Chapter 254: Real Monster

CLINK. CLINK. TINKLE.

The sounds of automatic gunfire in the corridor finally sputtered out.

Silence rushed into the vacuum, broken only by the metallic clatter of hundreds of hot, spent brass casings raining down upon the concrete floor. Dense grey cordite smoke hung thick in the air, illuminated by the strobing red flashes of the emergency klaxons. The pungent stench of burned gunpowder filling the air.

Down the corridor, eight operatives lowered their smoking high-caliber rifles, their chests heaving behind chestplates. Their gloved fingers remained locked around their triggers, their heads tilting slightly as they stared through their night-vision visors into the dense, churning veil of smoke.

Nothing moved.

"Cease fire! Cease fire!" the squad leader barked into his comms, his voice tight. "Check target telemetry! Is he down?!"

Through the fading grey haze, a faint sound echoed across the hall.

Fsssshhhh...

It was the sound of superheated vapor venting into cold air.

Slowly a towering silhouette emerged from the mist.

Hide rose to his full height.

Not a single bullet had breached his flesh. Hundreds of high-velocity, mana-infused rounds lay flattened and deformed on the concrete around his boots, stripped of their momentum like discarded pebbles.

From his bare toes to the crest of his brow, Hide was completely encased in the impenetrable armor of the Abyssal Scale Carapace. The overlapping draconic scales were smooth as obsidian glass, pulsing with an oily sheen. Resting atop his messy silver hair, the crown was no longer an inanimate piece of metal; it writhed and shifted like a living, sentient entity, ribbons of viscous dark mana coiling along its barbed edges like black vipers.

Beneath the shadow of the shifting crown, his ocean-blue locked on the opratives.

Hide didn't issue a warning and simply vanished.

BOOM!

The concrete floor pulverized under his boots.

The front-line operative barely had time to raise his shield before a black blur tore through the smoke.

CRUNCH!

Hide's bare, scaled right hand struck the center of the reinforced shield like an artillery shell. The four-inch ballistic alloy crumpled inward like wet foil. Hide's razor-sharp talons drove straight through the shattered metal plating, punching clean through the operative's Kevlar vest and burying themselves wrist-deep into the man's abdomen.

"GAH—!"

The soldier didn't even have the breath to scream.

Without breaking his forward momentum, Hide flexed his forearm, lifting the grown, armor-clad man completely off the ground with a single arm. With a whip-like snap of his torso, Hide hurled the impaled corpse horizontally down the corridor.

SMASH!

The flying body struck the operative standing directly behind him with catastrophic force. The violent impact smashed their helmets together, shattering both skulls in an explosive spray of bone, teeth, and brain matter that painted the ceiling. Both corpses collapsed into a tangled, twitching heap.

"RELOAD! RELOAD—!"

Panic detonated through the remaining soldiers.

Two operatives in the rear broke formation entirely, throwing their empty rifles to the floor, turning on their heels to sprint desperately toward the door at the end of the hallway. The other three fumbled frantically, their shaking hands dropping fresh magazines onto the blood-slicked stone.

Hide's scaled frame blurred again.

He moved not like a trained swordsman, but like a primeval serpent uncoiling in the dark. His talons flashed through the strobe-lit air in blinding, merciless arcs.

SHING! RIIIIP!

One operative was decapitated mid-sentence, his helmeted head spinning through the air before hitting the wall with a hollow thud. Hide spun on his heel, driving his elbow into the chest of the second reloader, caving the man's ribs straight into his lungs. Before the body could hit the floor, Hide caught the third operative by the throat, hoisting him against the concrete wall and crushing his windpipe with an effortless clench of his iron talons.

The Captain mananged to reload and let out another barrage of attacks. But they were useless as he saw his own headless body falling besides him.

Silence crashed back over the corridor.

Six corpses lay strewn across the red-stained hallway, their pooled blood steaming faintly in the cold draft.

Only one man had managed to slip through the heavy pressurized blast doors at the far end of the hallway, slamming the emergency lock shut behind him.

Hide stood amidst the gore, his scaled chest rising and falling in deep breaths. Hot, dark human blood dripped steadily from the tips of his claws.

The corridor was painted in red, but through the vision slit of the door at the end of the hall, a sterile white radiance spilled outward.

Hide marched forward, his boots leaving dark crimson footprints over the spent bullet casings.

Reaching the locked door, he didn't look for an electronic keypad or a biometric scanner. He drove both sets of talons directly into the seam, sinking his claws into the hardened alloy like a butcher driving hooks into meat.

SKRRRRRRT!

Veins of dark mana flared along his arms. With a guttural roar, Hide violently tore the door apart, ripping it clean off its hydraulic hinges.

He stepped through the breach, clutching the massive, crumpled sheet of two-ton steel in his left hand like a discarded street bludgeon.

