Mechanical met organic—
The collision swallowed most of the kinetic charge he'd been storing. His uppercut came fast, a crackling arc of force that lit the air on contact. The impact sparked like lightning, the blow ripping through the space between them with enough pressure to split the air.
Energy exploded outward.
He stared at his arm—calm, unreadable.
Then to the Delta Unit.
Unmoved.
Its stance hadn't broken.
Before he could react, it struck.
A flurry of blows—calculated, punishing. Each one landed with ruthless precision, driving deep into his ribs, shoulder, gut. His body lifted, weightless for a split second.
Then he hit the wall.
Hard.
The steel buckled on impact, the air knocked from his lungs in a violent gasp. Dust and fractured paneling rained around him.
And still, the Delta Unit advanced.
He rose slowly, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth as he wiped blood from his brow. His body ached—bruises blooming along his ribs—but he felt something beneath the pain.
Energy.
It flowed through the point of impact, subtle but present. Healing? No. Circulating. Redirecting.
He moved—ducking low, slipping past another crushing blow from the Delta Unit. His boots skidded across the floor as the room vibrated around him, a low hum rising through the walls.
But nothing was breaking.
No cracks, no structural collapse.
The chamber wasn't failing—it was adapting.
He glanced at the seams—those faintly glowing core channels embedded in the walls. Then it clicked.
They'd scaled everything.
The room, the droid, the force it exerted—it was all calibrated to him.
A twisted execution of Newton's third law.
Every ounce of power he generated? Matched. Answered.
Equal and opposite.
This wasn't a test.
It was a counterweight.
The cores in the walls weren't just environmental—they were feeding it.
Fueling the bot.
Every time he struck, he felt it. That hum. That transfer. Energy drawn from the chamber, cycling directly into its frame.
And still—he couldn't pierce it.
Not even a crack.
Its armor wasn't just dense—it was designed for this. Melee combat. Close quarters. Its domain.
And he had walked straight into it.
A fighter built for attrition, trapped in a ring where the rules were rigged against him.
He would win this.
He had to.
The thought echoed, quiet and defiant, as he shot backward—reading the next move before it happened. Predicting the devastating arcs of its strikes like a grim pattern.
It was holding back.
Testing him.
Then it struck. Hard.
His body slammed into the ground, the floor absorbing the impact with eerie precision—stopping his momentum like a net made of stone.
He didn't even get a chance to breathe.
Dragged across the surface like a ragdoll, sparks and grit trailing behind him, until he was launched upward in a violent whip of force.
Then came the interception—mid-air, no reprieve.
Like it had been waiting.
Nathaniel immediately began bashing his fists against each other, each impact ringing out like muffled thunder. His enhanced musculature flexed and coiled with every strike, raw kinetic energy building beneath his skin. Cyan light flared in his eyes.
15% Collection.
He kept going—fast, relentless. Like someone clapping their hands furiously until they turned red. But in his case, it wasn't applause—it was ignition.
The sides of his arms slammed together again and again, flesh bruising, blood beginning to smear. The rhythm was imperfect—he couldn't jump or reposition. Every time he tried to build momentum, the floor stole it, stalling him with the same brutal neutrality as before.
He was trapped in the ring. Taking hits. Grounded.
But still charging.
Still rising.
30%.
He charged in—this time focused, surgical.
Only his irises glowed now, narrowed to slits of cyan fire. His breathing had steadied. The wildness was gone. What was left was a man with a plan—and the pain tolerance to see it through.
He wasn't trying to brute-force it anymore. No, he was going to break the scale.
Overload the damn equation.
Penetrate the armor not with power, but with intent—too dense, too fast, too wrong for the system to counterbalance in time. He'd dislodge the card. The data key. That was the brain behind the bot's adaptability, the thing feeding it his every move, his patterns, his reactions.
It had been learning him.
But now he was going to teach it something new.
Something it wasn't built for.
He tensed—leg muscles locking tight like wound cables before release.
