Part 2: Ghost Recovery
The slab hissed open, drowning the room in a gush of scalding synthetic vapor.
Kairo slid off the metallic surface like a carcass dropped from a hook.
His hands slapped the floor. Black blood, thick and tar like, vomited from his mouth in slow, heaving waves. Each coughing fit peeled old scars from the lining of his throat. The viscous sludge splattered across the broken tiles, sizzling as it ate into the ground.
The bunker walls trembled around him.
His body—if it could still be called that, sagged into a shivering crawl. Muscle strands twisted violently under his skin. His ribs, exposed and splintered, convulsed with the rhythm of an animal too broken to live and too furious to die.
Above, through broken speakers, the AI murmured in a voice thick with static:
"Recovery incomplete. Warning: Cognitive drift at 42%."
Every syllable felt like a nail driven into his brain.
Kairo pushed himself upright. Every motion ripped tissue, popping tendons like old rope, his right shoulder spasmed. A spike of bone jutted out. His arms no longer matched, the right one was fused with branching structures, part tendril, part skeletal hook.
The air clung to his lungs like wet concrete. It tasted of scorched iron and rotting antifreeze.
His eyes struggled to focus. Vision shifted without his command—thermal overlays, corrupted HUDs, patches of static blind spots. As he blinked, the bunker blurred into a nightmare of wet shadows and twitching shapes.
A monitor flickered to life across the room.
Cracks radiated across the surface, but one broken image pulsed through,
Sera.
Alive. Then distorted.
Her face twisted in agony, goggles slipping sideways. Behind her, sterile hallways bathed in surgical light. Hands—so many hands—dragging her backward. Her mouth opened to scream, but the sound arrived delayed, filtered through broken audio channels.
The screen glitched. Again.
Her face split. Then merged. A glitch looping her final, desperate look.
Kairo's heart—or what was left of it—spasmed violently.
He took one step forward. His foot sank into the half dissolved body of a Paragon technician. A puddle of gelatinous flesh squelched under his boot, clinging to him as if begging for salvation.
The bunker resisted.
Siren lights bathed the room in sick, pulsing red.
Doors slammed shut in cascading booms, trying to trap him.
Magnetic locks engaged, screeching as they bit into their frames.
Electroshock barriers sprang to life, crisscrossing the hallway with arcs of crackling agony.
He walked into it.
The first shock hit like a hammer.
His body convulsed. His teeth cracked from the force. The air filled with the sickening stench of burning hair and flash fried skin.
But he kept moving.
More shocks. More bullets. Autoturrets deployed from recessed compartments in the ceiling, vomiting streams of steel into his malformed flesh. Rounds punched through his torso, leaving ragged tunnels that gushed molten black blood.
He didn't flinch.
He didn't slow.
He moved like death ignoring its own wounds.
Finally, he reached the terminal.
The corrupted file pulsed like a heartbeat:
STATUS: CORRUPTED. QUARANTINED.
Kairo jammed his mutilated hand against the scanner.
The machine screamed—literally screamed—as it tried to deny him. Energy surged through his frame. His body lifted off the ground, arched like a bow.
Skin split open in ribbons. Veins burst and sprayed blue ichor. His jaw unhinged. A raw, crackling screech tore itself free from his ruined throat.
The screen shattered.
And the ghosts came out.
The walls wept memories. The ceiling bled light.
Projections, flickering, bleeding, corrupted, vomited into the room.
Sera running down endless metal corridors, dragging him behind her.
Sera screaming as guards in Paragon armor pried them apart.
Sera on a gurney, her spine exposed to surgical air, wires threading through vertebrae.
Sera—eyes wide, mouth frozen open in a silent, endless scream.
Kairo stumbled back.
He slammed against the wall, leaving a trail of boiling blood.
His malformed hand clawed gouges into the steel.
His breathing degraded into guttural, bestial snarls.
Inside his skull, a voice not his own spoke—too clear to be a memory.
"Kai... wake up... please..."
Sera's voice.
Raw.
Broken.
Alive.
Somewhere.
The AI panicked, its voice degenerating into a shrill mechanical shriek,
"SYSTEM FAILURE. TOTAL NEURAL CONTAMINATION. EXECUTE FULL BUNKER PURGE."
The ceiling exploded. Panels rained down. Fire systems activated, belching chemical agents that hissed against Kairo's mutated skin, burning lines through flesh and bone alike.
It didn't stop him.
Nothing would now.
Through the smoke, another file unlocked itself.
Hidden. Buried. Sealed under layers of dead code.
Label:
"APOPHIS"
Coordinates.
Deep.
Far beneath any mapped facility.
A blacksite buried so far from the world it might as well have been another planet.
A symbol appeared, a single all seeing eye, nailed shut.
And the last transmission:
A video feed barely holding itself together, images of cages stacked six feet high, with something inside, each crammed with twitching, broken forms.
Human? Not anymore.
Clawing. Gnawing. Moaning prayers through shredded throats.
Sera's voice bleeding through the static like a knife through silk:
"Help me, Kai. Please... it hurts..."
He dropped to his knees.
The ground split beneath him.
With a roar that tore the air apart, he drove his fist into the foundation. Concrete exploded outward. Fragments of steel embedded into his forearms, yet he didn't feel it.
Bones in his left leg shattered and reformed in seconds, mutating before his own eyes. Tendrils lashed from his spine, anchoring into the floor to hold him upright.
His heart—if it was still a heart, beat once. Twice.
And then split.
Pulsing new organs took root in his chest, fused with synthetic cords and memory grafts.
His eyes, filled with rage and fire burning in them.
His mouth, torn wide—bled words:
"I'm coming."
Every light in the facility exploded.
The ground shook.
The bunker—every bolt, every panel, every line of code—knew something had awakened that would never sleep again.
He dragged himself through the shattered doorway, leaving trails of black and silver blood that hissed and burned wherever they touched.
Kairo was no longer just a weapon. No longer just a ghost.
He was death made flesh.
And he was coming for Requiem.