The Côte d'Azur was a corpse wearing a faded mask of beauty. The sapphire waters of the Mediterranean now had a sickly, greyish tint, and the famed beaches were littered with the bleached skeletons of pre-fall luxury and the more recent, sun-blackened remains of the infected. Nestled into the cliffs near a ghost town once called Antibes was a facility that mirrored the sea's deceptive nature. From the outside, it was a ruin, a shattered concrete bunker. But deep within the limestone, it thrived—a sterile, white, multi-leveled laboratory dedicated to the Architect's most esoteric and cruel biological research.
Tonight, it was dying.
The death began silently. The external sensors didn't fail; they simply reported nothing, as if the world outside had ceased to exist. The first guard on the internal perimeter died without a sound, his neck snapped by a force that left no mark, his body arranged almost neatly against a wall. The second died as he rounded a corner, a blade of solidified darkness piercing his forehead so precisely it didn't even scrape the bone of his cranial plate.
Alarms finally blared when the third patrol found the bodies. They were too late. The killer was already a ghost in the machine, a rumor of violence that flowed through the ventilation shafts and sterile corridors faster than any alert.
He was a study in efficient butchery. He didn't use the world-ending fire he was known for. This was a quieter, more intimate work. He used the Umbralite bat, its dark form a blur that left behind shattered bodies and pulverized bone. He used his hands, fingers rigid like steel spikes, piercing armor and flesh with contemptuous ease. He used the environment, turning surgical tools into projectiles, using control consoles as bludgeons.
He moved with a purpose, a shark driving relentlessly towards a specific scent. He bypassed holding cells filled with weeping subjects, ignored data servers brimming with priceless research. His goal was not liberation or information. It was acquisition.
The final door stood before him. It was not like the tungsten bunker; it was something else. A circular vault of a shimmering, silver-blue alloy, humming with a low, psionic frequency designed to pacify and contain whatever was inside. This was Prime 2's personal project. A cell for his magnum opus.
Wolfen placed his palm against the cool metal. He didn't try to break it. He simply stood there, his own immense psionic presence—a roaring inferno to the door's gentle hum—reaching out, not to smash, but to understand. He found the frequency, the resonant key. With a subtle push of will, he didn't break the lock; he persuaded it to turn.
The door hissed, not with the sound of releasing pressure, but with the sigh of a tomb being opened after millennia. A wave of frigid air washed out, so cold it made the moisture in the corridor crystallize and fall as a fine, glittering snow.
He stepped inside.
The chamber was vast and circular, the walls the same silver-blue alloy. The air was perfectly still and so cold it burned the lungs. The only light came from the center of the room, where a woman was suspended in a complex web of energy fields.
Her name was Selene.
And she was the most terrifyingly beautiful thing Wolfen had ever seen.
She looked like a statue carved from living moonlight and frost. Her skin was not pale, but truly translucent, like the heart of a millennia-old glacier, revealing faint, intricate networks of silver veins that pulsed with a soft, internal luminescence. Her hair was not hair at all, but a cascade of fine, crystalline filaments that shimmered like spun diamond dust, moving in an unseen current as if underwater. Her features were achingly perfect, sharp and elegant, but utterly devoid of warmth or emotion. Her eyes were closed, but the lids themselves were the color of frozen violets, dusted with a faint sparkle of ice.
She was clad in a simple, shift-like gown of a material that seemed to be woven from solidified mist. She was Absolute Zero given form. Not just cold, but the utter and complete absence of heat, of life, of motion. She was a perfect, frozen moment.
Wolfen approached, his boots leaving no sound on the frosted floor. The energy field around her hummed, a cage of pure force designed to keep her power contained and her mind in a state of docile stasis. He could feel the potential locked within her, a reservoir of cryogenic power so vast it could flash-freeze an ocean.
He didn't speak. He simply reached out with his mind, a scalpel of pure will, and severed the primary conduits of the containment field.
The hum died. The light flickered and went out.
Selene's eyes opened.
They were not human eyes. They were pools of liquid mercury, swirled with veins of deepest sapphire. There was no pupil, no iris, just a shifting, molten metal gaze that saw the world not in light, but in thermal gradients and the cessation of energy. Those eyes fixed on Wolfen.
For a moment, there was nothing. A perfect, empty calm. Then, the temperature in the room plummeted further. Rime flash-froze across the walls. The very air began to crystallize. A whisper of power escaped her, and the surgical steel tray next to Wolfen shattered into a million brittle fragments, not from impact, but from instantaneous thermal contraction.
