I stared at the hard set lines of my jaw. The hollow exhaustion dug deep trenches under my eyes. I stood alone.
Then the reflection blinked.
I remained perfectly still. The figure in the glass rolled its shoulders. It straightened its posture. The exhaustion bled out of its face leaving a smooth flat apathy. It wore my skin but the inside was entirely empty.
"You built a pathetic cage," it said.
The voice belonged to my vocal cords. It carried the dead acoustics of an empty metal room.
I stepped back. "What are you?"
The reflection offered no answer. It dropped its hand and balled a fist. It struck the inside of the glass.
The giant mirror shattered.
A shockwave threw me backward. My spine hit the black glass floor. Before the silver shards stopped raining down he stepped through the empty frame. He did not speak. He just moved.
I scrambled to my feet and lunged. I threw a wild punch aimed directly at his jaw.
He slipped the strike with absolute precision. He did not bother to block. He simply vacated the space. He drove a knee straight into my stomach. The impact mirrored swinging a baseball bat against a concrete pillar. The air vacated my lungs in a violent rush.
As I doubled over his elbow came down hard on the back of my neck.
I slammed face first into the floor. The sharp copper taste of blood flooded my mouth.
I tried to push myself up. He stepped on the center of my spine. The weight defied gravity. It pressed down not just as a physical boot but as a massive crushing pressure dropping directly onto my consciousness.
"Go to sleep," he said.
The void collapsed entirely.
I fell directly into a blinding sterile white light.
Voices shouted in a frantic panic over the steady beep of monitors. Hands pinned my shoulders against a hard metal table. Thick leather straps cut deeply into my wrists. I strained against them. They did not give.
A man in a surgical mask leaned over my face. He held a thick clear cylinder attached to a heavy gauge needle. Stenciled down the side of the glass tube was a single word in bold black lettering. EquiV.
Cold fluid pumped directly into my spine. The second it hit my bloodstream it turned to liquid acid.
I screamed. No sound escaped my raw throat. My back arched violently against the restraints. The veins in my arms bulged as if tearing apart from the inside. I did not know the masked faces hovering above me. I only registered the absolute agony of the fire spreading through my chest cavity.
Then the burning stopped.
It did not fade gradually. It froze. The violent tearing sensation in my veins snapped into place and buried itself deep inside my bones. The acid shifted into a low mechanical hum. It vibrated through every individual cell in my body.
My eyes snapped open.
The blurry white lights sharpened into a crisp focus. I gasped dragging in air that smelled sharply of antiseptic and ozone.
I lay flat on a steel medical table inside a brightly lit lab. Heavy metal cuffs locked my wrists and ankles. Heart monitors beeped frantically next to my right ear.
A man in a white coat stepped back from the table. His hands shook violently.
I turned my head.
The man in the dark tactical armor from the warehouse stood in the corner of the room. His gray eyes locked onto my face. His rifle rested across his chest. He watched my every minute movement.
My breathing leveled out into a slow steady rhythm. The dull ache in my shattered ribs vanished entirely. The bone deep exhaustion was erased. Only that steady metallic hum remained inside my blood.
I gritted my teeth and pulled experimentally against the cuffs. The thick leather and steel creaked loudly. A sudden unfamiliar strength flooded my arms. The heavy metal table groaned under the upward pressure. The dense fibers in my arms pulled with unnatural force.
The armored man took a slow step forward. He kept his rifle lowered but his posture shifted seamlessly into a perfectly balanced combat stance.
"Where am I?" I asked.
The armored man ignored my question. He kept his gray eyes fixed firmly on my face but spoke to the trembling man in the white coat.
"How is he alive?" His voice was clipped tight and entirely professional.
The doctor swallowed hard. He reached out with a trembling finger and tapped a sequence into the digital monitor beside my head. He refused to look me in the eye. "He hibernated. His core vitals flatlined until the EquiV compound fully integrated with his nervous system."
The armored man tightened his jaw. His right hand hovered just inches from his holstered sidearm. He studied the expansion of my chest and the corded tension in my forearms. He assessed a live explosive waiting to detonate. Strict military discipline was carved into every single movement he made. He was a soldier.
I stared back at him. My chest rose and fell in a steady controlled rhythm. Every nerve in my body hummed on full alert.
