Seth’s POVThe alarms screamed loud enough to make my teeth ache. Red emergency lights flashed in rapid bursts, washing the entire chamber in a strobe of panic. Every second, the room trembled under the weight of whatever the hell was happening inside that tank.Rose’s eyes were bright, radioactive blue stared straight at me from behind the glass. For a heartbeat, I thought she recognized me. Then her gaze drifted through me, vacant, unseeing.“Rose! ROSE!” Alex was hammering the containment glass with both fists, screaming her name over the blaring sirens. The liquid inside was boiling now, not hot, but vibrating, swirling like a storm trapped in a bottle.I stepped between him and the tank, yanking him back by his vest. “Move, Alex! Step away from it!”He shoved me off, face twisted in desperation. “I’m not leaving her!”“Then shut up and let me think!” I barked.That was when the voice came again, calm, cutting through the chaos like a scalpel through silk.“You can’t stop it, Capt

The countdown was still screaming when the world ended.“Two minutes remaining.”Seth’s ears rang from the alarms, his vision flickering from the overload of data streaming across every broken screen. The room glowed with that same merciless blue like lightning frozen in glass. The Bio Reactor core was no longer just humming; it was screaming, a shrill metallic howl that made the entire structure shake.He’d done everything, override codes, manual stabilizers, even Hale’s access card but the system had reached a point beyond reason. The machine had begun to think for itself.“Come on, you bastard,” Seth muttered through clenched teeth, his hands moving furiously across the control pad. “Stay with me.”The interface flickered. Sparks burst from the walls. The temperature spiked to unbearable levels.And then, for a split second, everything stopped.The alarms. The vibration. The noise.A moment of silence, calm, terrifying silence before the voice returned, slow and mechanical:“Critic

The world didn’t end that night.Not in the way people expected it to.There was no fire raining from the sky, no cracks splitting the earth open. The stars didn’t fall. The oceans didn’t boil. Life didn’t vanish.No, the end was quieter. Stranger. Crueler.It began with a ripple.A wave of unseen light that washed across Veloria first,a shimmering pulse of energy that rolled through the clouds, through the cities, through every living thing it touched. It passed through walls, metal, and bone as though the world itself were transparent.No one saw it coming.The news that night was filled with the usual chaos: border skirmishes, political corruption, celebrity scandals. Then, one by one, the broadcast screens flickered, their signals distorting. The anchors froze mid-sentence, their faces fracturing into static before the image snapped back with a faint blue tint.“—reports of electromagnetic interference across northern Veloria. Citizens are advised—”Then came the screams.People c

Seth's POV When I woke up, it wasn’t peaceful.It wasn’t the soft fade in of morning light, the birds singing, or some poetic rebirth from a long sleep. No, my awakening felt like my soul had been dragged through molten glass, torn apart, and forced back into a body that wasn’t mine anymore.The first thing I noticed was the sound.Machines humming. A constant beeping somewhere close to my right ear. A low drone, like electricity dancing through metal. Then came the smell... sterile, clean, too clean. That sharp hospital scent that makes you feel both safe and like something inside you’s about to be cut open.I opened my eyes.The world was… different.Everything looked sharper, brighter, almost alive. The lights above me weren’t just white, they were bleeding with color spectrums I’d never seen before. The walls had faint traces of vibration, as if I could see sound moving through them. And every breath I took echoed inside me, deep, mechanical, almost harmonic.I blinked. Once. Twi

Seth's POVI had been awake for hours, yet the room felt the same as it had when I first opened my eyes. Sterile white walls, the faint hum of machinery, the occasional beep from monitors that charted my vitals. The air smelled faintly of antiseptic, a thin layer of hospital smell that clung to everything. And yet, despite the clinical monotony, nothing felt normal. Nothing had been normal since that explosion.I had been lying there for what felt like an eternity, confined to a bed that was far too small for what I now was. I hadn’t seen Lucas, I hadn’t seen Alex, and there had been no word from the president’s aide, just food, water, and the faint assurances that I was recovering. Recovering, as if I were some fragile human being, when the truth was far more complicated now.I flexed my fingers and noticed something strange. My skin glinted faintly gold under the harsh fluorescent light. My eyes, once dull brown, now shimmered like molten metal. At first, I thought I was imagining i