The morning sun had not yet broken through the grimy windows of the makeshift interrogation facility, but the courtyard outside was already swelling with a restless crowd. News channels had been running nonstop for hours, projecting images of the scientists who had been captured just days ago. Across the globe, commentators condemned them as monsters, criminals who had violated every law governing human experimentation. The air outside was thick with anger, the murmur of the crowd rising into chants, demands for justice, for blood.
Inside, the building smelled faintly of antiseptic and damp concrete, the fluorescent lights flickering intermittently above the rows of cold, metal benches. One by one, the scientists were brought in. Their hands were cuffed, their eyes darting nervously—or perhaps in some, defiance. Most had hoped that the authorities would treat them fairly, that the government's promise of due process would hold. Those illusions dissolved the moment they were met by Regan Nine and Regan Ten.
Regan Nine, tall and sharply built, carried the air of authority effortlessly. His face was an impassive mask, but his eyes were knives, cutting into each person who dared meet his gaze. Beside him, Regan Ten, Riley, moved with a quiet, deliberate precision, the kind of calm that made people feel as though they were being dissected, piece by piece, under the microscope of his attention. Together, they were both judge and executioner in the eyes of those trapped within the room.
The first scientist, a man named Dorvan, was ushered into the chamber. He was middle-aged, with graying hair and a perpetually worried expression that seemed permanently etched onto his face. He tried to steady himself as the door slammed behind him, echoing like a gunshot.
"Dorvan," Regan Nine began, voice low but cutting, "we're going to ask you one question. Where are Guren and Kuro?"
Dorvan swallowed hard, glancing at the steel walls as though they might offer some answer. "I… I don't know," he said, his voice trembling.
Regan Ten stepped closer, leaning down slightly so his shadow fell across Dorvan's face. "You don't know, or you won't tell?" His words were slow, deliberate, each syllable hammering the distinction into Dorvan's mind.
"I… I don't know," Dorvan repeated, but there was a slight quiver now in his hands.
Regan Nine's hand flicked, and a small device on the table buzzed. Dorvan flinched, realizing the seriousness behind the empty threat. "You will spend your life in jail if you cannot answer us," Regan Nine said evenly, almost casually, as if stating the weather. "Forever. And if your conscience bothers you about that, remember: the public already knows what you did."
Dorvan's face paled further. The interrogation was not just physical; it was psychological. The world outside was watching, judging. Every channel, every social media feed, every television in every country was condemning them. The scientists weren't just prisoners; they were public villains, their guilt already a fait accompli.
Dorvan opened his mouth, hesitated, then whispered, "I… I truly don't know."
"Lies." Regan Ten's voice was ice. He stepped forward and slammed Dorvan's head against the metal bench. There was a sickening crunch, and Dorvan gasped, his nose bleeding. "That was a warning," Riley said, almost quietly, wiping his hand on his coat. "Tell us the truth, or there will be no warning next time."
Dorvan's knees buckled, and for a moment, the room spun around him. But he didn't cry, didn't plead. His defiance—or perhaps resignation—was a small, silent act of control.
Outside, the crowd's anger had grown, simmering into a dangerous momentum. Screens displayed the captured scientists, their faces a mix of fear, defiance, and horror. Children, parents, workers, and former victims' families shouted from behind barricades, calling for execution, for justice. Governments tried to pacify them, but the spectacle of the interrogation fed the frenzy. People were hungry for vengeance, and the scientists were the embodiment of every horror story they had ever been told.
Inside, the next scientist, a young woman named Hester, was brought in. Her eyes were wide, not with fear but with the calculation of someone who knew the stakes. Unlike Dorvan, she understood the game at hand. The Regans were not merely agents of law—they were players, manipulating public perception as much as they were extracting information.
"Hester," Regan Nine said, voice neutral. "Where are Guren and Kuro hiding?"
"I… I don't know," she replied, her voice steady. Her tone lacked the tremor that Dorvan had betrayed.
Regan Ten stepped forward, studying her like a sculptor inspecting marble for flaws. "Do you understand what happens if you continue to withhold information?"
"Yes," she said simply. "I understand."
Riley's expression remained impassive, but his hand flexed slightly. There was an undercurrent of tension, the sense that she had just put a foot on dangerous ground.
"Do you?" Regan Nine leaned forward, voice dropping. "You will be painted as a murderer, as someone who condoned experiments on vessels. You will be hated, reviled, perhaps executed. And yet, you still choose silence. Why?"
Hester's gaze didn't waver. "Because I cannot betray what I do not know."
The Regans exchanged a glance, a silent agreement passing between them. Riley moved suddenly, slamming her face against the bench. A muffled cry escaped her lips. Blood trickled down her cheek, but she didn't break. Her resolve was stubborn, immovable, a mirror of Dorvan's earlier defiance.
