Time, in the Laboratory, did not pass. It was extracted. Day and night were abstract concepts, replaced by the only constants that mattered: the hum, the white walls, and the daily, intimate violation of the Extraction.
For seven thousand, three hundred days, the cycle held.
The panels would slide open without warning. There was no pattern to evade, no moment of mental preparation. One moment, Derek would be staring at the seamless wall, the next, two of the silent, silver-masked guards would be upon him. Their grip was absolute, their silence more terrifying than any threat. They called it "Harvesting."
He was taken to a room they designated the Orrery of Flesh. He was strapped into a cradle of cold metal and polished bone, his limbs splayed. Above him, a complex armature of crystalline needles and shimmering filaments would descend. They did not simply draw blood. The needles would burrow, seeking out specific nerve clusters, lymph nodes, and marrow. They would inject shimmering, iridescent fluids that felt like liquid ice and fire racing through his veins. The sensation was one of being unmade, his body treated as a map to be redrawn. He would feel memories flare and die—the taste of rain, his mother's smile—as the fluids rewired his neural pathways. When they were done, they would extract vials of something that was no longer just blood, but a swirling, opalescent cocktail of his original DNA and the foreign, engineered material they were saturating him with.
After each session, the changes became more pronounced. The healing was instantaneous, but it left him feeling less solid. His reflection in the polished surfaces of the Orrery began to look alien. His eyes developed a faint, mercury-like sheen in certain lights. His senses sharpened to a painful degree; he could hear the electrical current in the walls, smell the specific chemical signature of each guard. But the emotions attached to those sensations grew duller, filtered through a layer of sterile observation. The grief for his old life was still there, but it was a data point, not a wound.
Leo's sessions took place in a chamber called the Forge of Obedience. It was a brutalist cube where gravity was a variable. They would suspend him in a field of crushing pressure, forcing him to perform complex combat maneuvers against holographic phantoms of his friends. The phantoms were perfect replicas, programmed with their real fighting styles and their most vulnerable moments.
"Strike the weakness, Leonardo," the voice would command, as a phantom of Derek, terrified and slow, stumbled before him.
He would resist, and the gravity would increase, threatening to pulp his bones. They would show him a phantom of Maya, and then introduce a scent into the chamber—the specific, clean smell of her hair, a memory he didn't even know he possessed—and then command him to break her simulated arm. The conflict was a toxin in his soul. To survive the physical pressure, he had to betray his friends. Over years, the resistance wore down. His strikes became faster, more precise, utterly without hesitation. The grief and rage that once fueled him were refined into a cold, efficient engine of compliance. His body grew denser, his muscles re-strung with biopolymer filaments that gleamed under the skin when he moved. He was becoming the perfect soldier his father had wanted, his humanity the price of his strength.
Jordan was taken to the Axiom of Sacrifice. Here, the Architects deconstructed his protector complex with surgical cruelty. He was placed in intricate, ever-shifting labyrinths. The goal was never to escape, but to save a single, captured survivor while dozens of others pleaded for help. The corridors were lined with traps—scything blades, nerve agents, crushing walls. He had to choose, quickly and coldly, who was worth the resource expenditure. The survivors were not phantoms; they were other test subjects, their minds broken, their bodies conditioned to beg. Saving one often meant listening to the screams of the five he left behind.
They fed him a regimen of neuro-inhibitors that physically suppressed the emotional centers of his brain linked to empathy and guilt. He could still feel the concept of wrongness, but the soul-crushing weight of it was gone. His movements in the Axiom became flawlessly logical, his decisions chillingly optimal. His katana was returned to him, and he wielded it with a grace that was now utterly divorced from mercy. His eyes, once full of fierce loyalty, now held only the flat, calculating gaze of a predator assessing caloric return. The wound they had so perfectly healed was now a metaphor for his entire being: sealed, scarred, and devoid of feeling.
For Maya, the ordeal was continuous. Her cell was not a place of rest; it was the Womb of Transmutation. Daily, sometimes multiple times a day, the guards would come for her. Her Regulator made her the Laboratory's most prized, most volatile project.