With a sudden push, he shot upward, slamming into the ceiling just long enough to stall and refocus his momentum. Energy shifted through his body—threading muscle fibers, syncing nerves, reinforcing each joint and tendon for the drop.
Then—he fell.
Not like a man—but like a projectile.
The kinetic force threaded down into his arms, compacting into fists, then down again—concentrated into his fingers. They began to discolor, silvering first, then turning a darker, reflective grey—densified through microscopic energy manipulation, mimicking hardened alloys.
His irises glowed faint white inside a cyan ring.
Below him: the Delta unit, advancing. Nearby, the Beta unit's exposed core glowed the same amber as the seams in the wall.
He made a decision.
He pushed past his reserve.
In an instant, he launched—his body a controlled kinetic spike. The shockwave trailed behind him, air displaced as his form blurred, energy sparking along his limbs. Cyan light bled into royal blue as overload built across his nervous system—until his silhouette blurred in motion.
His fingers reached the target—mere nanometers from the Delta unit's armored chestplate.
For a single breath, the air between them ionized—electric arcs dancing between target and attacker.
Impact.
Each finger struck like an armor-piercing round—spaced just enough to focus energy distribution across multiple points. The shock absorption system on the Delta tried to compensate—but even engineered dampeners have limits.
And he'd just exceeded them.
The plating cracked—not from brute force alone, but from stress layering, microfractures, and overload. The energy hadn't just been dumped into the surface—it had been drilled into it. Local temperature spiked. The alloy warped.
A deep bang echoed—pressure release from material failure.
He didn't stop.
He dragged his fingers outward—scratching through weakened armor. The bot staggered as internal systems tried to compensate, its balance disrupted, footing slipping. It was launched back nearly ten meters, landing hard—its dampeners barely saving it from total collapse.
The Delta unit had calculated the probability of a direct core strike. It had adapted.
Its internal chassis—surrounding the amber core—was reinforced with the densest plating in its design. Multilayered alloys. Compressed shock gel beneath hardened outer casing. A buffer system designed to absorb, distribute, and negate precisely this kind of impact.
It knew the strength readings Nathaniel had shown prior. It had data. Projections. Simulations.
It was ready.
But projections fail when the equation changes mid-strike.
As Nathaniel launched, the Delta's countermeasures kicked in—micro-vibrational shielding rippling across the chassis as the bot braced. The armor tensed, adjusting for kinetic absorption. Internal gyros aligned to shunt excess force into the walls—back into the room's stabilizing framework.
Then the first finger hit.
The initial impact didn't break through. The bot held.
But Nathaniel wasn't punching once.
Each digit drove inward like a pile-driver—compounding, pulsing, calibrated not just to strike but to overload. Heat built beneath the surface. The shock gel reacted, but it couldn't vent fast enough. Stress cracks formed microscopically, invisible to the eye—but not to physics.
He struck again.
And again.
With every contact, the armor's calculated margin shrank.
The system predicted he should have stopped at 70% output. He had pushed past 100.
The gel vaporized under pressure. A hairline fracture spread. Then, under one final surge—
The threshold broke.
A sharp, concussive crack resounded as the metal split—not explosively, but like a car hood denting inward from sudden collapse. The reflective armor warped, deformed at the edges where his fingers dragged, peeling back slightly. No full core breach—not yet—but now the shield around it was damaged, compromised.
The bot reeled—its stance stumbled as recalibration routines flickered across its systems. It hadn't just been hit—it had been outpaced. Its prediction matrix lit red across the board. The data it had relied on was now outdated, invalid.
Nathaniel's form landed solidly, steam rising from his shoulders.
For a moment, the Delta unit froze. Not in fear. Not in hesitation.
But in recalculating.
Observation Deck –
The chamber flickered with energy readouts as the shockwave from Nathaniel's strike hit the sensors. Lights dimmed briefly before rerouting power from the reserve cores. A thin shimmer of static flicked across the monitoring glass as the data feeds struggled to catch up.
