The canvas of the medical tent smelled of stale antiseptic and cheap rubber, a fragile barrier of synthetic fabric holding back the oppressive weight of the jungle. Inside, the air conditioning unit groaned under the strain of the tropical heat, humming a frantic, rhythmic song that did not manage to mask the sound of Lifeless's jagged breathing. He lay flat on a steel gurney, his skin the color of wet chalk, his entire left side wrapped in layers of thick gauze that were already turning a deep, wet crimson.
Every breath was an unmitigated disaster inside his chest. The child of divinity, that towering monument of silver fur, had rearranged the boy's skeletal structure with a single, casual movement of its knuckles. His left collarbone was split into three distinct fragments, the jagged edges grinding against his shoulder muscle whenever his torso shifted. Three ribs were completely shattered, the bone fragments pressing precariously against the delicate lining of his left lung, threatening to puncture the tissue if he drew too deep a breath. His left cheekbone was flattened, the skin above it swollen into a dark purple mass that completely sealed his left eye, leaving only a thin slit of watery white visible beneath the puffed flesh.
Worse than the bones was the internal damage. The crushing impact of the gorilla's headbutt had sent a massive kinetic shockwave straight through his abdomen, leaving his left kidney slightly ruptured, weeping blood into his urinary tract. The bite from the monstrous baboon had left a jagged, ragged crescent of missing flesh on his right shoulder, the edges of the wound already showing signs of local necrosis from the toxic saliva of the divine beast.
Medical monitors beeped in a frantic, uncoordinated chorus around the gurney. A young field doctor, his hands trembling as he swapped out a fresh bag of synthetic plasma, kept his eyes locked on the fluctuating pressure readings. The statistics were a clinical horror story. Any regular human being would have suffered immediate, irreversible hypovolemic shock within the first four minutes of that encounter. The sheer density of the kinetic blows would have ruptured a normal person's aorta, causing the entire cardiovascular system to collapse before the body even hit the volcanic stone floor. Lifeless was alive strictly because of the terrifying density of his muscular walls and the residual, stubborn durability of his bone tissue, a biological fortress that refused to stop pumping blood even when the foundation was thoroughly cracked.
He needed over five months for all that damage to heal properly. Five months of absolute stillness, five months of cold fluids and bone-knitting serums, five months of carrying the toxic shame of his survival while the world moved forward without his consent.
Jarvis stood at the foot of the gurney, a towering silhouette against the harsh, white fluorescent light of the medical bay. His face was completely shadowed, his massive arms crossed over his chest, his presence filling the small tent until the space felt suffocating. He looked at the ruined face of the boy, then down at the shattered casing of the chest camera that lay on the instrument table, its lens cracked into a spiderweb pattern, though the tiny red light still flickered with a stubborn, dying rhythm.
"you need time to heal, we should handle the rest of this mission ourself"
Jarvis's voice was a low, heavy vibration that rattled the metal trays on the counters. It carried no pity, no warmth, only the cold, logical calculus of a military asset evaluating a broken tool.
The words hit Lifeless like a physical blow. The rage inside him, that volatile current Norris had spent years cultivating through systematic trauma, surged through his central nervous system like liquid fire. He forced his right arm down against the metal rail of the gurney, the muscles in his forearm bunching until the skin threatened to split. He pushed his torso upward, ignoring the white-hot scream of his shattered ribs as they scraped against each other, his good eye widening into a wild, bloodshot glare that locked onto the giant soldier.
"you'll be damned with out me AND YOU KNOW IT"
The scream tore through his flattened nose, spraying a fine mist of dark blood across the white sheets. His face contorted into a mask of pure, unadulterated venom, the skin around his swollen eye splitting open to let a fresh tear of crimson run down his bruised jawline.
Jarvis did not flinch. He did not shift his weight. He merely adjusted his grip on his belt, his eyes remaining fixed on the boy's trembling frame.
