A cold metal blade ripped through my stomach.
The man in the black raincoat in front of me didn't just stab. He twisted the hilt of his knife a full ninety degrees right inside my flesh.
Pain exploded from my solar plexus straight to the base of my spine.
My vision whited out for a second. The air in my lungs was violently forced out.
I coughed hard. A thick, dark clot of blood slid from my mouth, staining the wet asphalt beneath my knees.
Great. Dying by live dissection in a piss-stinking alley in Kreuzberg? What a beautiful end to the week, Elias.
Berlin's storm poured down on us mercilessly. The sky seemed eager to wash away the last traces of my existence from this city.
The bone-chilling water soaked through my shirt and trench coat. Everything felt sticky now. Sticky with my own blood.
The man yanked his knife out with one brutal, sharp jerk.
The sound of tearing flesh echoed gruesomely in my ears.
My legs lost all their strength. I collapsed onto my knees. My body slammed face-first into a puddle of rainwater that was rapidly turning a deep red.
My breathing grew loud and raspy. It sounded exactly like a broken whistle every time I tried to pull oxygen into lungs that were slowly drowning in blood.
The figure stood towering over me. His raincoat's hood obscured most of his face.
But I could still see the cold gleam in his eyes. There was no panic there. No anger.
He stared at me as if I were just a pathetic frog pinned to a laboratory dissection table.
This man was a ghost. For the last six months, every law enforcement agency in Germany had been hunting him. We called him 'Der Rabe'. The Raven.
Der Rabe reached deep into the pocket of his raincoat.
He pulled out a small metal device, about the size of a lighter. The object hissed softly as its tip heated up, glowing bright orange against the pitch-black night.
A branding iron.
He intended to leave his signature on me. That damn letter 'R' he always burned into the necks of all his victims.
Not today, you son of a bitch.
My only goal in this exact second: do not let him touch my neck.
Relying on sheer adrenaline and raw survival instinct, I forced my right arm to move. My fingers still tightly gripped the hilt of my Walther P99.
The standard-issue police firearm was useless. I had emptied the entire magazine three minutes ago just trying to shoot his shadow.
As Der Rabe leaned down to press the searing iron to my neck, I swung my pistol.
I mustered every last ounce of strength I could scrape together from my dying arm muscles.
Crack!
The iron grip of my Walther smashed hard into his left shin.
A highly satisfying, tiny snapping sound echoed.
Der Rabe grunted in pain. It was the first sound I had heard from him all night.
My strike clearly caught him off guard. He stumbled back a step, losing his balance on the slick, moss-and-blood-covered asphalt.
As he retreated, his erratic movement caused something to slip out of his coat pocket.
A small metal cylinder. It was only the size of an index finger.
It clinked softly as it hit the asphalt, then rolled toward me. The cylinder stopped dead center in the middle of my ever-expanding pool of blood.
Der Rabe cursed quietly in a language I didn't recognize.
He stared at the cylinder intently, then glared at me. His hand darted out, intending to snatch the object back.
But another sound stopped him in his tracks.
Wooo! Wooo! Wooo!
From the end of the street, the wail of dual sirens cut through the night. The sound was piercing and approaching dangerously fast.
Blue and red strobe lights began to bounce wildly off the brick walls of this narrow alley. Backup was finally here.
Der Rabe froze. He weighed his options for one full second. His eyes narrowed in cold calculation.
Then, without uttering a single word, he turned his back on me.
The figure sprinted through the rain, vanishing into the deep shadows of the alleyway that led to the U-Bahn subway network.
I was left completely alone. Dying in the middle of a storm.
With trembling hands, I tried to press down on my stomach. I desperately tried to plug the gaping hole that was steadily puking my life out onto the street.
It was useless. My hands were shaking too violently.
My vision began to blur. The edges of my sight darkened steadily. Bizarrely, the freezing asphalt pressing against my cheek started to feel comfortable.
My brain was shutting down all non-essential organs. I had less than a minute before my heart stopped pumping entirely.
Suddenly, a soft, localized hissing sound emanated from right beneath my chin.
I forced my eyeballs to look down.
The small metal cylinder Der Rabe dropped earlier was reacting. My warm, pooling blood had touched its surface.
The cylinder seemed to melt. Its metallic shell broke down into a living, liquid silver substance that writhed constantly. It moved like it possessed a mind of its own.
The silver liquid began to crawl upward.
It defied gravity, slithering across the asphalt and touching the tips of my lifeless fingers.
The first sensation that hit me was a biting cold. But within a second, that feeling mutated into an agonizing, searing heat.
The silver liquid penetrated my skin's pores. It moved like thousands of starving, microscopic leeches.
The substance forced its way into my bloodstream, violently tunneling through my veins and arteries, heading straight for my heart.
I screamed at the top of my lungs. My back arched completely off the ground from brutal muscle spasms.
But my voice was entirely swallowed by the roar of the storm and the sirens that were now deafeningly close.
It felt like millions of incandescent needles were being injected directly into my bone marrow.
In the midst of that sanity-shattering pain, an impossible phenomenon occurred.
Neon-blue text suddenly exploded right in the center of my retinas.
The letters hovered, glowing brightly, superimposing themselves over the grim reality of the dark alley.
[Warning: External genetic material exposure detected.]
[Apex Gene Fusion System: Forcefully Activated.]
