The instant the voice sounded, both of them shuddered violently.
The elevator doors were already open, but Owen and Sarah stood frozen in place, too terrified to take even a single step.
They knew that voice all too well. The last time they had heard it, it had been screaming and sobbing from an operating table.
"Fenris?"
Owen's chest heaved. His Adam's apple bobbed painfully as he drew a deep breath, forcing himself to stay calm while slowly turning around.
But the sight that met his eyes made him lock up on the spot, his pupils shrinking violently.
The blast door, forged from special alloy, nearly half a meter thick and weighing dozens of tons, needed no introduction when it came to sheer toughness.
And yet now, it had been pried open by a pair of pale bluish-white hands. Deep palm-shaped dents were sunken into the metal, enough to make Owen forget how to breathe.
"How is that even possible..."
Fear washed over her whole body like a tide. Sarah sucked in a trembling breath, but even swallowing felt difficult.
As the high-temperature steam slowly dispersed, everything inside the reactor chamber came into view.
Sarah's eyes passed over the warped alloy doorway, and her pupils tightened instantly.
The soldiers who had entered the chamber earlier had been neatly stacked into a pile. Their expensive firearms lay scattered across pools of blood, broken cleanly in half, the cuts smooth and even, as if some overwhelming force had sliced straight through them.
But when Fenris had turned into a lizard-man before, even his claws had been soft and weak. He had struggled just to scratch through a thin wooden board. And now...
"Running into old friends, and you don't even say hello?"
A handsome young man with a tall, upright frame stared directly at the two of them, his eyes cold enough to freeze blood.
Owen, the head of the mutant program at the Alkali Gene Research Institute, was responsible for capturing ninety percent of the mutants in the base.
Sarah, Fenris's "lead surgeon," was even worse. Most of the agony Fenris had endured over the past few months could be traced directly back to this harmless-looking woman.
Live dissection, dehydration testing, bacterial gas exposure, frostbite experiments...
There was almost nothing she had not mastered.
If it had not been for his healing factor, Fenris had no idea how many times he would have died at her hands by now.
"Fenris, this is a misunderstanding..."
A Level-Two Mutant with no combat ability whatsoever had suddenly transformed, and now a fully equipped squad had not even lasted thirty seconds against him...
When the weak little mutant they used to handle however they pleased suddenly emerged reborn and started walking toward them reeking of blood and murder, cold sweat drenched their backs, and terror drowned them whole.
"Whatever this is, we can talk about it..."
"Hah..."
Owen had not even finished speaking before Fenris moved.
His figure crossed dozens of meters like a phantom. In the next instant, those long, distinct fingers were clamped hard around Owen's throat.
"Between me..."
"...and you, is there really some misunderstanding?"
Meeting that pair of blood-red eyes head-on, and feeling the pressure on his throat tightening with every second, Owen's breathing caught. His pupils shook violently, and his entire body trembled uncontrollably.
Beside him, Sarah collapsed to the floor, desperately trying to crawl backward, only to have her head pinned under a heavy foot. The sudden burst of pain made her scream over and over.
As Sarah's cries filled the air, everything from the past rose back up in Fenris's mind, and a savage fury suddenly surged out from the depths of his chest.
"Roar!"
In the next second, under the horrified eyes of the two researchers, Fenris's smooth skin began thickening and roughening at a speed visible to the naked eye.
With a deafening series of pops and cracks from his bones, muscles twisted and bulged violently beneath the skin. His body rapidly swelled, his height shooting past seven and a half feet in moments.
His limbs began growing at an astonishing rate. His arms and thighs thickened several times over in the blink of an eye, and his hands transformed into sharp claws that looked capable of tearing steel apart, glinting with a cold metallic sheen.
A huge tail over eight feet long burst out behind him, wrapped in thick scales. Every casual flick of it split the air and produced a shrill, cutting scream.
Sharp spines ran from the tip of the tail all the way up his back, where a ghostly blue light flickered steadily across them, making them look all the more dangerous.
"This feeling..."
Fenris took a deep breath. At that moment, every part of him felt flooded with surging power, and his heavy hide gave him an overwhelming sense of defense.
He was no longer anything like the frail creature he had once been. Power thundered through his veins. His whole body shook, and it took everything he had not to let out the roar building in his chest.
"You... what kind of monster are you?"
"How did you turn into this?"
Seeing the terror in their eyes as they stared at him, Fenris gave them a freezing smile and bared a mouthful of sharp teeth.
He tightened his grip on Owen just slightly, and the nearly two-hundred-pound man was lifted off the ground one-handed as easily as if he weighed nothing.
The once-glorious man in charge struggled frantically in his grasp, but could not move him in the slightest.
"Trying to run?"
Seeing Sarah crawling toward the elevator as if she hoped to slip inside, Fenris's face turned cold. He vanished and reappeared behind her in a flash, grabbing her by the hair and hoisting the famed biologist high into the air.
