Red emergency beams flickered across rust-stained walls, casting eerie shadows over shattered capsules and toppled lab tables.
A thick chemical mist clung to the floor like a living fog, wrapping around the ankles of a woman who was running purely on instinct. Her body was a wreck—her left arm hung limply at her side, blood dripping in a rhythmic pattern onto the grated floor. Yet, her right arm held something tightly, something warm, delicate, and alive.
A newborn.
Swaddled in a stained emergency insulation cloth, the baby squirmed feebly against her chest. Its skin was pale—almost unnaturally so—and its wide, unfocused eyes glowed a deep crimson. The baby had stopped wailing; it had cried enough. Now, it only whimpered softly as the chaos around it roared.
Above, sirens wailed.
Behind her, footsteps drew closer. Ahead, only darkness—and maybe a glimmer of hope.
The woman stumbled through a broken bulkhead into a narrow tunnel. Sparks rained down from a severed power conduit overhead. The corridor was collapsing, section by section, like a ribcage of steel and death caving in behind her.
They found her.
Two shadows emerged through the shattered wall, tall and armored, the white-and-gold trim of the Shepherd Corps elite now stained black with smoke and blood. Their visors glinted coldly in the dim light. They didn't say a word. Shepherds rarely did when it came to Nullborn exterminations. They were here for Experiment X-K0.
And Her.
And the child in her arms.
She turned to shield him, but it was too late.
The first Shepherd raised his arm—an elegant blade unfolded from beneath his wrist, crafted from a quirk-bound alloy that shimmered with mutation disruption. In one swift motion, it sliced through her side, nearly severing her in two. Before her body even hit the ground, the second Shepherd raised his hand.
The tips of his fingers pulsed once—then flashed.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Three shots echoed through the air. Two struck the woman squarely in the chest, and the last one—right into the bundle she cradled.
Her knees hit the cold steel floor with a dull thud. Blood spread across the emergency cloth, pooling into the crevices. Her head drooped forward, a final act of protection over the infant, even in death.
The Shepherds stood there, eyes fixed on the small figure beneath her, waiting for any sign of life.
But there was nothing. The baby's eyes remained wide open—frozen in time.
Its chest lay still. Its skin turned pale.
A flawless kill.
"Target eliminated," one of them stated, devoid of emotion.
"Another failed Experiment," the other grumbled.
"Just trash from a broken womb."
They turned and walked back into the smoke-filled corridor, not bothering to look back.
Silence enveloped the scene.
Then… the cloth stirred.
The baby's dark eyes blinked once.
Twice.
The air held its breath.
From its tiny chest, the bullet began to inch its way out—slowly, wetly—until it clinked against the floor, stained with newborn blood. A faint breath escaped its lips. Then another. Then—
A scream.
It started to piece itself back together, the flesh on its chest. Gradually. Tentatively. But it was clear.
And thus, the first evolution had begun.
One year later.
Darkness.
Thick and absolute. The kind of darkness that feels like it's breathing right back at you.
The child, known as K-0, recalled the last thing his mother had whispered to him as he crawled across the jagged ferrocrete. His leg, twisted from a fall days earlier, dragged limply behind him, the bone misaligned and grinding with every movement. A trail of dried blood marked his path. No one followed it. No one cared.
He was just one year old.
And yet, he remembered everything.
His mother's voice, trembling.
Her body shielding him as her life spilled onto the cold steel.
The blade. The gun.
From the moment light flooded his eyes in that crumbling lab, he remembered it all. The scent of his mother. Her blood. The glint of the Shepherd's visor. The precise angles of the muzzle flare. Their faces haunted him with every blink.
He had no language. No words.
But he understood everything.
He was not one of those helpless, screaming babies. His intelligence allowed him to focus and think clearly. He observed. He listened.
And above all—he adapted.
He also knew that the fungus growing near the generator vents would make him vomit. He was aware that the orange slime pooling near the waste pipes stung his tongue but not his throat. He had learned how to chew rat meat raw, knowing exactly where to bite first so it wouldn't scream.
There was a constant ache in his body. Always. After consuming a poisonous mushroom two nights ago, his stomach twisted painfully, and his shoulder throbbed from the impact. He had been forced to seize. Yet, he endured it. The poison coursed through his veins. His body responded to it.
He was changing.
Every injury, every bite, every illness—it all became a part of him.
Now, he crawled forward, drawn by a flickering light. It was cold.
Zone W-11, Pit Sector – 1.5 Years P.A.E.
The air was thick with a metallic rot, mingling with the breath of those long forgotten.
From his high perch, nine-year-old Larn watched, chewing on what might have once been wire casing. His face was gaunt, skin marked with the dark, charcoal veins of his unstable Bone-Burn quirk.
