* *

* ! *

* * * *

* !!! *

Not mere agony—it was as if a nest of red-hot, barbed steel wires erupting to life within his abdomen, contracting, tearing in all directions.

Santali’s breath seized. A choked gasp tore from his throat as his knees struck the ground, the pistol clattering from nerveless fingers. He looked down, disbelieving, at the wound X had sutured days before.

Not sutures.

Ice-threads.

Micron-fine filaments of ice, woven deep into muscle and fascia during the healing—dormant, parasitic, symbiotic—now stirred by her will.

They moved.

Inside the wet, warm dark of his body, they sprang: branching, sharpening, hardening into malignant thorns of living frost. They lanced through muscle, cinched around intestines, climbed his spine with a slow, drilling insistence. Every movement was exquisitely articulated—a magnified, vicious rending—

—he could feel the soft, wet pop as each new filament pierced virgin tissue, could hear the hideous, grating scrape-crunch as ice scraped over, then into, bone.

A sound was ripped out of him—less a groan than a choked, animal rasp, torn from a throat locked tight against a scream. Sweat sheeted down his spine and flash-froze, forging a second skin of a crackling, agonizing carapace of rime.

X stepped in, close enough that her ice-blue eyes drowned his world, inches from his contorted face.

“Know why I left this in you?” Her whisper was intimate, lethal. Fingers hovering above his abdomen, she called the threads deeper. “I trust no one completely. Least of all a liar… with a smile as perfect as yours.”

Her hand squeezed.

Inside him, the threads erupted.

They pierced bowel wall, warped the smooth arc of a kidney, climbed toward the dense muscle of his heart. Pain became a tidal roar—drowning, absolute. Vision blacked out. All that remained was the frantic, hammering thud-thud-thud of his own heart, straining to burst.

He did not beg.

He laughed.

Blood streaked from the corner of his mouth—he’d bitten clean through his tongue—yet his smile held, terrifyingly beautiful.

“Still… too gentle…” he rasped, words thick with tissue and blood. “My Lunar… you should have… let them pierce the diaphragm… go straight… for the heart…”

His trembling hand seized her wrist—not to resist, but to guide—forcing her fingers deep into the ruined, freezing meat of his wound.

“Go on…”

His violet irises were dilating, but beneath swam a dark, sacramental fire.

She needed no further invitation.

Her fingers drove in—not with nails, but with blades of ice that sprang from her fingertips: three centimeters, reverse-barbed, cruelly sharp. They entered the suture lines and twisted, following the paths of the threads—screwing into him. Each rotation tore flesh. She pushed deeper, feeling the warm, silken spasm of his intestines around the ice, hearing the wet, grinding whisper of frost against living tissue.

When the spike met the resistant density of his liver, she paused—

—and rammed it through.

His body arched off the ground, back bowing into an impossible curve, every tendon standing in stark relief. A sound escaped him—not a scream, but a guttural, drowning rattle. Blood welled from eyes, nose, ears, mouth, freezing instantly into crimson icicle-trails.

When she withdrew her hand, it came out clutching a tangled nest of barbed ice-thorns, clotted with tissue—blooming in the air like some grotesque winter rose.

He collapsed. Blood pooled beneath him, already crystallizing at the edges. His abdomen gaped—a glazed, hollow cavern. Through the frozen wreckage, organs glistened, slowly sheathing in frost. Breath faded to nearly nothing. But his eyes stayed open, fixed on her—and in their dark, widening pools, X saw her own reflection… and behind it, the sudden collapse of an inner glacier.

In her palm, the thorn-clump pulsed. Its barbed tips tapped rhythmically against her skin—one beat, another—like the last feeble kicks of a dying heart.

——Kill him.

——Kill him.

——Kill him.

The urge coiled around her spine—a venomous, hissing thing. Arcana recoil screamed for blood; betrayal burned cold fury; her parents’ violated remains cried out for vengeance. Kill him. Shatter him. Freeze him to dust and scatter him on the wind.

Her fingers shook.

