The warehouse had been transformed. What had once been the old, decrepit building that was Arkham's Woks, long abandoned and silent, was now something else entirely. Nathaniel would not call it a lab. It was a hidden field site, tucked into a quiet corner of the city.
Machines and tools, scavenged and restored, lined the walls. Worktables held monitors, containment units, and instruments Nathaniel had carefully curated. Some had been bought outright. Others were repurposed, fused into working order using hellcharge and hardened resin. A few had been stripped from abandoned factories and laboratories in compromised zones, scavenged in the aftermath of biome breaks. He huffed softly to himself at the thought.
The simple wonders of having a pocket dimension for an inventory.
He removed a bloody gauntlet and set it aside. Crates that once held raw materials now stored specimens and data devices. Every corner bore the subtle stamp of organization. The chaos that had once defined the space was gone. Even the machines in the corner had changed. A finished pair of gauntlets rested on the workbench, bulkier than standard issue, but intentional. Nathaniel lingered on them for a moment, already thinking ahead.
Polaris was restrained upright against a reinforced support beam. A deep purple bruise bloomed across her fractured thigh. One arm hung slightly out of place from a dislocated shoulder. A cauterized bullet wound passed cleanly through her shoulder, a harsh testament to the fight that had ended her freedom. Light scratches marked her skin. She was bruised, broken, and acutely aware of how vulnerable she was.
Even under the dim lighting, Nathaniel could see the tension in her body, the way she shifted instinctively to protect the injured side.
He stood a short distance away, observing her carefully. His amber eyes flickered faintly as he scanned her vitals and energy signatures with quiet precision. Every movement she made was noted. Every breath counted.
"Relax," he said softly, his voice neutral and clinical. "I will not make this harder than it has to be."
The words were undercut by the manic enthusiasm that bled into his expression. He dropped the bloody gauntlet at her feet. The lights brightened suddenly, harsh and sterile, like an operating theatre snapping to life. Above her, a platform shifted, lifting another gauntlet into view.
She inhaled sharply, wincing as pain flared through her body. Her eyes locked onto him. This was the man her clients had targeted. Her mark. And now she was wounded, restrained, and standing in front of him.
She snarled, hatred sharp and unfiltered. Her green eyes glowed dimly as she glanced down at her standing leg. A metal coil wrapped tightly around it, disrupting her uratsu flow. It was modified, welded seamlessly into the support beam itself. She could feel the suppression biting deep.
Nathaniel turned away, fingers brushing over instruments as he paced the length of the space. He sighed, a sound caught somewhere between irritation and resignation. He did not enjoy this part. But she would not break easily. Organizations like the Black Order always had failsafes.
He would bypass them.
After that, what happened to her was his choice. Fire, disposal, or something more useful. People who tried to end his life, or even thought about harming Alyssa, did not get mercy.
Polaris's gaze tracked him. She could not move quickly, but her mind was working. Calculating. Waiting. Nathaniel noticed it. Not fear, not yet. Awareness.
He crouched in front of her, close enough now that she could feel his presence. His tone shifted, slick and unsettling.
"You are awake," he said. "Good. That is all I need you to be for now."
Her shoulders trembled, not just from pain, but from the weight of control pressing down on her. The space. The restraints. Him. She tested the metal around her, pulling instinctively.
Nothing responded.
Nathaniel smirked and opened his palm.
Resting there was a small cyan capsule.
Her cyanide pill.
Polaris stayed very still.
Not because she wanted to, but because every part of her body screamed the moment she shifted. The fractured thigh throbbed in a slow, nauseating rhythm. Her shoulder burned in a tight, ugly way that told her it was still out of place. Pain was layered now, old and new overlapping until it was hard to tell where one ended and another began.
She focused on breathing.
In. Out. Slow.
The warehouse smelled wrong. Clean, but not sterile. Like oil, resin, and old metal scrubbed until it behaved. The kind of place where people pretended nothing bad ever happened.
Her eyes tracked him when he moved. She did not blink when the lights brightened. She refused to give him that. He wanted reactions. She could feel it in the way the room was arranged around her, the way every tool had a purpose.
Nathaniel.
Her mark.
The bastard who was supposed to be dead, or at least broken.
Instead, he moved like this was routine. Like she was a problem already solved.
