"Hideous."
The word was the first thing she remembered. Not the light, not the faces, but that single, cleaving verdict.
Lady Kresnik. The silver-haired noble's lip had curled as if smelling rot. "Your son will be perfectly safe?" she had scoffed, cutting off Hephryx. "Look at her. That mouth could take a head clean off. My house will not be seen escorting a creature like that."
The memory was a bright, burning brand: the sterile exhibition hall, the pointing nobles, the collar meant for the chosen.
Hephryx, for once, had been speechless. Then, softly: "This… is her sister. D-67."
The woman's eyes—calculating, cold—had swept over the other girl. "Yes. This one will do."
They collared D-67. They led her away. She had the symmetry they valued. The softness they envied.
And D-66, the strongest they had ever built, was left standing. A hot, shameful coil of jealousy tightened in her gut.
For five years, she held onto a foolish hope. She was perfect. She was obedient. She was strong.
No one ever came for the hideous one.
That was before the coffin.
Before the rot.
Before the arena.
Before the hammer.
The past faded, the violent memories dissolving into a bright, humming white noise.
Then, silence. A profound, absolute quiet that pressed against her eardrums.
The roar of the crowd was gone. The clashing of steel, the screams, the terrifying footfalls—all vanished. The only sound remaining was the soft, wet slap of something viscous dripping onto the sand.
She blinked. Her vision, slow and tearing at the light, swam into focus.
The arena was a landscape of carnage, a tapestry woven from ruin. Mounds of twisted flesh and shattered armor lay scattered like discarded toys. The towering insect-man lay a few feet away, his massive carapace crushed inward like a dried leaf, his giant hammer snapped clean in two pieces. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed.
A strange vertigo took her. She realized she wasn't staring up at the empty sky from her back. She wasn't broken in the dirt, paralyzed and helpless.
She was looking down.
She stood upright.
Rigid and unharmed.
A monument of lethal stillness.
High above, the nobles were a frozen mosaic, their cheering mouths slack, their elegant hands suspended in mid-applause. Thousands of eyes stared down at her like they had just witnessed nature at its ugliest and most unstoppable.
A heavy, warm liquid ran over her fingers. Blood—thick, metallic, and sticky—dripped from her sharpened claws, pattering onto the sand. More smeared the torn corners of her mouth and chin.
It wasn't hers.
And as she stared at the crimson on her claws, the understanding came, colder than any metal.
The chill that descended on her was not the cold of the coffin, but the chilling realization of an absolute lack of control.
When the hammer struck, the violence had jolted her body's advanced healing mechanisms into frantic overdrive, instantly overcoming the paralysis of years. Her body was functional, but her mind had fragmented.
What rose was the Other.
It was pure, savage instinct, stripped of all thought, mercy, or restraint. This was the flaw Hephryx had warned of: when the system overloaded, cognition collapsed. Instinct filled the vacuum.
It could not be controlled.
She felt the phantom sensation of its work—the increased strength, the tearing, the hunger. She hadn't fought with skill; she had fought with brute, unstoppable need. Her jaw ached, as if she had bitten through something thick.
The once vibrant crowd—hungry for spectacle—was silent now.
Not in awe.
In trauma.
Their faces, usually fixed in smug, predatory smiles, were masks of shock. Their jewels gleamed, reflecting the bloody sand below, but their eyes held nothing but revulsion and sudden, profound fear.
That's right, filthy bastards.
Her breath came heavy, ragged, drawing the coppery scent of the massacre deep into her lungs.
I won.
The word echoed hollowly in her mind, divorced from the raw carnage surrounding her. The promise of freedom.
Will I really be free?
Or... it was just another lie?
The suffocating silence shattered.
A single, slow clap cut through the vast arena.
Hephryx's voice followed—bright, dangerously giddy.
"Do you see this?" he called, laughter bubbling beneath his words, echoing off the marble tiers. "This… is true beauty!"
He thrust a hand toward her, pride radiating from every movement—the same cruel, misguided pride she had sought fifteen years ago. It was a vile compliment, but it meant she had fulfilled his requirement.
Her head lowered on its own, a reflexive posture of subservience that she had not yet managed to purge.
Somewhere behind her, a gate—not the heavy iron of the storage cells, but a vast, carved portal—rumbled open. She turned, her eyes widening in disbelief.
It wasn't darkness waiting on the other side.
It was light. Bright, unfiltered daylight, shining through an open exit. A path to the outside.
She hesitated, her functional body suddenly frozen by the impossible realization. Her gaze flicked back to Hephryx.
"Go on," he said, his smile wide and genuine. "A promise is a promise, little one."