Hours passed, each scientist subjected to the same relentless scrutiny. Some broke, sobbing, babbling fragments of names and locations in a desperate attempt to save themselves. Others held firm, their dominance—or madness—resisting the Regans' methodical pressure. And always, outside, the world watched. Every whispered lie, every admission, every bruise was televised, debated, dissected by millions.
Then came the Rage-Fueled Scientist samuel, known among his peers for his volatile temperament. He was brought in with chains that clinked ominously, his posture upright and unbowed. He didn't plead, didn't stammer, didn't flinch.
"Where are Guren and Kuro?" Regan Nine asked, the question echoing against the cold concrete walls.
"I don't know," the scientist said, his voice calm, almost serene. There was no fear in his tone, no hint of submission. Dominance radiated from him, a quiet, unshakable force.
Regan Ten's eyes narrowed. He moved forward and caught the scientist by the collar, yanking him down and slamming his face into the bench. The sickening crunch of bone breaking echoed through the room. Blood spurted, but still, the scientist did not beg.
"You will learn respect," Riley hissed, his voice low and dangerous. "Or you will learn pain, over and over, until the world forgets what a man you once were."
They chained him in Ventablack restraints, the material absorbing light, creating a void around his limbs. It wasn't just physical imprisonment—it was psychological, a shadow pressing against every part of his being, muting hope, muting the world, making him invisible to salvation.
Other scientists looked on, fear mixing with awe. Some whispered that perhaps silence was better than confession. Some prayed they would never reach that level of attention from the Regans.
Hours blurred into one another. Each interrogation, each act of violence, each whispered threat reinforced a single message: the world was watching, the government was in control, and the Regans were both its enforcers and its actors. Every scientist, no matter how brilliant, no matter how defiant, was a pawn in a larger, darker game.
And yet, even in the face of this terror, a seed of rebellion lingered. In small, quiet ways, some of the scientists began to notice the cracks in the Regans' facade. There was a pattern to their movements, a calculation to their cruelty. They were not invincible; they were human. And perhaps, just perhaps, the next move in this deadly game had yet to be made.
The day ended not with answers, but with silence. The scientists were returned to their cells, chained, bruised, and broken—but not entirely defeated. The world outside remained loud and unforgiving, yet inside, a quiet tension had taken root. The Regans had demonstrated dominance, yes, but in doing so, they had also revealed the structure of their power. And in that revelation lay the possibility of resistance, of revenge, of the shadows rising against the light.
And somewhere in the silence of the cells, the Rage-Fueled Scientist samuel smiled faintly, his chains absorbing the dim light around him, as if daring the world to break him.
The verdict was handed down with mechanical efficiency. Twenty years of imprisonment. Each scientist was assigned to a cell, bound in chains, and sealed behind reinforced doors that echoed like tombs. The words twenty years reverberated through the halls, but for most, it may as well have been a death sentence.
The Rage-Fueled Scientist, Samuel, sat unmoving as the guards read the decree aloud. His hands clenched into fists, knuckles whitening, his jaw tight. He didn't flinch when they listed his crimes, nor when the iron bars closed with finality. But inside, his rage boiled like molten rock. Twenty years. Twenty years wasted in a cell while the world screamed his name as a villain.
He tilted his head back, staring at the cracks in the ceiling above him, and thought: This isn't justice. This is a cage for ambition.
---
Outside, the world churned with voices. News anchors dissected the trials endlessly, flashing images of Samuel and the others across glowing screens. Protesters rallied outside government buildings, some demanding harsher punishment, others warning against excessive cruelty.
But the loudest voices came not from the streets, but from inside people's homes.
In a cramped apartment on the outskirts of Viace, a mother set down bowls of soup for her two children as the television flickered in the background. The broadcast showed Samuel being dragged into his cell, his broken nose still bandaged, his eyes burning with a hatred that unsettled even through a screen.
"Turn that off," the mother muttered, her hands trembling slightly.
"But Mama," her son protested, "everyone's talking about it at school. They say those scientists were monsters. Did they really kill people?"
His sister chimed in, wide-eyed: "They said they were using vessels. What's a vessel, Mama?"
The woman froze, spoon suspended in midair. How could she explain? How could she tell them the truth of what had been done to innocents in the name of progress? She turned the television down, her voice barely above a whisper. "It means… people who didn't have a choice. People they used like tools."
The children went quiet, the weight of her words sinking in.
In another household, a group of men sat around a table in a dimly lit bar, mugs clinking, the television mounted above them replaying the footage of the sentencing.
"They should've been executed," one man growled, slamming his fist down. "Twenty years is nothing for what they did."
"Execution makes martyrs," another replied, swirling his drink. "No, this is better. Let them rot in silence. Let them vanish into cells until the world forgets they ever existed."
