The man's cold fury snapped into something worse: a gleaming, triumphant cruelty. The sterile lab lights made his steel eyes look like chips of ice.
"You think you are powerful?" he said, his voice dropping to a venomous whisper. "You are a storm. Impressive. Uncontrolled. I am the architect. I build channels for storms. I build cages."
He didn't move. He didn't raise a weapon. He simply tapped a command into the floating panel of light.
The room changed.
The seamless grey walls and floor shimmered. From them, thin lines of brilliant blue light erupted, racing across the surfaces in a complex, dizzying pattern. They formed a perfect circle on the floor around Kaito and a matching dome in the air above him. The hum in the room shifted from a low drone to a piercing, high-frequency whine that vibrated in his teeth.
A containment field. Not magical. Something else. Technological, precise, and humming with a power that felt like it could cut the soul.
"You are a source," the man said, walking slowly around the outside of the glowing blue cage. "A font of chaotic, adaptive energy. I saw it in the data from the Hive Queen's final strike. I see it radiating from you now. Your very presence warps local reality. It is messy. Inefficient. But potent."
He stopped, a mad, proud light in his eyes. "My prototypes—the wolves, the Heart of the Abyss—they were just shadows. Echoes of your power that leaked into the world and that I... refined. But they were copies of copies. Weak."
He gestured, and a section of the wall slid open. Beyond it, Kaito could see a vast, dark chamber. Inside, hooked to pulsing machines by tubes and wires, were shapes. Monstrous, shifting forms in giant glass tanks. They were half-formed, nightmares made flesh, their bodies swirling with familiar, chaotic energy.
"My new generation," the man breathed, his voice full of horrible love. "Born not from echoes, but from the source itself. I will tap your aura. I will drain that boundless, chaotic power directly. I will filter it. Focus it. Give it purpose."
He turned back to Kaito, a wide, chilling smile on his face. "I will create monsters that don't just mimic your power. They will be your power. They will have your adaptability. Your immortality. But they will have my mind. My will."
He leaned close to the shimmering blue barrier, his reflection distorted in its light. "You wanted to clean up the mess? You wanted to be the warden? Good. You can watch from your cage as I unleash your own power upon the world. An army of Kaitos, loyal only to me."
The man laughed then, a dry, cracking sound that held no joy, only a vast and terrible ambition.
"Hahaha... Hahaha! They will be perfect. And you... you will be the battery that makes them eternal."
Kaito stood in the center of the blue cage, the Leviathan Staff cold in his hand. The man wasn't trying to kill him. He was trying to farm him. To turn his very nature into a weapon. For the first time, his infinite power felt not like a burden, but like a resource about to be strip-mined. And the cage around him hummed with a science he did not understand.
The Architect's smile was a slash of triumph in the sterile light. He tapped another command.
The air behind him wavered. Not like the silver Door to the Blightscar. This was different. It was a tear that bled color, a wound in reality that showed not another place, but a non-place. A swirling vortex of muted greys and silent, lightning-like flashes of stolen energy—Leviathan bone mana. His pocket dimension.
"Observe," the Architect said, his voice vibrating with fanatical pride.
Through the tear, Kaito saw them.
A vast, grey plain stretched into a formless horizon. And on it, things moved. Dozens of them. They were humanoid, like him. Their forms were made of shifting, unstable material—sometimes stone, sometimes slime, sometimes cracking energy. They were crude, unfinished copies. Kaito's Copies.
And they were fighting.
Two copies clashed in the distance. One swung an arm that hardened into a spike of jagged crystal. The other absorbed the blow, its form rippling, then shot back a spray of corrosive shadow. They were using his powers. Terrakinesis. Energy Siphon. Adaptive shifting. But clumsily, wildly, like children smashing with stolen tools.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" the Architect whispered, his eyes glued to the violent ballet. "They learn. They adapt from each other. Just like you. But here, in my garden, their adaptations are harvested."
As the copies fought, Kaito could see it. Thin, almost invisible strands of energy—their energy, his energy—were being pulled from them as they clashed. The violent bursts of omni-elemental power, the frantic adaptive shifts, all of it was siphoned away by the hungry grey atmosphere of the pocket dimension. The energy flowed like glowing rivers towards a central point in the distance, a throbbing, placental mass of concentrated power.
"That is the Crucible," the Architect said, pointing to the pulsing mass. "Their fight is the fuel. Their copied adaptations are the recipe. And from that chaos, I distill purity. I create the next step."
As they watched, the central mass convulsed. A shape pulled itself free from the morass. It was not a crude copy. It was something else. Sleeker. More defined. It had four arms, each ending in a different elemental focus—flame, stone, crackling void, and shimmering light. Its eyes glowed with a cold, unified intelligence the copies lacked.
"A Synthesis," the Architect announced. "Born from the combined, refined data of a thousand copied fights. It possesses their adaptive traits, but optimized. Consolidated. It is beyond the copies. And soon," his steel gaze cut back to Kaito, trapped in the blue cage, "it will be beyond you. For I will feed it not just copied power, but the original source. Your essence. The final ingredient for a true, flawless evolution."
He was using Kaito's own nature—the adaptation, the endless growth from conflict—against him. The pocket dimension was a farm. The copies were livestock, fighting to produce richer milk. And the Syntheses were the product, being bred to become something that could surpass the original.
The Architect wasn't just building an army of Kaitos.
He was building an army of better Kaitos. And he was going to use Kaito himself to finish the job.