She took one slow, testing step toward the gate. Nothing happened. No shocks. No alarms. No chains dragging her in the dirt.
So she walked faster. Every step was a terrifying defiance of the laws of her existence.
Then faster.
Her eyes stayed locked on the square of blinding white light, fixed on the absolute notion of outside. She broke into a run—a clumsy, powerful sprint across the blood-soaked sand.
A man stepped through the light.
He was a silhouette against the sun, massive and sudden. She skidded to a halt, scattering sand, her heart slamming against her ribs with the force of a hammer.
He stood exactly in the center of her freedom.
Exactly where he shouldn't be.
He was tall, imposing, and wrapped in a heavy, slate-colored coat that swayed with the deliberate weight of concealed armor. His eyes, the color of storm-gray iron, swept slowly over the arena's carnage—the mounds of shattered flesh and metal—without a single flicker of surprise or revulsion.
Hephryx's voice cut in behind her, crisp and unnervingly courteous. "My apologies for bothering you with this small cleanup, Strategoi Fenric."
A Strategoi.
The name, snatched years ago from the guards' careless whispers, thrummed with dangerous significance. They were the apex of magic: only those with an overwhelming Domain and sage-level mastery of at least two Patterns could ever earn the title. They were calamities in human form. She didn't understand the esoteric nonsense of Domains and Patterns, but she understood the threat.
Magic was the one flaw in her design, the one threat she had no answer for, no matter how powerful her body was. It was the only reason she hadn't escaped the complex years ago. Cheaters. All of them.
Up close, she took him in. Only human. And yet… utterly daunting.
Every movement, every deliberate breath, seemed to claim the arena itself, bending the air to his will. The space around him pressed against her senses, demanding her attention, radiating a cold authority that dwarfed Hephryx's own.
A primal shiver threaded down her spine.
No hesitation. Not now. He was the last barrier. Once she slipped past him, no one—not the nobles, not Hephryx—could stop her.
She bolted towards him.
A flicker—light the color of storm-gray iron—crackled beside him. A spear materialized out of nothing, too fast for even her reflexive speed to register.
It struck.
Warmth spilled down her legs—hot, sudden, terrifyingly wrong.
She looked down.
The spear hadn't been thrown; it had simply manifested inside her. Half her stomach, cleanly excised, was gone.
She snarled, the sound choked and wet, and lashed out with her right arm, aiming a killing blow at his head.
Her hand connected—and her arm exploded.
Bone and flesh burst like fragile crystal, disintegrating into a cloud of crimson vapor. The impact didn't feel like striking a man's body; it felt like slamming into an unyielding, enchanted stone idol. The sudden, absolute resistance shredded her enhanced cohesion.
White-hot pain flared through every screaming nerve.
Before she could even stagger back, his free hand—impossibly quick—closed around her throat.
He lifted her. She felt completely weightless, suspended over the bloody sand.
Her heart dropped into the hollow where her stomach had been.
Her body convulsed violently, trembling as the severed tissues tried to knit themselves together. Her healing—usually a violent snap of regenerated flesh—was strangely slowed, as if time itself had thickened and coagulated around the torn, bubbling edges of her wounds.
A sword—clean, sharp, and silent—shimmered into existence in his free hand.
She stared down into his storm-gray eyes. Hatred had no room in the suffocating reality of this moment—only a flicker of something small, frail, and pleading.
"Your pain ends," Strategoi Fenric said, his voice level, utterly devoid of emotion or triumph.
The words, instead of offering peace, ignited a final, savage panic.
Her heart began to pound—not with the steady rhythm of survival, but with a frantic, desperate hammering. Her body convulsed, finally overcoming the dampening effect of his power. She strained, her torso arching, her mouth stretching into a deafening, raw shriek of pure terror and denial.
The silver flash of the blade was the last thing she saw.
The strike was absolute.
Her body fell.
Her head did not.
He held it in his hand.
The once silent crowd erupted. Cheers, roars, a tidal wave of sound barely reaching her fading senses. Celebrating the absolute finality of her defeat.
The world went dark.
Silence.
Emptiness.
A weightless void where even pain had finally gone quiet. The cessation was absolute, a perfect peace she had never known.
Then—
a voice split the nothing, its edges crackling with a faint, static texture, like dry ice scraping across metal:
N̷o̷t̷ ̷y̷e̷t̷.
N̴o̴t̴ ̴y̴e̴t̴.
A shadow flickered within the void. Green eyes—sharp, fleeting, and unnervingly familiar—glowed against the dark, vanishing before she could grasp the image.
Light exploded behind her eyes. It burned—sharp, merciless, a shattering migraine hurting more than the darkness ever had. She didn't know why she was weeping.
