The Executive's single apartment was on the mid-level of the Sanctuary.
Karen turned the shower water to its lowest temperature. The icy water stung her back as if it were made of countless steel needles, trying to alleviate the increasingly intense internal burning sensation caused by the inhibitor's failure.
The mist from the shower head filled the small bathroom, but to Karen's senses it was not gaseous but solid, heavy and high-pressure.
He closed his eyes, bracing his hands against the cold tiled wall.
Drip, drip.
The sound of the water droplets hitting the floor changed from crisp to dull and deep, accompanied by a low-frequency vibration that seemed to penetrate thousands of metres deep.
Buzz—
A sound similar to the breathing of an ancient beast slumbering in the abyss suddenly exploded in his ears. It wasn't an external sound, but rather the 'Achilles' sequence within him — or more precisely, the primal 'Leviathan' gene — wresting control of his cerebral cortex.
His ear canals began to secrete a clear, sticky fluid as a defence against the non-existent yet crushing pressure.
'Not yet... that depth...' Karen muttered through gritted teeth.
Scattered points of light appeared on his retinas — the fluorescence unique to deep-sea creatures. In the darkness, he saw countless translucent, barbed tentacles emerge from the bathroom drain and slowly coil around his ankles.
This was not a hallucination.
It was a cross-species resonance generated by his genes sensing the medium of 'water'. Karen's eyes snapped open.
The mirror was shrouded in mist, vaguely reflecting a distorted figure.
Looking down at his chest, he saw that several neat cracks had appeared in the skin along his ribs, stimulated by the cold water.
Those were gills.
Red, fine, filter-feeding tissues fluttered restlessly in the cracks, greedily capturing the thin moisture in the air. Each flutter sent a tingling, soul-stirring sensation through him.
'Is this what you wanted, Silas?'
Karen reached out and traced the surface of the mirror with his fingertips.
His once-polished nails had completely degenerated into deep blue claws and his knuckles were covered in thick, metallic calluses. The muscles in his arms slithered beneath the skin like snakes — reconstructed red muscle fibres, remodelled for the explosive predatory power needed to unleash their might in the lightless depths of the ocean.
The frequency grew louder.
Thump, thump, thump.
That was the sound of his heartbeat, now reduced to thirty beats per minute. Each pulsation carried a faint bio-current, pumping blood throughout his body.
He felt an extreme silence.
At this frequency, the clamour of the entire 'Sanctuary' vanished. He could not hear the rain outside the window or the alarms in the central area; only the call from the depths of the underground laboratory, from its heavily sealed bottom.
'Come back... back to the pressure... back to that eternal place devouring everything, where there is no light.'
Just as Karen was about to succumb to the deep-sea illusion, a strange sensation interrupted the low-frequency pulsation abruptly.
It was Leah's wavelength.
A golden-purple hue tore a rift through the dark illusion.
Karen saw Leah sitting in a large glass container filled with a nutrient solution. She didn't struggle; she simply pressed herself against the glass. Her heterochromatic eyes pierced layers of barriers and stared directly into Karen's soul.
'Karen... there's blood... in the water.'
The girl's voice no longer travelled through the air, but resonated directly in Karen's mind.
Karen jerked free from under the shower head, gasping for breath.
The gap in his cheek closed rapidly, and the intense tearing pain made him kneel in the water. He looked at his hands, which were not yet completely atrophied; his fingertips were still trembling slightly from the high-frequency pulsation.
He understood.
This deep-sea illusion wasn't a side effect, but rather a "location".
Silas was transporting Leah to the top of the 'Halo Zone' via a pipeline — a massive reactor simulating deep-sea pressure — where they would use the high-pressure environment to forcibly suppress all the neutralising factors in Leah's blood.
He was the chosen one: the only tool capable of surviving this extreme pressure and carrying out the final 'harvest' mission. Karen turned off the tap.
Silence returned to the room, but the low-frequency hum still echoed in his mind like the prelude to an endless funeral.
He walked to the dressing mirror and wiped the condensation off it.
The 'monster' in the mirror stared coldly at him.
He no longer felt fear. This power, originating from the depths of his genes and known as 'Leviathan', was eroding his humanity while also giving him the strength to tear apart this hypocritical world.