Isabelle Maret leaned forward, her fingers tightening around a stylus. "Did anyone else see that? That shouldn't have breached. That chassis was stress-tested up to three-point-seven kilotons."
Ginah Esker, arms crossed tightly over her chest, didn't respond immediately. Her eyes tracked every movement in the chamber. "He didn't breach it. Not fully. But he fractured the seal. That's worse."
Corinth Saren, calm as ever, leaned his weight into the console, fingers steepled. "He bypassed the threshold without exceeding it. Smart. He forced the shock absorption system to fail organically. That armor's strength is irrelevant if the absorption matrix folds under continuous microburst delivery."
Isabelle looked over, annoyed. "Smart? That kind of maneuver isn't in his file. Not even in the projections post-Uratsu initiation. He was supposed to cap out before even threatening the Delta unit."
Ginah didn't look away from the glass. "The projections were based on compliant training patterns. You don't get readings like this when someone's playing pretend. He's improvising under stress."
Isabelle scoffed. "Improvising? That wasn't improvisation, Ginah. That was targeted precision. And he knew where the core was—he struck at the densest vector, adjusted his speed to avoid diffusion loss... that's not just instinct. That's experience."
Corinth gave a slight nod. "He's been in real fights before."
The silence that followed was thick.
Ginah, voice low, muttered, "He wasn't supposed to remember anything."
Isabelle glanced sideways at her. "You sure he hasn't been faking it?"
Corinth cut in coolly, "Does it matter?"
Ginah finally turned, meeting his eyes. "If he's adapting mid-battle with that kind of efficiency… then everything we've been feeding into his file is already obsolete."
Corinth didn't disagree. Instead, he looked back at the glass, watching Nathaniel steady his breathing, shoulders trembling from exertion.
"And the Delta unit," he added, "just realized it too."
There was a manic gleam in Nathaniel's eyes—a twisted cocktail of triumph and exhaustion—as he caught sight of the fractured plating on Delta's chassis. He backpedaled hard, muscles burning, lungs dragging for air. That hit had cost him. Most of his reserves were gone, siphoned into that one strike. But it had worked.
His gaze flicked toward the downed Beta unit lying motionless near the barrier's edge. The glow of its shattered core—still faintly alive—reflected in his pupils. He had three charges left in his right hand. It would have to be enough.
Delta reacted. A low-pitched whir signaled its pursuit. Its systems had registered the threat. Its directive had changed.
Eliminate. Immediately.
Nathaniel shot backward in a controlled dash, legs screaming, one arm extended like a blade as his fingers sliced through the thin-layer barrier that separated this chamber from the previous zone. The field crackled, destabilized, and peeled open for a split-second. Just long enough.
As the Delta unit surged forward, triggered by the disruption and the prior blow, Nathaniel rerouted the perimeter control—looping the barrier into a tight ring around the bot. It slammed into the far side, its inertia nearly breaking the field's integrity as it distorted outward like a strained balloon. But it held.
That was all he needed.
He twisted, dragging his fingertips across the Beta unit's cracked chest, skimming the exposed core.
There.
In a fraction of a second, the dormant Beta core linked with the Delta's circuit mesh—a failsafe built into their shared grid architecture. Energy began to cycle. It would've been seamless… if Nathaniel hadn't planned for it.
Before full integration could trigger, his charged fingers snapped into place. The last three kinetic flashes ignited like embedded micro-detonations. The connection was forcibly severed. Sparks erupted as the overload feedback rattled the entire floor.
Nathaniel's hand seized the core mid-pulse—a concentrated tech-engine filled with raw Ura, siphoned and refined from crystal strata. Its glow pulsed against his palm, unstable and volatile.
He didn't hesitate.
This hadn't come from guesswork. He'd studied the loadout types. He'd tracked Delta's energy dispersal during the first half of the fight. And more importantly—he'd reviewed old combat logs. These units shared a bloodline. Same grid. Same heart.