"calm down, we have high tech able to kill an entire country."
"but not able to kill a creature from here right?"
The question left Lifeless's lips like a curse, sharp and bleeding. He leaned forward, his teeth stained pink, his breath coming in short, shallow puffs that rattled against his teeth.
The room followed with a loud silence.
The humming of the air conditioner seemed to vanish, swallowed by a heavy, suffocating vacuum. The field doctor froze, his hand suspended in mid-air over the plasma line, his eyes darting between the broken boy and the massive commander. The silence stretched, expanding until the walls of the tent felt like they were bowing inward under the pressure of an unspoken truth. The high-tech weaponry, the satellite lasers, the kinetic strikes that could level a modern metropolis, none of it could account for the terrifying, rule-breaking biology of the entities that ruled the deep interior of the rainforest. The machinery of man was useless against the raw, unyielding divinity of the jungle
.
Lifeless tore the heart monitor leads from his skin, the small adhesive patches ripping away with a dull snap. He swung his legs over the edge of the gurney, his boots hitting the canvas floor with a wet thud. Every movement was an exercise in pure agony, his body protesting with a wave of nausea that threatened to empty his stomach onto the floor. He reached out with his right hand, his fingers wrapping around the leather grip of his sword that leaned against the medical supply crate.
"I'm going there, and I said it. If I Dont get out alive I entered trying."
He did not look back. He shoved past the trembling field doctor, his right shoulder dropping low as he dragged his useless, heavily bandaged left arm against his flank. He unzipped the tent flap with his teeth, stepping back out into the sweltering, grey haze of the jungle morning.
He went out to kill the animals with one hand.
The rainforest was a blur of steaming green and heavy grey mist. Lifeless moved like a dying reaper, his right arm swinging the heavy blade in short, vicious arcs whenever a mutated creature crossed his path. A massive, five-legged lynx with skin like wet moss lunged from a low branch, its jaws wide, but Lifeless simply pivoted his hips three centimeters, letting the beast slide past his broken ribs before driving the tip of his sword straight through its ear canal using the raw torque of his obliques. He did not feel the thrill of the hunt. He felt nothing but a cold, driving necessity to erase every living thing that had witnessed his weakness.
He pushed deeper, his boots sinking into the black mud, his breath a rhythmic, wet wheeze that left flecks of red foam on his lips. The jungle grew unnaturally dark, the canopy woven so tightly that the sun could not find the floor.
A figure appeared twenty meters ahead, standing motionless in a small patch of dead ferns.
The shape was slender, elegant, completely out of place in the primal chaos of the wilderness. It wore garments of a deep, midnight black that seemed to absorb the ambient light, its posture relaxed, almost delicate. Lifeless stopped his advance, his right hand tightening around his sword hilt until his knuckles turned a bloodless white. His good eye narrowed, tracking the faint, shimmering distortions in the air around the figure, a visual manifestation of a high-tier bio-current that made the hairs on the boy's neck stand up.
But whatever it was it was not an animal.
It was him, the mysterious man.
The handsome stranger turned his head slowly, his features perfectly symmetrical, his pale skin entirely unblemished by the mud or the humidity of the forest. His eyes were a cold, piercing silver, holding a level of vanity and amusement that made Lifeless's stomach turn.
"what brought you here, we are going to kill all the animals and empty the forest for you."
Lifeless's voice was low, filtered through the copper taste of his own blood. He balanced his weight on his good leg, his sword tip pointing slightly toward the damp earth.
The mysterious man let out a soft, melodic laugh that sounded like silver coins dropping onto stone. He stepped forward, his boots leaving no impression on the wet ferns, his movements carrying a terrifying, weightless grace.
"oh you thought I was just gonna kill those animals and the forest for my self, oh no I don't want to kill them they are innocent"
The man paused, his lips curving into a thin, mocking smile that dripped with a dark, theatrical sarcasm. He raised his right hand, his fingers spreading wide as if he were addressing a stadium full of worshippers.
