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The twins, the blonde boy, and the girl—
Everyone froze.
They couldn't understand what had just happened.
Blood splattered across the floor, painting it a deep, unnatural red. The walls wore streaks of it like some grotesque masterpiece—eerie, yet mesmerizing in its horror.
Stella closed her eyes.
She had betrayed them, yes. But now, seeing this… she regretted it.
Better to die than live like this.
Whether it was the last shred of humanity or simply the exhaustion of giving up, no one would ever know.
She lunged forward, toward the man in the white suit seated in the center chair.
Someone tried to stop her.
"No!" she screamed. "I don't want this! It's wrong—everything I did was wrong! Stop it!"
Her voice broke into a desperate cry, but it changed nothing. What was done could not be undone.
The blonde boy's eyes followed her. So did the man in black.
The man in white simply lifted his hand.
The guards forced her down. She thrashed, screamed, bit—anything to break free.
He didn't speak.
A flick of his fingers was enough.
A blade kissed her throat.
Her body fell. Blood spread beneath her in a dark halo.
The blonde boy didn't flinch.
No one did.
No one thought she deserved it. No one thought she didn't.
They simply… thought nothing.
They all knew it was their turn next.
And when you don't know if you'll live to see the next minute, why waste your last moments screaming over someone else's death?
The men in black moved forward, dragging the twins and the blonde boy upright.
Torture.
Beatings.
Humiliation.
And then—worse.
The man in white rose from his blood-painted throne.
The red dripping from its edges gleamed under the light, a quiet reminder of the dozens—hundreds—who had sat before him only to vanish.
He took a syringe from one of his men, flicked it once, and pressed the plunger just enough for a bead of liquid to bloom at the tip.
It caught the light like a drop of mercury.
He didn't speak. He didn't need to.
First, the boy.
The needle slid into his neck—smooth, deliberate.
A heartbeat later, his eyes widened.
Breath caught in his throat.
Then—
The memories came.
Not in sequence. Not in order.
They slammed into him all at once, like shards of glass driven into his skull.
Every moment of fear. Every scream he had swallowed. Every hand that had struck him. Every night curled in cold darkness wishing for an end.
They weren't just replayed. They were louder. Sharper. Rewritten to be worse than they had ever been.
It was as if the world itself wanted him to believe he had never known a single safe moment in his life.
Then Leya.
The cold sting.
The burning rush.
And then—
Her own mind turned against her.
Faces she once trusted warped into sneering masks.
Kind words twisted into threats.
Her own voice—begging, crying—echoed inside her skull, overlapping until she couldn't tell which memory was real and which had been born of the injection.
She tried to claw at her own head, to rip the noise out, but her body wouldn't listen.
Elen last.
The liquid flooded through their veins, heavy and fast.
At first, it was silence.
Then the silence broke—shattered—
And every suppressed feeling came flooding back, raw and jagged.
The sound of chains dragging across stone.
The smell of rotting wood and damp floors.
The taste of blood in her mouth from nights she couldn't remember.
At first, nothing moved.
Then the air began to breathe.
The walls of the room twisted, bending inward like they were made of wet paper. The blood on the floor rippled, spreading into black pools that reflected faces—her face—only the eyes were gone.
The ceiling sank lower, warped into jagged ribs of some enormous beast. Shadows peeled themselves from the corners and crawled toward her, their arms stretching impossibly long, fingertips brushing her ankles.
The others were gone—no, they were still there, but their shapes blurred, melting at the edges until she couldn't tell where their bodies ended and the darkness began.
The man in white sat in his chair, but his face was wrong—shifting, sliding out of focus. One moment he had no mouth, the next, too many.
His pulse roared in her ears. His vision bled red.
He didn't think—he moved.
His body surged forward, teeth bared, ready to tear his throat out—anything to make it stop.
And beneath it all, a voice that wasn't his whispered—no, ordered:
You are nothing. You were always nothing. This is who you are.
The guards didn't need to hold them down anymore; their own bodies were heavy with something worse than restraint.
The man in white stepped back, admiring them the way one might admire a painting just completed.
Three living, breathing weapons—built from their own nightmares.
Elen thought, We're dying anyway.
But death wasn't coming—not yet.
He moved, lunging at the man, biting into flesh.
Leya was still hallucinating when she saw her brother moving forward, with no thought she moved just as fast to hold the man's arm to stop him.
Leya grabbed his arm, holding him back.
The blonde boy saw them through the haze of pain. And for the first time, he moved—not away from the guards, but toward them.
His eyes locked on something glinting in the man's pocket.
He knew.
With one swift motion, he pulled it free, wrapped his arms around Ellen and Leya, and drove the blade home—into himself.
Blood poured down his chest.
His eyes rolled back.
The walls stopped moving.
The shadows froze.
The man's face snapped back into focus.
It was over.
Too real.
Blood spilled down the boy's chest as his knees buckled, dragging them both down with him.
Their screams became something primal, raw—pure rage and grief twisted together.
The room became normal again, hallucinations broken but....it was no use anymore.
The hallucination was gone—
and reality was so much worse.
The men in black pinned them to the ground, but they didn't care. All they could see was the boy—the boy who had never spoken, who had given them a reason to live—bleeding out before their eyes.
And they could do nothing.
Please… somebody… help him, they begged in their minds. If not us, at least him.
The man in white pressed a cloth to his bitten arm, then looked down at them with a smile.
"I succeeded," he murmured. "Three experiments… all perfect."
His gaze slid back to the dying boy.
"Guess I'll only need to show them the other two," he said, laughing. "I knew I could do it."
And then—
Thud!!!...
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