Xenon woke to silence.
Not the peaceful kind—no birds, no wind, no distant hum of a living world—but the dead silence that pressed against the skull like deep water. It was the kind of quiet that suggested abandonment, the aftermath of something that had already screamed itself hoarse and left nothing behind.
For a long moment, there was nothing else. No memory. No pain. No sense of time.
He felt like a completely blank slate.
Then sensation returned all at once.
Cold first—absolute, invasive cold—
followed by weight. His chest felt heavy, as if something unfamiliar had settled inside him and refused to leave. His fingers twitched, slow and uncertain, scraping against a metallic surface beneath him. The sound echoed sharply, too loud in the empty space.
Xenon inhaled.
The breath hitched.
Air burned its way into lungs that did not remember how to function. He coughed violently, convulsing, a harsh mechanical sound tearing from his throat as his body relearned something it had once done effortlessly. With every cough came flashes—fractured images that vanished before he could grasp them. Fire. Screaming. A sky that had turned the wrong color.
Then—darkness again.
Not unconsciousness. Awareness.
Something was there now.
Not a voice. Not quite. More like pressure, like a presence leaning close enough that he could feel it without seeing it.
SYSTEM INTEGRATION COMPLETE.
SUBJECT: XENON
STATUS: TERMINATED — REINSTATED
Xenon's eyes snapped open.
Light stabbed into him, harsh and white. His pupils constricted painfully as his vision struggled to adjust. Above him stretched a ceiling of cracked concrete and rusted beams, veins of old wiring hanging like dead nerves. Fluorescent panels flickered weakly, some shattered entirely, others humming with unstable life.
He lay on a platform—steel, cold, stained dark with something that had soaked in long ago. Restraints lay open at his sides, snapped apart as if they'd never stood a chance.
He sat up too fast.
The world tilted. His stomach churned, though it felt strangely… empty. Not hunger. Not sickness. Something deeper. An absence.
He pressed a hand to his chest.
His heart was beating—but not like it should.
It was steady. Too steady. Each thump perfectly spaced, perfectly controlled, as if regulated by something other than flesh.
Memory seeped back in fragments.
The end of the world had not come quietly.
No meteor. No warning sirens that mattered. Just a virus—fast, aggressive, merciless. It spread through air and touch, unraveling humanity at the cellular level. Cities fell in weeks. Governments in days.
Most people died.
Some didn't.
Before the collapse—before anyone understood what was happening—a vaccine had circulated. No manufacturer. No origin. It appeared in clinics, relief camps, black markets. Some called it a miracle. Others called it a scam.
Those who took it survived.
Not untouched—but alive.
The virus still burned through the world, reanimating the dead into twisted mockeries of humanity. Corpses that walked. Bodies that hunted. Zombies, the old word clung to the horror because nothing new could quite capture it.
Years passed.
And then something else began to happen.
Nanites.
Machines so small they bordered on myth. They appeared in corpses that had been dead too long to save. They stripped away the virus cell by cell, rebuilt tissue, rewired nerves. They did not resurrect people as they were.
They changed them.
The resurrected were faster. Stronger. Sharper. Some developed abilities that bent reality in subtle, terrifying ways. No one knew where the nanites came from. No one knew why they chose who they chose.
But when they were done, the resurrected were no longer civilians.
They were soldiers.
Xenon staggered off the platform, boots hitting the concrete floor with a dull clang. His legs held him easily—too easily. There was no weakness, no atrophy, no tremor that should have followed death.
Two years.
That was how long Xenon had been dead.
The name surfaced unbidden, heavy with something that hurt to touch. Xenon. A life before. A man who had died screaming in the early days of the apocalypse, when hope still existed and made everything worse.
A Terminator was what remained.
A designation. A function.
A tool.
A terminal on the far wall flickered to life as he approached, responding to something he hadn't consciously done. Lines of pale text scrolled across the cracked screen.
TERMINATION SYSTEM — ONLINE
OBJECTIVE: ERADICATION OF INFECTED ENTITIES
PROGRESSION METHOD: CONFIRMED TERMINATIONS
Xenon frowned.
Progression.
The word sent a pulse through his chest—there, that absence stirring.
NOTICE:
Growth is contingent on lethal engagement.
No kills. No evolution.
The meaning landed with brutal clarity.
To become stronger—to survive—he would have to kill.
Not metaphorically. Not eventually.
Directly.
Deliberately.
A cold understanding settled over him, disturbingly calm. Fear tried to rise and failed. Whatever the nanites had done, they had sanded down the sharpest edges of panic, leaving focus behind.
Another line of text appeared.
ABILITY UNLOCKED: KINETIC PULSE (TIER I)
DESCRIPTION: Short-range release of compressed force.
WARNING: Limited usage. Cooldown enforced.
Xenon lifted his hand experimentally.
The air around his palm tightened.
Not visibly—no glow, no spectacle—but he felt it, like pressure building beneath his skin. On instinct, he thrust his hand forward.
The concrete wall across the room exploded.
Not outward—inward. A concussive blast slammed into it, pulverizing stone and rebar in a perfect circular pattern. Dust and debris rained down, the echo thunderous in the enclosed space.
Xenon stared at his hand.
A slow, dangerous thrill crept through him.
Power.
Raw, undeniable power.
Before he could dwell on it, something clattered behind him.
He turned.
Leaning against a weapons rack—miraculously intact—was a blade.
Not a sword. Not a knife.
Something in between.
The metal was dark, almost matte, etched with faint lines that pulsed once as he approached, responding to him. When he wrapped his fingers around the hilt, the weapon woke up.
WEAPON ACQUIRED: NULL EDGE
COMPATIBILITY: MINIMAL
NOTE: Weapon efficiency scales with user progression.
The blade hummed softly, vibrating at a frequency he felt in his bones. It was light. Perfectly balanced. When he swung it experimentally, the air split with a whispering sound, like reality itself stepping aside.
Xenon exhaled slowly.
Ability. Weapon.
A system that rewarded violence.
Somewhere beyond the ruined facility, the world waited—rotting cities, wandering dead, fortified human enclaves clinging to survival. The resurrected like him were ranked, categorized, monitored. He could feel it now, just beyond reach—a hierarchy he had not yet been allowed to see.
Not yet.
First, he had to prove he belonged.
The terminal chimed again.
INITIAL TARGET DESIGNATED.
LOCATION: SECTOR GREY-9
ENTITY TYPE: AWAKENED INFECTED
THREAT LEVEL: UNKNOWN
A grainy image resolved on the screen.
Tall. Wrongly proportioned. Eyes glowing faintly in the dark.
Xenon tightened his grip on the Null Edge.
Somewhere in the ruins, something waited to die.
And with its death—
He would grow.