“What is… this?” The young Rakna’s voice quivered as he beheld what lied below the nuclear plant.

The bridge he was on spanned for tens of meters and expanded into a massive grid of which the cases had each a cistern located within their perimeter.

These cisterns were filled with a red liquid mixed with blue light as if it was electrified. And if the smell didn’t make the contents’ nature clear enough, the hundreds of dead animals hung to the ceiling with their throats slit definitely would.

“Is this… the pool of blood?” Ceres asked uneasily as she viewed the memory.

“Correct. Or rather, the pools of blood,” Rakna said with an empty chuckle.

“What happened here…?”

“Watch. You’ll get your answer.”

Ceres turned back to the memory as the thirteen-year-old boy started walking further down the bridge whilst staying close to the railings. His face was stuck in a perpetual grimace as he did his best to examine the situation.

“Those cisterns…” He muttered and leaned a bit more over the railing to see that the containers of blood each had a screen displaying different measures. Additionally, there were several conduits pouring a cyan liquid inside.

“The Eion… Blood… Animals…” His eyes widened. “The trucks aren’t for the Eion, they’re for the animals… Zeera? Did they steal Aurora’s research and continued it on all sorts of wild animals? If that’s true, why bring them all here and drain them of their blood?” He muttered to himself.

Since there didn’t seem to be anyone monitoring this room, he quickly headed to a staircase static to the bridge and approached one of the cisterns’ screens. “Enzymes, acids, antigens… all sorts of natural compounds,” he mumbled and clicked his tongue.

He looked up again at the drained animals with a wince. His eyes wandered to the crystallized air around them coming from the vents. “They keep them cold… do they use the corpses to add the organic compounds? Fuck; the old man is better at this than me,” he spat under his breath and started running around, trying to find out what this blood was for but to no avail.

He did find one cistern different from the others though. He climbed the ladder built onto it and looked inside only to almost gag. “Disgusting pieces of shit,” he uttered. There were decomposing animals in there and some were already bones. “This is clearly not Zeera’s method. Are they trying to come up with a different solution to make super soldiers?”

As he was thinking that, he heard a sound coming from the other side of the underground factory along with voices he couldn’t make out. ‘Shit,’ he cursed internally and quietly headed to the most outward walls of this test center. He used the metal poles sustaining the ceiling as covers and he started hearing the footsteps and voices clearer.

“Are we even sure the motion sensors didn’t just malfunction? Might just be a rat. Who would even get in here? We should have fucking cameras anyway…”

“Shut up. The fewer devices we have vulnerable to hacking, the better. Aurora’s been a pain in the ass since they’ve started putting back doors in every market.”

Rakna quietly listened to their conversation and eventually made his way back up on the bridge so that he could spy on them from above. They were speaking English and were obviously not of Asian descent; which made it even more likely for them to be Flood.

“Yeah, yeah, sure… see anything?” One of the two men asked as they walked around the cisterns.

“No,” the other responded lazily and his partner clicked his tongue.

“Tch, I hate this smell. Hey, do you know when’s the next batch?”

“Tomorrow. It’s the last one too. We’re done with the research. The two other sites are closing and this one will follow next week. The higher-ups want to wrap this up before we get found out. To top it off, we have some weird vigilante after us. Some are saying the Demon’s back.”

“Pff! As if! That’s just a freaking urban legend at this point. It’s been what? A hundred years since he disappeared? He must be dead already. My mom used to tell me scary stories about him when I was a kid.”

“You should have listened to her,” the man heard an unknown voice and before he could react, a knife had been thrust through his temple and Rakna landed on his falling body.

“Wha-!” The partner turned around when he heard the noise and raised his firearm. But before he could aim, the knife in Rakna’s hand extended into a spear and swatted his weapon.

The spear then stabbed into his knee and he cried in pain. He reflexively keeled over and a hand grabbed his throat and pushed him to the floor. He tried to get the hand off but the spear retracted and slashed both his shoulders.

“Quiet,” Rakna spoke through his mask. “You’re clearly the most knowledgeable here. You’re going to tell me what I want to know.”

“I’m not going to tell you anything… brat…” He choked out of his strangled throat and Rakna rolled his eyes. He whirled the knife and stabbed it into the man’s palm while tightening his grip so that the man’s scream couldn’t be voiced.

“Reconsider. The hand’s a surprisingly painful place, you know? You wouldn’t want me to stir this thing inside your palm, would you? Or do you prefer having your fingers slowly sliced open? Nerve by nerve.”

Ceres watched with a feeling even more complicated than the ones before as the young boy began to torture a man in front of her eyes. It didn’t take long for the criminal to speak but the only thing he knew of was the advancement of the site’s schedule and the base’s layout and personnel.

“Thanks,” the young Rakna uttered and pierced the man’s brain in a blink. He searched his clothes for the device that stopped the motion sensors from triggering and pocketed it. “No pager. Maybe that’s a bit too much to expect from them anyway,” he commented and stood up.