He wasn't improvising anymore.He knew exactly what he was doing.
Fingers trembling, Nathaniel clutched the core tighter—felt the faint whine of its containment shell. Without hesitation, he crushed its outer panel, the smooth, pristine casing cracking beneath his grip. Pale threads of raw Ura spilled out like threads of light. His last charged digit pressed in, sliding directly into the exposed crystal.
A surge hit him like a breaker snapping.
His eyes flared—no longer cyan, but amber. Not from overload, but alignment. The energy field around the core synced with him for a moment, feeding him like an open vein. His muscles spasmed from the sudden intake, but he held fast. He had studied his body. He knew the threshold. And he was damn close to it.
Turns out, Kinetic Muscle wasn't just for output.
There was a buffer zone—a layer beneath the fibers, laced with conductive biotissue. Whether it was intentional or just a freak byproduct of his augment, he didn't know. Maybe it was always there. Maybe it had developed because of how he fought. But it worked.
He was a battery.
Not a perfect one, not a long-lasting one—but a good enough one. He could store high-voltage kinetic energy just long enough before the bleed started. And just like his flashes—like everything else tied to his augment—it was temporary.
But temporary was enough.
Enough to finish the trial.
He rolled his shoulders once as the energy sank into his spine, threading through each nerve. Static danced across his skin, crawling like electricity that didn't know where to go. Every step hummed with coiled momentum.
The Delta unit recalibrated in the distance, sensors realigning, cores syncing for defense.
Too late.
Nathaniel's irises dimmed, but his aura brightened—blue-tinted smoke curling off his shoulders.
No tricks. No guesswork. No more playing the part.
He was here to break something.
He looked at the Delta unit.
Streaks of amber light shot through his body like circuit lines igniting under skin. He clutched the orb—still pulsing, still alive with residual power.
Then he moved.
Faster than ever before. Faster than the bot could calculate.
His hand hardened, taking on that dark metallic sheen under the shredded remnants of his tracksuit sleeve, the fibers tearing as muscle swelled. He drove the charged core forward—not at the chest, but through it, bypassing the armor entirely. Like a shaped charge breaching a vault, the impact detonated deep inside the Delta unit's frame, sending it hurtling backward into the air.
He didn't let go.
The core remained gripped in his hand—now levitating slightly, suspended between his palm and the scorched airflow. Arcs of energy danced between his fingers and the crystalline engine, flickering with unstable momentum. It began to spin—oscillating, vibrating with raw conversion energy.
Nathaniel reared back.
Then he threw.
The arm shot forward, the core riding its momentum like a slug from a railgun. Its field expanded mid-flight—streaking like a comet. No fuel. No combustion. Just energy transformation, pure and devastating.
It struck the other core with pinpoint precision.
Detonation.No explosion in the traditional sense—just light, heat, and a sonic collapse as energy transferred in full, surging across the cavity like a wave of molten data.
Debris rained down from the far wall, scorched chunks of reinforced plating skidding across the floor. The Delta unit was totaled.
Its head was lodged deep in the far wall. The faceplate cracked. Sections of armor were melted, its chest cavity still glowing with heat. Two Ura cores—spent and warped—were welded into its center, half-melted from overload.
This thing wasn't just some training dummy.It had been calibrated at a B-rank strength scale—capable of adapting to S-rank level augments under the right conditions. A unit like this was designed to push Knights near their limit.
And Nathaniel?He bypassed its adaptation matrix. Overwhelmed its predictions. Shut it down.
Not with refined skill.
But with knowledge, timing—and sheer, brutal execution.
He collapsed to the ground, breathing heavy.His arms were bruised. Cuts marked his body, blood streaking through sweat and grime.
But the trial was over.
Nathaniel Alderman had won.
Observation Deck – Knight Facility 17-A
The room was silent for several seconds after the explosion faded. Only the faint hum of the barrier system and the soft ping of debris hitting the floor broke the stillness.
Then—
"He actually did it," Isabelle muttered, leaning closer to the glass.
