Everything exploded into motion at once.

Alaric moved like a shadow breaking free from stillness. His steps made almost no sound, only a rush of air as it rippled through the objects in the room. The man reacted instantly. His metallic tendrils lashed out, wrapping toward where Alaric had just been. But before they could touch him, time itself stopped.

Completely.

The tendrils froze, mere millimeters from Alaric's shoulder. Dust particles hung motionless in the air, suspended as if in a vacuum. Even the leaves of the small plant in the corner were stuck mid-fall. Everything was silent and lifeless.

The AI system had taken over.

Alaric walked slowly through the frozen world, his footsteps the only sound in the vast stillness. He moved closer to the man's motionless figure, studying his face. The wide-open eyes, the pupils locked mid-panic. A faint red glimmer lingered in his irises, proof that an artificial system controlled him too, now caught in the same freeze.

Then Alaric turned his gaze to the cabinet, the source of the strange pulse that had been calling to him. Now, without any interference, he could feel its pull clearly. It wasn't just an illusion or a trick of the mind. It was real, and it was powerful.

Alaric stopped right in front of the cabinet. The faint purple light that had been flickering through the seams was gone, leaving only a dim glow clinging to the surface like the final breath of something that had just been shut down.

He stood still for a moment, letting his eyes trace every detail. The metallic surface, the delicate engravings along its panels. Even the thin scratch marks on the door that looked like it had once been forced open in a hurry.

But what caught Alaric's attention wasn't the cabinet's outer form. It was the sensation coming from within. There was something behind that door that wasn't still, yet wasn't truly alive either. A pulse, but not of electricity. Something closer to consciousness.

He swallowed hard and crouched to examine the bottom of the door. There were no conventional hinges. Instead, the surface seemed to merge seamlessly, forming an organic connection between metal and energy. When he brushed his fingertips against it. It was cold, but not the lifeless kind of cold. It trembled faintly, like the skin of a sleeping creature.

Taking a deep breath, Alaric pulled the handle. The magnetic hinges gave a soft click, and a faint shimmer reflected on his face. He squinted slightly, then opened the cabinet doors fully.

Inside, there were no books.

No chemical bottles.

No mechanical tools like he had expected.

What he saw instead were cables.

Hundreds... maybe thousands, of cables stretched from one side to the other. Forming a tangled, almost organic network. Some hung like tree roots growing downward from the ceiling, while others wrapped around each other in tight, natural knots like intertwined vines. The ends pulsed gently, glowing with a faint light that resembled veins under skin.

"This…"

"It's like a living organism inside a cabinet."

He stepped closer, his eyes following the twisted cords that resembled synthetic muscle fibers. When he focused, he could sense a faint current moving through them. As if some lingering spark of life still flowed there, even though time itself had been frozen by his system.

Alaric reached out, stopping just a centimeter from one of the cables. He could feel the static field prickling against his skin, like the charged air before a storm. But something in him refused to let him touch it.

He lowered his hand slowly and turned to the side. That was when he saw it, behind the layered mass of cables was something that looked like a white curtain, though not fully transparent. It divided the space into two.

The curtain didn't move at all, not even slightly.

"Why is there a curtain in a place like this…" he muttered, though no one was there to answer.

Alaric remained cautious. His first thought was danger. The cables could easily discharge a surge that would electrocute him. But then he remembered: his AI system had frozen every living organism and all biological connections.

The man who had attacked him earlier was completely immobilized. If this system was linked to that man's body, then this machinery was likely paralyzed too.

Still, Alaric didn't want to take unnecessary risks.

He began searching for a control switch, a manual on-off button that might serve as a failsafe. He felt along the edge of the door, touching the right side, then the left. Nothing.

He crouched, peering beneath the structure. That's when his eyes caught a small bump near the back, almost hidden between two thick cable joints. Leaning closer, he spotted a worn-out switch marked faintly with a power symbol.

"So that's where you are," he whispered.

He pressed it.

Click.

Nothing happened. No sound, no vibration, no returning light. Everything remained frozen.

He exhaled softly and gave a faint smile. "Of course. It's dead."