"Forget?" a third man scoffed. "People will never forget. Every family have someone related to their experiments. The whole world will remember their names in curses."
They drank, cursed, argued—like so many others across the continent. In every home, in every market, the scientists were no longer people. They were legends of horror, woven into stories parents would tell their children at night: Don't disobey, or the eclipse scientists will come for you.
---
Samuel sat in the dark of his cell, his wrists bound by the black, light-devouring chains. His breathing was steady, but his mind was storming. Twenty years… The thought gnawed at him like rats on bone.
Yet even as the silence pressed in, his mind drifted back—not to the interrogation, not to the public's hatred, but to a memory buried deep in the folds of his childhood.
---
He was five years old when the sky darkened. He remembered standing barefoot in the dust of his family's courtyard, the chatter of neighbors rising around him as the moon slid slowly across the sun. Shadows lengthened, animals grew restless, and for a brief moment, the world was cloaked in an otherworldly twilight.
His small hands clutched his father's sleeve as he gazed upward, eyes wide with awe. "Papa! Look! It looks so awesome!"
His father smiled faintly, though his eyes stayed cautious on the strange sky. "Yes, Samuel. That is an eclipse."
The boy tilted his head, puzzled. "But… Papa, if people can use solar power, and some people can use lunar power, then why can't we use eclipse power? Why not both at once? Wouldn't it be stronger?"
His parents exchanged a glance—his mother, nervous, his father, somber. After a pause, his father knelt, putting a hand on Samuel's shoulder. "You have to grow bigger to find out. Some things… they aren't meant for children yet."
The boy nodded, though dissatisfaction simmered in his chest. He wanted to know now.
That night, when the eclipse had passed and the sky returned to its natural order, Samuel lay awake in his bed. The question haunted him. Why solar? Why lunar? Why not eclipse?
---
Years passed. Samuel grew taller, stronger, sharper. He devoured books, pored over dusty texts that spoke of powers forbidden and abandoned. But no matter how hard he tried, no spark of eclipse power ever surfaced in him.
When he was fifteen, his frustration became unbearable. He trained under mentors of solar power, only to find himself powerless. He shadowed those gifted with lunar affinity, but the moon's call was silent to him.
The answer he longed for was clear enough: eclipse research was outlawed. It had been condemned as too dangerous, too unstable. But Samuel's obsession only deepened. If it was forbidden, it meant it was powerful. If it was hidden, it meant someone feared it.
By twenty, he had become a man consumed by questions no one dared ask. He scribbled notes by candlelight, diagrams of celestial alignments, theories that strayed close to madness. And then—
---
He remembered the night vividly. Rain pounded against the windows of his small apartment, lightning illuminating the clutter of papers on his desk. He had been sketching yet another formula when the knock came at the door.
Opening it, Samuel found a man standing there—tall, sharp-eyed, with an aura that seemed to distort the very air around him. Kuro.
"You've been asking questions no one else dares to," Kuro said simply, his voice low and commanding. "And you've been watched for it."
Samuel's pulse quickened. "Who are you?"
"A scientist. Like you. But one unafraid of truths the world calls forbidden." Kuro stepped inside uninvited, his gaze sweeping across Samuel's notes with clinical interest. "You want to know why eclipse powers were never realized. You want to know why they fear it. I can give you those answers."
Samuel stared, heart thundering. Every fiber of him screamed caution, but his obsession drowned it out. "And what do you want from me?"
"Come with us," Kuro said, meeting his gaze with a piercing intensity. "We need you. With us, you can conduct eclipse experiments freely. No laws. No restrictions. Only discovery."
The words ignited something in Samuel's chest, a fire he could not extinguish. In that moment, hesitation vanished. He nodded. "Yes."
And thus, the path was set. The boy who once asked why eclipses held no power had become the man who would carve answers from flesh and bone, unafraid of taboos.
---
Now, decades later, Samuel sat in his darkened cell, chains biting into his skin. He thought of that boy in the courtyard, staring at the sky with wonder. He thought of the man Kuro had found, consumed by questions. He thought of the world outside, branding him a monster.
Twenty years.
His lips curled into a grim smile, blood drying at the edges from his broken nose.
"They think twenty years will tame me," he whispered to the darkness. "But twenty years is only fuel. And when I walk out of here, the world will remember the name Samuel not as a prisoner… but as the father of eclipse."
In distant homes, families whispered about him with fear. In taverns, drunk men cursed his name. In schools, children mocked the scientists as villains in hushed voices.
And in his cell, Samuel sat in silence, rage glowing in his chest like an ember waiting to burn.
The cell was silent, save for Samuel's breathing. Each inhale was steady, each exhale deliberate, as though he were measuring the rhythm of his own existence. The chains bound him, yes, but the true restraint was the twenty years stamped upon his life like a coffin lid. Twenty years of stillness, of rotting, of irrelevance.
