Part 1: The Flight of the Architects
The architects of Requiem fled through hidden maintenance shafts, like rats scurrying through the festering veins of a dying machine.
Their lab coats soaked with blood and grime, snapped around them like torn shrouds. Their boots skidded on floors slick with coolant and melted flesh. Sirens shrieked overhead, and the walls trembled as systems failed, steel doors of the fortress giving way.
Behind them—footsteps.
Not running.
Walking.
Unhurried.
Inevitable.
Kairo pursued.
Each step fell like the toll of a great iron bell, rattling bolts loose from their sockets, shaking dust and blood from the ceiling. His ruined body steamed against the freezing air, open wounds hissing where the cold touched exposed muscle.
Flesh flayed, bone revealed, blood blackened and bubbling—Kairo moved not like a man, but like a god that refused to stay dead.
On his back, tethered by strips of shredded synthetic cloth, Sera clung weakly to his mutated form. Her shallow breathing tickled the burned skin along his spine, the only fragile heartbeat anchoring him to a world he would otherwise reduce to ash.
He tracked the architects by scent.
The acrid stench of terror. Sweat heavy with synthetic stimulants. The sour rot of fear induced adrenaline.
Ahead—desperation.
The architects hammered hidden panels, triggering emergency failsafes. Gears shrieked and ancient walls shifted, peeling open hidden alcoves.
From them spilled nightmares.
Failed experiments.
The forgotten children of Paragon.
Creatures stitched from hatred and desperation, twisting masses of sinew, wire, bone, and sorrow—stumbled and crawled out of the corridors.
They shrieked and wept.
Maws opened too wide, filled with shattered teeth.
Fingers ended in scalpels.
Joints bent the wrong way, legs convulsing in spasms.
Kairo barely slowed.
The first creature—a brutish colossus armored in slabs of organic steel charged, roaring.
Kairo caught it mid lunge by the throat.
The thing's talons raked shallow trenches across Kairo's chest—earning no reaction.
With a twist, Kairo snapped its neck, the wet crunch lost under the creature's last garbled roar.
He hurled the corpse into a few of its kin, sending them sprawling like broken dolls.
Another, a spider limbed horror—scuttled across the walls, acid drooling from its jagged mandibles.
Kairo jumped and met it mid leap.
His blade hand punched through its open maw, splitting the creature's skull into pulpy halves. Its acidic blood hissed against his forearm, but the new, blackened tissue resisted the burn.
Still the architects fled.
Kairo pursued.
The corridor narrowed into a bottleneck, a deliberate killing floor.
They triggered the next failsafe.
Vents screeched open, vomiting toxic mist, a dense, choking green designed to strip flesh from bone.
The cloud rushed forward, devouring the walls, peeling paint and rust from steel.
Kairo wrapped Sera tighter with his what was left of his coat and pressed her against his chest and stepped into it.
The mist ate away his surface flesh instantly—skin blistered and sloughed off in thick, wet sheets, muscles smoking and crackling.
Underneath, new armor.
Tissue already adapting.
Black and slick like wet obsidian, ridged and reinforced by metallic bone lattices.
He emerged from the gas like a specter—wreathed in steam and death.
He checked on Sera, most of the coat had burned away, but she was safe, no serious damage.
He put her back behind him.
His eyes, once human, now glowed like coals torn from a dying sun.
Alarms howled.
Turrets unfolded from ceiling mounts, vomiting gunfire.
Kairo moved.
Bullets stitched lines across his ribs, pockmarking his mutated frame, but he drove through them, weaving with inhuman precision.
He slammed into the base of the nearest turret, ripping it free with a screech of tearing metal. Sparks rained down.
He swung the broken machine like a club, smashing other defenses into splintered ruin.
He carved a path of devastation.
The architects screamed.
One stumbled, fell and scrambled back on hands slick with blood.
Kairo was on him before he could rise.
A foot slammed down—crushing ribs and spine—turning the man into a mangled wreck.
Another scientist fired a desperate shot from a hand pistol.
The round punched into Kairo's shoulder and embedded itself uselessly.
He responded with a slash that opened the man from groin to sternum, intestines slithering out like a broken nest of serpents.
Still, the core group ran.
Through twisting corridors lined with broken mirrors and flickering lights—relics of a dead dream.
Every reflection showed them the same thing.
Kairo.
Closer.
More inevitable with every second.
They triggered final barriers—walls designed to collapse, crushing anything behind.
Kairo didn't stop.
He hit the first barrier shoulder first.
The reinforced concrete shattered like brittle bone.
Dust and debris fountained around him as he emerged through the wreckage—unstoppable.
Ahead, the last and final gate.
A blast door the size of a shuttle bay hatch.
They pounded desperately at the control panel, bloodied fists slipping on cracked keys.
The door jammed.
System failure.
Kairo closed the distance.
The first man, a younger technician—turned, panic wide in his eyes, leveling a stunner.
Kairo swatted the weapon aside and drove his claw into the man's chest—his fingers spearing through flesh, splintering ribs, rupturing organs.
The body convulsed violently, twitching like a fish on a hook.
Kairo wrenched free—ripping free a handful of dripping viscera.
The tech collapsed.
Next, a woman—fell to her knees, hands raised in surrender, tears streaking her face.
Kairo paused.
Not in mercy.
In judgment.
He placed his blade gently against her throat and pressed.
With surgical like precision.
Blood sprayed in an arc.
Her head dropped to the floor, not knowing it had been cut off, spinned once, after a second, stopped moving, mouth still shaping useless prayers.
The final architect—an elder, white haired and wild eyed—backed against the wall.
"We made you," he rasped, broken and shaking. "You belong to us!"
Kairo stepped closer.
Smoke coiled from his wounds, his breath venting in slow, deliberate bursts.
He leaned in and looked the man in the eye, voice a blade of static and finality, eyes raging with fire and fury
"You made your executioner."
And he drove his blade up under the man's chin, punching through soft palate and brain.
The old man spasmed, boots skittering against the floor, and crumpled into a twitching heap.
Silence reclaimed the corridor.
Only the wailing alarms and the slow, steady heartbeat against his back remained.
Sera was alive.
He was glad.
Kairo stood over the corpses of his creators.
Over the architects of his nightmare.
He turned toward the heart of Requiem.
Blood sizzled and smoked where it fell, boiling against the overheated floor.
It was time to finish what they had started.