"That freak's still alive," he muttered, mostly to himself.
Inside the shell of a collapsed tank, Meera remained silent. She couldn't even blink. By the time she was six, her mutation had fused her skin into tough armor plates. Her gaze was unyielding as K-0 passed beneath a dripping power line, careful to avoid the surge.
"Even if he makes it," Meera thought, "he won't last in this brutal place."
From the shadows near the fungal pipes, Jagg crouched low. At just six years old, his teeth resembled cracked obsidian, and his jaw never quite closed. He tracked K-0 with an animalistic instinct.
He remembered the one time he had tried to bite him. Just once. He had sunk his teeth into K-0, exposing his fangs to the skin. Blood had poured from the wound.
K-0 hadn't cried out. He hadn't even flinched. He simply turned his head and looked on with a chilling gaze that made something in Jagg's mind retreat.
Now Jagg kept his distance.
K-0 didn't seem to notice them. Or maybe he did, but just didn't care.
His focus shifted to a sharp metallic sound overhead—a groan of twisted steel. Then came the impact.
A deactivated drone plummeted from the ceiling, crashing to the floor just two meters away. Sparks erupted from its cracked chassis, and its lens flickered uncertainly.
K-0 crawled toward it, his gaze unblinking. He reached out, pressing his fingers against the lens.
The drone sparked again.
Then—boom.
The explosion ripped through the corridor, sending shrapnel flying against the walls. The force hurled K-0 sideways, reopening a wound on his shoulder, blood pooling beneath him.
Larn blinked. "He's dead now."
Meera remained still. "Maybe."
For a long moment, the air was thick with silence.
Ash floated in the corridor, the dim light from the drone's core flickering against the charred walls. Heat shimmered from the cracked floor where the blast had struck.
And yet—there was no body.
Larn was the first to leap down from the pipe. His bare feet slapped against the metal as he landed, eyes wide, scanning the wreckage.
"Where is he?"
Meera followed, descending more slowly, her armored skin glinting with debris. She kicked aside a broken piece of the drone, her hands trembling slightly despite her efforts to stay steady.
Nothing but dark blood smeared across the ground… and a faint trail leading into the shadows.
"He should be dead," Larn hissed. "He should be—"
Gone.
K-0 had vanished.
He had foreseen the aftermath of that explosion. He knew the others would rush in, that they would look to him. What he could survive on. What he might turn into.
Beneath a fallen support beam, tucked away in the darkness, K-0 pressed himself flat, not daring to make a sound. His shoulder still sizzled from the burn, but even so—his skin was already starting to heal.
The flesh folded like damp paper, nerves reconnecting, blood retreating. He watched it unfold. He understood it.
He had grasped the threat.
> "They will fear me."
He didn't have the exact word for it, but the idea was crystal clear.
Others feared the strong. The distinction. Those who should have perished but didn't. No longer would they be able to push him around if they witnessed the wound vanish and his bones solidify and throb.
They'd try to kill him.
Just like the Shepherds.
> "This is why they tried to erase me."
He curled deeper into the shadows, his eyes locked on the movement beyond the wreckage. They were leaving now, murmuring and bickering. But he remained there, frozen, for hours.
Once he was sure they were gone, K-0 pulled himself out and slipped into a safer corridor, a collapsed chamber lined with shattered tiles and cooling pipes. Here, alone and unseen, he finally concentrated.
He glanced down at his knees—raw and torn from months of crawling. In some places, the skin was completely gone. His bones were misshapen. His body wasn't designed for walking. Not yet.
If he wanted to survive longer, blend in, and escape… he needed to walk.
He placed his hand on his right knee, took a deep breath, and slammed it against the floor.
A loud crack. A strangled gasp. The pain hit him like a wave.
But he didn't stop.
He did the same to the other leg, carefully repositioning the bones with small, precise movements. He gritted his teeth as muscles tore and reformed. Blood flowed. Nerve endings screamed.
Still, he didn't cry out.
He watched as the broken bone began to seal tighter than before. He observed his thighs tense, reorganize, and compress. The more pain he inflicted, the more his body responded.
>"I must not let them know what I am."
>"Not yet."
Time passed.
He kept his distance from the others.
K-0 knew what would happen if they found him. He had seen how they treated the inexplicable. In Zone W-11, mutation was the norm. But surviving without a special talent or help? That made you dangerous.
So he hid.
Tucked away in vents, beneath collapsed rail pillars, inside the remains of drones. He listened. He watched. But he rarely moved. He only emerged when his stomach twisted too tightly or his mouth felt like dust. And even then, he was quick, silent, and gone before anyone could register more than a shadow.
Hunger didn't scare him.
