The rhythmic impact of boots on the grate-work floor measured out the remaining seconds of his autonomy. Clack. Clack. Clack.
Beta-79 counted them, syncing his breath to the mechanical tempo. The air in the corridor shifted as they moved deeper into the facility, transitioning from the stale, recycled musk of the containment block to something sharper—the chemical bite of antiseptic and the faint, coppery tang of ionized air. It was the smell of the Syphon Wing. It smelled like a hospital built inside a crypt.
He did not look left or right. To look was to engage, and to engage was to invite error. But his peripheral vision caught the blur of passing sectors. The heavy blast doors of Gamma Division, reinforced with runic etchings to contain the physical abominations housed within. The sleek, electrified barriers of Alpha Division, where the walls were scorched with carbon scoring from Aero blasts and Pyro tantrums.
And here, the silence of the Beta sector.
"Halt," the guard's vocoder crackled.
Beta-79 stopped. His body was a mechanism, responding to inputs before his mind even processed the command. He stood before a set of double doors made of frosted glass and white polymer—a jarring attempt at cleanliness in a dungeon of grease and blood.
The doors hissed open.
The room beyond was blindingly white. It was an assault on the eyes, calibrated to wash out shadows, but shadows were stubborn things. They clung to the corners, pooled under the heavy steel chair in the center of the room, and radiated in invisible waves from the woman standing by the console.
Veres.
She did not look up as Beta-79 entered. She was tapping a stylus against a datapad, her posture rigid, her Vanguard-issue lab coat pristine. She was beautiful in the way a scalpel is beautiful—sharp, cold, and designed to cut. But it wasn't her appearance that made the air in the room feel twice as heavy as the corridor. It was her soul.
Beta-79 felt it before he saw it. A Purple-tier resonance. High frequency. Dense.
Her Tenebrae sigil, hidden somewhere beneath her sleeves, leaked a subtle, suffocating pressure. It felt like standing at the bottom of a deep ocean trench. It pressed against his eardrums, a silent static that made the fine hairs on his arms stand up. She was the darkness that ate the light, and he was the candle she intended to snuff out.
"Unit Beta-79," Veres said. Her voice was smooth, lacking the metallic rasp of the guards, but it held even less warmth. She didn't speak to him; she spoke to the space he occupied. "Onto the apparatus. We are behind schedule. Gamma-120's stabilization took longer than anticipated. The meat is rejecting the graft."
She said meat with the same casual disdain one might use for a spoiled cut of Sarkos Hyos.
Beta-79 walked to the chair. It was a monstrosity of brushed steel and leather restraints, bolted to the floor. It looked like a throne for a condemned king. He sat. The leather was cold, stiff with dried sweat from the previous occupant.
He didn't resist. Resistance was a variable the machine had already accounted for.
The guards moved in. They were efficient, practicing a routine they had performed a thousand times. One secured his ankles, the heavy buckles clicking shut with a sound like a pistol hammer cocking. The other grabbed his wrists.
Beta-79 placed his arms on the rests. He turned his hands palm up, exposing the sigils.
Lumen on the right. Infusus on the left.
The guard strapped his wrists down, tightening the leather until the circulation cut off, leaving his fingers tingling and numb. A heavy metal collar was locked around his neck, pressing against his windpipe, forcing his chin up. He stared at the ceiling lights. They buzzed like trapped flies.
"Vitals," Veres commanded.
A machine next to the chair whirred to life. Wires snaked out, attaching to the sensors embedded in the collar.
"Heart rate, fifty-two," a synthetic voice intoned. "Mana pressure, critical. Containment threshold at ninety-eight percent."
Veres finally looked at him. Her eyes were a pale, watery grey, devoid of anything resembling empathy. She walked over to the tray beside the chair. It held the needles.
They were not standard medical syringes. They were extraction shunts—thick, hollow bores made of conductive black glass, tipped with silver runic filigree. They were designed to pierce not just the vein, but the meridian lines of the mana soul itself.
"The Orange signal is erratic Cycle," Veres noted, lifting one of the shunts. She examined the tip under the light. "You are repressing, Unit. Holding on to the flow."
Beta-79 stared straight ahead. "I am compliant."
"Compliance is an action," Veres said softly. She leaned in, the smell of her perfume—something expensive and floral, clashing violently with the antiseptic—filling his nose. "Submission is a state of being. You are compliant, but you are not yet submissive. The soul clings to what it creates. It thinks the light belongs to it."
She positioned the needle over the soft flesh of his left forearm, directly into the nexus of the Infusus sigil.
"It does not," she whispered.
She drove the needle down.
Beta-79 did not scream. The box in his mind rattled, the lid straining against the hinges, but he held it shut.
The pain was not the sharp sting of steel piercing skin. It was deeper. It felt as if she had driven a spike of ice into the center of his chest. The needle hunted for the mana stream, scraping against the metaphysical bone.
She inserted the second needle into his right arm, into the Lumen sigil.
"Channel open," Veres said, stepping back to the console. She tapped a command. "Engage Syphon. Phase one."
The machine began to thrum. A low, grinding vibration traveled up the tubes and into the needles.
It begins.
The Infusus sigil was designed to move mana. It was a conduit, a bridge. Normally, a Signifer used it to push power out to heal, or to pull toxicity in to cleanse. But the machine reversed the polarity. It created a vacuum.
It sucked.