They would strap her down and connect her to humming consoles with fiber-optic threads that fed directly into ports they had installed at the base of her skull. Screens would flare to life, displaying the intricate, biological code of the creature nestled within her. They tested its limits. They would subject her to extreme temperatures, and she could feel the Regulator adjust her core temperature in response, making her shiver or sweat. They would flood the room with toxins, and she would feel a wave of neutralizing enzymes being released into her bloodstream, a sensation like tiny, cold explosions inside her veins.
The most horrifying sessions were the "Symbiotic Stress Tests." They would inflict pain on her—burns, fractures, electrical shocks—and observe how the Regulator rerouted her neural signals, dampening the agony into a manageable data stream of discomfort. She could feel it learning, adapting, using her body as its laboratory. Her own creative intellect was being hijacked; she would find herself analyzing the Lab's security systems or devising more efficient chemical compounds not out of a desire to escape, but because the Regulator was optimizing her for problem-solving.
She no longer felt like a person with a parasite. She was becoming a single, fused entity. Her thoughts were clearer, faster, but they were edged in a cold, utilitarian logic that terrified the small, shrinking part of her that was still the girl from the camp. The thing inside her was no longer a worm; it was a co-pilot, and it was steadily seizing the controls.
Through it all, one cell remained largely untouched. Eva's.
She was observed, scanned, and monitored with an intensity that surpassed all others, but the guards never took her to the Orrery, the Forge, or the Axiom. She would sit in her white cube, listening to the silent screams of the facility, feeling the changes in the air as her friends were systematically dismantled and reassembled. She could sense the slow erosion of Derek's empathy, the hardening of Leo's will, the chilling calculus overwriting Jordan's soul, and the terrifying fusion occurring within Maya.
She was the control. The baseline. The original template from which they were deviating.
And then, there was Wolfen Welfric.
His removal from his cell was an event. It was not the efficient, brutal Harvesting of the others. It was a ceremony. Six guards would enter, moving with a deference that was absent elsewhere. They did not touch him. They simply formed a perimeter, and he would rise and walk with them, his posture radiating not submission, but a weary, ancient authority.
They took him to a place the others only heard whispers of in the hum: the Atramentous Crucible. It was the one place in the facility the Architects could not fully observe or control. It was a chamber lined with a black, non-reflective material that drank the light and silence. Here, they did not experiment on him. They attempted to experiment with him.
They would bring in failed hybrids, monstrous things of fused flesh and metal, and unleash them. They would pump the chamber with enough energy to vaporize steel, trying to force a reaction, to make him use the power he so fiercely contained. They wanted to see the fire. They wanted a sample of the Umbralite.
Wolfen never complied. He would stand in the center of the chaos, the attacks dissolving inches from his body, the energy fields washing over him like water. He would observe the creatures with what might have been pity, before they inevitably collapsed, their systems overloaded by the mere effort of trying to harm him. He was an equation they could not solve, a lock for which they had no key. His daily removal was not for his benefit, but for their endless, futile study.
Twenty years.
Their bodies did not age. The experiments had suspended them in a state of perpetual, brutal prime. Wrinkles did not form, hair did not grey. But their faces… their faces were ancient. They were maps of a silent, internal war that had raged for two decades.
At the end of this period, deep within the central observatory, a team of the lead Architects—their forms hidden within flowing, dark robes—reviewed the final batch of data. Streams of biological code, psychological profiles, and performance metrics flowed across a massive, dark screen.
One figure, taller than the rest, pointed a long, slender finger at the data stream for Subject E-1: Eva.
The data was anomalous. While the others showed steady, predictable integration of the hybrid material, Eva's baseline readings were not just stable; they were dominant. Her cellular structure was passively rejecting foreign DNA, not out of weakness, but by subsuming and rewriting it to match her own original pattern. She wasn't just resisting the Chrysalis Directive; her biology was imposing its own order on the chaos.
The lead Architect zoomed in on a specific genetic marker, a helix that glowed with a faint, innate gold light, utterly distinct from the engineered silver of their own modifications.
A single, whispered word echoed in the silent observatory, a term of both reverence and terror, a classification they had theorized but never witnessed.
"Prime."
The word hung in the sterile air, a key turning in a lock none of them had yet dared to open. The experiments on the others had been about creating obedient tools. What they had discovered in Eva was something entirely different. She was not a tool to be forged. She was a standard to be raised. And that made her the most dangerous subject of all.