Then his eyes narrowed. "But why did even non-living systems stop working?" he thought. Normally, the freeze protocol only affected biological entities. Yet now, even this machine was lifeless.

"Maybe because it's linked to that man's body. The system must have identified it as part of his biological network."

He straightened up, drawing a long breath, and looked back toward the white curtain. The glow from the surrounding cables cast a faint moonlit sheen across its surface.

"All right then…"

Carefully, he stepped forward. His hand reached out, parting the curtain little by little. The fabric felt cold against his fingertips... soft yet heavy, like touching something not entirely cloth.

And behind it lay another chamber.

A room that hadn't seemed large from the outside.

Alaric stopped at the threshold, trying to adjust to what he saw. His eyes swept the area, checking for any sign of reaction from the system. Once he was sure it was stable, he stepped through, weaving between the cables that coiled like roots around his path.

He was careful not to step on any of them, because they weren't fully asleep.

As soon as he passed through the curtain, the atmosphere shifted. The air smelled faintly of ozone, and the entire room felt like it was breathing.

Alaric swallowed, letting his senses adapt to the dimmer light. Slowly, the shapes hidden in the shadows began to take form.

One. Two. Three… five… ten.

So many small figures lined up along the room.

They sat in oversized chairs, far too big for their tiny bodies. Each chair was connected to dozens of cables, attached to their hands, backs, even their faces. Alaric froze. He stared, unable to comprehend what he was seeing.

Children.

Small children.

Their faces were calm, peaceful even, as if sleeping soundly. But Alaric knew it wasn't real sleep. Their breathing was faint, and some of their fingers twitched weakly—as if their bodies were trying to reject the condition forced upon them.

"No… it can't be…"

He stepped closer, each movement heavier than the last. His heartbeat thundered, and even the AI voice in his head fell silent, unable to process the horror before them.

The soft blue light from the cables pulsed in uneven rhythm. Each time it did, a monitor on the back wall displayed fluctuating waves of energy. Alaric's eyes followed the data and then froze on the label at the top corner: Energy Output: Emotional Conversion Unit.

His stomach dropped.

"No…"

"So this is the source."

He turned back toward the children, studying each small, sleeping face. A little girl with long hair, her cheeks streaked with dried tears. A boy whose fingers clenched the armrest so tightly his skin had gone pale.

"He used them… for this."

Suddenly everything made sense. The robotic system he had disabled earlier shouldn't have been able to reactivate. Yet it had surged back to life, twice as strong as before. Two hundred percent power. The only explanation was new energy drawn from an external source. Living energy. Human energy.

These children weren't just victims. They were fuel.

Alaric stared at them one by one. He could feel something radiating from them. An overwhelming sorrow, a suffocating despair thick in the air. It seeped into his chest.

"They can still feel it," he murmured. "Their bodies may be asleep, but their hearts are still screaming."

Something ignited inside him. Not just anger—guilt. Because all this time, he had been fighting the enemy's machines without knowing what powered them. He had been destroying metal, unaware of the human lives entangled within it. The lives of children.

His gaze fell on a boy in the front row, no older than eight. The child was clutching a small toy robot, half-broken, in his hand. Maybe the last thing he held before his world turned into a nightmare.

"They were never meant to end up like this," Alaric whispered hoarsely.

In the center of the room stood a transparent sphere, pulsing faintly. Each child was connected to it, their cables feeding into its core. Every time it throbbed with light, blue currents ran through the wires... and the children's bodies tensed in unison. Their pain was being transformed into raw energy.

"So that's your secret," Alaric said quietly.

"You didn't create power. You stole it."

He stood there for a long time, letting the realization sink in. His shoulders tightened, his breath turned heavy. This should never have existed. It was something that had crossed every line of humanity.

He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again.

"So this was your true purpose."

The missing children. The strange anomalies around the facility. The inexplicable energy spikes. Every clue pointed to the same horrific truth. A madman who had traded the joy of children for strength.

Alaric's fists clenched until his knuckles turned white.

"No," he said softly but firmly. "I won't let this continue."