Beta-79 gasped, his back arching off the chair as the first wave of extraction hit him. It felt like being disemboweled from the inside out. The machine latched onto his mana soul—that warm, orange core of his being—and dragged it tearing and screaming through his veins.
His vision went white.
Don't think. Don't feel. You are hardware.
But the hardware was burning.
The orange mana surged through the clear tubing connected to his arms. It wasn't liquid; it was a viscous, glowing gas, swirling with the chaotic energy of raw creation. It cast a sickly amber light over the room, illuminating Veres's impassive face.
"Flow rate nominal," Veres narrated to her recorder. "Subject Beta-79. Cycle 2,400. Extraction purity is... acceptable. High particulate count of emotional residue."
She frowned, tapping the glass of the collection canister where the orange light swirled. "Too much fear. It taints the batch. The Argent Legion requires clean energy for the synthesis, not this neuro-chemical sludge."
She looked at the dial on the machine. She turned it up.
"Cleanse it," she ordered the machine.
The vacuum intensified.
Beta-79's fingers curled into claws, scraping uselessly against the leather. The Lumen sigil flared, trying to manifest, trying to protect itself with a burst of blinding light, but the shunt drank it all.
He felt the light leaving him.
It was a terrifying sensation, worse than the physical pain. It was the sensation of fading. The memories he had stored in that light—the way the dust motes danced in the cell, the sound of the rain he'd heard once through a ventilation shaft, the face of the girl with the mop he had seen yester Cycle—were being siphoned away. The light was his self. And he was pouring it into a glass jar to fuel a war he would never see.
His jaw clamped shut so hard he heard a tooth crack. The taste of copper flooded his mouth.
Hold onto something, his mind screamed. Hold onto anything.
He thought of the number. 79. It was just a number. It meant nothing.
He thought of the girl. Beta-103.
The image flickered in his mind, unstable, threatened by the drain. She had smiled. Why had she smiled?
Pain is data, he recited, the mantra fracturing. Pain is...
"Heart rate elevating," the synthetic voice warned. "One hundred and twenty. One forty."
"Suppress it," Veres said, bored. "Inject the dampener."
The machine hissed. A secondary fluid, cold and grey, was injected through the same needle that was sucking the life out of him.
It hit his bloodstream like liquid lead. The chemical suppressant slammed into his nervous system, chemically severing the link between the pain and the brain's reaction to it.
His body went limp. He slumped back against the chair, his chest heaving, sweat soaking through his grey tunic. The screaming in his head stopped, replaced by a dull, drugged fog. He couldn't feel his arms anymore. He watched the tube, watched his own essence flowing out of him, and felt... nothing.
The orange glow in the tubes dimmed, turning sluggish.
"Extraction complete," Veres announced. "Disengage."
The needles retracted with a wet shluck sound. The sudden absence of the metal left a throbbing void in his arms.
Beta-79 stared at the ceiling. The fly-buzz of the lights seemed very far away. He felt light. Hollow. Like a husk of corn left in the sun, dried out and brittle. If he moved, he felt he might crumble into dust.
Veres walked over to him. She lifted his chin with a gloved finger, tilting his head side to side, checking his pupils. She pulled a small pen-light from her pocket and flashed it in his eyes.
He didn't blink. He couldn't.
"Pupillary response sluggish," she noted. She checked the datapad. "But the empathy centers are suppressing properly. The emotional spikes flattened out the moment the dampener hit. Good."
She wiped the tip of the pen-light on her coat.
"You are improving, Unit. It took ten seconds less to break you this time."
She gestured to the guards. "Unstrap him. Send him to the mess hall. He needs caloric intake to regenerate the mana for next cycle. If he dies of starvation, the Director will deduct the replacement cost from my budget."
The buckles snapped open.
Beta-79 didn't move immediately. He lay there, breathing in the scent of his own burnt magic. It smelled like sulfur and ozone.
"Get up," the guard grunted, grabbing his shoulder.
Beta-79 forced his body to obey. He swung his legs down. The floor felt different now. He couldn't feel the cold. He couldn't feel his feet. He was floating in the grey mist of the dampener drug.
He stood, swaying slightly.
Veres had already turned her back. She was holding the canister of glowing orange mana, admiring it like a trophy.
"Beautiful," she murmured to herself. "Chaos, distilled into order."
Beta-79 looked at her back. For a second, just a micro-second, the drug wavered. A spark of something hot and jagged flared in the bottom of his hollowed-out soul. He looked at the woman who drank children, and he thought of how easily a Lumen flare could burn out a retina. How easily an Infusus channel could pull the water from a human body until they were nothing but salt and dust.
Then the grey fog rolled back in. The thought dissolved.
Compliance.
He turned and walked toward the door. His arms hung uselessly at his sides, two streaks of blood trickling down from the puncture wounds, staining his fingertips. He dripped red onto the pristine white floor.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
He left a trail.
Veres didn't notice. Or if she did, she didn't care. She knew the cleaning unit would be along shortly.
The door slid open, revealing the corridor again. It looked darker now. The shadows seemed to have teeth.
He stepped out, leaving the white room behind, but carrying the cold of it in his veins. He was lighter now. Emptier. Ready to be filled with whatever bad dreams the facility had scheduled next.
But as he walked, his thumb brushed against his index finger, smearing the fresh blood. The sensation was sticky. Warm.
Real.
He rubbed the blood between his fingers. It was the only thing in the world that belonged to him.
He kept walking. The mess hall was Sector 4. Nutrients. Recovery. Cycle.
Just another cycle.