The corridor opened into a colossal, multi-tiered amphitheater.

The air was bitterly cold, heavily scented with chemical preservatives, and the faint, unmistakable hum of multi-million-watt power generators. The ceiling arched fifty feet overhead, supported by massive, polished white pillars lined with fluorescent light strips.

And the entire hall was in absolute, screaming pandemonium.

Dozens of researchers, gene-technicians, and medical doctors dressed in white lab coats and pressurized bio-hazard suits were stampeding in terror. Alarms wailed from wall-mounted consoles. Workers tripped over fallen clipboards and tablet terminals, clawing at each other to cram inside two high-speed executive elevators on the far wall, while others scrambled desperately up a set of wide, bulletproof-glass security stairwells leading toward the upper surface levels.

Hide ignored the fleeing scientists.

He stood at the threshold of the room, his ocean-blue eyes widening as his gaze swept across the infrastructure.

Row after row of cryogenic containment pods. Massive gene-sequencing arrays. Glass dissection tables equipped with mechanical laser scalpels, neural-mapping headbands, and mana-extraction siphons. Pinned to the walls were diagnostic holographic monitors displaying live physiological telemetry, cellular adaptation rates, and mana resonance frequencies—all marked with a single, chilling project label:

[SUBJECT: HIDE VOLTER — CORE EXTRACTION PROJECT]

A lab.

This wasn't a military base.

He had been brought here as a laboratory specimen. A caged animal to be experimented upon.

The realization poured molten fuel over the volcanic fury already boiling within Hide's chest.

"Bastards..." Hide hissed, his voice trembling with unbridled rage.

He hurled the crumpled blast door across the room.

KABOOM!

The two-ton slab of steel hurtled through the air like a missile, crashing directly into the massive, room-spanning central supercomputer mainframe on the western wall. The impact pulverized the server racks into twisted scrap metal and exploding circuit boards. Showers of white electrical sparks rained down from the ceiling as power lines snapped.

Instantly, half the sterile fluorescent lights across the cavernous laboratory died, plunging the facility into an eerie, flickering twilight.

Hide stalked into the hall, a demon of pure destruction.

With every step, he lashed out. He smashed cryogenic cooling towers with his bare fists, shattering the glass and spilling nitrogen across the floor. He ripped neural consoles from their foundations and tore heavy cables from the walls, severing the nerve centers of the illegal facility.

Then, as he rounded a cluster of shattered monitoring arrays in the dead center of the amphitheater, Hide's boots came to a dead, frozen halt.

His breath seized in his throat. His jaw went completely slack.

The rage, the violent malice, and the dark mana swirling around his frame seemed to violently collapse in upon itself, leaving behind a cold, bottomless void of horror.

Dominating the center of the hall was a colossal, floor-to-ceiling glass incubation vat.

The reinforced glass cylinder stood twenty feet high, filled to the brim with a bubbling, luminescent emerald-green stasis fluid. Heavy, pulsing conduits and thick monitoring cables entered the top and bottom of the vat.

Suspended in the center of that green stasis liquid was Risa.

She drifted weightlessly in the center of the cylinder, completely naked. Her long, snow-white hair fanned out in the emerald fluid like a delicate, drifting halo. Her eyes were gently closed, her pale, slender arms floating loosely at her sides, her head tilted slightly downward in a posture of peaceful solitude.

She looked as though she were simply asleep.

Hide stumbled two steps forward, his scaled talons trembling so violently they scraped against his thighs. He reached out, his hand pressing flat against the cold exterior of the thick glass.

There was no wound.

Her pale skin was smooth, pristine, and unblemished—not a single scar, not a single drop of blood, and not a single scratch upon her porcelain flesh.

And yet, she was dead and no more than a corpse.

Her core was an empty, shattered crater devoid of a single speck of life mana.

'Why...?' Hide's mind screamed. 'How did they took her body? What did Walter do to her?! What were they planning to do to us?!'

The sheer perversion of it all—taking the girl who had died in his arms and turning her corpse into a pristine laboratory specimen—carved an open, bleeding wound straight through Hide's sanity.

"So you finally showed your true colors..."

A voice drifted from the flickering shadows behind a row of severed server towers.

Hide froze.

It was the exact same voice from the isolation cell. The raspy, dry whisper that had mocked him in the dark.

"You look so freaking monstrous in that," the voice continued, chuckling with cold, nostalgic amusement. "Julian always said you stink of a beast on you. Looks like the dead bastard was right for once."

Hide slowly retracted his scaled hand from the cold glass of the stasis vat.

He turned around, his movements mechanical, his ocean-blue eyes narrowing into razor-thin slits of lethal malice.

Stepping out from the flickering gloom, casually leaning against an overturned metal console with his arms crossed, was a man Hide had never forgotten since the day they had crossed paths in a gate.