It hurt all the time, but it seemed familiar now. When his gut lining started to consume itself, his body knew how to fix it. His organs conserved energy by slowing down. However, evolution was not without its limitations. He needed fuel to grow.
So, once in a while, he hunted.
Old rat dens. Maggot nests. Scrap soup from a forgotten fire. He swallowed it all. Let his body burn it and turn it into something stronger.
That strength came at a cost.
K-0 trained in secret every day. He would repeatedly push upward until something snapped, drag himself to his knees, and smash his trembling limbs on the floor. He never yelled aloud, only inside his mind. He was inaudible.
He made his bones break.
And when they healed, they healed harder
A year passed.
K-0 turned two.
He didn't celebrate. He didn't even know what a birthday was. Time only mattered in how much it let him change.
His knees no longer gave way as he stood. He ran without tearing his thighs. His fall did not cause his lungs to collapse.
Once crawling on wounded elbows, the boy now silently sprinted the shattered hallways of Zone W-11, getting quicker every day, every hour, and every week. He still had a petite, boyish build.
And he didn't stop.
Because deep in his chest, deeper than memory or fear, something pulsed:
Survive.
Evolve.
Surpass.
Even if it hurt.
Even if it cost him everything that made him human.
What little light was left came from bioluminescent moss, flickering quirk residue in the vents, or the occasional green flare of unstable energy sparks dancing along exposed wires. The broken lights of the upper corridors had long since died. This was the landfill of the world. The gutter. It's a grave.
And somewhere in its deepest artery, he moved.
K-0 had changed from a crawling baby four years prior. He was now five years old. Yes, small, but small and sharp, like something carved out of stone rather than newly born. He had dense, compact muscles. His bones were far harder than any child's would be, and his reflexes had outgrown his size.
He had no one to talk to. No books. No training modules. But his instincts had taught him everything the body needed to learn
He could run for more than an hour before his breath became heavy. He was able to jump three meters straight out of the air. As he adjusted to the green haze of the deeper tunnels of the Underscape, his eyes observed in dim light. Almost every toxin he came into contact with was now absorbed by his blood; his liver had developed into a purifier, and his cells responded to poisons with adaptation
What others couldn't eat, he consumed.
Mold. Fungus. Rat flesh laced with chemical residue. Old coolant fluid, diluted with slum water. All of it made him sick. At first. But every sickness built something.
> "The more I hurt," he'd think silently, "the more I grow."
He never tested his limits by accident anymore.
Tonight, he waited near the lower chasm ridge, crouched atop an old rail skeleton bent into a warped bridge. A soft growl echoed beneath him. Something stirred in the garbage heap of Sector Blackline's refuse trench.
The beast emerged—half-hound, half-reptile, a quirk-mutated hybrid that had likely been thrown down from the surface generations ago. Its skin was leather, bones protruding, glowing lines running across its side from an unstable metabolism. It sniffed once, then snarled.
Most kids would have run. Most adults, too.
K-0 jumped.
He landed on the creature's back like a vulture striking a corpse, arms wrapping around its neck. It bucked, twisted, slammed itself into a pillar. Pain shot through his chest. One rib snapped.
Good.
He bit down on its nape, felt blood spill. The beast thrashed. A claw tore into his shoulder—but the wound had already begun to close. He twisted, drove his elbow into the base of its skull.
Crunch.
The beast fell limp.
K-0 stood over its corpse, panting lightly. Blood dripped from his lip. His arm trembled from the impact. The pain made him stagger.
He just stood there emotionless.
> "That blow wasn't strong enough. I need to adjust the force."
He dragged the corpse into a hollow and began carving into the muscle. The meat was raw, hot, tainted with chemical traces.
He ate anyway.
Because he had to feed the thing inside him. The thing growing stronger each day. The thing that learned from every drop of blood spilled—his and theirs.
He didn't know the word for it.
But if the Shepherd Corps saw him now, they would know.
This was no longer a child.
The deeper parts of Zone W-11.
This one was referred to as the Red Hollow — not because of color, but because of what remained when things disappeared. It was quiet. Too quiet. Even the rat nests and scavenger tribes shunned it. Something within was amiss. Always restless. Always famished.
K-0 had watched it from the ridges for months. Observed how animals that entered didn't return. How warped bones would later be found, clean and bent in impossible ways. Tonight, he returned again — not to watch.
But to fight.
He dropped from a maintenance shaft, landing hard on jagged concrete. The smell was immediate—burnt ozone, rotting meat, and something deeper. Something wet and acidic. The fog was thick. Vision short. But sound was his guide now. Vibration. Air pressure.
And he wasn't alone.
The first came without sound.
A mutated dog-thing — skin peeled into scales, four legs twisted into seven. Its breath hissed steam as it charged. K-0 sidestepped, pivoted low, and snapped a pipe into the back of its head.