He put his knife back on his belt and made his way to the exit. The doors were unlocked; courtesy of the pair who had come looking for him. It led him directly inside a corridor with dim lighting.

‘Feels like I’m inside a hospital at night,’ Rakna jested to himself and moved forward and when he was a few steps away from an intersection, someone took a turn in his direction.

“Hey-!” The man’s shout died in his throat when a needle-like throwing projectile speared through his forehead. Rakna wordlessly approached him and pulled the dart out while he was still falling.

“44 left,” he muttered based on the number given by the other man. He couldn’t have possibly told him the exact number that fast and in panic but he gave it a reasonable margin of error.

“A habit the old drilled into me,” the present Rakna suddenly said. “If you know how many targets you have, your focus isn’t lost. If you count down, you don’t get distracted. And when you reach zero, you know you either have to retreat if there are enemies unaccounted for or be even more careful for surprises out of your intel.”

Ceres glanced timidly at him as he said those words and when her eyes returned to the images, she almost let out her voice when she saw him break the neck of someone sitting at a desk right outside the corridor.

“43,” the boy casually said without stopping as he zeroed on the laptop lying on the desk. “Old model. Not tampered by Aurora,” he muttered and did the most civilian thing to do; check the Wi-Fi. “Ah, close. Fiber. Makes sense,” he mumbled and, after a few clicks and input of a password, he linked the laptop to a server back home that would scour the files and network.

When he was done with that, he heard footsteps coming from his left and threw a dart that landed on a woman’s throat who barely came into view. Rakna stepped over her body to head to the place she came from. “Gender equality as they preach. 42,” he scoffed and when he saw three people at the end of the passage pointing at him and raising their weapons, he knew stealth was over.

He could have tried to kill them from a distance but the alarm that went off as fast as they noticed him didn’t leave him any choice. He pulled something from inside his vest and threw it at the wall behind them.

When the throwing knife hit, a blip echoed and the three men were engulfed in an Eion explosion that tore the flesh out of their bones. “39,” he whispered and started running immediately after. He dived into the smoke of the explosion and past the hole made in the wall.

His mask adjusted the vision and he jumped behind the first cover he could see right as a hail of bullets began to whizz through the bluish smoke of the explosion. He scowled and readied his two spear-knives. When the bullets stopped, he started hearing the reloading sounds and the slow footsteps closing in from all directions.

He groaned internally. ‘They’re professionally trained. Of course,’ he sighed silently and unclipped a small disc-like object from his belt. He pressed the button on it and tossed it over the cover. The object blipped midair and released an extremely high-pressure gas that kept the object airborne for a few short seconds.

The room was filled with thick tear-gas near instantly. Rakna promptly rolled out of his cover and switched his mask to thermal vision. He dashed to the farthest target first. In the way, he flicked both of his weapons and turned them into spears.

He swung them and reaped two men during his run before stabbing one spear into the chest of his original target. Then, before the rest could recover from the gas, he turned around and threw three darts, efficiently downing the remaining threats.

When the tear-gas dispersed, Rakna noted that the room he was in was a small cafeteria. “Oh, my bad for disrupting your meal,” he muttered as the bodies spilled blood on the floor. “33,” he said off-handedly and started hearing far more noise coming from two different directions.

He sighed and kicked one body over. He scowled and crouched to grab something inside a pouch next to the deceased man’s ammunition. “There you go.” Rakna scoffed as he pulled out a frag grenade. “Too scared to use them on me, huh? I don’t like it but still better than guns,” he said and went on to grab two more from the others.

He turned toward the second exit of the cafeteria and pulled a pin with a grin. When the door was slammed open, he tossed one and hid behind a corner. “Meal’s not ready,” he said laughingly and heard yells before the grenade detonated.

Ceres went on to watch as the boy a few years into his adolescence gored his way through tens of armed men like a breeze. The grins he flashed also appeared genuine to her. It seemed like he was enjoying it. She couldn’t even fathom to understand how such a person could be traumatized to the point of becoming the one she knew today.

“9.” This statement brought her back to attention and saw the past Rakna standing in front of a metal door locked by a biometric scanner with a handful of bodies at his feet.

He frowned at the door and tried to use his fingerprint to open it for the sake of it. When the buzzer went off and flashed red, he groaned. “We can always dream,” he muttered and looked around. He angled his sight toward the holster of one corpse and clicked his tongue.

He reached for the handgun in it and pulled the slide to check the chamber. He turned off the safety and pointed the weapon at the scanner before pressing the trigger. He didn’t even blink as the bullet dug a hole into it.

Sparks flew out and the door opened a second afterward. Rakna snickered and dropped the gun in his hand. “Never fails,” he jested and stepped inside. This new room was a laboratory and the first thing he noticed were cylinders filled with an opaque green liquid.

He approached one of them and squinted his eyes. He was almost capable of seeing a silhouette inside but it was far too large for it to be human. He glanced at the tactile screen affixed to it and when he was about to press on the ‘Drain’ button, he felt something cold pressed against the back of his head.

“Well, well, what do we have here? A kid?”