SUBJECT 47: AWAKENING

Dance of Liquid Metal

The connectors behind my ears ignite, no warmth, no pain, just fire. Thought fractures like glass shattering underwater.

One moment, Dr. Aveline’s worried face hovers behind the pod’s glass seal.

The next…

I’m here.

Boots sink into a surface that isn’t there. Stars hang low overhead, dozens of them, too sharp, too still.

The sky burns violet and gold, smeared across a horizon that never curves. Space itself stretches outward like a lie.

Weight settles in my palm, solid, familiar, alive.

The blade hums before I can think. Blue plasma dances across its edge, lighting veins of geometric circuitry that feel… intimate.

Like the weapon knows me. Knows what I’ve done. What I will do.

“Neural interface established,” Devon’s voice murmurs, distant and underwater.

“Consciousness transfer complete,” he adds.

“Vitals?” Aveline again, tight, clinical.

“Accelerated. But stable. The weapon appeared on its own… we’ve never seen that before.”

A ripple tears through the silence.

From above, something glides in slow orbit, a manta-shape carved from obsidian, its surface alive with shifting metallic patterns.

Liquid metal. Constant motion.

Beneath the surface: a heartbeat. Purple. Pulsing.

“First hunter-killer manifestation,” Kira reports. “Bio-readings are…”

The object folds in on itself, peeling reality like fruit.

What steps forward mimics my silhouette, humanoid, silver-black, faceless. Its eyes glow with violet flame. The longer I look, the more I feel… seen.

Not by a mind.

By a hunger.

“It’s scanning him,” Devon says quietly. “Analyzing reflexes, neural patterns. Everything.”

“How long do we have?” I ask. My voice feels like thought pressed through static.

“Ninety seconds,” Aveline says. “That’s what the others lasted.”

Figures.

The hunter moves first, fast, and wrong. It doesn’t lunge. It flows.

I swing. The plasma edge arcs blue and deadly.

It ducks like liquid draining from a glass. Slides beneath the strike, smooth as mercury.

Then…

Pain.

A spike-arm slams into my shoulder. Precise. Clean. Blood sprays across the impossible surface beneath my feet.

“Contact,” I grunt, twisting with the blow. My blade leaves streaks of fire in the air, wild, fast, useless.

Three clean hits. The alien absorbs them. Its eyes burn brighter. Learning. Reacting.

“Devon,” Kira’s voice tightens, “it’s adapting faster than our algorithms projected. He’s not unpredictable enough.”

“Appreciate the vote of confidence,” I hiss, deflecting a needle-limb slicing for my throat.

The hunter shifts. Blades extend. Arms stretch. The rules of anatomy mean nothing.

I dodge two. The third cracks into my ribs—like a jackhammer made of shadow and bone.

“Heart rate’s spiking,” Devon says. “One-ninety. Ezren…”

“Yeah,” I growl. “Noted.”

A blade flashes in from my blind spot, white-hot agony tears from collarbone to elbow. My grip slips; the sword grows slick in my fist.

“Suggestions?”

“Don’t die,” Aveline says.

“Brilliant.”

Tendrils lash from above. Razor-arms stab from the side. I spin and cut, blue arcs screaming through alien tissue.

The flesh heals mid-blow.

A club-hand smashes into my back. I collapse to one knee.

Two whips coil around my neck, hoisting me off the ground. I dangle, choking, as the hunter’s face, face twisted into flame and void, stares into mine.

“Neural strain approaching redline,” Aveline warns.

“Pain response exceeding simulation parameters.”

“Pull him?” Kira asks.

“No,” Devon snaps.

“He’s still adapting. Look at the feedback.”

I slash upward, severing the tendrils. Hit the ground hard. My arm dangles, limp and ruined. Another strike comes, I barely parry. The next hits square—breath knocked out. Ribs crack like dried wood.

Vision narrows. Chest burns. The sword drags in my hand now, heavier than memory.

This is where I die.

Like the seventeen others.

The hunter circles. No rush. No mercy. It knows the script.

Knows how this ends.

I stagger backward, legs trembling. “Getting tired of this dance.”

Then, shift.

A flicker in my gut. Not thought. Not instinct.

Something older.

My arm moves before I tell it to. The blade arcs in a way I didn’t choose, like it remembered something I forgot.

A perfect strike. Clean. Unreadable.

The alien jerks, surprised. Eyes flicker.

My blade carves again, blue lightning through liquid steel.

For the first time: it stumbles.

The flow shifts. Still hopelessly uneven, but I matter now.

My hits count.

The hunter reels, defensive algorithms scrambling to keep up. Its eyes burn hotter, but with something more than aggression now.

Frustration.

We move together, predator and prey. Each step is adaptation. Each clash a rewrite. My blade connects, another wound that refuses to heal.

And then…

A flicker of fear.

“The predator’s learning to fear its prey,” I whisper, panting.

The air rips behind me.

Another figure emerges.

Then another.

“Oh, come on,” I breathe.

Three of them now, same body, same face, same burning eyes. Purple light pulses in perfect rhythm.

“Three active hunters,” Kira says. “Never seen this before.”

“Because no one survived long enough,” Aveline murmurs.

“They died too fast to trigger replication,” Devon confirms.

The lead hunter tilts its head.

They’re talking, not in sound, but through frequencies I feel vibrating in my skull. Shared memory. Shared strategy.

“Devon, now would be a good time to pull me out.”

“Interface is locked. Construct wants full data.”

“Meaning?”

“Victory or death.”

“Great.”

The trio spreads out. One moves like liquid thought. Another strikes like a machine learning how to kill. The third, graceful, patient, surgical.

“Ezren…” Kira’s voice breaks. “Your vitals…”

“I know.”

The first hunter attacks, blur of fluid violence. The second shadows it, timing its strike to my recoil. The third waits, collecting data from every move.

My blade meets them in a storm of light and blood.

Seventeen others died in lesser simulations.

I can feel why.

But something inside me refuses.

A ripple behind my ribs. My mind clicks. My body remembers.

Not logic. Not training.

Lineage.

Patterns I’ve never practiced flood my limbs. Sword strikes from an ancestral well of war.

The air cracks with plasma arcs as I intercept the next blow, duck the next, counter before the third even begins.

The hunters close in. Faster. Smarter.

So do I.

Let’s see what else I can do.