The restraint around her leg pulsed faintly when she tested it again. No give. No resonance. It was killing her uratsu flow cleanly, not brute force suppression but something smarter. Modified. Of course it was.
"Shit," she muttered under her breath.
She looked at his hand when he opened it.
The pill.
Cold dropped into her gut. She had checked it twice before the job. Triple sealed. Bio keyed. The kind of insurance you never expected to lose.
He held it like a coin, casual, like he had plucked it from a pocket instead of her last way out.
That was when it really set in.
He was not rushing.
That scared her more than anything else.
Organizations prepared you for pain. They drilled it into you. Pain could be endured. Pain ended. Even death was preferable to certain outcomes.
But this was control. Time. Space designed to make you understand that struggling was optional and pointless.
Her jaw tightened. She lifted her chin despite the tremor running through her body.
Do not beg.
Do not plead.
If she gave him anything, it would be defiance. Even if it cost her later.
She watched him move again, cataloguing every sound, every shift of weight. If there was a moment to act, she would need to recognize it instantly.
Her heart hammered. Not fast, not wild. Controlled. She forced it to be.
Inside, fear clawed at her ribs.
She swallowed it.
Whatever he planned to do, she would survive it as long as she could.
And if she could not, she would make sure it hurt him to try.
He stepped closer.
Too close.
Polaris tensed instinctively and tried to turn her head away, but the restraint bit harder as she moved. Then she felt his hand on her thigh.
Her breath caught.
Not because of what it meant.
Because of what it did not.
The touch was not intimate. Not lingering. Not exploratory. It was precise, evaluative, like a mechanic bracing a component before applying force. That terrified her more than any leer ever could.
He was not that kind of monster.
People like him, calm, lighthearted, methodical, did not cross that line. They did worse things and told themselves it was necessary.
Her mind barely finished the thought before she screamed.
The sound ripped out of her, raw and involuntary, as something punched up through her damaged thigh. Hardened resin burst from beneath her skin, locking her leg in place from the inside out. Pain detonated, white and blinding, drowning out everything else.
Her vision swam.
She tasted copper.
Nathaniel smiled.
Not wide. Not cruel. Just satisfied.
He stepped back, gesturing casually to his own arms. Fresh patches of damaged flesh marked both biceps, tissue not fully healed yet. She noticed it through the haze, the way her brain latched onto anything to stay anchored.
He had taken damage earlier.
And he had chosen not to heal it.
That realization landed harder than the pain.
This was measured. Budgeted. He was managing resources, not reacting. Her suffering was part of a calculation.
She shook, breath coming in broken pulls, teeth clenched so hard her jaw ached. The resin inside her leg pulsed faintly, locking the fracture into something worse. Every nerve screamed at once.
He watched her like she was data updating in real time.
In his head, though she could not hear it, there was no thrill.
He simply had not activated maximum regeneration.
He was saving it.
The thought settled in her gut like a stone.
This was not escalation.
This was setup.
And whatever came next was going to be far more deliberate.
Her vision drifted despite her effort to keep it steady. That was when she noticed the gauntlet.
It lay discarded to the side, half-shadowed beneath a worktable. Blood had dried into its seams, dark and crusted. Through it jutted a pillar of golden resin crystal, jagged and asymmetrical, as if it had grown there rather than been placed.
There were fragments caught in it.
Not enough to identify. Just enough to understand.
Her breath hitched.
She did not need to ask. She did not need him to explain. She had seen enough battlefields, enough aftermaths, to recognize what was missing as clearly as what remained.
Magnum was gone.
Not captured. Not restrained. Gone.
Her squad. The backup. The contingency layers written into the contract. Every reassuring redundancy she had trusted when she took the job had collapsed into nothing.
Everyone was dead.
The weight of it pressed down on her harder than the restraints, heavier even than the pain lancing through her leg. The realization stripped something vital out of her chest.
This was not a bad turn.
This was not bad luck.
This contract had been botched from the start.
She had walked into a situation that never should have been approved, never should have been greenlit, never should have reached execution phase. Somewhere above her pay grade, someone had underestimated Nathaniel Alderman and written the cost off as acceptable losses.
She swallowed, throat tight.
She was the loss that was still breathing.
For now.