"I'm gonna free them to your world and then take the island. Two birds one rock."
The pure, casual malice of the statement hung in the humid air. He was going to unleash the mutated, divine horrors of the deep interior upon the unsuspecting cities of the world, letting millions drown in blood just to claim the isolated land mass for his own hidden purposes.
"fuck you"
The curse had barely left Lifeless's lips when the man vanished from his line of sight.
There was no sound of footsteps, no displacement of air. The man simply ceased to exist in one spot and materialized directly in front of Lifeless, his fist already moving in a short, horizontal arc that crackled with a dense, white-hot bio-current.
Lifeless reacted on pure instinct. He activated the shadow technique, attempting to slip his physical form into the spatial blind spot of the strike, but his body was a ruined machine. His broken ribs shifted, a sharp, white-hot spike of agony paralyzing his diaphragm for a fraction of a millisecond. He was not that fast.
The man's fist caught him squarely in the stomach.
The force of the blow traveled straight through his abdominal wall, the white current frying his nerve endings instantly. Lifeless felt his stomach contract violently, his breath exploding out of his mouth in a wet spray. Before he could fall, the man's left hand blurred, a brutal punch after punch landing on his face.
The impacts were a rapid, rhythmic succession of dull thuds. Left hook, right cross, an upward jab that shattered his remaining nasal cartilage. The white electricity from the man's fists arced across Lifeless's skin, cooking the outer layers of his flesh, leaving small, blackened tracks across his cheeks. He spat out a tooth, the white enamel bouncing off the man's dark sleeve before disappearing into the mud.
Lifeless was getting beat up to mere death.
He was a human punching bag, his head snapping back with every strike, his legs turning to water beneath him. His vision was a chaotic smear of grey, white, and red. The world had reduced itself to the sound of his own bones cracking and the cold, elegant face of the man moving closer and closer.
In a desperate, final effort, Lifeless let his knees give way entirely. As the man threw a heavy downward elbow meant to cave in his skull, Lifeless slid through the slick mud, his torso twisting under the strike. He finally dodged a hit. Using the momentum of his fall, he launched his body backward, rolling over his uninjured shoulder and jumping away from the man, creating a gap of five meters.
He came to a stop in a low, three-point stance, his right hand holding the sword diagonally across his chest as he guarded himself. His breath was a horrific, bubbling whistle, his chest heaving as he tried to clear the blood from his throat.
The man did not give him a second to breathe. He lunged with the shadow step, his body turning into a long, dark streak that cut through the grey mist. Before Lifeless could lift his blade, the man's fingers wrapped around his throat with the force of a hydraulic press, slamming his back against a massive mahogany tree.
The impact drove the bark deep into his existing back wounds. Lifeless felt the air cut off completely, his throat collapsing under the pressure of the man's grip. His good eye began to roll back into his head, the darkness creeping in from the edges of his vision.
He could not die here. He could not die like a dog on a leash.
With a final, explosive surge of his bio-current, Lifeless drove his right knee upward into the man's groin. The man tilted his pelvis back slightly to absorb the blow, but the momentary shift in balance was enough. Lifeless got away from the choke, his right hand coming up in a desperate, wild trajectory, throwing a punch on the man that caught him across the side of his neck.
The man grunted, his grip loosening for a fraction of a second. Lifeless broke free, his boots tearing up the turf as he ran away, trying to gain the deep shadows of the thicker undergrowth where he could utilize his tactical analysis.
He had not taken five steps when the man recovered. A long, sweeping kick caught Lifeless directly behind the ankles, taking him completely off the floor. He spun through the air, his weightless momentum carrying him sideways until he was thrown into a tree four meters away.
He hit the trunk with his broken side, the sound of his remaining intact ribs cracking echoing through the quiet clearing. He slid down the bark, landing face-down in the wet leaves.