He pulled the last two murky inhibitors from his belt.
He didn't inject them.
Instead, he smashed the glass vials of inhibitors in front of the mirror. A murky liquid trickled down his fingers, mingling with his blood.
'I'm not going to be a hunting dog anymore,' he whispered, his voice filled with an unprecedented resolve.
He picked up the battered gun that Barnes had left behind — he didn't need clean weapons, just sharp teeth capable of killing.
His body began to undergo an irreversible 'semi-liberation'.
His black trench coat billowed open again, but he ignored it, stepping barefoot out of the bathroom. Each step left a wet, barbed footprint.
The Halo Zone.
It was the highest point in the city, the closest to the abyss.
Karen pushed open the apartment door.
It was still raining outside, but in his eyes, the entire city had sunk into an inky abyss.
He plunged into the ocean of steel and exhaust fumes, no longer concealing or pretending.
Since all 'purity' is built upon devouring, he — this ultimate predator from the deep sea — will show the Sanctuary what true greed for equality among all beings looks like.
At three in the morning, the air circulation system on the middle level of the sanctuary switched to 'low-power mode', the fans whirring slowly and heavily like a giant snoring.
Shirtless, Karen Vance sat in the centre of the cramped, cage-like single dormitory room.
He didn't turn on the light.
His eyes, now completely degenerated into 'deep-sea irises', emitted a ghostly blue light, casting a cold, desolate glow over everything around him.
The pain was no longer intermittent, but continuous and all-encompassing, as if he were walking slowly on dry land under the pressure of ten thousand metres of water.
'Crack.'
The sound of something hard breaking came from his back.
Karen turned his hand over and felt the middle of his spine. The once soft human skin had completely disappeared, replaced by an uneven, hard, iron-like texture.
Gritting his teeth, he hooked his fingertips around the edge of the bulge and pulled sharply.
"Hiss—!"
A chilling sound, like leather being ripped apart, exploded in the darkness.
Karen's body convulsed violently and he was instantly covered in cold sweat. He gasped for breath, holding his trembling right hand to his eyes.
Illuminated by the blue light dancing at his fingertips, the object was solid and about five centimetres long. It was irregularly rhomboid in shape and as hard as iron.
It was neither bone nor simple keratin.
It was the first scale.
It was jet black, with a texture like the purest obsidian and a surface covered in tiny barbs that were almost invisible to the naked eye. These barbs were designed to cut through water at high speeds and lock onto the flesh of prey during hunts.
Karen pressed the scale onto the alloy tabletop, applying pressure with his fingertips.
A sharp, ripping sound followed.
The alloy tabletop was strong enough to withstand high-pressure firing, yet it was easily ripped open by the 'part' that had just grown from his body. This left a deep trench revealing the bone beneath. 'Spontaneous evolution...'
Karen murmured self-deprecatingly.
Usually, B.R.A. hunters needed expensive organ transplants and complicated biochemical surgeries to reach this stage of mutation, but Karen was different. The 'Leviathan' within him was acting like a runaway creator, bypassing all restraints and taking over his body directly.
His body no longer questioned his will.
Every hour, his alveoli collapsed and reorganised, becoming more adaptable to high concentrations of carbon dioxide, and his blood viscosity doubled to hold more bioelectric charge.
He wasn't just mutating; he was being reshaped.
The human will known as "Karen Vans" was like an old building collapsing. Beneath the ruins, a terrifying monster from the prehistoric abyss was emerging.
He looked in the mirror.
The back of him in the mirror was blood red, with black shadows writhing beneath the skin like scales waiting to pierce it.
'Silas...'
Karen gripped the obsidian scale tightly.
He finally understood why Silas had reduced the inhibitor's purity.
The Inspector didn't need an obedient executor, but ripe 'fruit'. He was using substandard drugs as a catalyst to force Karen's "Leviathan" gene to undergo its final spontaneous evolution.
Once her entire body was covered in these obsidian scales, she would no longer be an experimental subject, but the world's most perfect living bio-armour material.
At that time, Silas would remove his own skin and use it to create a divine suit that would grant immortality to the purest beings in the apocalypse.
Just then, that faint, purple-glowing sensation flashed through Karen's mind again.
