Timus POV

  I didn’t know how long it had gone on.

  Time stopped mattering after the tenth or maybe the hundredth scream.

  The restraints were soaked in blood and sweat. My body twitched involuntarily, nerves firing without command. My left eye was gone, pain pulsing through the socket in hot waves. The only thing sharper than the agony was the humming sound of machines that never stopped working.

  They flooded me with stimulants, neural stabilizers, anything to keep the body alive long enough to bleed. After awhile I couldn’t tell if the red on my arm was fresh blood or just leftover. My thoughts came in flashes, each half-formed, flickering between pain and memory like a broken comm-link."

  “Fascinating,” the male lead whispered, every time the ichor flared.

  Two lead scientists moved around me, speaking in clipped, dispassionate tones. The others worked in the background, running diagnostics, monitoring fluids, adjusting settings.

  "Pain response thresholds have stabilized," the female said. "Extraction remains inconsistent.”

  "Too much interference," the other muttered. "Neural feedback's corrupting the ichor stream. We need to refine the flow... start panning."

  They weren’t being poetic. They meant it. To them, I wasn’t a man. I was a vein full of something rare, and they were miners digging through flesh.

  They increased the current.

  My body convulsed. Another golden stream oozed from the extraction line. Liquid light, thicker than blood, glowing faintly as it was funneled into a pressurized vial.

  Still not enough.

  They began to escalate.

  Plasma microtools clamped down on my fingertips. One by one, each nail was peeled back with meticulous precision, each removal recorded on a pain-threshold monitor. Nerves screamed louder than I could.

  I’d been through it before. Republic torture test number three, they called it back in Centurion training. Classic field capture scenario: no sedation, no mercy. They ripped out your fingernails and toenails while instructors watched from behind reinforced glass, making notes on pain tolerance and reflexes. If you passed out, you failed. If you begged, you were recycled into logistics. Only the quiet ones got to keep fighting. I was probably no more than ten, blood pooling under the chair, chewing leather straps to keep from screaming.

  Now it was happening again. But this time, it wasn’t training. And there were no instructors waiting to clap me on the back after. Just machines, needles, and the cold certainty that this time, they weren’t stopping.

  Next came something much worse. A long, vibrating needle was driven into my sternum, tapping directly into the marrow, where they claimed the ichor swirled closest to its origin. They called it bone-panning. I called it hell.

  Then came the temperature extremes. Cryonic clamps on my legs. Flesh flash-frozen, then hit with a pulse-heater that cooked tissue in seconds.

  The hiss of gas triggered something deeper. Another memory buried beneath training and scars. I was thirteen. Stripped naked in the cold-room below Fort Hades, standing on ice-rimed steel while my instructors watched through glass. It was called the attrition chamber. You stayed inside until your body stopped shivering—because if you still shook, they said, you still had weakness to burn.

  The air was liquid frost. My feet split open. Frostbite took my left ear. One kid beside me dropped after nine minutes. His lungs collapsed from breathing the cold too fast. They left him there overnight as a warning.

  When it was over, I was rewarded with an injection, a ration bar, and a cot near the heating vent. I didn’t cry. Not then. Not ever again. That’s how you survived the Centurion program. That’s how you got chosen.

  "Adapt or die," they'd said. "Pain burns weakness away."

  Funny how those words feel a lot less poetic when your skin’s actually on fire. They watched the data spikes with interest as my skin blistered and split.

  Then my arms were braced out and threaded with microfilaments. Slivers of glass-thin tubing that snaked beneath the skin and fed into shimmering reservoirs. I was draining slowly, every heartbeat feeding their greed.

  A burst of gas cooled the room to sub-zero.

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  But still, I lived.

  "Ichor stability is degrading. We need deeper resonance. Pain isn’t enough."

  "Increase psychological agitation. Layer trauma sequences. Try cortical echo stimuli."

  They weren’t talking to me. Not really. I was just the container.

  Another needle plunged into my side. Somewhere past the ribs. I couldn’t scream anymore. Just flinched.

  A machine nearby hissed, filling a second vial. It lit up the room, casting a soft glow over their surgical gloves.

  “We’re still not hitting core resonance,” the woman said, tapping at a DNA sequence projected in the air. “Something’s interfering with pattern stabilization. Maybe psychological resistance. Could be emotional anchoring.”

  “Strip it,” the man said flatly. “Break whatever’s holding it together. He doesn’t need memory. He needs to bleed clean.”

  Yuki had turned away.

  She paced along the far wall, her arms tight across her chest, eyes flicking to the containment tanks and back to me. She couldn’t watch. But she couldn’t leave either.

  I felt myself fading, drifting between the agony and something else. A memory. Or maybe a dream. I couldn’t tell anymore.

  "Candidate 001-09," someone said. A voice I half-remembered.

  Electroshock surged through me.