The ice-thorns slipped from her grasp, hit the frozen floor, and shattered into a thousand glittering shards.

“You don’t deserve my hand,” she said, her voice regaining human cadence but colder than deep permafrost. “Lie here. Bleed out. Or let this place bury you. Either will do.”

She turned and walked deeper into the laboratory. A hidden door was sliding open—"Fake" Matsuki -07 stood behind it, applauding softly.

"Bravo," he said. "The spectacle of mutual destruction is always the most captivating. But Miss X, I suggest you hurry. The self-destruct sequence is initiated. You have... eight minutes left."

X ignored him, charging forward.

As she brushed past Matsuki-07, Santali moved on the floor.

With his last ounce of strength, he raised his right hand—his left was frozen solid—and smashed it down violently onto his left wrist.

Onto the cufflinks X had given him.

The impact was sharp, brutal. Platinum dented, then split. The amethyst exploded—and the micro-transmitter hidden inside disintegrated into fragments. Shards of metal components lacerating his wrist. Blood welled, thick and dark, seeping into the fractured jewels and metal, staining the wreckage with vivid, relentless red.

Intentionally.

X glanced back: cufflinks shattered, and the final look in Santali's eyes—not resentment, not pleading, but something... complex.

Then she rushed through the hidden door, pursuing Matsuki.

Sealed shut behind her, the door left Santali alone in the main laboratory.

He lay in a pool of blood and ice shards. Nearer grew the distant explosions, a relentless tide of sound. Plummeting from blood loss, his body temperature dragged him down. His consciousness faded—like a stone sinking into an abyss, grew it faint.

But at the very brink…

His eyes opened.

And deep within his violet pupils, something stirred.

X sprinted through the doorway.

The passage narrowed rapidly behind her, ice crawling furiously in her wake, tearing screeches from the metal walls. Ahead, Fake Matsuki's footsteps were light and rhythmic, maintaining a precise twenty-meter lead—an exactitude that felt like bait.

Rounding the fourth turn, space abruptly yawned open.

There was no ceiling. Only a vast, upward expanse of densely packed glass cylinders receding into the darkness. Each cylinder held a suspended human form, floating in faintly glowing blue fluid. Embryos, children, adults... tens of thousands of faces drifted in the silence. Some resembled her. Red hair, mixed features. Some looked like the White, like Lorie White, like fragmented echoes of any face from her memory. All eyes were closed; all chests rose and fell slightly with the fluid's circulation.

Fake Matsuki No. 7 stood before a central console, his back to her, fingers dancing across a keyboard.

"Welcome home, ME-09-217." His voice echoed in the cavernous space. "A 'mirror' never reflects just one face. It reflects all possibilities."

X stopped amidst the forest of glass columns. Her reflection splintered across countless curved surfaces.

"Which one am I." It wasn't a question.

Fake Matsuki hit enter. Lights ignited tier by tier from above, illuminating more cylinders, more suspended bodies. From the deepest recesses, an especially large one slowly descended.

Inside was a girl.

Red hair, mixed features, similar enough to X to be nauseating, yet possessing an inorganic perfection. Flawless skin, limbs adhering to some golden ratio. A label glowed in the luminescence:

[ME-09-217 / Prime Origin / Consciousness Stasis].

"You are the special one. The only success. When the Whites stole you, we thought the project a total failure. But you see, life finds a way… you returned on your own." Fake Matsuki stroked the glass as if petting an animal. "Your current body is a replica, accelerated to maturity via gene editing by the Whites. To let you grow up 'human,' they weakened certain sequences, including the Arcana gene-lock. The result? You are a key that cannot fully enter the keyhole."

He turned to her, his eyes gleaming with a sickly light.

"We needed you to 'mature,' Nyxl. We needed rage, despair to activate the dormant codes. For instance, had you achieved neural resonance with your 'parents'' brain tissue in a state of extreme grief… a pity. But no matter, the system has many cultivation protocols."

X stared at the "herself" in the cylinder. That face held a non-human serenity.