"He bypassed Delta's prediction threshold," Corinth said, voice low, but not unreadable. There was something like respect in it—tinged with concern. "B-rank scaling. Ura twin-core combat calibration. And he gutted it. That's… not nothing."
Ginah said nothing for a moment. Her eyes remained fixed on the monitor, tracking Nathaniel's vitals as the system displayed his energy flux history in real time.
"He studied the architecture," she finally said. Her voice was calm, but there was a tightening at the edge. "He knew about the core's harmonics. Knew the Ura signatures would interfere if destabilized mid-sync. That wasn't a lucky strike."
Isabelle raised a brow. "But it wasn't clean, either. He nearly fried his nervous system."
"Maybe," Corinth added, crossing his arms. "But he didn't. You saw that throw—he turned a core into a goddamn penetrator. Shock absorption's got a limit, and he clocked it. That's someone who understands damage physics as well as his own body."
Ginah's lips thinned. Her fingers danced across the interface, replaying the energy transfer frame by frame.
"He's adapting faster than expected. That much Ura charge shouldn't have stabilized in his system—his cells acted like containment vessels. That's not in the file."
Isabelle glanced at her. "You sound surprised."
"I'm not."A pause. Then a whisper under her breath, barely audible."I just didn't think he'd remember."
Corinth turned. "Remember what?"
"Nothing," Ginah said quickly, her tone back to neutral. "Prep the recovery team. And get me a diagnostic on those cores. I want to know if the residuals show any imprinting."
"You think the Delta unit was starting to adapt beyond its programming?"
"No."She glanced back at the arena below.
"I think he was."
Post-Trial – Medical Bay 3C, Knight Facility 17-A
The room was dim, sterile. Only the soft, pulsing blue of the medical monitors lit the space around him.
Nathaniel lay half-upright, propped against the tilt of a reinforced recovery chair. Bandages wrapped his right arm, the flesh beneath swollen and blistered in patches where the Ura feedback had licked at muscle. IV lines fed a cocktail of healing accelerants and nerve stabilizers into his bloodstream. The faint hum of bio-repair fields rippled against his skin.
He didn't move.
Not because he couldn't—but because he was still feeling it.
Not the pain. That was dull now, fading into the periphery like background noise. What he was feeling pulsed deeper. Inside.
The amber was still there. Lingering. Traces of the Ura core he'd ruptured, of the raw grid energy that had surged through him like lightning down a fractured rail.
He hadn't hallucinated that stabilization point. For a second—maybe less—his body hadn't just taken the energy.
It had welcomed it.
His fingers twitched.
"Kinetic Muscle, augmented adaptation threshold..." he whispered hoarsely to no one. "Confirmed. Storage isn't passive. It's active when interfaced with high-frequency field conductors—like cores."
The words felt strange coming from his mouth. Not because he didn't understand them. But because he hadn't been thinking them during the fight.
He'd known them.
There was a difference.
His breath was ragged as he leaned his head back against the rest. The ceiling above was featureless—white. Quiet. Peaceful.
He laughed once, bitterly.
"Not improvising anymore, huh?"
He turned his palm upward, watching how the bio-field licked over the scarring. It still pulsed faintly—amber sparks dancing in the nerves.
Ginah would be watching. Probably dissecting every frame of the impact. Maybe Isabelle would argue it was a fluke. Corinth? He didn't care.
But Nathaniel knew what that was.
He wasn't fighting instinctively anymore. Not just reacting. He had crossed a line in that arena. Not just in power—but in clarity.
And that was more terrifying than anything.
Because something inside him had woken up.
And it knew things he hadn't learned yet.
Observation Deck – Overlooking Medical Bay 3C
Ginah Esker stood still, arms crossed tightly against her chest as she watched Nathaniel from behind the medical glass. The facility lights cast sterile reflections across the window, but she only saw him—breathing heavily on the recovery bed, his body wrapped in a web of gauze, bruises, and crimson-streaked tape.