Her eyes flicked back to him, to the calm way he moved through the space, to the absence of urgency in every step. He was not cleaning up loose ends.
He was studying them.
And she understood, with cold clarity, that survival was no longer about strength or endurance.
It was about whether she remained useful longer than she remained inconvenient.
The thought steadied her.
If usefulness was her only currency, then she would spend it carefully.
Very carefully.
Nathaniel followed her gaze.
He looked down at the golden crystal embedded in the ruined gauntlet and reached for it without hesitation. His fingers closed around the resin pillar, and with a subtle flex of intent, the gold dulled, shifting to a muted blue before dissolving entirely. The energy folded back into him, reabsorbed as if it had never left.
She watched in silence as the holes in his flesh knit themselves shut. Clean. Efficient.
Too efficient.
Her eyes dropped to the floor beside him.
Empty vials.
Recognition hit her like a second wound.
Magnum's stims.
She knew them. She had seen Magnum use them, had seen what they did to his body and how carefully they had to be rationed. And now the vials lay discarded at Nathaniel's feet, spent without ceremony.
He had known how they worked.
Worse, he had planned for them.
Her gaze drifted to the walls. Weapons mounted in orderly rows. Their weapons. Disassembled, catalogued, stripped down to components. Rifles, sidearms, gear she could identify blindfolded, all reduced to inert metal and polymer.
He had her supply.
He had their guns.
The thought left her hollow.
What was this guy?
The question slipped out before she could stop it. Her lip trembled slightly as she spoke, exhaustion and pain finally cracking through her composure.
Nathaniel did not answer immediately.
He dragged a simple steel and leather chair across the floor and turned it around, sitting astride it in reverse. He leaned forward, resting his arms across the backrest, bringing himself down to her eye level.
Up close, his eyes were wrong.
Not amber.
Pale silver, glowing white beneath the lab lights.
They fixed on her with unnerving focus, not staring, not glaring, but observing. Measuring. As if her skin, her thoughts, her very intent were transparent to him.
It felt like being dissected without a blade.
He tilted his head slightly, studying her expression, the tremor in her breath, the way her pupils reacted.
She had faced interrogators before. Professionals. Sadists. Men who enjoyed the work too much.
Nathaniel was none of those things.
That terrified her.
Because whatever he was seeing when he looked at her, it was not fear.
It was possibility.
what are you going to do to me huh she said looking at his eyes as she saw him point up at his head I want to know all you know about this situation, who ordered the hit, and why he said smirking and maybe ill let you off on on the mutilation you did to my body.
This guy was creepy.
Not the loud kind. Not the obvious kind. It was a quieter wrongness, the kind that sat under the skin and refused to leave. It stirred a memory she had buried on purpose.
She had felt this once before.
White skin. Patterned horns.
The Black Order's main headquarters, years back. She, Ivo, and Magnum standing at the edge of a corridor they were not meant to linger in. A woman moving through the space like it already belonged to her. Lustrous white hair. Black sclera, white irises. No urgency. No guards that looked nervous enough to be guards.
White hooded figures flanking her, silent and perfectly aligned.
Someone out of their league.
The head of Vanorion.
Polaris remembered the look on Magnum's face then. Not fear. Calculation shutting down. The instinctive understanding that whatever hierarchy he thought he operated within did not apply in that moment.
That same feeling crept into her chest now.
Nathaniel leaned forward on the chair, close enough that she could see the minute reflections in his eyes. Pale silver. White glow. Unbothered. Calm in a way that did not come from confidence, but from certainty.
The same certainty.
People like that did not posture. They did not threaten unless it served a function. They moved as if outcomes were already decided and everyone else simply had not caught up yet.
Her throat tightened.
She had not been captured by a rogue Knight.
She had walked into something adjacent to Vanorion's gravity. Not the organization itself, maybe not even its attention, but the kind of existence that operated on the same ideology.
Nathaniel did not smile.
He did not need to.
He was already ahead of the conversation, ahead of her thoughts, watching her realize it in real time. She felt it as clearly as if he had said it out loud.
You are not negotiating from equal footing.
The realization settled in, cold and absolute.
This was not interrogation.
This was evaluation.
And she had the sinking sense that, somewhere deep in his assessment, the decision about her fate had already begun to crystallize.
"I will get what I want from you anyway," he said, rising from the chair. "So there is no need to struggle."
