The blue rays cut across Ethan's body like scalpels made of light. They didn't miss a single inch. Every pore, every vein, every damn cell lit up on the wall-sized screen in front of Lyra.
The machine was Hephaestus tech, brand new, straight from the god's forges. One scan and the whole world knew why everyone still bowed to him even after Zeus banned direct interference.
Hephaestus didn't need to throw lightning. He built the lightning. And right now it was carving Ethan open without touching him.
Lyra leaned forward, elbows on the console. Her eyes narrowed. "Pure blood?"
Marcus stood two steps behind her, arms crossed tight. "What?"
"I said, is he a pure blood?" She didn't look at him. "Not one of those watered-down half-breeds born from some god screwing a human. Real blood. God on both sides."
Marcus swallowed. "I… I thought his mother was human. That's what the file said."
"You thought." Lyra's voice was flat. "Files lie. Keep scanning."
The doctor, a thin man in a white coat with Hephaestus's hammer stitched on the shoulder, tapped commands.
The image zoomed. Heart first. The muscle filled the screen, beating slow and steady under the blue glow. Then deeper. Arteries lit up like glowing wires.
The doctor's finger froze mid-air. "He's not pure blood."
Lyra's head snapped toward him. "huh...Explain."
"Structure's half-human. Clear markers. But look." He zoomed again. Tiny marks appeared inside the walls of the arteries, sharp, burned-in lines that formed letters no modern language used.
They pulsed with each heartbeat, like they were alive.
Marcus stepped closer. His face went pale the second he read them. He knew that script. Spent six years in the Academy drilling it into his skull. The words weren't symbols. They were a sentence.
Mark of the Destroyer.
His stomach dropped. That was supposed to be a bedtime story for scared cadets. The end-times prophecy.
One being who would break the world when the gods finally went to war again. Fairy tale. Bullshit. Except the letters were right there, carved into Ethan's heart like a brand.
Lyra caught the change in his breathing. She grabbed a fistful of his shirt and yanked him down to her eye level. "You know something. Spit it out."
Marcus forced his face blank. "Nothing. It's ...nothing."
She stared straight into his eyes for three long seconds. Then she smiled, cold and sharp.
"You're a good liar. I'll give you that." She let go and turned back to the screen. "Focus on muscle and bone density. Can it handle the procedure?"
The doctor wiped sweat from his forehead. "Yes. Easily. Even more than we planned."
"Good. Run it at two hundred percent then."
The doctor's hand hovered over the controls. "Ma'am… one-twenty is the safe upper limit. Two hundred—"
"JUST ...Do it." Lyra's voice didn't rise much. It didn't need to. The room temperature felt like it dropped ten degrees.
The doctor nodded fast and started typing. Two assistants wheeled Ethan's table out of the main chamber and through a set of blast doors into the secondary room.
Warning signs covered every wall in red and black
: RADIATION, HIGH VOLTAGE, BIOHAZARD, EXTREME HEAT.
Thick cables snaked across the floor, ending in metal clamps already locked around Ethan's wrists, ankles, and chest.
Marcus's eyes widened. "Is this even safe?"
Lyra didn't look away from the monitors. "Maybe. He'll either die or walk out with a body that can handle the hundred-times system he was gifted. Either way, we get answers."
Marcus lunged forward. "We didn't agree to this! Stop the whole damn operation right now—"
Four soldiers in black tactical gear moved before he finished the sentence. One jammed a knee into his back, another slapped a mask over his face.
Anesthesia hissed. Marcus fought for two seconds, then his knees buckled and he dropped like a sack of bricks.
Lyra watched the whole thing on the secondary feed without blinking.
"Put him in the observation room. He'll wake up when it's done." She turned back to the main screen. Ethan lay unconscious, chest rising and falling under the harsh lights. Wires glowed blue where they connected to his skin.
She rested one hand on the glass separating her from the chamber. "You're going to be the beacon for my revenge, dear Ethan," she whispered. "Start it...NOW!"