Second down.
The next came from the wall — a rodent the size of a child, limbs fused into a slick tail that lashed out like a whip. It caught his leg mid-run, yanked him off balance. His hip dislocated. He roared internally, twisted, popped it back in place, and drove a sharp fragment of bone he'd broken from his own arm into its throat.
It screamed. Then silence.
But more followed.
Too many.
A horde of malformed scavengers crawled from the shadows—maggot-eyed, lungless, foaming. All mutated in different ways. No logic to their shapes. Just corruption of flesh and failed genes.
K-0 ran. Fast. Darting between pillars. Sliding under pipe wreckage. Leaping across gaps.
But they kept coming.
One slammed into his back, another tackled him into rusted iron. His ribs cracked. A fang dug into his neck. Something pierced his side — glass or claw, he didn't know. He fought back—biting, slashing, slamming heads into stone. He killed two more. Then another.
But they overwhelmed him.
He fell.
His back struck the floor hard. The creatures clawed and gnawed, shredding at skin, grinding into bone. His vision pulsed red. His limbs spasmed. Blood poured into his eyes. His muscles screamed to adapt—
—but they couldn't keep up.
Not fast enough.
Not yet.
> "Am I… going to die?"
He didn't fear it.
But he wasn't ready.
He grabbed the last one still clinging to his chest and drove his thumb through its eye before the weight finally pinned him. His pulse slowed. Darkness crept in. He lay there, breath ragged, his body broken in more places than he could count.
Alone. Bleeding.
He had never felt so close to being dead.
And then… his body twitched.
His heart gave a sharp, painful thump. Something snapped in — not from outside pressure, but from within. Like a pulse of heat — a command.
Survive. Or die.
A few moments ago, that shredded muscle was now starting to pulse. The jagged tissue shook in violent motion. Not healing, but actually integrating. The rib broken in two pressed into place. Blood slowed its seepage to form a seal. One after the other, the vital signs crawled back into life.
He wasn't conscious. Not fully.
But deep inside, something was screaming to keep going.
There was no light anymore.
Only heat. Pain. Hunger.
And instinct.
Something deep within K-0 sparked to life — not like a simple flare, but more like an explosion. His body shot upward in a wild convulsion, limbs flailing as bones clicked into place and muscles ripped apart only to come back together even stronger.
His skin bubbled and hardened, veins bulging and stretching. A deep, guttural growl erupted from his throat—not a cry of pain, but the sound of something awakening.
As soon as his eyes rolled back, the screaming started.
The twisted creatures swarmed over him, their jaws unhinging and claws stabbing down. They never expected him to rise. They never thought their prey would fight back.
But he did.
In a flash, he shot upward, arms wide, teeth bared. His first punch crushed a skull with a sickening pop. His second shattered a ribcage, blood spraying across the walls.
He didn't hesitate.
Didn't think.
He clamped down on a snapping jaw—ripping the creature's face off in a shower of gore. He plunged his hands into its chest and pulled until the body split in two.
Another creature leapt at him—he ducked, seized it by the throat midair, and bit through its neck like it was nothing but raw meat.
He was consuming.
Tearing.
Devouring.
Claws, legs, spines—none of it mattered. His mouth was filled with blood and marrow, his body twitching and healing faster with every bite. Bones cracked and sealed, organs fused mid-motion. The more he bled, the more his quirk pushed him forward, dragging him past the brink of control into pure, evolutionary fury.
The Red Hollow was strewn with twitching bodies — or what remained of them. Limbs. Teeth. Fragments of ribs. It resembled a slaughterhouse than a battlefield.
In the middle of it all, curled up among the bones and pools of dark blood, K-0 began to stir.
His eyes slowly fluttered open, his vision hazy with light. He coughed, thick, dark fluid spilling from his mouth.
> "What... did I—"
He attempted to sit up, pain flared through every nerve. Yet, the wounds had vanished.
His hands… were stained red.
Flesh clung to his nails. His teeth throbbed from the grinding of bone. His chest heaved too quickly. His breathing hitched.
He glanced around.
And found nothing alive.
Just devastation.
His devastation.
> "No…"
Then the flash hit him.
A scream. His mother's.
The sound of gunfire.
The moment her blood splattered on his cheek.
The bullet.
The chill.
> "Don't die, my little virus."
The memory struck him like a bolt of lightning, gripping his spine. He saw her face again—blurred, beautiful, and shattered. Her arms wrapped around him. Warmth. And fear.
And love.
Then it vanished.
He sat in the stillness, trembling.
> "What am I?"
He couldn't find an answer.
But deep down, something in his blood already understood.
He had become a living response to death.