In the freezing silence of Site-Stonehaven, the ARGUS Foundation loomed like a forgotten citadel—its walls thick with secrets, its corridors built not to keep things out… but to hold nightmares in.
Outside, the storm raged like a thing possessed. Trees bowed to the shrieking wind. Rain lashed against the windows like claws. But inside, the silence was worse.
Heavy. Watching.
As if the air itself held its breath.
Deep in the shadow-choked lower wings, something had begun to stir.
The Foundation had withstood countless breaches before. It had contained the uncontainable. Outlasted monsters that laughed at cages.
But this—this felt different.
A tremor whispered through the floor. Barely perceptible. Just enough to dim the lights. To make the machines hiccup.
A printer stuttered, then died. Papers fluttered to the ground like autumn leaves at a grave.
No alarm sounded. No voice heard.
Just a gut-deep wrongness.
Dr. Rhys Stane Moores felt it before he saw it.
Frozen at his desk. Fingers poised above the keyboard. His breath was held captive by the hush.
Then the second tremor. Sharper. Closer.
The overhead lights flickered red. A pulse. A warning.
He was on his feet the moment the intercom burst to life:
"All personnel, report to designated stations. Containment teams, standby for potential breach. Repeat—containment teams, standby."
Footsteps echoed down the corridor. Then—
A hand seized his arm. Tight. Urgent.
It was Dr. Rebecca Harker. Pale. Wild-eyed. Her lab coat soaked at the cuffs.
"Rhys…" she whispered. "Tell me this isn't what I think it is."
He opened his mouth to lie, to shape any word that might offer solace.
But the truth came instead:
"We need to get to the control room. Now."
The halls were alive with restrained panic. Security teams sprinted past. Researchers abandoned terminals. The sirens hadn't reached full pitch, but everyone felt it:
This wasn't a drill.
By the time they reached the control center, the tremors had become quakes.
Steel groaned. Consoles buzzed with static. The emergency lights blinked like a heartbeat unraveling.
And then the sirens wailed—long, low, and final.
Too late.
Ganymede stood at the helm. Still as iron.
Her black hair curtained her face—sharpened by tension, carved from resolve. Her eyes were locked on a wall of monitors, each one trembling with chaos.
"A Containment breach."
Her voice was calm. Absolute.
"Cell Block 2. Subject 004 has escaped."
Stane's stomach dropped.
He remembered the warnings. The restless debates. The ones who said it shouldn't be moved.
"You can't cage a storm," he muttered.
Ganymede didn't glance his way.
But she heard.
"Then you survive it."
A low, inhuman groan shuddered through the walls.
Not mechanical. Neither seismic.
Alive.
As if something massive was dragging itself through the bones of the facility.
"Activate emergency protocols ALPHA-9. I want this place in full total lockdown. All sectors—now!"
The response was swift. Steel gates slammed down across the site. Doors sealed. Barricades snapped into place.
But it kept coming.
Faster. Louder. Closer.
Then—on the monitors—they saw it.
A figure. Wreathed in smoke. Moving too fast for its size.
A pale face floated through the haze. Serene.
But the eyes—
The eyes were like molten coins. Unblinking. Burning. Wrong.
"Oh God," Rebecca whispered. "It's already here."
The hallway outside the control room thundered. The steel door shuddered beneath an impact that rattled teeth. Weapons lifted. Soldiers took aim. Another blow.
Then stillness.
Smoke seeped in under the threshold. Black and curling, alive with static.
From it, a hand emerged.
Small. Human.
A child's.
A boy—
He stood like a marionette on the edge of collapse—shoulders slack, his head tilted—
Then they snapped upright with a sickening series of cracks.
Bones shifted. Twisted. Reset.
One by one.
Not healed. Just—rearranged.
The sound was wrong. Wet and sharp. Like someone breaking twigs in a bowl of water.
He moved in a death trance, his limbs jerking in unnatural sync, his joints rotating with inhuman precision. Each step forward a grotesque rebirth.
Smoke clung to his feet as he entered fully, coiling up his legs like it worshipped him.
There was no expression. No pain.
Only eyes that watched.
Watched them scream inside their skulls.
Ganymede's breath hitched as she finally saw, really saw, what stood before her.
Not the boy.
What stepped from the smoke had the face of a child, yes. But delicate. Narrow. Not the square-jawed specimen they had catalogued and contained for months.
This one had shoulder-length hair matted with blood. One eye burned yellow. The other was torn open with glistening bone exposed, and muscle twitching beneath the ruin.
One arm hung ruined. Their shattered fingers twitching.
She stepped forward. Slowly. Calmly. Unhurried.
The others didn't see. Not yet. Paralyzed by fear. But Ganymede saw.
A pulse of silence struck her.
Her brain clicked back to the containment logs. The hundreds of surveillance hours. The profiles. The subject, she remembered, was infact a boy. A confirmed, catalogued boy.
So what was this?
Ganymede's mouth parted slightly.
She whispered to herself, unheard beneath the whine of sensors and the hiss of venting smoke.
This… this was—
Her voice barely moved past her lips:
"That's not 004."
The girl's gaze swept the room.
No confusion. No fear.
Just calculation.
Stane whispered, stunned:
"He's sizing us up…"
Ganymede spoke without turning.
"She. That's not the one we locked up."
And then—
The girl's fists clenched.
The lights died.
The air thickened.
Taiji light—black and crackling—rose around her like living smoke.
And the room erupted in gunfire.