She floated down, her bare feet touching the frosted floor without a sound. She looked at her hands, then at him. Her voice, when it came, was the sound of ancient ice cracking over a deep, dark lake. It was soft, yet it carried the weight of absolute finality.
"Who are you?"
"I am the one who opened the cage," Wolfen replied, his own voice calm, a rock in the face of her glacial presence.
"Why?"
"To offer you a choice."
Her mercury eyes narrowed. The air around her began to shimmer, a heat-haze in reverse, as she drew the ambient thermal energy into herself. "I have no need for choices. I am perfection. I am an end."
"You are a weapon," Wolfen corrected, his tone that of a lecturer stating a simple fact. "Forged by Prime 2. A masterpiece of cryogenic annihilation. But a weapon, nonetheless. A tool in someone else's hand."
He took a step closer, ignoring the deadly cold that sought to invade his cells. "Look around you, Selene. Look at this room. This is not a throne. It is a display case. You were not created to rule, or to live. You were created to be used. To be pointed at a target and unleashed. And when your purpose was served, you would have been returned here. To this perfect, silent, frozen hell. To wait for the next time your masters needed a catastrophe."
He gestured to the door, to the carnage beyond. "I have just killed every single one of the men who built this cage for you. The guards who watched you sleep. The technicians who monitored your vital signs as if you were a machine. They are all dead."
For the first time, a flicker of something other than absolute cold passed through her metallic eyes. Confusion. A tremor in the perfect ice.
"You… killed them?"
"I am killing all of them," Wolfen stated, his gaze holding hers, a vortex of fire meeting a void of ice. "Every Architect. Every Prime. I am burning their world down. And I am offering you the chance to light the match."
He saw it then. The crack in the glacier. The tiny, almost imperceptible flaw in Prime 2's "perfection." She had not been created without a sense of self. She had been created with one, and then buried under layers of conditioning and isolation. He wasn't building a new loyalty; he was excavating an old, buried rage.
"They did this to you," he whispered, his voice a hypnotic, insidious thing that slithered through the cracks in her psyche. "They took whatever you were and turned you into this. A living weapon. A frozen heart. They stole your past, your future, your very warmth. They left you with nothing but this cold, empty power and a cage to practice it in."
He took another step, now within arm's reach. The cold radiating from her was agonizing, but he showed no sign of it. "You can stay here. In this perfect, silent room. Or you can come with me. You can use this magnificent, terrible power they gave you. Not on their command. But for your own vengeance. You can look Prime 2 in his many eyes and show him what happens when Absolute Zero decides to thaw."
He let the silence stretch, the offer hanging in the supercooled air like a shard of poisoned glass.
Selene was still. The crystalline filaments of her hair settled. The shimmering aura of cold receded, pulling back into her translucent skin. Her mercury eyes were unreadable.
"And if I refuse?" she asked, her voice still cold, but now laced with a new, dangerous curiosity.
"Then you are of no use to me," Wolfen said, his tone shifting from persuasion to a flat, terrifying finality. The air around him began to warp, not with cold, but with heat. A faint, white nimbus of flame flickered at his fingertips. "And a weapon I cannot wield is a weapon I cannot allow to remain in play. I will not return you to your cage, Selene. I will simply unmake you. It will be a warmer death than you have ever known."
It was not a request. It was the final move in a game of psychological chess he had already won. He had presented her with two paths: a glorious, vengeful purpose, or a swift and total annihilation. He had validated her power, stoked her buried resentment, and then backed it with a threat so absolute it mirrored her own nature.
She looked from his burning hands to his cold, certain eyes. She saw no lie there. No hesitation. Only the truth. He would kill her if she refused. And the part of her that was more than a weapon, the part that remembered what it was to have a choice, found the idea of being "unmade" by this man… preferable to an eternity in the silent cold.
The last of the resistance melted away. The glacier did not crack; it calved, a monumental piece breaking off to reveal the raging, dark water beneath.
"Vengeance," she said, the word a puff of frozen vapor.
Wolfen's fiery nimbus vanished. He gave a single, slow nod. "Vengeance."
He turned and walked towards the shattered doorway, not looking back. He didn't need to. He heard the soft, almost silent crunch of her frozen footsteps following him. The scent of frost and ozone trailed in her wake.
As they stepped over the bodies of the Architects he had slain, Wolfen allowed himself a fraction of a second of satisfaction. The Queen was a sword of chaos. Elijah was a hammer of wrath. And now, he had acquired a scalpel of absolute zero.
The board was taking shape. The pieces were moving into position. And in the silent, frozen heart of the woman who followed him, Wolfen Welfric had just planted a seed of hatred that would one day blossom into a winter that would consume a god.