than Zayne's ice evol, colder than the recycled air in this sterile corridor.
"Correct. Until one did."
The scientist turned to one of the other monitors—a smaller screen mounted on the wall behind him. With a gesture, he activated it, and footage began playing.
Nana recognized the scene immediately.
Zayne. Young—younger than she knew him now, though not by much. Standing in what looked like a medical examination room, arguing with someone off-camera. His expression was frustrated, defensive, and completely, devastatingly familiar.
"Dr. Zayne Li," the scientist said, gesturing at the screen. "A cardiologist from Linkon Hospital. Drawn into Avalon six years ago through one of our standard portal deployments. He was not a planned subject—his entry was... opportunistic. But his performance data proved exceptionally valuable."
The footage continued. Zayne fighting. Zayne surviving. Zayne doing things that no ordinary doctor should have been capable of—moving too fast, reacting too quickly, his body performing at levels that spoke of something beyond normal human capability.
"He was the first subject to discover the Wish Bridge," the scientist continued. "The first to successfully navigate the blood moon escape protocol. The first to actually reach the portal exit and survive the crossing back to the real world."
On screen, Zayne was running—desperately, frantically—toward something Nana couldn't see. His face was covered in blood and dust and the kind of raw terror that came from someone who had been pushed past every limit they had.
"We hadn't anticipated that possibility," the scientist admitted, and for the first time, something that might have been genuine surprise colored his voice. "The escape route was designed as a theoretical failsafe, not an achievable objective. Dr. Li's success was... unprecedented. And extremely informative."
Nana stared at the screen. At the man she loved, younger and bloodier and desperately fighting to survive a hell that had been built by the people standing in front of her.
Six years ago. Zayne had fallen into Avalon six years ago and escaped.
And then he'd forgotten. The reset—not a supernatural phenomenon. Something engineered. Something these people had done to him.
The cold fury in Nana's chest ignited.
She moved before anyone could react.
Three steps closed the distance between her and the scientist. Her gun was holstered—she didn't need it. Her fist connected with his jaw in a strike that carried the full force of her aether core, every ounce of rage and grief and violation that had been building since she woke up in this place.
The scientist went down hard, staggering backward into a bank of equipment that rattled and sparked from the impact. He hit the floor, glasses flying off his face, blood streaming from a split lip.
The soldiers moved instantly.
Four of them, tactical gear, weapons trained and ready. Nana fought. Of course she fought—she was an S-class hunter with an engineered aether core and nine months of survival training burned into her muscle memory. She took down the first soldier with a kick that sent him crashing into the wall. Dodged the second's weapon and drove her elbow into his throat.
But there were four of them, and they weren't Wanderers. They were human. They moved like humans—with intelligence, with coordination, with the ability to learn and adapt in real time.
The third soldier's stun baton caught her across the back of the knees. She went down but rolled immediately, coming up fighting. The fourth one was on her before she could recover, a restraint device pressed against her neck that discharged a pulse of electrical current.
Nana's muscles seized. Her aether core flickered—once, twice—and then dimmed, the blue glow fading as the pulse disrupted her energy output.
She hit the floor on her knees, gasping, every nerve in her body firing with residual shock.
Captain Jenna stepped forward, looking down at her fallen hunter with an expression that was carefully, deliberately unreadable.
"Restrain her," Jenna said quietly. "Gently. She's still one of ours."
The soldiers moved to comply, securing Nana's wrists and ankles with reinforced cuffs that hummed with their own low-level energy—designed, she realized with sick clarity, to suppress evol abilities.
Nana knelt there on the cold laboratory floor, restrained and bleeding and shaking with fury that had nowhere left to go, and looked up at the woman who had been her captain. Her superior. Someone she'd trusted.
"You knew," Nana said. Her voice was barely a whisper but it carried the weight of everything she'd survived. "The whole time. When I came to you begging you to believe me about Avalon. When I was crying and desperate and everyone thought I was losing my mind. You KNEW."
Jenna held her gaze without flinching. "Yes."
"Why?"
The captain didn't answer. Just turned away, gesturing for the scientists to continue their work while the soldiers kept Nana contained.
On the wall of monitors behind them, Avalon continued playing. Thousands of screens showing thousands of moments of suffering and death and desperate survival.
All of it watched. All of it recorded. All of it data.
And somewhere in the middle of it all—on one of those screens, in one of those districts—new souls were appearing. Drawn through portals they didn't understand, into a hell that had been carefully, deliberately constructed by the people standing in this room.
The nightmare wasn't waiting on the other side of that iron door.
It had been here all along.
.
.
.
.
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To be continued.