'Leah.'
As Karen's Leviathan gene awakened further, the symbiotic connection between her and Leah grew stronger than ever.
He could smell a faint trace of Leah's blood in the air.
It was different from the cloying sweetness of old Pete's decay and the bitterness of tobacco on Barnes; it was an extremely pure scent, like morning dew mixed with a faint electrolyte.
It was the smell of a neutraliser.
It was the only substance in the world capable of stopping the rampant growth of black scales and restoring human skin.
'She's in the baptistery in the "Halo Zone".'
Karen closed his eyes, sensing the pulse of the city through the vibrations of his obsidian scales.
The entire structure of the sanctuary appeared in his mind in sonar form. He could see the biosensors densely packed in the pipes and the Execution Department cleaners standing by. He could also see Silas's cold eyes watching through closed-circuit surveillance.
'Do you want to see my evolution?'
Karen stood up and casually draped a long black trench coat over his bloodied back.
He stuffed obsidian scales into his coat; the hard edges cut into his chest, bringing him a morbid pleasure.
It was four in the morning.
Karen pushed open the dormitory door.
The motion-sensor lights in the corridor turned on one by one. In the pale light, each step he took felt unusually heavy and his boots made a dull, sticky sound on the metal floor.
Two bio-robots on duty turned around, their electronic eyes flashing red.
'Executor Vans, this is not mission time. Please return..."
Before the robot could finish speaking, Karen's figure vanished.
This wasn't due to excessive speed, but rather because, in the instant of movement, his body entered a state of 'sensory deception', distorting the surrounding light and sound through the high-frequency vibrations of the newly formed scales on his back.
*Snap.*
By the time Karen reappeared, he was already standing between two robots.
Rather than drawing his gun, his hands transformed into deep blue claws and precisely pierced the bio-neural interfaces in the robots' necks.
'Warning... Unauthorised intrusion detected...'
The two robots' voices abruptly ceased.
Rather than destroying them, Karen used the bio-toxin secreted from his fingertips to swiftly take over their nervous systems.
He looked up at the vertical elevator leading to the 'Halo Zone'.
That was the Sanctuary's pinnacle, the origin of all evil.
A series of cracking sounds came from his back again.
A second piece, a third piece, a tenth piece...
They burst forth from both sides of his spinal cord like a row of sharp dorsal fins, instantly tearing through his black trench coat.
Karen didn't look back. He was like a beast weary of its oppression in the shallows, charging headlong into the abyss that could liberate or destroy him.
'Lia, wait for me.'
He stepped into the lift.
As the lift rapidly ascended, Karen's body began to swell violently. When the doors slowly opened at the 'halo zone', the guards in pristine white uniforms holding command boxes saw not a human hunter, but a deep-sea god of vengeance covered in jet-black scales, his eyes burning with eerie blue fury.
A vengeful god had emerged from the deep sea, covered in jet-black scales, his eyes burning with eerie blue fury.
The lower tiers of the Sanctuary are known as the 'Corrupted Appendices'.
This is a blind spot in the city's defences and is rarely visited, even by B.R.A. scavengers. Garish, multicoloured neon signs sizzled in the perpetual acid rain, casting a sickly bluish-purple hue on every passer-by's face and resembling poorly developed film negatives.
Draped in a wide-brimmed, hooded cloak that nearly covered his face, Karen Vance walked through ankle-deep, foul-smelling puddles.
His back throbbed with pain; the newly formed obsidian scales were irritating the fabric. With each breath, he could feel the spinal fins on his back struggling to break free of their final restraints.
'Inhibitors... pure "Blue Ocean One"... all you need is a liver or your eyeballs.'
On the street corner, a cyborg with a missing lower body whispered his wares to Karen.
Karen ignored him, tracing the peculiar isotope frequency remaining in the murky potion. Eventually, he arrived at the door of a biological clinic called 'Noah's Cocoon'.
The door was made of iron and welded from an old submarine hatch. A strange odour emanated from its cracks, a mixture of formaldehyde and high-concentration growth hormone.
'Click.'
Karen pushed open the door, her blue grappling hooks silently extending from the shadows of her cloak.