And the glow… still there. Subtle amber pulses running beneath his skin, like a low hum waiting to rise again.
"You saw it too," Corinth said from behind her. His voice, usually sardonic, was quiet now. "That wasn't a lucky punch."
"No." Ginah shook her head slowly. "It wasn't."
She tapped a few keys on the observation panel, bringing up the footage frame-by-frame. The moment of final impact. The core crackling in his hand. The shift in his musculature. The energy transfer. The precise arc of force.
He'd done all of it deliberately.
And with a level of familiarity that should've been impossible.
"There was a study," she murmured aloud, mostly to herself. "R&D sector out in Lower Sonas… obscure place, didn't even make the big consortiums. They published a limited-run white paper on temporary augment feedback and kinetic-based energy retention. Half the data was theoretical, barely peer-reviewed." She paused, squinting at the screen. "He copied the process almost exactly."
Corinth raised a brow. "What, he memorized some backwater tech paper and pulled it off in live combat?"
Ginah didn't answer right away.
Because that was what he did.
And that was exactly the problem.
"The paper was buried under six layers of off-grid indexing," she said finally. "You don't find it unless you're looking for it. And not casually. You have to dig."
She turned from the screen.
"Nathaniel didn't just survive that trial. He weaponized it."
Corinth exhaled, pushing away from the railing with a slow stretch. He looked at the kid behind the glass like one might look at a volatile prototype.
"So he's not just strong… he's curious."
"No," Ginah corrected, eyes still sharp. "He's dangerous. Because he learns."
And maybe… he wasn't learning this stuff for the first time.
Observation Deck – Post-Trial Analysis
The trial room's lights dimmed as the scorched Delta unit clanked lifelessly to the floor. Nathaniel collapsed moments later, panting, arms limp, clothes shredded by the strain. The room was silent save for the low hum of the core dampeners recalibrating the energy dispersal.
From behind the observation window, Corinth let out a long breath.
"He did it…" he said, half in awe, half in disbelief. "He actually cleared a B-class Delta with direct impact. Raw, but effective."
"I wouldn't call it smart," Isabelle chimed in, brushing a lock of hair behind her ear. "Reckless, unrefined, burned through nearly everything he had for a flashy finish."
Corinth chuckled. "Flashy or not, it's logged. No one's ever cracked that frame at equal output levels. He's got raw potential."
"Raw is the keyword," Isabelle repeated. "He'll plateau fast unless he learns control."
The two analysts began gathering their notes, finalizing the data packets for transmission. Ginah stood silently beside them, nodding as they gave final remarks.
"Upload the report," Corinth said as the doors hissed open. "We'll let the Knight Command review it tonight."
"You coming?" Isabelle asked Ginah.
"In a moment," she replied. "Just running one more cross-check for internal redundancy."
Isabelle gave her a brief look, then exited with Corinth.
When the door sealed shut, Ginah was alone. The glow from the monitor cast long shadows across her face.
She leaned forward.
Silent. Focused.
Fingers flicked through the trial footage, frame by frame. Not the fight—but the moment of the strike. Nathaniel's final charge. His aura flaring into a deep amber, hair silvered by overexposure, fingers darkened into a solid kinetic sheath as he broke the core's resistance.
She enhanced the image.
There it was.
The same aura polarity. Same core compression method. Same rotational spin from the Noirwraith archives—but without the divine catalysts. He shouldn't be able to do this.
Yet…
She brought up a hidden window. Cross-reference: Subject AR-01. The screen split—on one side, Nathaniel mid-strike. On the other, the Noirwraith: Arc Kodonaki, final form. Amber-lit, hair blazing white, surrounded by a thunderstorm of elemental chaos.
Arc moved like a god carved into man. Nathaniel—he twitched like an instinctual echo.
Nowhere near equal.
Arc was Zenith-tier. Singular. His presence alone warped battlefield physics.