  The lab coat faces blurred, melting into things from another time. One of them wore the mask of a man I had seen before.

  Dr. Kiros.

  "But pain is the inheritance of the chosen," he continued, his voice distorting into layered echoes that wrapped around my thoughts like a coil. "It is the crucible through which the ichor surfaces. Etched into bone, buried in memory, encoded in every scream. Without it, your kind forgets its purpose. Its design. You weren’t bred to survive. You were bred to rule."

  But now he wasn’t human. He loomed over me, tendrils of black smoke and serpentine limbs curling like corrupted circuitry, pulsing with a darkness older than memory. He didn’t speak aloud—he didn’t have to. His voice slid into my mind like a virus, elegant and cold.

  "The lie they fed your kind," he said, "is that pain is failure. That it must be resisted. Escaped. That to suffer is to break, when in truth, it is the threshold of awakening."

  Another jolt hit. Harder. Brighter. I bit down on the scream.

  "But pain... pain barely stirs it in you," he murmured, his voice curling around my skull like a wire pulled tight. "Curious. We flayed your nerves. Flooded your synapses with agony. And still, your ichor only whispers."

  He leaned in closer, tendrils twitching with interest.

  "Others scream, and it erupts from them like wildfire. But you... no. It slumbers. Quiet. Caged. Until someone else bleeds. Until someone you care about breaks."

  The air around me shifted. My breath caught.

  "Love," he said, the word sour and amused. "What a brittle switch to wire power through."

  He turned.

  "Bring her in."

  The darkness deepened, and the dream twisted.

  The door slid open.

  They dragged her in.

  Yuki.

  Small. Fragile. Her black hair in knots. Her lip bloodied. Wrists bound behind her back. She struggled, but it was weak. Tired. Eyes wide and locked on mine as they forced her to her knees beside the table.

  "No," I remember trying to scream, but the gag held it back.

  The first shock hit her, and she arched forward, her face twisting in agony.

  I thrashed. Rattled the restraints. Blood filled my mouth from biting down too hard.

  They shocked her again.

  And again.

  Her cries cut through me sharper than any scalpel ever could.

  And that was it.

  That’s when they won.

  Not with pain. Not with power.

  With her.

  His tentacles wrapped around my skull, tighter, burrowing through thought. I saw flashes. A mother’s face blurred in static. A name erased. And Yuki, although much younger. Innocent. Reaching for me, begging for my help in the dark.

  "Even she knows this," Kiros whispered. "Unit 001-07, her genetic enhancements may be primitive compared to yours, but her intellect, her physical resilience... they were calibrated for a different kind of endurance. Pain shaped her as it shapes you. And whether she admits it or not, she remembers what she was made for."

  The words filled my head like smoke.

  "Ichor is not a gift. It is the cost of survival. And pain," he said, "is the currency we pay to become more than human."

  The gag was torn from my mouth, and the world snapped back into focus. I gasped hard, dragging in air as an oxygen mask was shoved against my face. The dream bled away, leaving the cold sting of reality in its place.

  I turned my head, barely able to lift it.

  Yuki.

  My voice was a rasp, broken and barely audible. "Zero... seven..."

  She froze. Her eyes snapped to mine. And for the first time, her expression cracked.

  A flicker of something real crossed her face. Regret. Sadness. Maybe even pity. Not just tears this time, but more pain than I’ve ever seen in anyone’s eyes.

  And then I saw her.

  Not as the beautiful woman in the sleek black suit.

  But the little girl I grew up with.

  001-07.

  The sight of her, that version of her, ignited something inside me. Something primal. Ancient. Buried deep beneath every layer of pain, memory, and restraint.

  The pain faded, replaced by a fury so pure, so absolute, it burned hotter than anything they could inject into me. Every nerve, every muscle tightened, not in pain but in rage. I felt it surge, a tide of power beyond my control, raw and violent, clawing its way out of me.

  The air trembled. The metal restraints around my wrists and ankles began to groan, bending, warping under an invisible pressure.

  The scientists stepped back, alarms blaring as machines went haywire and the instruments on their trays rattling as my power surged.

  Vats ruptured, spilling glowing, viscous liquids across the floor, and the lights above shattered in a hail of glass and sparks.

  “Contain him!” one of them shouted, his voice cracking with fear. Another scrambled for a control panel, frantically punching in commands.

  “Activating neural inhibitors! Increase voltage to maximum!” another shouted, panic lacing his voice.

  Pain surged through me, lightning chewing through every nerve, every synapse. But it was too late for them.

  I clenched my fists. Heat radiated from beneath my skin like a reactor on the verge of meltdown.

  I screamed, and the restraints snapped like brittle bone. One after another, they gave way, metal twisting and spiraling across the room.

  “Shut it down! Shut it all down!” one of the scientists screamed, just before I subconsciously smashed his head like a melon from across the room.