It all started at the Base.
Hidden far from the eyes of the world, buried beneath layers of steel, stone, and secrecy, the facility was known only to a handful of powerful people. To the public, it did not exist. No maps showed it. No satellites spoke of it. Yet inside its cold walls, humanity was about to cross a line it could never return from.
They called them experiments.
To the scientists, they were breakthroughs.
To the leaders funding them, they were the future.
But to the people who would one day suffer because of them, they would become something far worse.
At first, the goal sounded noble.
Humanity had always feared its own weaknesses—disease, aging, war, and the harsh limits of the human body. The higher-ups believed they had found the answer. If humans could not survive the future as they were, then they would simply evolve them.
Not naturally.
But artificially.
They called it "The Evolution of Humankind."
Inside the Base, laboratories glowed day and night. Machines hummed endlessly as scientists manipulated genetic codes, rewriting the very blueprint of life itself. They believed they were improving humanity—making it stronger, faster, smarter. A species that could survive anything.
But evolution had never been something that could be controlled so easily.
Every human was different. Unique. Unpredictable.
And when you force change upon something that was never meant to change that way… the results rarely follow the plan.
At first, the changes seemed promising.
Test subjects showed unusual abilities. Their bodies adapted in ways no one had expected. Strength increased. Reflexes sharpened. Their senses expanded beyond normal human limits. The researchers celebrated each success as proof that they were on the verge of rewriting the future of the species.
But slowly, something began to change.
The subjects stopped behaving like humans.
Their minds drifted away from the people they once were. Their instincts became sharper, more primal. Some became aggressive. Others… simply disappeared into themselves.
The scientists tried to correct it.
They adjusted the formulas. They modified the genetic sequences. They ran more tests, more trials, more "improvements."
Instead of fixing the problem, they made it worse.
The experiments no longer produced humans.
They produced variants.
The first two were the most stable results the project ever created. The scientists recorded them carefully, documenting every mutation, every behavioral change, every terrifying discovery.
They gave them names.
Tikions.
And Burono.
At the time, the researchers believed they were witnessing the next step in human evolution.
They were wrong.
What they had really created…
was the beginning of something the world would soon learn to fear.
And once it was released, there would be no way to stop it.
The nightmare had already begun.