The doctor hit the final key.
A million volts slammed into Ethan's body.
The lights in the room flickered. The table rattled. Ethan's back arched so hard the metal groaned. Every muscle locked at once. The monitors screamed warnings in red.
***
Inside Ethan's head, everything was different.
He stood in open sky, no ground, no clouds, just endless blue stretching forever. He was a kid again, maybe eight years old, barefoot and small. A shadow waited ahead.
The shape of a woman. Long hair, familiar shoulders. His mother.
"Mom!" he yelled and ran.
She turned, smiled the way she used to when she tucked him in. Then she dissolved into black smoke and blew away.
Another voice rolled across the sky. Deep. Calm. Like it had been waiting a long time.
"She wasn't your mother."
Ethan spun in a circle. "Who...who the hell are you?"
"You don't need the name yet. You don't have the will to carry it."
The sky darkened at the edges. Ethan felt the words sink into his bones anyway.
"But soon you will."
A pause. Then the voice spoke again, softer this time.
My son
Electricity exploded through Ethan's nerves.
Back in the chamber the voltage spiked. Two million. Three. The doctor's hands shook on the controls but he didn't dare stop. Lyra watched every spike on the graph with hungry eyes.
Ethan's body jerked harder. Veins stood out like ropes under his skin. The ancient marks in his heart flared white-hot on the scanner.
The Destroyer sigils burned brighter, spreading outward along every artery, every vein, painting his circulatory system like a map of coming war.
In the dream the sky cracked.
Lightning, real lightning, ripped across the blue nothing. Each strike slammed into kid-Ethan's chest and stayed there, coiling around his ribs. Pain and power mixed until he couldn't tell them apart.
"You were never meant to live small," it said. "They hid you. They lied. They all lied to you. But the mark doesn't lie. It waited. Waited for you, an it choose."
Ethan tried to scream but the current filled his throat. His small hands clenched into fists. The lightning answered, wrapping tighter, pushing deeper.
Something inside him cracked open, not bone, not muscle, something older. Power poured in like an ocean through a pinhole.
Outside, the monitors flat-lined for half a second, then jumped back online screaming new readings.
Muscle density tripled. Bone density quadrupled. Neural pathways lit up like city grids at night. The doctor stared, mouth open.
"Ma'am… his body is accepting it. All of it. The system is rewriting itself around the mark."
Lyra's lips curved. "Good...increase it, increase the output."
"Ho..How much?"
Lyra looked at the doctor, and smiled. "..1000%"
"Roger."
Ethan's eyes snapped open inside the dream. He wasn't a kid anymore. He stood full-grown, shirtless, lightning dancing across his shoulders like living tattoos.
The voice spoke one last time before the sky shattered completely.
"Wake up, My Destroyer. The world isn't ready. Make it ready. Re write the world with my gift."
Then suddenly, Reality slammed back.
Ethan's eyes flew open in the chamber. The million-volt cables still pumped power into him, but now he was awake and the electricity felt like warm water. His chest heaved.
The sigils under his skin glowed faint blue through the muscle, visible even to the naked eye. Every breath hurt and felt perfect at the same time.
He looked straight through the one-way glass and locked eyes with Lyra.
She didn't flinch. She smiled wider.
Marcus groaned awake in the observation room, head pounding from the anesthesia.
He dragged himself to the window just in time to see Ethan rip one of the wrist clamps clean off the table like it was paper.
"Wait."
Ethan tore the second clamp free. Then the chest one. He stood up slowly. The table groaned and bent under his grip. His voice came out rough, raw, but steady.
"What the hell did you do to me?"
Lyra's voice crackled over the intercom, calm as ever. "Gave you what you were born for. Welcome to the real game, Ethan."
He looked down at his hands. Blue lightning flickered between his fingers, answering his thoughts. The mark in his heart thrummed like a second heartbeat, stronger, older, hungry.
Marcus pressed his forehead against the glass, whispering to himself.
Gods help us. It's real....
The Destroyer's real.