The room was too quiet.Adrian shut the metal door behind him, sealing himself inside the abandoned laboratory. Dust drifted through the stagnant air. Rows of dead monitors stared back at him like hollow eyes. Every surface felt cold, untouched, deliberately forgotten.Clara stood rigid in the center of the room, pale under the faint flicker of a dying ceiling light. A thick folder sat on a rusted desk beside her.“You said you found something,” Adrian said.She didn’t look at him.She didn’t breathe for a moment.She simply whispered:“Adrian… this room belonged to you.”His heart dropped into a pit.“No,” he said automatically. “That’s impossible.”Clara finally turned. Her eyes glistened with something he had never seen in her before.Fear of him.“Look.”She opened the folder.Photographs spilled out—grainy, black-and-white surveillance shots. Him. Walking into this same lab. Sitting at that same desk. Talking with someone whose face was blurred entirely, as if erased.Adrian froz

The world came back in pieces.A crack of thunder.The taste of smoke.A distant alarm howling like a wounded beast.Adrian pushed himself upright, coughing as dust fell from the shattered ceiling. The underground chamber—once sterile, humming with machines—was now a graveyard of sparks and broken steel. Red emergency lights pulsed across the walls like a heartbeat struggling to stay alive.What happened?He remembered the explosion.He remembered Elena screaming his name.He remembered the cold voice on the speaker saying:“Terminate him before he remembers everything.”Adrian dragged himself to his feet just as the main doors hissed open and boots marched in. A squad—six soldiers—armor black, helmets visored, rifles glowing with blue electric charges.“Target is alive,” one of them said. “Initiate extraction protocol.”Extraction?No.He wasn’t going back in a cage.Not again.He took one shaky step back, but the world tilted. His vision flickered—blue static breaking across his sig

The floor cracked open like a hungry jaw.Adrian grabbed Elena and pulled her back just as a massive steel plate tore free, plunging into a black void below. Smoke gushed upward—thick, chemical, choking the air.Then came the sound.Not footsteps.Not machinery.Breathing.Heavy. Wet. Wrong.Elena clutched Adrian’s arm, her voice trembling. “What… is down there?”Adrian didn’t answer.He already knew.Every failed experiment.Every discarded prototype.Every creature they made before him and locked away.Helix Protocol: Liberation wasn’t an alarm.It was an order.A release command.And whatever was rising from that darkness… wasn’t supposed to ever see daylight.A pale hand shot up from the gap—fingers long, joints bending backward unnaturally.Elena gasped.Another hand followed. Then a head… completely hairless, marked with glowing blue veins. Its eyes were black pools, no iris, no white. Skin stretched tight over bone.Adrian exhaled slowly. “Prototype Gamma.”The creature hissed.

The night tasted like iron.Adrian sprinted across the abandoned shipyard, boots slamming against rusted metal, lungs burning as the alarms wailed behind him. Red floodlights swept across the maze of containers like hunting eyes. He didn’t dare slow—not with the shadows closing in, not with the feeling that something inside him was waking again.Something he didn’t choose.Something he didn’t control.He ducked behind a crate as a mechanical whir approached. The laser grid scanned the area, humming like a predator sniffing prey. Adrian pressed his back to the chilled steel, forcing himself to breathe.Not now. Don’t lose it now.Then—Footsteps.Silent, measured. Too light to be a soldier. Too confident to be a civilian.A figure stepped into view.Clara.Her hair whipped in the wind, her coat fluttering like wings. Her face was pale, eyes wide—not with fear, but with something worse.Recognition.“Adrian,” she whispered. “They activated another layer.”His stomach dropped. “What laye

The abandoned industrial district was silent… too silent.Adrian moved through the shattered alleys with the kind of awareness only pain and experience could sharpen. His wounds from the rooftop fight burned under his clothes, but his mind stayed ice-cold.The Oracle’s location pin led here.A forgotten zone where factories had died, windows shattered, pipes rusted, and the whole place smelled of metal ghosts.Perfect place for secrets.Perfect place for a trap.Adrian’s boots crunched over broken glass as he scanned the skyline—cranes, smokestacks, collapsing rooftops. His instincts tugged at his nerves.Something was wrong.Even the wind felt like it was holding its breath.He passed a graffiti-marked wall and froze.A shadow behind him.No footstep. No breathing. No whisper.But Adrian felt the air shift.He spun—A blade slashed where his throat had been a split-second earlier.Adrian rolled back, eyes narrowing as a tall figure stepped out of the darkness.Leather jacket. Tactica