Nathaniel's move had only triggered a brief flicker of that aura. Just enough to get the job done. A flicker.
Yet it was there.
Ginah leaned back, arms crossed.
"You're still in there," she whispered to herself.
She closed the secondary feed and wiped its record.
The official log would show nothing but a standard overclocked augmentation event. Nothing else. She tapped a knuckle against the terminal.
"They don't need to know. Not yet."
As she left the room, the camera feed froze for a moment—on Nathaniel's collapsed form, arm still twitching slightly, faint remnants of amber still clinging to his knuckles.
A whisper of something much, much greater.
Something sleeping.
-------**
The trial room flickered back to low lighting as the automated containment fields stabilized. Nathaniel Alderman lay sprawled across the scorched floor, his chest rising and falling with labored effort, his right hand twitching faintly as residual amber sparks crackled along his bruised arms.
From behind the glass, Corinth was the first to break the silence.
"He actually did it…" he muttered, brow raised.
"Don't sound so shocked," Isabelle replied. "He's still alive, isn't he?"
"Barely. That charge was beyond his expected limit."
Isabelle narrowed her eyes at the readouts. "There's no divine bleed, no foreign augment, and the readings line up—just at a near-lethal output. He bypassed the unit's adaptive cap using sheer acceleration and concentrated overload."
Corinth chuckled. "Reckless genius."
"No. Just reckless," Isabelle corrected, already walking off. "Let's see if he can walk tomorrow."
The pair left, doors sliding shut behind them.
Ginah remained behind.
She didn't move. Not for several seconds.
Only when she was alone did her expression shift—flat into sharp, focused analysis. She called up the private feed, hidden deep beneath system protocols.
A split screen emerged.
On one side: Nathaniel's final impact. Amber flares, silvered hair, aura resonance. Instinctive. Reflexive. A ghost of something greater.
On the other screen—Arc Kodonaki in full Noirwraith manifestation: white hair blazing, eyes glowing amber, a storm of burning kinetic and soul-bound energy around him like a throne of annihilation.
Ginah muttered under her breath.
"Not random. Not evolution. Residual memory."
She encrypted the footage and transferred it to an external, untraceable drive—for her eyes only.
Then, a separate monitor flickered to life. Unbeknownst to Ginah, a background feed had been quietly running the entire time—severed from the main observation logs. A screen buried deep in the facility's backend surveillance stack.
A flicker of an old university seal appeared: R&D Archive – Level 9 Clearance.
Professor Wolfbane stood in a low-lit lab, arms folded, watching the trial feed through a private terminal. His face partially obscured, his eyes flicking across analytics and frame-by-frame data—particularly that brief aura shift and the kinetic imprint of Nathaniel's final strike.
He wasn't alone.
On the second half of his screen, a secure call was active. Encrypted. The camera revealed only a dimly lit study, lined with ancient tomes, technology, and artifacts of both science and war.
Seated calmly behind a carved obsidian desk was a towering man—8 feet tall, with dark skin, a faded cut of white hair, a neatly trimmed beard, and eyes glowing green like trapped lightning. The power in him was coiled tight, like a dam holding back the sea. Even sitting, he radiated control—pressure, the kind that bent rooms around him.
His name tag on the feed read only: J. Peak.
But Wolfbane knew the truth.
Jackson Peak. The man known only in classified war doctrine as the Grandmaster Zenith.
Wolfbane spoke quietly, voice low.
"We may have a ripple."
Jackson's eyes narrowed. "Define ripple."
Wolfbane turned back to the image of Nathaniel, zoomed in on the lingering amber shimmer along his forearm.
"Vestigial instinct. Not full memory. But… enough to trigger adaptation mid-combat."
There was a long pause.
Then Jackson leaned forward, hands steepled.
"Watch him. If it spreads…" A faint hum of energy pulsed through the signal—just his voice carried weight. "…contain it. Or I will."
The feed cut.
Wolfbane stood alone in the dark, watching Nathaniel twitch in exhaustion with in the med bay.