"Then you won't be making it out alive either!"
Lane's stern warning came through the speaker. "Stop stalling and get started."
"Open the pressure valve..."
"The entire reactor chamber will erupt with radiation..."
By then, Fenris's consciousness was already starting to blur. Every inch of his skin burned, and through the haze, Dr. Lane's words reached his ears as little more than broken fragments.
"The pressure valve!"
Glancing at the progress bar, now sixty percent lit, Fenris raised a hand with difficulty and, without the slightest hesitation, grabbed the red valve.
"Yes, yes, that's right..."
Lane had just let out a breath of relief and reached for a steaming cup of coffee when Fenris's next move nearly made him jump out of his skin. The rich-smelling coffee splashed all over the floor.
"No! No!"
"That's the pressure valve! What are you doing? Stop!"
"Fenris! Etherreal! Is your brain fried? Are you trying to kill everyone in this facility?"
"Doctor."
Fenris looked toward the camera from afar.
His eyes were bright, those clear blue irises like a pair of lakes, but now they were cold to the core.
"In a place like this, how many people do you think don't deserve to die?"
Countless memories flooded into his mind.
In a spotless, brightly lit lab, Fenris had been strapped to an operating table while a crowd of people carved him open, scraped his bones dry, then stitched his shriveled body back together...
In a dim cell barely five square meters wide, a young-faced Ryan had silently wiped away tears while watching Fenris struggle to breathe...
The memories were like knives. Just thinking about them was enough to make his heart ache, let alone the fact that every one of them had happened to him.
"Fenris, calm down!"
"Whatever you want, we can give it to you!"
"Calm down!"
As the frantic shouts kept coming, a mocking smile curved across Fenris's lips.
Then, in the next instant, his right hand yanked the valve open without hesitation.
Boom!
The moment the pressure system roared to life at full power, the entire building seemed to shake. A thunderous mechanical roar filled the room.
Strange noises began coming from several of the reactor vessels. As the seconds passed, they grew more numerous.
Within moments, faint cracking sounds began to ring out one after another.
Not long after, a massive hiss of escaping gas erupted, followed by a violent burst of atomic radiation. The alarms inside the room instantly began shrieking.
"It's over! It's all over!"
"That lunatic!"
As the image on the monitor gradually distorted, Dr. Lane's face twisted into something vicious in the lab outside, and his shrill cursing did not stop for even a second.
"No. I can't stay here. Let the military and Stryker deal with this headache themselves."
After a brief moment of panic, Lane immediately grabbed the hard drive where he had already backed up all his nuclear physics research and sprinted for the elevator, fleeing toward the surface as fast as he could.
The reactor chamber was deep underground, but once the radiation ran wild, the surface would be finished sooner or later anyway.
Fenris, however, knew nothing of what was happening outside.
"Come on. Let the radiation hit even harder!"
His condition was getting worse by the second. Fighting through the dizziness in his head, Fenris tore off the so-called protective suit and exposed his bare body directly to the raging radiation.
The invisible radiation pierced through him at once. Just as he gritted his teeth and braced himself for the next wave of agony, the Titan Index suddenly appeared before his eyes without warning.
Fenris felt his body heating up again.
But this time, there was no searing pain, no relentless dizziness.
It was like sinking into a warm spring. A gentle heat wrapped around every inch of his skin, and all the discomfort from before vanished in an instant.
An unprecedented hunger swept through his body. The formless radiation had become the most delicious food in the world, and every cell in Fenris's body began greedily devouring everything around him.
As the pages of the Index turned, Godzilla's unlock progress exploded upward.
Seventy percent. Eighty percent. Ninety percent...
One hundred percent!
The instant the bar reached full completion, a massive roar split the sky.
The towering cry seemed to cross millions of years of history and spread across hundreds of kilometers in the blink of an eye.
At the same time, an overwhelming vision suddenly appeared before Fenris's eyes.
A monstrous beast floated on the surface of the ocean. Its body was so enormous it stole the breath from his lungs. A submarine nearly two hundred meters long looked like nothing more than an intricate toy at its feet.
