Year 4083, Earth ...Continent of Eurosia (formerly Eastern Europe)
The skies above Eurosia were dark and windless. No stars. No moon. Only the humming silence of dread in the dead of night. A rusted facility sat like a dying animal in the valley ...concrete walls cracked, broken wires dangling, and faded banners of a long-collapsed civilization whispering in the dark.
Inside, a woman screamed.
Strapped to an upright iron rack, the Elite-Class HNO officer squirmed in her restraints. Her suit had been torn apart, her exposed body drenched in a mixture of blood, sweat, and whatever fluids Indigo had doused her with over the last three hours.
She was no longer sure what time it was. Her name, her rank, her training ...they all felt distant now. She only knew pain. And the man who inflicted it. He stood in the shadows. Tall, shirtless, his pale skin painted with lines of black ink and dried blood. His light blue hair fell over one eye, the other gleamed like a knife blade in the dark. Indigo.
He moved slowly now, dragging something behind him ...the squeal of steel scraping concrete echoed.
"People from HNO always think you're saving the world," he muttered, voice cold. "With your ranks. Your shiny suits. Your 'neutralizer' tech. But I've seen…"
He stopped in front of her. Dropped the blade. A machete, blackened and chipped, its edge wet with yesterday's blood.
The woman coughed, her breath shallow. "You… you're not only a monster, You're worse."
Indigo smiled faintly, kneeling in front of her. " Listen, I'm not here to be anything better. I'm just the Darkness that your people tried to bury." He stood again. "And now I dig you up, piece by piece."
He pressed his hand against her stomach ...not softly ...but with the weight of a burning brand. Her scream was low now. Nearly hollow. Her nerves were fried from hours of pain.
In one corner of the room, Mindless Class Hemengo ...malformed, rotting, twisted beings ...waited, chained like wild dogs. They were blind, but they twitched every time she screamed, reacting to the sound like it was a dinner bell.
Indigo stepped back. Then kicked a lever. The rack tilted, slamming her body flat against a metallic slab. The machinery groaned, and heated rods beneath began to glow.
"Don't worry," he said softly. "This isn't about pain anymore. It's about balance." He looked up.
"Let the world remember the monsters you made." Then, he walked away. Her screams trailed behind him, softer now… swallowed slowly by the howling of the Mindless Ones.
The metallic doors groaned shut behind him as Indigo stepped into the upper corridor of the facility. The floor beneath his boots was soaked in water and rust… or perhaps blood. He didn't care.
He lit a cigarette with a single snap of his fingers ...not with fire, but a tiny burst of bio-electricity that sizzled between his nails. The air was thick. Rotten.
Outside, the black clouds hung lower now, like a warning ...or maybe a memory. Indigo took a drag and gazed out the shattered window, watching the distant lights of the city where HNO's polished towers gleamed like ivory teeth.
"They still believe they're in control," he muttered to himself. Behind him, deep in the facility, the last of the woman's cries were drowned beneath mechanical whirring and the feral howls of the Hemengos.
He didn't flinch. "Let them name me villain… butcher… or Monster." His voice was steady, calm, almost indifferent. "But I will carve the truth into the bones of this world."
His pale blue eyes narrowed as the cigarette burned down to ash. "Even if I have to burn every last one of them to get there."
Across the broken continent of Eurosia . Across the violent skies of 4083 Earth. Across the scars left by the ancient war ...the one that gave birth to the Hemengos, and cursed the planet forever. And in the stillness… the air whispers. War is not coming.
War has already begun.