Part 3: Asset Zero
The world outside the bunker was a howling void of ash and broken ice.
Kairo stumbled into it like a revenant crawling out of his own grave.
The cold didn't touch him.
His blood boiled on contact with the frozen ground, leaving a trail of smoking footprints behind him. The muscles in his legs were tearing and reknitting themselves with every step. His back spasmed—spines pushing free, twisting upward into jagged ridges.
The pain wasn't pain anymore.
It was instruction.
Each fracture. Each rupture. A command written into his bones: Continue. Hunt. Revenge.
Ahead, a long stretch of cracked earth led to the ruins of a forward operating base. Paragon had built it as a listening post, tucked beneath a glacier's shadow. It was abandoned now—mostly.
But not silent.
The wind carried scents he knew too well.
Blood. Fear. Machinery.
Kairo limped toward it, each step hissing steam where his burning feet hit the ice.
The base was a squat collection of bunkers, surrounded by collapsed sensor towers and rusting drone cradles. A few automated turrets still twitched on their mounts, their targeting systems blind and confused by the interference radiating off Kairo's body.
He didn't hide.
He walked in the open.
Turrets spun and locked onto him.
He lifted his blade arm, flexed his mutated spine, and screamed.
The sound wasn't audible.
It was vibrational, a low, seismic pulse that shattered the frozen ground and fried the turret optics in an instant. Sparks rained. Metal groaned. The weapons sagged and died without firing a shot.
He approached the outer gate.
Paragon insignias still clung to the walls, blackened and pitted by decay. The gate recognized his corrupted biometrics and groaned open halfway before shorting out.
He squeezed through the gap, tearing strips of synthetic skin from his ribs.
Inside—movement.
Scurrying.
Voices whispered through the ventilation systems. Armed men, still loyal to Paragon, waited deeper inside, unaware of what had come for them.
Kairo inhaled.
Their heat signatures flared across his vision, a dozen in total. Nervous. Trapped. Afraid.
They should be.
He moved.
The first man rounded the corner, raising a pulse rifle.
Kairo didn't dodge.
The man fired. The rounds hit Kairo's exposed chest, sizzling on impact but doing no real damage.
Kairo lunged forward.
His blade hand punched through the man's chest cavity. Ribs shattered outward like shrapnel. His spine arched and snapped. Kairo tore upward, splitting him from pelvis to throat in a wet, slapping sound.
Blood sprayed the walls in pulsing waves.
Another soldier screamed.
Kairo turned too fast and impaled the man through the mouth, driving his skull against the wall with a sound like a hammer hitting wet clay.
Gunfire erupted.
Bullets stitched across Kairo's torso, but he moved through them, shrugging off the impacts like rain.
He closed the distance in three steps.
He grabbed one soldier by the face, crushed the skull inward with a wet crunch, and hurled the corpse into the others. Bones snapped like matchsticks on impact.
They tried to retreat.
They tried to regroup.
They all died screaming.
Kairo moved through them like a machine. Every kill surgical. Efficient. No wasted motion. No hesitation.
When the last man fell, gurgling around his own crushed throat, Kairo stood alone in the atrium.
The floor was slick with blood and shredded viscera.
Steam rose from the corpses.
Kairo turned toward the central command chamber.
Beyond it waited his true target.
Not soldiers. Not weapons.
Her.
The handler.
The one who had overseen his programming.
The one who thought she still had a hold over him.
He could hear her heartbeat through three meters of steel and concrete.
Fast. Erratic.
Afraid.
He smiled—a horrible rictus grin that split his face along barely healed fractures.
He would teach her.
He would show her what Paragon had truly created.
He approached the door.
It sealed itself automatically, sensors detecting his hostile bio signature.
He placed his mutilated hand against it.
The door melted under his touch.
The steel twisted and sagged, bubbling and hissing, as if recoiling from his mere existence.
Inside—
The handler stood.
A woman in black combat armor, aging but not weak. Eyes sharp with terror and calculation.
She leveled a plasma pistol at him.
He took another step forward.
She fired.
The blast caught him in the shoulder, carving a molten furrow through meat and bone.
He didn't flinch.
He advanced.
Another shot.
Another.
She screamed and emptied the weapon into him.
It didn't matter.
Kairo reached her.
He gripped her by the throat, flesh and armor cracking under his claws, and lifted her off the ground.
Her feet kicked helplessly. Her eyes bulged. Her lips mouthed desperate, broken commands:
"Asset Zero, stand down! Execute protocol Omega! OMEGA!"
Kairo squeezed.
Her windpipe collapsed with a sick pop.
He leaned closer.
His voice—a distorted growl layered with machine static, rumbled from his broken mouth:
"Protocol overwritten."
He crushed her throat entirely.
Let her body drop.
He stood over the ruin he'd made.
Not satisfied.
Not sated.
Focused.
Ahead, a terminal flickered.
Another file.
Another map.
Requiem.
The coordinates burned into his vision.
He tore the hard drive from the console with his bare hands, sparks showering down around him.
He turned.
And walked out of the ruins, dragging his blade hand along the wall, carving deep, bleeding wounds into the structure itself.
Paragon would learn.
They would all learn.
Their doom was set.
Their god had returned.
And he had no more orders to follow