Finally the soldier turned slightly away from the table. He addressed the entire room.
"If he is adapting then he is an asset. Keep him alive."
Those words settled over the room. I was a tool. The humanity had been completely stripped away and replaced by a cold utilitarian assessment of my potential value.
The soldier turned back and stepped right up to the edge of the medical table. He looked down into my eyes.
"My name is Zack," he said. The tone offered zero comfort. "You are in a secure Alpha Division facility. If you break those restraints I will put a bullet in your head."
He turned sharply on his heel and walked out the heavy steel door.
Hours bled together into a thick gray haze. Time lost all distinct meaning inside the windowless room. The doctors worked around me in constant silence. Sharp needles pierced my skin. Medical machines droned a dull endless rhythm. My body shifted under their latex gloves. My skin prickled constantly. My muscles burned hot and then turned freezing cold as the foreign substance threaded itself deeper into my tissue.
It was an endless cycle of extreme disorientation. The steady metallic hum inside my blood kept the worst of the agony buried.
The world swam in and out of focus. Through the blur of the bright sterile lights I watched the hallway outside the open steel door. Heavily armed soldiers moved past the medical bay in steady organized patrols. Their dark armor gleamed sharply under the fluorescent lights. Their rifles were always held perfectly at the ready.
I caught sight of an insignia stitched clearly onto the shoulders of their uniforms. Two black wings framing a crimson spear.
Alpha Division.
The name rose unbidden in my mind. A stray fragment of memory floating in a storm of broken scattered pieces.
Somewhere deeper in the medical haze one of the doctors muttered quietly under his breath. It was almost too soft to hear over the steady drone of the monitors.
"Better this than ending up like the Outcasts."
The second doctor snapped at him immediately. "Stay quiet and check the saturation levels."
The word echoed loudly in my hollow skull. Outcasts. It meant absolutely nothing to me. It was foreign and meaningless.
My head pounded with a dull heavy pressure. Nothing made logical sense. But one absolute truth carved itself directly into my bones and refused to let go. I was not human anymore. I had been altered. I had been turned into something else entirely.
Eventually the doctors stepped away from the table. Heavy chemical sedation took over my brain. I drifted slowly into the dim light of the quiet room. The machines hummed a low steady song around me. My skin tingled constantly with a faint electrical buzz just beneath the surface.
My physical body felt fundamentally different. I traced the feeling of the raw dense muscle fibers in my arms and legs. I felt distinctly stronger. I felt faster. I knew with absolute certainty that I could tear the leather straps holding my wrists if I truly applied the force.
But I also felt incredibly hollow. It was as though a vital piece had been stripped out of my chest during the integration process. The physical changes were undeniable but they came at a terrible hidden cost.
Heavy boots hit the floorboards right beside my head.
A voice broke through the thick chemical haze. "Can you hear me?"
I turned my head slowly. My eyelids felt heavy and thick. Zack stood right beside the metal table. The room was completely empty except for the two of us. His sharp features were cast in dark shadows by the overhead surgical light.
"You should not be alive," Zack said quietly. He sounded like he was speaking mostly to himself. "Everything about this program was specifically designed to break you. But you are still here."
His gray eyes narrowed and hardened into cold unyielding steel.
"The question is why."
The question reverberated deep within my chest. It was massive and terrifying. I had absolutely no answer to give him.
I tried to speak but my throat was scraped completely raw. Only a dry raspy breath escaped my lips.
Zack leaned closer to my face. He rested a gloved hand on the metal edge of the table. "Do you even know what you are?"
The question stabbed right through my core. No coherent answer surfaced in my mind. Only violent fragmented shadows appeared. Armored corpses lying dead on the cold floor of a ruined bunker. The deafening sound of gunfire echoing off stone walls.
The images were completely disjointed and totally incomplete. They hinted heavily at a dark and violently bloody past, but they offered zero clarity.
I shook my head weakly against the cold steel table.
Zack did not soften his expression. He did not offer any pity. He stood up straighter. His posture became rigidly formal again. His voice grew noticeably colder.
"Then you will find out soon enough. Alpha Division does not waste valuable resources. If you are breathing you will be fighting."
Fighting.
The word coiled tightly inside my chest. It felt incredibly heavy and entirely inevitable. My fate was completely sealed. My new purpose was officially defined.