He stepped back into her space.
Too close again.
Polaris flinched as she saw his hand ignite with color. Not fire. Not anything clean or natural. A sick, unstable crimson crackled across his palm, twitching like it wanted to leap free. The energy strained against a dim, stabilizing field of ura, barely contained, pressing outward as if it was hungry.
Her stomach twisted.
This was not uratsu.
This was not anything she had trained to recognize.
His irises were amber again, but they were shifting, bleeding toward a deep, violent red. It looked wrong on him, like something forcing its way to the surface.
She tried to pull back. The restraints bit harder. Heat rolled off his palm, not burning, but oppressive, like standing too close to a reactor core you knew was unstable.
She turned her head away on instinct, unable to look at it any longer.
"I hate that color," he muttered, irritation creeping into his voice as he glanced at her aura. "It does not belong on you."
Her breath hitched.
Then his hand closed around her head.
Not crushing. Not yet. Just firm enough to make the point unavoidable.
She screamed as the foreign power pushed into her.
It was not pain at first. It was invasion. Something threading through places that were not meant to be touched, forcing pathways open, rewriting flow she had relied on her entire career. Her thoughts scattered. Heat and pressure and something sharper flooded her senses all at once.
She felt him inside her energy network, not rummaging, not searching blindly, but moving with intent. Like he already knew what he was looking for.
Her vision fractured. White spots burst across her sight. The lab faded at the edges as her own aura buckled under the intrusion.
She clawed at the restraints uselessly, teeth clenched hard enough to hurt, every instinct screaming at her to fight something that did not exist in any rulebook she had been given.
Nathaniel's grip tightened just enough to keep her conscious.
"Stay with me," he said calmly, almost kindly. "This works better if you do."
That was when she understood.
This was not interrogation.
This was extraction.
And whatever he was pulling from her, whatever he was imprinting or breaking or rewriting, it was happening whether she wanted it to or not.
All she could do now was endure.
And pray that something of herself was still intact when he was finished.
It took a while.
Thirty minutes, by his internal count.
He stood there the entire time, unmoving, his hand fixed over the upper half of her face. Crimson energy bled steadily from his reserves as he drew deeper than he usually allowed himself to. He converted uratsu to ura on the fly, feeding Ura Forge piece by piece, carefully rationing what he burned. His eyes had long since shifted from crimson to a glowing white, the strain visible only in the subtle tightening of his jaw.
Polaris did not scream anymore.
She could not.
The sensation dulled into something heavy and invasive, like pressure flooding every channel at once. Her awareness shrank, stretched thin, then held in place by his grip and his will. She felt something pass through her, not ripping, not tearing, but imprinting. Like hot metal pressed into clay that had not been given time to harden.
Nathaniel's gaze flicked to her hair.
The seaweed green sheen she had always carried was gone.
In its place was a faint, glossy crimson, catching the lab lights when she shifted. He felt the link finalize, a quiet internal click, and withdrew his hand.
She sagged for a second, unconscious, breath shallow but steady.
A symbol had printed itself onto her forehead.
A blood red four sided diamond, clean and symmetrical. Beneath it, two thin rectangles ran parallel to its lower edges. Facial markings had formed as well, mirroring his own. Two thin black lines beneath her lower orbitals, etched onto her cheeks as if they had always belonged there.
Nathaniel frowned slightly.
That was new.
Her eyes fluttered open.
They glowed white.
Not blank. Not empty. Black pupils centered in white irises, ringed with a dull black border before fading into clear sclera. He took her face gently, turning it side to side, testing reflexes.
Her eyes tracked him immediately.
No resistance. No panic. But not vacant either.
She straightened slowly despite her injuries, posture adjusting without instruction. Her breathing evened out. The tension that had once defined her stance was gone, replaced by something quieter. Focused. Attentive.
Obedient.
Not mindless.
Nathaniel released her face and took a step back, studying her. He felt the imprint humming faintly through the link. Responsive. Stable. Not overriding thought, not erasing self. He could feel her awareness there, intact, processing, adapting.
Good.
He could not control minds. That shit was beyond him and always would be. This was not domination. This was alignment. A forced resonance that bent behaviour without hollowing it out.
Still.
This was the first time he had ever imprinted on a sentient being.
