CHAPTER 146: WEAKENING MINDS

The piercing noise coming from the pod reached a breaking point. The cracks on the thick, frosted glass glowed with an unstable purple light. For a terrible moment, the creature inside the pod convulsed, focusing all of its unending psychic scream into a focused point.

Then, CRACK-BOOM!

The chamber didn’t just break, it exploded. The reinforced glass, which has been designed to withstand immense force, shattered outwards in a deadly wave. It wasn’t just a simple explosion of glass. It was a powerful pulse of psychic energy that acted like a propellant, turning the broken pieces into a lethal shotgun blast that shot through the lab’s atmosphere.

The team, who were already fighting a war inside their own heads, had no time to think. They could only react on pure, battle trained instinct.

"Watch out!" Seraph screamed, her voice strained and tight from the mental pressure. She threw herself sideways, diving behind a heavy, steel table just as a dozen sharp pieces of broken glass slammed into it with loud, metallic pings.

Draven was too large and too close to find cover. He let out a furious roar that was more animal than human. He dropped his shoulder, angled his body, and raised his greatsword sideways. The massive slab of manifested steel became a wall. Shards of glass, some as long and sharp as daggers, pinged and bounced off the magical metal, spraying the air with a cloud of shiny dust.

When the last glass piece hit the floor, the lab was quiet again, except for the constant, drilling scream still in their minds.

Subject Alpha pulled itself free from the wreckage.

It stumbled forward out of the freezing mist, like a horrifying puppet whose strings had just been cut. Its uneven legs struggled to grip on the floor. Its movements were not the smooth, controlled actions of a warrior, but an unbalanced movement of limbs.

For a moment, the creature just lay there, twitching. The psychic scream in their heads had lessened slightly, just for a moment. But in that brief moment, a bit of hope appeared. Maybe the explosion had been too much for its unstable body.

That hope was a lie.

Draven, his face covered in sweat and grit, saw his chance. This... thing... had hurt his team. It had crippled Vanessa’s magic and had brought Jonah to his knees. He refused to let this unnatural creature dictate the terms of the fight. He had to take control of the situation, to force this strange battle into a set of rules he understood: a physical fight to the death.

He let out a deep roar, a sound of pure warrior’s rage meant to push back the noise in his own head. "IT ENDS NOW!"

He charged.

His armored boots hit the concrete hard, each step closing up the distance. He was a walking wall of pure, focused violence. He raised his greatsword high, the magical blade glowing with a deadly silver light in the dim lab. He brought it down in a powerful arc, an attack meant to chop the wretched thing in half.

The creature didn’t dodge. It didn’t try to block. It didn’t even seem to see the two hundred pound armored warrior about to bring a magical sword down on its head.

It simply took the hit.

The greatsword slammed into its shoulder with a tearing sound. The cut was so deep, nearly slicing the scaly arm from its body.

But there was no blood.

Instead, a sickly purple glow leaked from the wound, the same awful energy that had come from the stasis pod. The sight felt so wrong, so unnatural, that Draven stepped back in disgust.

Before he could process what he was seeing, before he could raise his sword for a finishing blow, the flesh of the wound began to bubble and twist. With a horrible sound, the massive gash sealed itself shut. Fresh scar tissue grew over the wound at a visible rate. In less than three seconds, the injury that should have crippled it was completely gone.

Vanessa, who had managed to push herself up against a nearby wall, stared in disbelief. "It’s healing," she gasped, her voice trembling with a mixture of fear and awe. "That kind of regeneration... that’s impossible. It’s rewriting its own body."

The creature seemed completely unaware that it had been injured. The psychic scream never wavered. The pain never stopped.

Its head twitched, and it dragged itself back to its feet. It thrashed its clawed hand sideways, not aiming at Draven, but just swinging in a random, shaking in pain. The claws tore through a thick power conduit on the wall as if it were tissue paper.

KRRZZZZT!

The main lights in the lab flared violently. They sparked, buzzed, and then died, covering the massive chamber into near total darkness. A moment later, emergency lights kicked in with a low hum, casting everything in a hellish red glow and shifting shadows.

Throughout it all, Jonah was still on the floor, locked in his own private war.

The others were fighting a monster of flesh and metal. He was fighting a hurricane of pure emotion. The creature’s scream was a relentless assault on his consciousness, and his empathic link held the door wide open for it. He could feel his own thoughts starting to break, his sense of self beginning to dissolve into the creature’s endless pain.

He was on one knee, his knuckles pale where he gripped the cold floor. He was a liability, a vulnerable weight on his team. He could hear the sounds of the fight, the clash of Draven’s armor, Seraph’s sharp commands, but they were all distant noises in the storm of pain. He had to fight it. He had to get back up. But it was like trying to stand before a landslide.

The lights went out, and the red strobes began to flash. The shadows danced and shifted like living things.

And the screaming in his head never stopped.