The blue glow on its dorsal spines blazed with terrifying brilliance. A dreadful atomic breath erupted from its jaws and shot into the heavens, blasting apart the thick clouds above the sea.
"Legendary Godzilla!"
With enough energy behind it, that atomic breath could even bore all the way to the center of the Earth.
The vision slowly faded.
On the pages of the Index, Legendary Godzilla had finally been fully illuminated.
And as more and more radiation poured into Fenris's body, Godzilla's image only grew clearer, while the blue glow of those dorsal spines shone ever brighter.
"I don't lack anything anymore..."
The X-gene suppression collar around his neck came off as easily as a piece of scrap metal in Fenris's hands. He spread his arms wide and basked in the violent atomic radiation around him.
As time passed, the pallor on Fenris's face gradually faded. Every muscle in his body was continuously reforged by the radiation, growing fuller and stronger, his once-thin frame straightening before the naked eye.
Even the dense web of scars across his body began healing away. Before long, they disappeared little by little, and his once-horribly damaged skin became smooth and tough.
"We just got word from Dr. Lane. The leak in the reactor chamber has already been dealt with. The lizard freak, Fenris, is still inside."
"As Fenris's primary researcher, this is the perfect chance to study how his healing ability reacts to intense radiation. We might even discover something new."
Just as Fenris was being remade from the ground up, voices suddenly sounded from outside the reactor chamber. A man and a woman in protective suits arrived by elevator with a squad of soldiers.
"Owen, that roar earlier sounded like it came from underground. The instruments traced the source to fifty meters below the surface, which is about the same depth as this place."
Sarah spoke to the male researcher beside her.
"That's Lane and Stryker's problem, not ours," Owen said without even turning his head. "Don't stick your nose where it doesn't belong."
As he spoke, he walked into Lane's lab with practiced ease. After several rounds of strict identity verification, the reactor chamber control panel rose automatically.
Sarah asked again, "Dr. Lane left in a hurry just now. Do you know where he went?"
"I'm the guy running this facility, not Professor X."
Owen answered carelessly, then waved to the squad behind him, a line of heavily armed soldiers in high-grade protective gear. "The moment the door opens, get that mutant out immediately. No delays. The leak may be under control, but there's still some residual radiation inside."
"Yes, sir!"
The soldiers answered in unison.
"Move!"
Owen slammed the button to open the door.
A low mechanical hum sounded. The heavy alloy door began to slide open, and the soldiers rushed in the instant there was enough space.
But not long after they entered, a thick white mist mixed with scorching air suddenly poured out through the doorway. The temperature throughout the vast underground chamber began rising at once.
"What is this...?"
For no clear reason, the same sense of dread rose in both of them at once.
Owen and Sarah frowned and turned toward the reactor chamber.
"Ahhh!"
A sudden scream tore through the air.
In the next instant, deafening gunfire erupted from the reactor chamber. Amid the crashes that followed one after another, the sound of bones breaking was horrifyingly sharp.
The abrupt chaos made Owen and Sarah's hearts leap into their throats, and a quiet panic began to spread between them.
Seeing that, Owen immediately slammed the reactor chamber door shut.
"What the hell is in there?"
"That roar... could it be the leak was never actually contained?"
"Lane, that bastard, set us up!"
"Run first. This isn't something we can handle. Let Stryker send someone else to deal with it."
A moment later, when everything went silent again, the two exchanged a look. Thinking back to how frantic Lane had been when he fled, they turned without the slightest hesitation and sprinted for the nearby elevator.
The silence behind them felt like an invisible maw, creeping closer step by step, ready to swallow them whole.
Their dread mounting, they ran faster and faster.
"Come on! Hurry up!"
"Stop yelling! I said stop yelling!"
Owen jabbed at the elevator button with trembling fingers. The elevator, normally swift, now seemed to crawl like a turtle. Sarah kept glancing back over her shoulder, shoving at him nonstop.
Ding.
The elevator let out a pleasant chime. Owen had not even had time to breathe in relief when, amid a deafening metallic crash from the alloy door behind them, a low male voice suddenly drifted over from the rear.
"Going somewhere, you two?"