He stared at her eyes again, searching for cracks, for collapse, for something he should be worried about.
"What did I impose on you," he muttered quietly.
Polaris did not answer.
She watched him with calm intensity, waiting, thinking, ready to respond if prompted.
Whatever he had done, it had changed her.
Not broken.
Not erased.
Something else entirely.
And for the first time since starting these experiments, Nathaniel felt a flicker of uncertainty creep into his chest.
Because he did not yet know whether this counted as success.
He said it quietly as he closed his eyes and followed the thread of the link inward.
Memories surfaced.
Not ripped out. Not dumped all at once. He walked through them deliberately, skimming the last few days with practiced detachment. The ambush. The approach. The moment plans began to fail. He ignored anything he had no right to. He moved past moments of privacy without lingering, skipped over showers, sleep, idle thoughts. That was not what he needed.
Names mattered.
When he opened his eyes again, he knew exactly who he had to find.
Theodore.
Ivo.
He looked back at the young woman in front of him.
She stood where he had left her, posture straight despite the restraints, eyes fixed on him. Waiting. Not pleading. Not questioning. Simply present.
He did not speak.
Instead, he reached out and unbuckled the restraints.
Her body did not fight it. Did not hesitate. She swayed slightly as the supports came free, injuries still catching up to her balance. The old edge was gone. The sharpness, the hostility, the constant readiness to strike. Whatever she had been before had not survived the imprint intact.
He exhaled slowly.
Had he stripped her personality, or only rearranged it. He did not know. He did not like that he could not tell.
Nathaniel lifted her with care and carried her to the long bench against the wall, setting her down gently. He removed the overextended resin poles embedded in her flesh with efficient movements. No hesitation. No ceremony.
He activated his interface.
Max regeneration.
The surge rolled through him first, knitting his own lingering damage shut in seconds. The sensation was familiar, grounding. Through the imprint link, the effect spread outward. He felt it take hold of her body, aggressive but precise. Bones aligned. Tissue regenerated. Old scars faded, even ones that had predated today. Muscle density increased. Colour returned to her skin.
She looked healthier by the second.
Stronger.
He noticed the changes without comment. The added mass. The fuller frame. Whether she had been malnourished before or whether this was a byproduct of shared vitality, he did not know. He was too tired to care.
When the glow faded, she sat upright on her own.
Her gaze remained locked on him.
He tested a name, quietly, almost absentmindedly.
"Valarie."
The word settled into the link.
She reacted immediately.
"Yes," she said, voice steady, different from before. Not flat. Not hollow. Just… aligned. "What are my instructions."
Nathaniel closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.
A long, weary sigh left him.
So that was the answer.
He had not interrogated her.
He had not extracted information.
He had overwritten a trajectory.
Whatever Polaris had been, she was gone. Not erased, but reorganized into something that now waited for purpose rather than choosing it.
Nathaniel looked at her again, really looked this time.
And for the first time since starting Ura Forge, he understood the weight of what he had just crossed.
This was not a technique.
This was a line. one he had crossed.
And he had stepped over it without fully knowing where it led. And there was no way he was cutting the link otherwise her body would fail.
Nathaniel leaned forward, pressing his head into his hands and rubbing his temple. The gesture was human, almost fragile, after the long, methodical control he had just exercised.
"On the bright side," he murmured, voice low but steady, "I know my enemies now."
His eyes flicked toward the cyanide pill he had taken from her earlier, still glinting faintly in his palm. The remnants of teeth, the token of what lengths someone would go to, what risks they would take to achieve their goals it was all clear to him.
Then his gaze shifted back to Valarie.
Her skin, now unblemished, smooth, and unscarred. Her teeth, a full set, natural-looking, clean. She sat upright on the bench, muscles relaxed but present, eyes glowing faintly white, tracking him carefully. In some way, she reflected his own restored vitality.
Nathaniel exhaled quietly, almost to himself.
This was no longer Polaris. Not entirely. She was Valarie now a living, breathing extension of his will, yes, but not mindless. Observant, capable, aware. And undeniably changed.
He looked at her one last time, the weight of the work he had done settling heavily across his shoulders.
Valarie nodded, expression neutral but alert, understanding more than he could say. The lab around them hummed quietly, the air settling into a tense, fragile stillness.