[Host Authentication... Complete. DNA permanently bound to target: ELIAS RICHTER.]
What the hell is this? Pre-death hallucinations? My brain must be rotting from the blood loss.
A new barrage of text appeared. This time, flashing in a blinding, critical red.
[Critical Warning: Host Status - Fatal Injury. Class 4 Hemorrhage. Estimated total time to death: 40 seconds.]
[Safety Protocols overridden. Scanning database for available DNA blueprints for physical recovery...]
[Blueprint Found: Genus Reptilia (Lizards).]
[Initiating Emergency Protocol: Level 1 Reptilian Cell Regeneration.]
The very next second, my stomach felt like it had been stuffed with an angry nest of fire ants.
Something was writhing inside my open wound.
My flesh and muscles shifted, twitched, and rubbed against each other unnaturally. The edges of my torn stomach felt unbearably itchy, burning, and excruciatingly painful all at once.
I tilted my head down. My eyes widened in absolute horror at the biological nightmare occurring on my own body.
Through my shredded shirt, I watched my muscle tissue elongate. My flesh moved like living, red threads.
They were stitching themselves together from one side of the wound to the other at a speed that defied the laws of nature.
The blood that was gushing out moments ago abruptly stopped. The red liquid seemed to be sucked back into the severed veins that were snapping back together.
My cartilage cracked harshly, snapping back into place.
Steam plumed from my stomach. My body was burning energy at an insane rate to repair itself in the middle of the freezing Berlin night air.
It only took a dozen seconds.
That gaping, palm-sized stab wound in my gut... closed completely.
Not a single drop of blood leaked out anymore. All that remained was a thick, jagged, pale red scar. It looked as if the fatal wound was months old.
The pain from Der Rabe's blade vanished completely.
But it was immediately replaced by something far more terrifying.
Emptiness. My stomach felt completely hollowed out by a brutal, ravenous hunger.
[Warning: Emergency regeneration has drained 85% of host's glucose and caloric reserves.]
[Humanity Indicator dropped to 60%.]
[Threat of cellular starvation. Predator Instinct: Forcefully activated to seek prey.]
I coughed softly. Forcing myself to get up.
Gripping the side of a rusted dumpster near me, I stood. My knees shook violently. My coat felt impossibly heavy, soaked in a mixture of rainwater and my own blood.
I survived.
Through some impossible absurdity, I had just cheated death.
I needed to report this immediately. Lukas, Anya, or someone from the LKA division had to be in the patrol car that had just pulled up at the end of the alley.
I took a step forward. But the world around me began to change drastically.
My sense of smell exploded.
The stench of Kreuzberg's garbage, which was usually just an annoyance, shattered into thousands of distinct, razor-sharp aromas.
I could smell the rotting corpse of a rat behind a stack of wooden pallets, the rust from the puddles, and... the mouthwatering, warm scent of copper. Blood.
My hearing sharpened to a painful degree.
The falling rain no longer sounded like a collective hiss. I could hear thousands of water droplets smashing against the asphalt individually.
And beneath all that noise, I heard a rhythmic, thumping cadence.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
Two human silhouettes emerged from behind the blinding glare of the patrol car's headlights.
Two uniformed officers pushed through the rain. They held flashlights in one hand and drawn firearms in the other.
They shouted something at me. Their voices echoed, demanding I raise my hands high into the air and freeze.
I wanted to do exactly what they ordered.
I wanted to throw my empty hands up to show I wasn't a threat.
I wanted to scream that I was Detective Chief Inspector Elias Richter, and that the fugitive they were looking for had just escaped.
But my mouth refused to open. My jaw locked so tightly my teeth ached from grinding.
My eyes widened uncontrollably. A cold sensation swiftly washed over my eyeballs.
My pupils constricted rapidly. They morphed into thin, vertical slits bisecting my irises, exactly like the eyes of a reptile.
My vision violently shifted out of the normal light spectrum.
The pitch-black darkness of the alley vanished. The scene before me was entirely replaced by a sea of colors reacting to temperature. Glowing crimson reds and bright yellows.
My gaze instantly locked onto the young rookie officer walking in front.
His flashlight no longer blinded my retinas. My eyes completely ignored the artificial light, piercing straight to his neck.
On my thermal-detecting visual display, the jugular vein beneath his uniform collar pulsed in a glowing, fiery red.
The sound of his heartbeat—thump-thump, thump-thump—sounded like war drums pounding inside my skull.
That sound drowned out the rain. It drowned out the sirens. And worst of all, it drowned out my sanity.
Thick saliva dripped from the corner of my lips. I couldn't hold it back.
My stomach twisted violently. Every single cell in my body howled, demanding to be filled with fresh meat, protein, and warm blood.
The muscles in both my legs tensed on their own, hardening like steel cables, preparing to pounce.
Shit... Damn it, Elias, control yourself! I screamed internally, trying to fight my own body. Why... why does the rookie look so damn delicious?
The system's red text flashed one more time in my eyes.
[Prey target locked. Initiating attack.]
Before the last shreds of my sanity could command my body to stop, the primal instinct now hijacking my nervous system took over entirely.
My calf muscles exploded with a force that shattered the limits of normal human physics. I shattered the puddle beneath my feet.
Like a starving wild beast, I lunged forward, launching myself straight at the officer's throat.
I let the predator's instinct swallow me whole.