Lumina's blood tasted like battery acid and overripe pomegranate.
I spat out the chunk of flesh my monstrous arm had ripped from her shoulder—completely beyond my control. Her cross-shaped pupils flickered, filled with a pain that cut deeper than any blade.
"I...am not...your enemy..." she gasped, trembling fingers clutching my wrist.
Behind us, Vaelis chuckled, dragging his fingers through the blood pooling on the floor.
"Look at you, little brother. Biting the hand that feeds you. Some things never change."
My arm moved before my mind could—a black tendril lashed out to impale Vaelis' chest...
And passed straight through as if he were a ghost.
Vaelis materialized behind me, his living sword whispering in my ear:
"They made you believe you were special. But you're just another test tube."
I swung around, my mutated arm now a spiked bludgeon. Every strike splattered that fake golden ichor flowing through his veins.
"Why can't I hit you?!" I roared.
His lips curved into a smile I suddenly recognized—the exact same one worn by the driver in my pre-death memories.
"Because you're fighting shadows instead of facing the light."
With a motion too fast to follow, he plunged his blade into the ground—and the world tore open.
The lab walls collapsed like cardboard props.
We stood in a celestial circus*l—endless bleachers filled with hollow-eyed silhouettes clapping mechanically. At the center, a crystal cage held...
Me.
Or a version of me—Subject 116, their body twisted into a spiral of flesh and bone, still conscious.
"Welcome to tonight's performance, Number 117." Vaelis bowed with macabre grace. "Today's feature: tragedy in three acts."
His fingers pulled invisible strings—and my own arm turned against me, its newly grown eyes snapping open in unison to shriek:
"THEY ARE WATCHING US!"
When consciousness returned, I knelt before a banquet table spread with impossible delicacies:
- Fruits pulsing with veins
- Wine thick as congealed blood
- And at the center... Lumina's still-beating heart on a golden platter
Vaelis, now clad in an executioner's tunic, carved a slice and offered it to me.
"Taste it, little brother. This is how gods are made."
Behind him in the shadows, Elyria observed while chewing on a pen stained with black ink.
"Subject's reaction: magnificent," she murmured into a recorder. "Initiation phase: successful."