Part 4: Failure Protocol
The ruins of the Paragon forward base hissed and groaned behind Kairo, a collapsed lung exhaling its final breath into the night.
He moved through the wreckage like a god disowned by its makers, every step branding the frozen earth with blood and searing heat.
The terminal data burned inside his mind, coordinates, blueprints, names. A path, written in betrayal.
Requiem wasn't a facility.
It was a promise of pain. A graveyard waiting for its last guardian to fall.
And Kairo was no longer a guardian. He was death given flesh.
The storm screamed against him. Ice shards slashed across his exposed muscle fibers, freezing instantly and shattering off his frame. Steam billowed from every joint where blood boiled into the air. The elements howled for his surrender.
He answered with silence.
Far ahead, through veils of swirling white, the lights of a Paragon convoy blinked, an oasis of warmth and desperation in a dead land.
Kairo smelled them before he saw them.
Fear had its own chemical signature.
Rotting adrenaline. Flaring cortisol. Metallic sweat burning off skin.
He stalked forward, his mutated legs extending subtly with each step—an organic evolution tuned for killing. Joints hyperextended unnaturally. Tendons tightened and pulsed. His breath vented from between shredded lips, a rhythmic hiss like a cooling reactor.
The convoy never saw him coming.
The lead transport—a crawler armored in titanium reinforced mesh—buckled sideways with a deafening roar as Kairo slammed into its flank.
Metal screamed. Men inside screamed louder.
The crawler's hull twisted inward like crumpled paper, throwing soldiers across its cabin. Emergency klaxons howled.
Kairo ripped the door from its hinges.
He stepped through the breach, steam rising from his shoulders, blade hand dragging a trail of sparks along the frame.
Inside, chaos.
Soldiers shouted, firing blindly.
Bullets rattled against Kairo's frame, embedding into regrowing muscle, sizzling impotently before being pushed out by spasming tissue.
He waded through them without slowing.
He caught the nearest man by the arm and ripped it off clean, the flesh parting with a wet snap, arterial spray painting the walls.
The man's body crumpled backward, twitching like a severed puppet.
Kairo seized another by the head, lifting him effortlessly.
With a grim twist, he crushed the skull between his fingers—grey matter bursting through his claws.
The driver tried to reverse.
Kairo punched through the windshield, grabbed him by the throat, and yanked him through the shattered glass. His spine folded in half with a crack like a tree snapping.
The crawler tilted, its ruined suspension groaning.
Flames belched from its ruptured engine block, casting flickering shadows over the slaughter.
Amidst the chaos, a commander's voice rasped over a commlink, strained with terror:
"Deploy Failure Protocol! Asset Zero is active! I repeat—DEPLOY FAILURE PROTOCOL!"
Kairo paused.
Failure Protocol.
A memory slithered through his damaged mind—buried instructions:
If an asset rebels. If an asset disobeys. If an asset remembers.
Destroy it.
At any cost.
Beyond the crawler, containment teams scrambled, dragging heavy emitters into place, bulky, coffin shaped devices buzzing with barely contained microwave energy.
Their plan was crude.
Brutal.
Turn him into boiling slurry before he could think.
Kairo smiled—a grotesque split of mangled lips and exposed teeth.
He stepped through the burning wreckage, molten metal fusing briefly to his skin before sloughing off in sizzling sheets.
The suppression fields activated.
Invisible waves hit him.
Flesh cooked instantly.
Skin peeled back from bone.
Veins burst like overripe fruit.
Kairo screamed—but no sound came. Only a vibration, subsonic, fracturing every pane of glass within a hundred meters. Soldiers staggered, clutching their bleeding ears.
He moved faster.
The first operator's face imploded under a hammer blow punch, collapsing inward like a kicked in door.
Another fled, slipping on the blood slick ice. Kairo was upon him in an instant, smashing him into the ground with enough force to crater the frozen earth, his skull flattening like wet clay.
Gunfire raked him from the flanks.
Heavy rounds from anti materiel rifles tore gouges through his torso, exposing bone, severing muscle.
For a heartbeat, he faltered.
Steam and gore geysered from his wounds.
Then—regeneration.
The torn tissue reknit in seconds, blacker, tougher, laced with carbon-fiber tendons shimmering under moonlight.
Adaptation complete.
He surged forward.
The firing line crumbled.
Men died screaming, limbs torn free, bodies pulped under his fists. He left no survivors. None worthy of mercy.
The final soldier—barely more than a boy—threw down his weapon, hands raised, sobbing.
"P-please… I don't—I don't want to die!"
Kairo loomed over him, steam billowing from his mutilated frame.
For a brief moment—an echo of old humanity flickered.
Then he ended it.
A quick slice.
The boy's head parted from his shoulders, rolling across the ice, eyes still wide with terror.
Kairo turned to the command vehicle—the brain of the convoy.
He ripped the armored door from its hinges.
Inside, servers thrummed with encrypted data.
He plunged his clawed hand into the mainframe, absorbing schematics, personnel lists, facility coordinates.
Each name seared into his mind.
Each one—a promise.
He memorized them all.
A funeral list.
A death map.
He left the convoy a blazing ruin.
Dragging the burning canvas of the command tent behind him like a king's bloody cloak.
Above, the heavens tore open.
Paragon dropships descended in screaming flocks, spilling more soldiers, more machines, more prayers for a world that could no longer save them.
Kairo welcomed them.
Failure Protocol wasn't his death.
It was his genesis.
He lifted his blade to the broken sky and roared, a sound that cracked mountains and froze blood.
Tonight, Paragon would learn.
Tonight, he would show them what their final weapon had become.