"Misunderstanding..."
"Fenris, we can explain what happened before..."
"Y-you can have anything you want... anything..."
Looking at the monster looming before them, both of them could see the pure, unfiltered killing intent in Fenris's eyes. Under that real, unmistakable threat of death, tears and snot ran down their faces as they desperately tried to trade anything and everything for the slightest chance to live.
"There's no misunderstanding between us, and there's nothing to talk about."
"If I had to say what I want, I want you dead."
Fenris swept his eyes across the room. When he spotted the pile of lab equipment of every size in Lane's laboratory, his eyes lit up.
Licking his slightly dry lips, he dragged the two of them over and began searching through the instruments.
A cutter. Blades. Liquid nitrogen. Poison gas...
"What are you doing?"
"What are you doing?!"
Watching his every move, both of them screamed themselves hoarse in terror.
"Don't be scared. I'm just going to use the same methods you used on me. Only this time, I'm using them on you."
Fenris thought back carefully for a moment. Once he was sure he had not forgotten anything, he hauled both of them back into the reactor chamber.
"Go on. Feel your existence as deeply as you can in the radiation..."
"No!"
"Please! Don't! Please don't!"
"Ahhh!"
Thrown hard into the blood-soaked floor, Owen and Sarah stared in absolute horror as the towering Fenris advanced on them with a savage look in his eyes. They fought desperately to crawl backward.
"What are you afraid of, Owen? You first."
"Didn't you love slicing things into thin little pieces? Let me help you test that out..."
"Sarah, come on. Feel what liquid nitrogen tastes like. Feel a cold harsher than Siberia in winter. One finger at a time..."
"Sarah, you said there's no pain in this state, remember? Go on, give yourself a few cuts and I'll let you out. Start here. Slice it open nice and gently. How does that sound?"
"Poison gas. Inhale one breath at a time. Don't get greedy!"
Inside the cavernous reactor chamber, low growls deliberately held back echoed through the air. At first, the screams and shrieks were piercing and loud, but as time passed, they faded into weak moans.
Yet every so often, the two of them would miraculously recover some strength, only to be dragged into another round.
At last, after who knew how long, under the relentless radiation, the two of them finally sank into complete mental collapse. Their reactions to the world around them dulled to almost nothing.
"Please... let me go... please let me go..."
"I'll never do it again... I swear... never again..."
Looking at the pair who could now only repeat broken mutters, Fenris's expression did not change. His hand rose and fell with precise force, and color strangely returned to their faces. Their clouded eyes regained clarity once more.
Fenris's control was perfect, just enough to relight the last embers of their reason and wake them at exactly the right level.
It was a trick he had learned from Sarah herself. Now he was simply returning it to its rightful owner.
"Owen. You run this base. Transfer the highest level of base authority to me."
Fenris turned first to Owen, whose condition was worse, and held out his hand.
"Heh..."
Owen barely had a few intact places left on his body. With agonizing effort, he tilted his head and looked toward the arm that had been tossed carelessly to one side.
On the mangled limb was an elegant silver wristband.
Watching Fenris pick up the band, Owen forced out an ugly, broken smile. "Fenris... you win."
"Of course I won."
Fenris coldly glanced at Owen, who no longer moved, then shifted his gaze to Sarah.
"Where are those two bastards, Matthew and Robert?"
"They... they're in this... main building..."
The light in Sarah's eyes was steadily fading, and even her voice came in broken fragments. "In the lab... the one you know best."
"And where did Lane go? Why were you and Owen the ones sent down here?"
Fenris asked again.
"Lane already... drove out of the base..."
As she watched Fenris's claw slowly close around her head, Sarah no longer had the strength to resist. "Before he left... he told the base... the reactor chamber problem had already been handled... and told us to bring you back to the lab..."
"Before leaving, he also took several hard drives... they should have... nuclear physics data on them..."
"Nuclear research data?"
Fenris's eyes lit up. That was exactly what he needed right now.
"Fenris..."
Sarah's voice had become barely audible. "Fenris... I'll give you this much... you're ruthless..."
Crack!
Before she could finish, Fenris's right claw tightened sharply. A crisp snap rang out.
Expressionless, Fenris released her and casually wiped the filth from his hand against the wall.
"Of course I'm ruthless. I learned from you."
He looked down at his new body. After a cold snort, he rose to his feet and strode straight into the elevator.
Now that the radiation was fully out of control, Lane had lied to the rest of the base on his way out, claiming everything had already been resolved so he could cover his own escape. Because of that, no full emergency evacuation had been triggered in time.
But this was the reactor chamber, the core of the base. Fenris had slaughtered a squad of soldiers on camera and tortured two of the base's senior staff to death.
There was no question what would be waiting for him outside now: nearly the entire security force of the facility.
"Come on, then. All of you."
"This place doesn't deserve to exist anymore."