"After activation," her voice was arid, "where will 'I' be?"

"You will become the 'Terminal.'" Fake Matsuki spread his arms. "The ultimate vessel for the Nightwatchers' system, the living index of the entire human genetic blueprint. The consciousness of old humanity is noise, to be filtered out, erased. And you will guide the selected genetic sequences into the next stage of evolution—"

"That's death," X interrupted.

Fake Matsuki's smile stiffened.

"It is ascension—"

Ice exploded from X's feet.

Not a spread, but a detonation. Solid ice, like pale pythons, constricted the nearest glass columns. Crazed cracks instantly spider-webbed across the surfaces. Blue-tinged fluid gushed from the fissures, the bodies within convulsing.

"Wait!" Fake Matsuki stumbled back, his heel hitting the console. "Don't you want the truth?! Don't you want to know why you exist—"

"I know," X said.

She raised her hand. The ice at Fake Matsuki's feet erupted. Sharp spikes of ice burst upwards with savage force—grinding between the bones of his feet, tearing through the arches, shattering shins, punching out behind the knees tipped with shards of cartilage, and finally slamming deep into his thighs, pinning him in place. His mouth opened, but only a wet gurgle emerged—ice crystals had already advanced up his trachea, freezing solid around his vocal cords, sealing all screams.

X walked towards the largest cylinder. An ice spike condensed and grew in her palm, its tip aimed at the center of the tank—

At that moment, the entire space lurched violently downward, then began to shake with insane intensity.

Not an explosion——Something older, vaster, deep within the base's foundations, was awakening.

The ceiling split into a web of cracks; massive chunks of concrete rained down, crushing several tanks and their contents into pulp. From the distance came the shriek of twisting metal support structures, and…

… howls.

Many, many howls. Layered—hoarse, shrill, subhuman growls—merging into a wave of sound that stabbed at the mind.

X whipped her head around, looking towards the warehouse entrance.

Through a twisted rent in the blast door, a tide of things poured in like a ruptured sack of pus.

Failures. Chimeras. And the half-finished, dragged from their shattered incubation tanks—a gallery of flesh gone wrong. Limbs sprouted in clusters where none should be. Skulls bulged, eye sockets packed with the faceted gleam of compound eyes, seeing nothing and everything at once.

…Twisted. Malformed. Insane. Hateful reflections. They surged indiscriminately towards anything any tremor of life.

The self-destruct was active. And part of its initiation was opening the cages, releasing all the accumulated madness—

The warehouse crashed into hell.

They fell upon it all—claws tearing at steel, teeth gnawing at conduit and flesh alike. They turned on each other, on nearby tanks, on sparking consoles. And on X—the only human in sight. There was no reason.

A Chimera with three arms and backward-jointed limbs lunged—first. She met it with an ice spike through the skull. The point punched out the back of its head in a wet burst of grey matter and clotted black gel.

Before the body crumpled, more twisted shapes swarmed from the shadows. Eyes void of reason, filled only with ravenous hunger.

A wall of ice erupted around her—a perfect ring slamming shut. It hurled the first wave backward, a dozen monsters crashing into each other with the sickening crunch of bone. But they kept coming. Hundreds. Then thousands. A relentless, seething tide throwing themselves against the barrier, clawing and gnawing at its surface until it gleamed with white scratches and filthy smears.

The wall trembled. Fine cracks spider-webbed across its face.

And deep below, the facility groaned—a chain of explosions rumbling through its veins. Shockwaves shattered more tanks. Glass rained down. Embryos and half-formed things spilled out with the nutrient slurry, only to be swept into the tide, trampled into something unrecognizable.

X leaned against the shuddering ice, its surface thrumming with impacts. Her breath came ragged. Beneath her skin, the Arcana’s backlash burned—a bloodlust scalding her veins, haze of crimson creeping at the edge of sight. She wanted to tear, to shred, to bury every crawling thing here. To bring this whole hell down atop herself.

Then, she heard another sound.

From the depths of the warehouse, from tanks still intact… a tapping.