The sensation was foreign. Illogical.
Yet she couldn't stop the hot tracks flowing down her cheeks.
Air dragged into her lungs like fire, forcing an agonizing cough. The lungs seized—small, weak, and utterly unfamiliar. The heavy, ragged breathing of the arena was gone.
She could move, but the body didn't follow the way it should. Her limbs felt too light, responding sluggishly to the neural commands. Her mouth was tight and soft, as if someone had sewn the shape of it differently—a weak, pliant construction.
This isn't my body.
The realization was immediate, terrifying. Her own thoughts flickered through this strange vessel in jagged, distorted bursts. They were hers, the core logic intact, but the sensations were alien.
She was dead. She had seen the flash, felt the silence. She had achieved the one thing she never thought possible: rest. And now—here? Trapped again?
Everything blurred—the shapes smearing, the colors bleeding and swimming together—until suddenly, they snapped into focus with brutal clarity.
"Give her to me," a gentle voice murmured nearby.
Arms shifted. The woman holding her—sharp, efficient, and smelling faintly of disinfectant—passed her into someone else's embrace.
It was warm—not stale arena air, not cold metal, but something alive. The softness of the fabric, the gentle heat of the skin beneath, was overwhelming.
She blinked through the tears the unfamiliar body produced.
A face swam into view.
Silver hair cascading like threads of moonlight.
Eyes soft—unbelievably soft, rimmed with the redness of exhaustion.
A smile trembling on the edge of collapse, filled with something she had never once received in all her years of obedience and combat:
Tenderness.
"Congratulations, my lady," the midwife said, her voice receding into the distance.
The woman gathered Elma close, breath uneven, her body still shaking from the immense strain of childbirth.
"Shhh, shhh… my little heart," she whispered, her voice a soft, steady rhythm against the cries. Her thumb stroked a damp cheek, her own eyes shining with tears. "You're here. You're finally here. It's alright. I've got you."
Elma—
The name, spoken by this exhausted, silver-haired woman, landed with the shock of impact. It wasn't D-66. It was a soft, civilian designation.
Something inside Elma cracked open.
She cried harder—raw, ripping sobs torn from somewhere deep inside her. The sound was unfamiliar, high-pitched, and pathetic. She tried to choke them back; crying was weakness.
But those words, spoken with such unreserved tenderness, struck harder than any blade ever could. They shattered the carefully built defenses of the executed weapon.
She slowly gave in. Her tiny, useless fingers curled into the smooth fabric of the woman's robe, clinging as if the warm, new world might disappear again if she let go. For the first time, the D-66 consciousness sought refuge, not power.
The woman laughed softly. "It's alright. Everything is alright." She pressed her cheek gently to Elma's.
The sterile quiet of the chamber was abruptly broken. The polished wooden door slid open with a soft scrape. A figure swept in, draped in fine, slate-colored lace, moving with the cold, deliberate grace of high nobility.
A familiar voice cut through the quiet. It was roughened by time, altered by age, yet utterly unmistakable: Lady Kresnik.
"She's beautiful, Christa." The tone was warm. Proud. Calculated.
Christa, cradling Elma, looked up and laughed lightly. "Thank you, Mother."
Mother.
Her mother's mother. The source of the rejection that defined her death.
The older woman stepped closer, carrying a complex scent. Over the powder and perfume, there was a faint, sharp undertone that Elma knew too well. Blood. It wrapped around her, stark and sharp in Elma's sensitive newborn nose.
"Let me take a good look at her," Lady Kresnik said, reaching out a long, impeccably manicured finger to touch the baby's pale cheek.
Instinct surged. Elma clamped her toothless gums around the probing fingers with all her newborn strength.
Lady Kresnik drew back, a flicker of genuine surprise crossing her harsh features. "Oh?" she murmured, inspecting the faint, saliva-wet pressure mark on her finger. "Quite the feral little one. Takes after her father, I see."
But beneath the haze of her newborn mind, something colder slid through her consciousness—a voice with no breath, no sound.
That voice again, threaded with static, as if it had always been part of her:
N̷o̷w̷ ̷y̷o̷u̷ ̷h̷o̷l̷d̷ ̷y̷o̷u̷r̷ ̷e̷n̷d̷ ̷o̷f̷ ̷t̷h̷e̷ ̷d̷e̷a̷l̷.
N̴o̴w̴ ̴y̴o̴u̴ ̴h̴o̴l̴d̴ ̴y̴o̴u̴r̴ ̴e̴n̴d̴ ̴o̴f̴ ̴t̴h̴e̴ ̴d̴e̴a̴l̴.
The presence vanished—but the command remained, etched into her core like a brand.
WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING ?