The silence in the vast, white chamber was not peaceful. It was the tense, humming quiet of a bowstring drawn taut, waiting for the release. Hundreds of souls, freshly scraped out from ninety days of personalized hell, stood blinking in the diffuse, sourceless light. The air smelled of antiseptic and a newer, sharper scent—collective, raw fear.
Derek was on his knees, his body trembling with a weakness that was more spiritual than physical. The memory of the void, of the accusing whispers, was a fresh brand on his mind. His eyes found his friends, his anchor points in this sea of white insanity. Leo stood a few feet away, his posture rigid, the usual cocky set of his jaw replaced by a grim, hollowed-out line. He looked like a man who had been forced to look into a mirror and see a monster staring back. Jordan was a statue of controlled fury, his hands flexing at his sides as if missing the weight of his katana. His gaze was fixed on some middle distance, replaying the horrific calculus of lives he'd been forced to take.
And then there was Maya.
She had collapsed, her body giving out not from a single injury, but from a systemic failure of spirit. Eva was there in an instant, catching her, lowering her gently to the floor. Eva's movements were efficient, her strength evident, but her face, for the first time, showed a crack in its stoic armor—a flicker of profound pity.
"They put something… inside me," Maya whispered, the confession a ragged, broken thing. Her hands fluttered weakly towards her abdomen, then fell back, as if she couldn't bear to touch the place of her violation.
Eva's arm tightened around her shoulders. "I know," she said, her voice low and grim. "The Regulators. I've seen it before." Her eyes, those strange, perceptive eyes, held a depth of understanding that was both comforting and terrifying. She knew the extent of the horror, which meant it was a common, catalogued procedure in this hell.
Derek and Leo moved closer, forming a shaky, protective circle around the two girls. Jordan took a step, positioning himself at their flank, his body a shield. The unspoken question hung in the air between them: What now?
The answer came from the walls themselves.
The same sterile, genderless voice that had narrated their torment echoed through the chamber, calm and utterly devoid of emotion. It was the voice of a god announcing the weather on the day of Armageddon.
"Subject cohort assembled. Total count: one hundred and fifty-six. Survival parameters have been updated. The path to ascension requires culling. The strong will be refined. The weak will be recycled."
A beat of dead, chilling silence.
"The trial commences now."
For a long, suspended moment, nothing happened. Hundreds of people stared at each other, confusion and dawning horror on their faces. Then, a man near the center of the room, a hulking figure with a scarred scalp, let out a guttural roar. The fear and pressure of the last ninety days, the disorientation, the primal instinct to survive—it all snapped at once. He turned on the person next to him, a smaller, terrified woman, and drove his fist into her throat with a sickening crunch.
The sound was the starter's pistol.
The chamber erupted into chaos.
It was not a battle. It was a frenzy. A raw, ugly scramble where the only rule was to not be the one on the ground. People who had shared silent, sympathetic glances moments before were now clawing at each other's eyes, biting, kicking, using their bodies as bludgeons. The air filled with the sounds of impacts, screams of pain, and the wet, final sounds of lives being brutally extinguished.
"Circle up!" Leo barked, the command instinctual, drilled into him by a phantom of his father. He shoved Derek and Jordan back-to-back with himself and Eva, who still crouched protectively over Maya. "No one gets inside!"
A wild-eyed man with a bloody lip charged them, swinging a piece of… something… he'd torn from his own shoe. Jordan didn't have his katana, but he had a lifetime of muscle memory. He sidestepped the clumsy swing, caught the man's arm, and used his own momentum to twist him to the ground. With a sharp, precise motion, he drove his knee into the man's sternum. There was a crack, and the man went still. Jordan's face was a mask of stone, but his eyes were haunted. He had taken another life, and this time, it wasn't a simulation.
Another came, a woman this time, her fingers hooked into claws. Derek, his heart hammering against his ribs, met her charge. He remembered Zane's training—efficiency, not flair. He didn't try to punch her. He dropped his weight, grabbed her leading arm, and pivoted, using her own force to send her stumbling past their defensive ring and into the path of two others who were already locked in a death struggle. It was a deflection, not a kill. He couldn't bring himself to do it. Not like this.
Eva was a different story. She moved with a fluid, terrifying grace. When a large man, his eyes blank with rage, lunged for Maya, Eva was on her feet in a flash. She didn't waste energy on a grand swing. She simply stepped inside his guard, placed the heel of her palm precisely under his chin, and snapped his head back. He dropped like a sack of stones, his neck broken. She was a scalpel in a room full of sledgehammers—deadly, precise, and utterly cold.
They held their small island of brutal pragmatism in the raging sea of madness. They killed only when a threat breached their perimeter, a grim necessity that stained each of them a little more. Leo broke a man's arm with a vicious kick from his bat, the sound a sharp report amidst the chaos. Jordan dispatched another with a chokehold, holding it until the struggling stopped, his expression unreadable.
Through it all, Maya huddled on the floor, the world a blur of violence and pain. The thing inside her, the Regulator, seemed to be reacting. The paralyzing terror she should have been feeling was muted, replaced by a cold, analytical clarity. She could track the movements of the fighters, predict the arcs of swings. Her body thrummed with a foreign energy, but her limbs were still leaden from weakness. It was a horrific dissonance—a mind being sharpened while her body and soul were being crushed.
And in the center of it all, untouched by the pandemonium, sat Wolfen Welfric.
He had not moved from his spot. He was simply sitting cross-legged on the smooth white floor, his back straight, his hands resting on his knees. His eyes were closed, as if in deep meditation. The chaos swirled around him—people stumbled over each other, fell bleeding next to him, died at his feet—but not a single drop of blood, not a single flailing limb, seemed to touch him. It was as if he occupied a space that was fundamentally separate. A bubble of impossible calm in the heart of the storm.
Derek saw him between the bodies of struggling figures. "What is he doing?" he yelled over the din.
Eva followed his gaze, her expression unreadable. "Waiting."
"For what? For us all to die?"
"For a reason to move," she replied cryptically, her attention snapping back as a new wave of combatants surged near their position.
The fight was degrading, becoming more savage and less structured. The initial surge of adrenaline was wearing off, replaced by exhaustion and desperation. The floor was becoming slick with blood. The bodies were piling up, creating grim, makeshift barricades. The initial count of one hundred and fifty-six was plummeting. People were no longer just fighting the strong; they were turning on the weak, the wounded, finishing them off to reduce the number, to meet whatever quota this unseen, insane god demanded.
A man with a shard of broken bone, wielded like a dagger, managed to slip past Leo's guard. He wasn't aiming for Leo; he was aiming for the weakest link—Maya, on the ground. Derek saw it a second too late. He shouted a warning.
Eva moved, but she was engaged with another attacker.
It was Jordan who intercepted him. He moved like a shadow, grabbing the man's wrist before the bone shard could descend. There was a brief, fierce struggle. The man, fueled by desperation, was strong. He headbutted Jordan, stunning him for a critical second, and drove the shard forward. It wasn't a killing blow. It sliced deep into Jordan's side, just above his hip.
Jordan grunted, his face contorting in pain. But his grip on the man's wrist didn't loosen. With a final, brutal surge of strength, he twisted the man's arm, forcing the bone shard back around and into its owner's throat. The man gurgled, his eyes wide with surprise, and collapsed.
Jordan staggered back, his hand clamping over the gushing wound in his side. Blood welled between his fingers, stark and red against the grey of his uniform.
"Jordan!" Leo yelled, pulling him back into the circle.
"I'm fine," Jordan gritted out, though he was clearly not. His face was pale, his breathing shallow. The injury was bad.
Their defensive ring was compromised. The scent of blood was in the water, and the sharks were circling. A few of the more calculating survivors, those who had held back and let others weaken themselves, now saw a wounded animal and its protectors. They began to converge, their eyes gleaming with predatory intent.
Derek felt a cold dread wash over him. They couldn't hold. Not like this. Not with Jordan bleeding out and Maya incapacitated. He looked desperately at the unmoving form of Wolfen. Do something! he screamed in his mind.
As if hearing him, Wolfen's eyes opened.
They were not the eyes of a man meditating. They were the eyes of a predator assessing the herd. They glowed with that faint, ember-like gold, scanning the room, taking in the number of dead, the positions of the living, the converging threat to Derek's group. His gaze lingered on Jordan's bleeding form for a fraction of a second, then on Maya's huddled shape. A subtle, almost imperceptible shift occurred in his posture. It was not the preparation of a man about to join a brawl. It was the stillness of a volcano before the eruption.
