The Gauntlet was chaos incarnate.We were down to five members. Half of Group 1 already gone—mangled by blades, dissolved in sludge, crushed by pistons. Their screams still echoed in my head, but I shut it all out. I had to shut it out.I gripped the first flag so tightly that my knuckles turned white. My palms burned from the electrified base, but I didn’t let go. Ahead, I saw the next one—lodged in a rotating gear system with jagged teeth the size of my torso. I sprinted.“Move left! Jump now!” I shouted to the others.We dodged a mechanical ram that pulverized the floor behind us. I slid beneath a swinging pendulum blade and leapt onto a raised platform that buckled under my weight. Sparks erupted from the seams. One of my teammates tried to follow—too slow. The gear caught his leg and dragged him in. Bone snapped. He didn’t even scream—just vanished into the grinding metal.Four left.I reached the gear mechanism and studied the rotation. It moved in threes—three rotations, half a

The next morning didn’t arrive with sunlight.It arrived with screams.The blaring klaxon shattered whatever restless sleep I had managed to steal, and the lights snapped on in my pod—bright, white, merciless. The walls buzzed as the containment locks disengaged and the clamps around my limbs released with a hiss of pressure.> “REST CYCLE COMPLETE. LABOR RESUMES IN 20 MINUTES. ALL UNITS TO LINEUP.”My joints cracked as I sat up. My body felt like it had been dragged across molten steel, then stitched back together with barbed wire. Every muscle ached. My fingers—bandaged crudely by automated dispensers—still stung, the plasma burns fresh and angry. But I didn’t care about the pain.Not today.Because I had something more powerful than rest.I had a clue.That note from D… it wasn’t just hope—it was purpose. My mind kept replaying the words:> “The Eye beneath the Black Reactor.”I didn’t know what it meant yet—but I knew who might. Cynthia. If there was anyone in this place sharp eno

The alarms were no longer blaring. They were screaming—panicked, desperate, useless. Red lights bathed the corridors in the color of death as I moved like a shadow from hell, fused again with the alien entity—stronger, darker, and more monstrous than ever before.My hands were not hands anymore—they were instruments of annihilation.The first SCID mutant I met was barely able to raise his weapon. I grabbed his face and drove his skull into the wall with such force the concrete cratered. His helmet cracked like an egg, his brain matter spattering out in a grotesque bloom.A scream tore the air behind me. I turned, eyes glowing like furnaces. Three guards rushed forward, tasers buzzing and boots thundering—but they didn’t know who I was anymore. I leapt forward, faster than thought.“You’re all dead men!” I roared as I impaled the first one with my hand through his stomach, lifted him off the ground and ripped him in half. The wet sound of muscle and organs tearing apart was drowned onl

The days passed like ghosts.Inside the frozen bunker, Cynthia and I trained, planned, studied every scrap of intel we could find. But the deeper we dug, the more I realized something:This wasn’t just a revenge mission.This was a suicide run.Because Mr. White… wasn’t just a man.He was a god of information. A mutant whose power wasn’t strength or speed or fire. It was thought. Pure, unfiltered thought—weaponized and unbound. A mind sharpened to surgical precision, fed by networks, satellites, neural implants, a thousand blacksite feeds all wired into his consciousness.He didn’t fight with claws.He fought with inevitability.“White doesn’t lose,” I muttered one night, staring at a map riddled with red markers—SCID strongholds, supply lines, surveillance towers. “He anticipates. He models every variable. We don’t surprise him. We don’t outsmart him. Every path we take—he’s already seen it.”Cynthia leaned against the wall, her arms crossed, eyes narrowed. “Then we make a move he ca

We stepped into silence. Not the kind that’s peaceful. The kind that presses on your skin like water at the bottom of an ocean. Thick. Crippling. Alive. The door behind us sealed shut with a hiss like a dying breath.Ahead, a vast tunnel stretched into infinity—lit only by the slow pulse of crimson veins running along the walls. The structure wasn’t built. It was grown. A blend of flesh and machine, of neural fiber and steel bone. A mind made into a place.Cynthia muttered, “Feels like we’re walking into something’s brain.”“You’re not wrong,” I said, my voice low.And then the whispering began.Voices. Hundreds. All White. All wrong.Failure…They said he was unstoppable…But he bleeds like the rest…Break him. Take her. Burn them.“Don’t listen,” I said, pushing forward.We moved deeper. The air changed. Grew warmer. Wetter. We passed what looked like nerve bundles strung like vines from the ceiling. Each one twitched as we passed. They remembered us.And then—the hallucinations.