The interior of the clinic was oppressively claustrophobic, with countless translucent IV tubing hanging from the ceiling like the tentacles of a dying beast. In the centre of the room was a girl who looked only fourteen or fifteen years old but who possessed a giant prosthetic eye resembling a biological microscope. She was frantically cutting into the chest cavity of an Awakened being with a laser scalpel.
'If you're here for medicine, please line up. If you're a B.R.A. hound, there's some freshly soaked intestine in the third can on the left. Please help yourself.'
The girl didn't even look up; her prosthetic eye emitted a rapid focusing sound.
'I need to find the source of this drug.' Karen slammed the murky vial onto the operating table.
The girl finally stopped and turned her head. A huge, microscope-like prosthetic eye stared intently at her, infrared beams shooting from its pupils and almost piercing her irises.
'Oh... Achilles sequence.' The girl gave a twisted smile, a twitch caused by excessive facial nerve modification. 'Spontaneous evolution has reached the spinal fin stage? Your back must be beautiful, like a perfect obsidian work of art."
'Where did the drug come from?' Suddenly, Karen gripped the girl's slender neck, her nails digging slightly into the skin.
'It's industrial waste dumped by St. Mary's Bio.' The girl showed no fear; instead, she greedily inhaled the deep-sea scent emanating from Karen. 'They sell substandard, low-purity products to the black market. We stitchers then mix them with bone marrow extract from mutants and sell them to you rabid hounds.'
She pointed to a huge glass jar at the back of the clinic.
"Look. This is the price you pay for maintaining your humanity."
Karen walked towards the jars.
In the dim light, she saw a heartbreaking scene.
Dozens of living 'carriers' had been skinned and were submerged in a pale yellow nutrient solution, naked. Thin metal tubes had been inserted into their spines, extracting dark purple bone marrow drop by drop.
The aim was to extract the stabilising component from the inhibitor.
'Hans?'
Karen's pupils contracted sharply.
In one of the jars, he saw his neighbour, whom he had personally taken away. His eyes had been sewn shut and his chest cavity forced open. His lungs were still pulsating with granulation tissue and beating.
'He's not dead yet,' the girl continued, her voice filled with cruel fanaticism. 'His Adam cells are highly pure. Even if his bone marrow is drained, it can regenerate within 24 hours. He's the 'gold mine' here.'
Karen's breathing became rapid and his cheeks flared wildly.
He stared at Hans's contorted, agony-stricken face, then looked down at the murky suppressant in his hand.
He had always believed that he was maintaining order and protecting civilians. But the truth was that he was consuming the marrow of those he had personally pushed into hell. He was using it to buy himself one more minute of sunlight in his disguise.
'This is the truth you wanted, Hound,' the girl's voice echoed in Karen's ears. 'Silas needs the black market because it can dispose of those "unqualified" raw materials and transform them into the poison you can't live without.'
'Help me kill him.'
A faint voice entered Karen's mind directly through bio-electricity.
It was Hans's final consciousness, pleading for mercy from his executioner.
Karen closed his eyes.
When she opened them again, a ghostly blue light overwhelmed her vision completely.
At that moment, the Leviathan gene within him resonated tragically. He could no longer suppress the stinging pain in his back and the obsidian scales exploded instantly, tearing his cloak and trench coat to shreds.
"As you wish."
Suddenly, Karen's right arm expanded and transformed into a gigantic, scaled, barbed claw, instantly shattering Hans's glass jar.
The nutritional fluid spilled out and Hans's body began to wither rapidly the instant he was separated from the liquid. Karen didn't stop. Like a runaway deep-sea storm, she swept through the entire clinic, shattering all the glass jars and tearing apart all the metal pipes under her claws.
Those imprisoned, suffering lives found final release in that moment.
"You're insane! You're destroying the entire supply chain!" the girl screamed, trying to activate the defence system.
Karen whirled around, his face covered in slits and black scales, looming close to hers.
'Tell Silas I don't need the medicine, but I will collect his bone marrow to appease the wronged souls in this place.'
He leapt, smashing through the clinic's iron gate, and rushed into the torrential rain.
His massive black dorsal fin shimmered coldly in the rain. He was no longer a hunter seeking redemption; he was a blood-soaked tsunami, about to engulf the entire sanctuary.