He lay perfectly still. He acted dead. He kept his muscles loose, his breathing entirely stopped, letting his head rest in the dirt at an awkward, unnatural angle, hoping the man would assume the impact had finally broken his neck.
The man was too smart for this.
A cold chuckle echoed above him. Before Lifeless could open his eye, a heavy boot slammed into his shoulder, rolling him onto his back. The man knelt over him, his face a mask of absolute, clinical cruelty. He punched lifeless countless times, his fists moving like twin pistons, driving down into the boy's face with systematic precision.
The blows did not stop. They came faster and harder, breaking the skin until Lifeless's face was a continuous, dripping wound. The white current from the strikes entered his skull, sending violent tremors through his brain tissue, threatening to cause an immediate cerebral hemorrhage. Lifeless's right eye was now all the way closed, the skin swollen into a thick, taut dome of black and purple fluid. He was completely blind. He was completely broken. The world was nothing but darkness and pain.
Inside the hollow, ruined cavern of his mind, a single spark remained. The voice was not his own; it was the cold, demanding ghost of Norris's teachings, mixed with his own terrifying, stubborn pride.
"I refuse to give up, no I'll die. Why am I so selfish, I can give a sacrifice for anyone, I can still stand. It's not over as long as I'm breathing, EVERY SCAR MEANS I KEPT FIGHTING"
The thought was an explosion of pure, volatile adrenaline. The toxic shame of his weakness turned into a physical fuel, a thick, heavy energy that bypassed his ruined nervous system entirely. His heart gave a single, massive contraction that sent a wave of fresh, hot blood to his limbs.
He rose back into his feet.
It was an impossible resurrection. His bones were grinding, his internal organs were weeping, but he stood. He stood in the center of the dark forest, his head tilted back, his blind face pointing toward the mysterious man.
He fights back.
He did not use the shadow technique. He did not use tactical observation. He reached deep into the core of his biological engine, tearing down the internal barriers of the Muzzle through sheer, unadulterated willpower. A new energy erupted from his pores, an energy that was not white or blue, but a deep, violent, crimson current that smelled of copper and ozone.
He lunged forward, his right arm moving with a speed that exceeded anything he had executed before. He punched the man with a red current right hook.
The impact was a volcanic explosion. The crimson electricity detonated against the man's jaw, the raw kinetic energy ripping through his spatial defenses like paper. The mysterious man's head snapped sideways, his elegant features twisting in sudden, profound shock as his body was lifted off the ground and he fell on the floor, sliding three meters through the mud.
Lifeless stood over him, his chest heaving, his crimson current arcing off his skin in long, jagged whips that hissed against the wet leaves. A sudden, paralyzing thought entered his mind, a product of his deep, deep paranoia.
"no, he can't be this weak. He has to be putting me in a trap. He's tricking me."
The man lay on the ground, his body slightly curled, his breath coming in a jagged gasp. Lifeless hesitated. He got away before he punched again, his boots stepping back into the shadows, his blind mind analyzing a trap that did not exist. He saw the man flinching as if he was going to die. The man's defensive field was completely shattered, his internal current fluctuating wildly from the unexpected devastation of the crimson strike. He was open. He was vulnerable.
But Lifeless had already backed off. He had wasted his chance because he trusted his instinct.
"you stupid piece of shit, I had the chance and I wasted it"
The realization was a bitter, toxic acid in his throat. The man was already pushing himself off the stone, his silver eyes flashing with an unholy, demonic fury as he realized how close he had come to annihilation. The vanity was gone; there was only a desire to erase the boy from existence.
"I have to come up with a plan to defeat this guy or I will die"
Lifeless backed off further, his boots slithering through the mud as he turned and ran away into the thicker parts of the mangrove roots, his mind racing to find a mechanical solution to his survival.
