Time stop or maybe slowed down.
I could see the alpha moving before it moved.
I stepped forward, the suit guiding me.
The wolves lunged.
The world turned into light.
My blade arced once—then again—cutting invisible paths through the air. Electricity cracked from each swing. Each wolf it touched disintegrated, shards of blue flying like data fragments blown apart.
The alpha roared, lunging again.
I caught its skull between my palms. Omega's energy poured out in a flood. Its circuits overloaded, red veins bursting into white. A thunderclap split the air—and then silence.
When I opened my eyes, the alpha was a pile of ash, its lieutenants twitching before going still. Around me, smoldering craters marked where the rest of the pack had stood.
Tiny lowered her weapon slowly. "Okay…th that was awesome and terrifying boss!!."
Crazy was laughing calmly . "My hero academia!!!!!
Nurse just stared, visor reflecting the glow still fading from my chest plate. "You shouldn't be alive after channeling that. I guess omega suits work different."
Muscles slumped beside a scorched wall, half‑grinning through pain. "Yeah, boss. You might wanna tell us what the hell you are before the next thing tries to kill us."
The voice whispered softly—only for me.
>Host successfully executed Protocol: Neutralization.
> System compatibility increasing.
> Danger: Integration approaching irreversibility.
Then Commander Zack's voice burst over comms, smug and calm, like we'd just finished a training exercise instead of nearly dying.
"Wow. You actually survived. Impressive. Consider that your warm‑up, team. Now, move deeper into the Dead Zone. You've just triggered the beacon we were hunting."
I clenched my fists, voice cracking in rage.
"Commander, with all due respect, that's not our duty! We were ordered to scout,not fight off a damn pack of infected monsters! We did our job—you want that beacon so bad, call those lazy upper pigs and dig it out yourself!"
Static crackled, but then another voice cut across the channel—cold and synthetic.
Mission complete.
"What?" I whispered.
The ground trembled.
In the distance, the skeletal outline of a tower—one of the ancient comm spires—folded in on itself. A shockwave rolled through the ruins, scattering dust clouds miles wide.
"They're collapsing it…" Tiny murmured. "The top‑rank teams—they were stationed at that tower."
Through the haze, multiple signal IDs popped onto our HUD feed: Team A1, Team A3, Team S.
All elite squads.
All moving away from the explosion.
An old transmission overlapped them, half corrupted but clear enough to chill me.
> "Sector secured. Specimen recovered. Eliminate lower units if compromised."
We all looked at each other.
"What the hell," Muscles breathed, "they used us as bait."
Then the full truth dropped in an electronic whisper from Zack himself.
"Well done, Team 100. You served your purpose. The top teams retrieved what was truly important in Sector C‑13. You drew out the local infected nests. Efficient, clean… expendable."
Nurse's hand shot toward her sidearm before I stopped her.
He laughed through the channel. "Don't look so betrayed. It's the Academy's protocol. Besides, your survival rate exceeds projections. You've earned yourselves a shuttle ride home. Mission success."
The comms went dark.
No one spoke for a long time.
Only the low moan of wind scraping the ruins filled the quiet.
Finally Crazy muttered, "So that's it, huh? We were the decoy fireworks. The cannon fodder in shiny suits."
Muscles slammed his fist into the ground. "I'm gonna pound that smug bastard's teeth through his skull—"
"Enough," I cut in. "We regroup. We get to the evac point and we live. That's all that matters"
The others nodded, each nursing their fury like a wound.
We moved toward the extraction beacon, the sky bleeding red overhead.
The evac chopper waited atop the cracked helipad, blades whirling slow in the gritty air.
Soldiers in standard exo suits waved us in, their faces hidden behind mirrored helmets. Too clean, too calm. The smell of machine oil was sharp and sterile—no battlefield smell, no ash, no sweat.
Something was off.
Tiny felt it too. "Why's the bird running if the comms are dead?"
"Orders," one soldier said flatly. "Team 100, approach the ramp."
I frowned. "And Commander Zack?"
"Already returned to base," another replied, without inflection.
Every alarm in my head flared.
But before I said anything, the world shifted.
My vision pixelated for half a heartbeat—like reality had glitched—and then a presence pressed at my back. Cold. Wrong.
A hand landed on my shoulder.
I spun, blade half‑drawn—
and froze.
The man behind me wore a black mask fractured by dancing symbols, like lines of broken code bleeding down his cheeks. The lenses where eyes should have been flickered with static.
He leaned close enough that his voice bypassed the world altogether—it spoke inside my skull.
"I found you."
Time fractured.
The ground beneath me warped, shimmered. The air around my boots bent into a spiral of black pixels. My team's shouts echoed as if from another universe.
I turned just in time to see them being herded onto the chopper by the soldiers. The ramp closed, the rotors screaming, dust exploding into the air.
The last thing I saw was the masked man's face glitching, breaking apart, cycling through thousands of expressions—my own among them.
Then the floor vanished beneath me.
I fell—not through earth, but through data.
Blue storms of light tore around me, binary rain cascading past in streaks. Fragments of memory flowed everywhere: my sister, training mission, wolves, blood, Commander Zack's smirk—all mixing in a stream of corrupted code.
The voice of the mask followed, breaking and reforming in rhythm with the data surge.
Welcome back experiment 446.
You've been asleep for a very long time.
I tried to move. My limbs wouldn't respond; they flickered between flesh and luminous wireframe.
You think you were a soldier
No.
You are the system's seed—the last original strain.
Images filled my vision: scientists in white rooms, injecting dark fluid into cryo‑tubes; the mark Ω‑Project: Genesis Protocol* carved into steel; my body—smaller, younger—floating in a tank.
I screamed, but the sound made no noise.
The virus was never a curse.
It was the world's blessing.
You are its final antibody
I saw him clearer then—beneath the pixels, a face carved with sorrow. His mask cracked open in thin lines, revealing an a green eye.
"Who are you?" I demanded.
"we are beginning," he said. "And we are end."
" what do you mean ?" I demanded.
He smiled beneath the shifting mask. "Because you're ready for his plans."