But Samuel was not a man built for rot.
Hidden beneath the folds of his prison garments, wrapped tightly in cloth and protected by the hollow of his cheek, was the culmination of years—no, decades—of work. A small pill, unremarkable in appearance, but heavier than any stone he had ever carried.
He had created it in secret laboratories, long before the arrests, before the world knew his name. The pill was an attempt to force the body into resonance with the sun's power, magnifying affinity by a hundredfold. It was madness in chemical form, a knife aimed at the gods themselves. But like all blades, it cut both ways.
Success rate: ten percent.
Failure—or death: ninety.
Samuel had never tested it. Not on animals. Not on prisoners. Not even on himself. It was the gamble of a man obsessed, the last card of a gambler staring down oblivion.
He had hidden it during his capture, slipped it inside his mouth as guards beat and chained him. Fortune favored him; the pill was inert without hydrochloric acid. Saliva alone could not trigger it. His body was the perfect hiding place. He had carried it through interrogation, through sentencing, through the cell doors clanging shut. All the while, it sat there like a whisper of freedom.
Now, in the suffocating dark of his confinement, Samuel touched the inside of his cheek with his tongue and felt its faint, familiar edge. He could almost laugh. They think they have me chained. They think twenty years will break me. But I have my own clock.
His mind spiraled back to calculations, to formulae scribbled on walls long since torn down. The pill was not just science; it was ambition distilled, years of obsession turned into a single, burning chance. If it worked, he would rise with power that no one—neither Regan Nine, nor Ten, nor even Kuro—could hope to cage. If it failed, he would die, perhaps screaming, his body consumed from the inside out.
But Samuel had lived long enough to know one truth: death was preferable to decay,
August 22. Seven days until the eclipse.
The date haunted him, circling endlessly in his mind. An eclipse was not merely an astronomical event to Samuel. It was the axis of his life, the moment that had first filled a five-year-old boy with wonder, the moment that had grown into obsession, into rebellion, into crime. The eclipse was his beginning, and he had decided, it would also be his rebirth.
Seven days. He would endure the monotony, the hunger, the rage that gnawed at him each night. He would wait, his mind sharpening like a blade honed against stone. And when the eclipse darkened the sky, when the sun and moon aligned in their eternal dance, he would take the pill.
The thought alone set his blood humming.
The guards thought him subdued. They saw a prisoner who rarely spoke, who sat with his back against the wall, eyes unfocused. They mocked him sometimes—called him broken, called him ghost.
But Samuel's silence was not surrender. It was calculation. Each insult was catalogued, each shift in their routine memorized. He mapped the prison in his mind with obsessive detail: when the lights dimmed, when footsteps echoed, when silence reigned. He measured not just walls, but people, turning flesh into equations as he always had.
At night, he pressed his tongue against the pill, feeling its hardness, its promise. He whispered to himself in the dark: "Ten percent. Ten percent is enough. It has to be."
The words steadied him, but doubt coiled in the corners of his mind. Images of failure played out unbidden—his veins blackening, his flesh tearing apart, his screams echoing down these halls until his body collapsed in ruin.
He shook them away, gripping the chains until they dug into his skin. Better to burn than to rot.
Outside his cell, the world's anger had not dimmed. From faint shouts in the distance, Samuel knew crowds still gathered, demanding the scientists' blood. He imagined families huddled around their televisions, watching news reports where his face was displayed alongside curses. Children were warned of him like a ghost story.
It didn't matter. Let them hate. Hatred was proof of relevance, and relevance was power. Forgotten men were powerless. Hated men still bent the world with their names.
Samuel's thoughts drifted again to the boy in the courtyard. He could still hear his younger self asking: Why can't we get eclipse powers? He remembered the half-smile of his father, the nervous glance of his mother. The answer had never been given to him. Instead, it had been taken—buried beneath laws, beneath bans, beneath fear.
But Samuel had found his own answer. Eclipse power was not absent. It was suppressed. And if the pill did what he believed, the eclipse would no longer be a spectacle in the sky—it would be alive in him.
---
Seven days. The thought became a mantra.
Seven days to sharpen his mind. Seven days to embrace the risk. Seven days until his chains would either melt away in the light of rebirth, or he would vanish into the void of failure.
He licked the pill again, its bitter taste faint but real.
Ten percent. Ten percent is enough.
His eyes glowed in the dim light of his cell, the fury within him refusing to dim. For the guards, for the Regans, for the world that cursed his name—Samuel would endure the wait. But the moment the eclipse swallowed the sun, he would decide his own fate.
---
And as he closed his eyes, Samuel whispered to the darkness:
"I won't rot. Not here. Not ever."
The eclipse loomed, inevitable, like destiny itself.
And Samuel prepared to gamble his life against the universe.