The man followed him like a vengeful specter, his shadow step tearing through the ferns with a terrifying, high-pitched whine. He materialized behind Lifeless before the boy could even register the movement, his long, slender arms wrapping around Lifeless's neck from behind, locking him into a flawless, suffocating chokehold.
The pressure on his carotid arteries was instantaneous. Lifeless felt his remaining strength draining from his legs, the crimson sparks on his skin beginning to sputter and die.
With a final, desperate movement of his right wrist, Lifeless reversed his grip on his sword. He drove the blade backward, keeping it tight against his own ribs, the polished metal sliding through his own shirtsleeve before plunging deep into the meat of the man's forearm.
The blade bit through skin, muscle, and bone. The man let out a sharp, ragged scream of agony, his grip loosening as the cold iron severed his tendons.
"arm to arm"
The thought was a tactical command. Lifeless did not pull the blade out. He planted his right boot against the massive, rotted trunk of a dying cedar tree beside them, throwing every ounce of his remaining kinetic weight into a single, devastating kick.
The impact was immense. The structural integrity of the rotted tree gave way with a deafening, splintering roar. The massive trunk, weighing several tons, snapped at the base and fell on the man, burying his lower torso beneath a mountain of heavy wood and tangled vines.
But the man was an apex entity. With a terrifying scream of pure, unbridled rage, he placed his uninjured left hand beneath the crushing weight of the log, his muscles swelling until his sleeves exploded into ribbons. He carried it and threw it away with one arm, the massive cedar trunk launching five meters into the undergrowth like a discarded branch.
He was defenseless while he was throwing the tree.
Lifeless had already closed the gap. He did not wait for the man to recover his stance. He punched the man with a straight right hand that landed squarely on the bridge of his elegant nose.
The bone shattered with a wet, crunchy pop. The man fell down, his head bouncing off the volcanic rock, blood erupting from his nose in a dark, consistent stream that ruined his pale features.
Lifeless did not hesitate. He got over him, straddling the man's chest, his right fist rising and falling with rhythmic, mechanical brutality. He started punching repeatedly, driving his knuckles into the man's mouth, his eyes, his forehead, using the raw, heavy weight of his torso to pin the stranger to the stone.
The man's silver eyes widened in a sudden frenzy of survival. He brought his left hand up, his palm pressing against Lifeless's chest, and discharged a concentrated blast of white current directly into the boy's sternum.
The impact made Lifeless fly toward a tree, his body traveling horizontally through the air before falling on his broken ribs.
A sound left his throat that was not human. He screamed his air out, a high-pitched, agonizing rattle that emptied his lungs completely. The white-hot agony of his bones grinding against his internal organs shattered the final remaining limits of his psychological sanity. The Muzzle's neural suppression did not just fail; the physical limiter inside his brain completely disintegrated under the pressure of his suffering.
The crimson current started to break the barrier and sparkle everywhere.
It was no longer a controlled energy. It was a localized disaster. Long, thick ropes of red electricity erupted from his skin, tearing his shirt into ash, melting the synthetic camera on his chest into a pool of black liquid. The air around him began to boil, the moisture in the atmosphere turning to steam with a loud, violent hiss.
He attacked the man with a dropkick to his rib that broke it.
The movement was a blur of pure, crimson speed. He launched his entire body weight through the air, his boots striking the man's chest with the force of a meteor impact. The distinct, hollow sound of the man's ribcage collapsing filled the clearing, the stranger coughing up a massive wave of dark, arterial blood as he was driven into the dirt.
Lifeless was in such unbearable pain that he screamed until his face was pure red. His vocal cords tore under the strain, his throat filling with his own blood, but the scream did not stop. It was a sound of pure, unadulterated torment, the sound of a human being whose biology was actively tearing itself apart to maintain its output.
He punch the man with so much current the man died from the first punch.
The strike landed directly in the center of the man's face, the crimson electricity expanding into a blinding dome of red light that vaporized the skin and muscle instantly. The man's consciousness vanished in a microsecond, his heart stopping as the current fried his central nervous system.
