I stopped suddenly.
the tunnel ceiling split open in a terrifying silence. There was no explosion; matter simply dissolved, and the rocks disintegrated into particles of dust under the effect of vibrational waves unlike anything I had ever seen.
From within that white void, they descended.
They did not touch the ground. They remained hovering a few inches above it, using silent jet thrusters embedded in their heels.
Four entities.
Their bodies were a nightmarish mixture of biological muscle and polished chrome. Their eyes did not look—they swept the area with a cold blue glow, analyzing every particle of oxygen… and every pulse within my body.
They did not speak.
They did not exchange signals.
They moved with a single collective mind.
One of them—the largest—extended his metallic arm, and in an instant, it transformed into an energy cannon that began charging with a screech that tore at the eardrum.
Then… he appeared.
---
He descended slowly behind them, as if gravity itself obeyed him.
He did not wear a military uniform, but a simple black robe. Yet his presence was heavier than mountains. The moment his feet touched the ground, I felt as though the tunnels were tightening… as if the air refused to enter my lungs.
His eyes were ash-colored, devoid of any human spark.
He looked at me—and did not see "Kael."
He saw a "defective serial number."
"Specimen number 009… 'Heart of Infinity.'"
He spoke in a smooth, calm voice, in a way that was almost irritating—as if he were delivering a lecture in a dissection room.
"You have caused significant losses to the budget this month. The recovery protocol is no longer viable."
He raised his hand slightly, as if brushing away a fly.
"Erase him from the record."
---
In less than a fraction of a second, the first "Modified" moved.
It was not running—it was instantaneous movement (Blink).
[Skill: Core Reaction — Maximum Limit]
The violet veins in my body burst forth to match his speed. His fist collided with my energy arm, and a pressure explosion blasted everything within a ten-meter radius.
I felt the bones in my forearm crack.
His strike weighed tons of hydraulics and modified flesh.
Before I could regain my balance, the second was behind me, and the third delivered a nerve-cutting strike from the side.
I was fighting living computers.
They knew my movement before I even thought of it.
"This is the difference, Kael,"
came the voice of the Head of the Organization amid the chaos, standing still within the explosions, not moving a single limb.
"You fight with emotion… they fight with equations."
The fourth Modified raised his hand, charged with blinding white light, and aimed it directly at my chest.
I knew…
my broken arm and exhausted core would not last another second.
---
Before the Modified could fire the finishing blow, the darkness split open behind him like the mouth of a starving beast.
A mass of black-bluish flames—fire that did not emit light but devoured everything around it—engulfed the Modified completely.
The sound of metal screeching as it melted echoed, along with a distorted mechanical scream, before it turned into ash within a second.
Ryo stood before me.
His coat fluttered, and his black flames coiled around him like burning serpents.
For the first time since his arrival, the expression of the Head of the Organization changed. His ash-gray eyes narrowed slightly.
"Ryo… the one flaw I regret not erasing."
Ryo smiled a cold smile, his eyes reflecting the glow of his black flames.
"Welcome to the bottom, 'Master of the System'… here, your laws do not work."
Ryo's black flames did not burn—they devoured.
The air around us began to groan, and the metal from which the Modified were made began to crack and melt under a heat that did not belong to this world.
"Fall back," Ryo ordered me without turning. His voice was calm, but carried the weight of death.
The remaining three Modified moved as one body. One of them fired a concentrated blue energy blast, but Ryo extended his bare hand and absorbed the attack into his black flames, then returned it as a blazing inferno that struck the second Modified, turning its mechanical limbs into molten wreckage.
"Is that all your system has?" Ryo mocked, his eyes shining with an angry glow.
---
The Head of the Organization stopped observing. He took one step forward, and in that moment, I felt as if gravity had multiplied a hundred times.
He raised his hand, and the particles of air gathered to form a blade of pure white light.
"You are nothing but an old programming error, Ryo,"
he said in a voice devoid of any emotion.
"And errors… are always corrected."
With a speed beyond perception, the blade of light collided with Ryo's black flames.
The resulting explosion produced no sound—only absolute silence that paralyzed my senses.
I saw Ryo step back, black blood flowing from a crack in his mask, yet he laughed quietly.
"Correction?" he said, charging his fist with increasingly darker flames.
"You don't understand… I am not an error in the system. I am the end the system was designed to escape from."
---
A final burst of black flames exploded from Ryo's body, covering the area in smoke that even the Modified's sensors could not penetrate.
"Damn you!" the Head of the Organization shouted—and for the first time, I heard real anger in his voice.
I felt my body being pulled into a cold shadowy void.
Before my vision completely faded, I looked up one last time.
I saw the Head of the Organization standing amid the black flames, holding the blade of light, his ash-gray eyes staring at the space we had occupied just moments ago.
He was not looking at us as fugitives…
He was looking at us as an existential threat.
---
We plunged into absolute darkness.
We fell for a long time, until I felt as though my soul had separated from my body.
When the fall finally stopped, I found myself lying on cold rocky ground, in a place where neither light nor sound could reach.
Ryo stood at a distance, his flames extinguished into faint sparks.
"Where are we?" I asked in a trembling voice as I tried to stand.
"In a place the system does not dare to observe," he replied without turning.