Part 5: Requiem Path
The road to Requiem was paved with blood.
Kairo stalked through the charred remains of the convoy, steam rising from his ruined body. Every movement peeled another layer of ash and dead tissue from him, revealing something harder, colder, less human beneath.
Above, the blackened sky churned with gunmetal clouds, casting a sickly pallor over the wasteland. The wind screamed like the ghosts of the dead Paragon soldiers now frozen into the blood slicked ice.
He barely noticed.
Every nerve was tuned forward, locked on the beacon embedded in his mind: Requiem.
A place of endings.
A place where they had taken Sera.
The coordinates blazed behind his eyes, a scar he could not erase.
Kairo's body twisted and reshaped itself as he moved. His blade arm thickened, the edges serrated with newly hardened bone. Spines along his back lengthened into jagged ridges. Blood vessels pulsed black and blue under translucent skin.
He wasn't healing anymore.
He was evolving.
Becoming the thing Paragon had feared most.
A weapon they could no longer control.
Hours passed, or maybe days, time blurred into a haze of endless cold and hunger. The landscape grew more twisted as he neared the site. Dead trees, gnarled into clawed shapes, clawed at the sky. Pools of frozen blood dotted the ground like shattered mirrors.
At last, he reached the threshold.
Requiem loomed ahead, a black fortress buried beneath a mountain of ice and steel.
Sensors tracked him from hidden turrets.
Lasers sliced across the ground, analyzing his corrupted form.
Inside, alarms howled.
They knew he was coming.
Good.
He descended into the entrance tunnel, boots crunching over crushed bone and shattered polymer.
The doors—thirty feet thick, made and layerd in depleted uranium began to close.
Kairo sprinted forward.
Faster than human reflexes.
Faster than the machines controlling the gate.
He jammed his blade between the closing slabs, the shriek of tortured metal drowning the wail of the sirens.
His muscles bulged, tendons snapping and regrowing as he forced the door back open with sheer brute force.
Alarms redoubled. Defense drones swarmed from ceiling hatches, their insectoid frames bristling with weapons.
Kairo roared.
The blast shattered the nearest drones instantly, raining sparks and shrapnel.
The rest opened fire.
Lasers carved molten lines across his skin.
Explosive rounds hammered his torso, blowing open craters of bone and flesh.
He moved through the storm.
Faster.
Deadlier.
He jumped and grabbed one drone out of the air, crushed it between his hands until the metal screamed, and hurled it into another, setting off a chain reaction of detonations.
He ripped a leg from a destroyed drone and used it as a spear, impaling three more as they tried to retreat.
Blood—both his and theirs—rained down, steaming in the frozen air.
He left the tunnel littered with burning wreckage and torn limbs.
Deeper and deeper into Requiem he went.
The halls twisted, narrow and sharp, designed to funnel intruders into killzones.
He adapted.
When the walls closed in, he climbed them like an insect, skittering along the ceiling to avoid traps.
When gun turrets emerged, he smashed through with brute force.
Every challenge hardened him.
Every attempt to stop him only made him faster, stronger, angrier.
In the inner sanctum, the architects of Requiem watched him on flickering monitors—their faces pale with dread.
They whispered prayers to dead gods.
They activated the final defenses.
Cryogenic warbeasts—abominations grown from the same stolen DNA that made Kairo—awoke in their containment pods.
Monstrous things, stitched from muscle, bone and rage.
They dropped into the corridors with wet, heavy thuds, jaws slavering, eyes empty.
Kairo faced them without a moments hesitation.
The first leapt.
He met it midair, driving his blade through its gaping maw and ripping downward, splitting its skull and torso in one brutal motion.
The second lunged for his back.
He spun, catching it by the throat, it tried to rip free, punching and clawing at his hand, but he lifted it high enough to hear its vertebrae snap, its hands dropped dead, then he crushed its ribcage between his hands.
The third—larger, smarter—circled warily.
Kairo feinted left, then drove a jagged knee into its side, puncturing its liver. As it howled, he tore its lower jaw free and impaled it through its heart.
Blood soaked the floors, ankle deep.
The architects triggered the purge sequence.
Walls shifted, sections sealing off, fire flooding the corridors.
Kairo burned.
Flesh blackened and peeled.
But he walked through the flames.
New skin knitting itself in warped, armored layers.
He was past pain and way past fear, he was a weapon of death and destruction.
He was the end they had created.
At the heart of Requiem, a great vault waited.
Behind it—the projects they had hidden even from themselves.
Kairo approached, blood hissing on the scorched ground.
He drove his mutated hand into the vault door.
Flesh melded with metal.
Circuits shorted.
Code collapsed.
The vault screamed open.
And there, amid cages and shattered dreams—
He found them.
The experiments.
The lost.
The forgotten.
And among them—
Sera.
Alive.
Barely.
Bound in chains too heavy for any human child.
Her eyes met his—and for a moment, the beast inside Kairo stilled.
He crossed the chamber in a heartbeat.
Shattered her bonds.
Caught her frail, broken body in his arms.
She whispered his name.
Not Asset Zero.
Not Project Final Asset.
"Kai... you found me."
He cradled her close.
And for the first time since his awakening, Kairo felt something pierce the armor of his rage.
Hope.
Then he turned—eyes burning with new fury.
The architects ran.
Kairo followed.
And this time—
There would be no survivors.