But lifeless didn't stop.
"you fucking piece of shit, im not going to give you merci."
The words were a gargled, bloody roar that shook the leaves on the trees. More red current flowed out of his body, the intensity rising until his skin began to crack, bright red light leaking from the fissures in his forearms. He kept punching the man until no blood flew on his face. He kept driving his fist down into the skull, over and over, twenty times, fifty times, eighty times, his knuckles turning into a mash of white bone and red tissue.
He did not stop until the man's head turned into ash.
The constant, high-frequency discharge of the crimson current completely incinerated the bone structure, leaving nothing but a grey, smoking circle of dust on the black stone where the elegant stranger's face had been.
Still, lifeless was overloaded with electricity.
The biological engine inside him was running without a governor, generating power that his cells could no longer contain. He was being shocked just by breathing, every inhalation causing a massive arc of red lightning to shoot down his trachea, searing his lungs from the inside out. Sparks five meters long shot from his ears, his fingertips, his toes, setting the surrounding ferns on fire instantly.
He dragged his broken body away from the corpse, his boots stomping against the stone with a heavy, metallic resonance as the electricity grounded itself through his heels. He moved back toward the perimeter, toward the clearing where the expedition cabin stood.
He threw open the wooden door with his right shoulder, the frame splintering into kindling under the ambient kinetic force radiating from his skin.
"get out of this fucking forest or you'll die"
The team, including Jarvis, were gathered around the central radar console. They turned slowly, their faces turning a pale, bloodless white as they looked at the doorway.
They saw how damaged he was. His left arm was a shredded piece of meat, his ribs were visibly deformed beneath his skin, and his face was a unrecognizable mask of purple swelling and black burns. But worse than the wounds was the energy. The crimson electricity was sparkling out of his body in thick, violent sheets that melted the metal fixtures on the cabin walls, causing the electronics to explode in small showers of green sparks. He was a walking nuclear meltdown.
Jarvis did not say a word. He took one look at the boy's bleeding, unblinking eye and the raw, world-ending voltage leaking from his skin, and grabbed the nearest technician by the collar.
"move"
The team scrambled through the back exit, running with a frantic, animalistic panic toward the river bank where the heavy expedition ship was moored. They scrambled over the gangplank, the engines roaring to life with a desperate, high-pitched whine as they tore away from the shore, the hull throwing up a massive wake as they fled toward the open ocean.
The camera on Lifeless's chest burned completely away, the final transmission cutting out into a screen of static before the global audience.
Lifeless let go.
The final internal limiter inside his heart snapped. The stored crimson current, thousands of volts of pure, biological kinetic energy, exploded outward from his body in a massive, expanding ring of absolute destruction.
The current flew on the Amazon.
It was an apocalyptic wave of red lightning that cut through the ancient wilderness like a scythe. The energy ripped through the canopy, turning every animal into ash in a fraction of a second, their skeletal structures turning to dust before they could even hit the ground. The massive, century-old trees did not catch fire; they simply died from the inside out, their leaves turning black and falling like soot as the current fried their cellular walls, turning the vibrant green labyrinth into a silent, charred graveyard of grey wood. It ended the Amazon. Within a radius of three miles, the living heart of the forest was reduced to a barren, smoking wasteland of black stone and white ash.
Lifeless walked out of the ruined cabin, his boots stomping heavily into the grey dust that had once been the jungle floor. Every step was an impossible miracle of pure survival, his muscles twitching with the final, dying remnants of the current.
He raised his head toward the bleak, cloudless sky, his throat raw, his voice a low, desperate rattle that barely carried across the silence of the dead clearing.
"help"
The word left his lips as a tiny puff of grey steam. The final spark of energy left his nervous system, and his legs gave way entirely. He collapsed instantly, his broken body hitting the black earth with a dull, heavy thud, leaving him motionless in the center of the world he had just destroyed.