He was deciding. Weighing their lives against… something. A principle? His own hidden agenda?
The decision was made for him.
The voice boomed from the walls once more, its tone unchanged.
"Cease."
The effect was instantaneous. The few remaining combatants, those still locked in struggles, froze mid-action. The chamber, a moment ago a cacophony of violence, fell into a stunned, heavy silence, broken only by the moans of the wounded and the ragged panting of the survivors.
"Trial concluded. Survivors: ninety-seven. Casualties: fifty-nine. Acceptable attrition rate."
Fifty-nine. The number hung in the air, a testament to the brutality. The white floor was now a canvas of crimson Rorschach blots. Bodies lay twisted and broken, their stories ended for the sake of an "acceptable attrition rate."
As the reality of the cease-fire sank in, a new sound began—a low, collective weeping, the sound of souls realizing the depth of the abyss they were in. They had survived, but at what cost?
Panels slid open seamlessly in the previously blank walls. Dozens of them. From these openings emerged the guards.
They were not human. Or, they were no longer human. They stood a head taller than the average person, their bodies encased in form-fitting black armor that seemed to absorb the light. Their faces were hidden behind featureless silver helmets, identical to the masks of the observers from the camp. They moved in perfect, unnerving synchronization, their steps a single, chilling sound on the bloody floor. In their hands, they held not guns, but long, rod-like devices that hummed with a low, threatening energy.
The harvest began.
The guards moved through the chamber with cold, dispassionate efficiency. They ignored the living, for now. They knelt by each of the fifty-nine corpses, checking for pulses with a gloved hand. Confirming death, they would then lift the rod. A blue arc of electricity would crackle from its tip, contacting the body. There was no dramatic convulsion—the bodies were already dead. Instead, the flesh seemed to desiccate slightly, the life force, or whatever residue remained, seemingly siphoned out. It was a final, post-mortem violation.
Once processed, two other guards would haul the body away, dragging it through the panels that vanished and reappeared behind them.
The survivors watched, too stunned, too broken to protest. This was the "recycling." The strong had been refined. The weak had been… processed.
Once the dead were cleared, the guards turned their attention to the living. They moved through the crowd, their intent clear. The trial was over; they were being returned to their boxes.
A guard approached Derek's group. Its silvered visor reflected their battered, bloodied faces back at them—a distorted image of their own despair. It pointed its rod at Jordan, who was leaning heavily on Leo, his face pale.
"He needs medical attention!" Derek pleaded, his voice cracking.
The guard gave no indication of hearing. It simply gestured with the rod towards an open panel.
Another guard moved towards Maya. Eva tightened her grip, baring her teeth in a silent snarl. "Don't touch her."
The guard paused. Its head tilted, a small, mechanical gesture. It seemed to recognize her. It then made a series of quick, subtle hand signals to another guard. The response was a single nod. The first guard bypassed Maya and Eva, moving instead to corral Leo and the wounded Jordan.
They were being separated.
"No! Stay together!" Leo shouted, struggling against the guard that pulled him away. His eyes met Derek's, wide with a fresh kind of terror—the fear of being alone again.
Jordan offered no resistance, his strength spent. He just looked at Derek, a silent apology in his eyes, before he was hauled away through a different panel.
Derek felt a hand on his arm. It was a guard, its grip like iron. He was pulled away from Eva and Maya, towards a third opening.
"Derek!" Maya cried out, her voice a weak thread of sound.
He looked back, his heart tearing in two. Eva held his gaze for a long second, her expression grim. "Survive," she mouthed, the word a command and a plea.
Then, he was through the panel. The white chamber vanished, replaced by a narrow, dimly lit corridor. The guard shoved him forward. He stumbled, his mind reeling. The last thing he saw before the panel slid shut was Wolfen Welfric, still sitting calmly in the now-empty center of the chamber. A single guard stood before him, not with a rod raised, but simply waiting. As if for an order.
Then, darkness. And the hum of the facility, a sound that was now the soundtrack of his nightmare. They were back in their cells. The Culling was over. But the message was seared into their brains: their lives were data. Their bonds were variables. And their humanity was the one thing the Architects were determined to engineer out of them.