The needle plunged into Thirteen, injecting the cold cruelty of Basilisk Venom into his veins.
Only this time, a profound stillness settled over him.
Years spent within these walls had dulled the jagged edges of Thirteen's fear, leaving only a deep weariness in his bones.
Around him, the other test subjects convulsed violently, their half-naked bodies spasming upon the cold tiled floor after falling from the beds they were strapped to.
Another test, another failure in the relentless pursuit of power of the monsters in white coats.
Their methods held no compassion, only cold calculation.
Hundreds had died this way through the years, their bodies too weak to adapt to the invasive power.
This time, it was Basilisk Venom—pure and undiluted, thick and dark as tar.
It burned in Thirteen's veins, not with heat, but an icy fire, utterly alien to his being.
The others gasped and screamed; not him.
Even as their shrieks echoed in the sterile chamber, then faded into an unnerving silence, not even the faintest whisper left Thirteen's lips.
He knew the meaning of both those silences.
One declared the loss of life. The other revealed the gain of power.
The freezing burn within Thirteen shifted.
It was no longer just pain.
He could feel something else, a nascent energy stirring within, strange and unfamiliar, yet undeniably his own.
"Utterly remarkable," Dr. Threl's voice echoed, thin and distant in the large room. His tone was never of concern, only of clinical satisfaction. "Subject 13 appears to be stable!"
Stable was a cruel joke here.
In this place of sheer suffering, stability was followed only by more pain.
Thirteen felt an unsettling grinding in his bones as he tried to move to avoid that pain, but then a prickling sensation took over his skin, as if slimy worms were trying to tear free from within it.
His blurring gaze fixed on a hairline crack beside the bright ceiling lights, a small point of reality to escape the surrounding chaos.
The cacophony of his brothers' and sisters' dying breaths had subsided.
Ragged inhalations eventually ceased, leaving only a grim quiet.
The finality of that silence weighed upon Thirteen's heart.
It was the death of their smiles, of his hope.
But the experiment couldn't claim Thirteen.
Even this time, it didn't dare.
The icy burn inside his veins morphed again.
It roared, some primal power seizing him.
Thirteen's skin rippled, turning to a smooth, deep purple-black, like polished obsidian.
Beneath it: tiny yet tough scales flexed, growing throughout his body.
The dull ache in his bones faded, lost to a silent, surging strength.
This was not just a change or adaptation.
It was his rebirth.
Threl and his assistants approached him cautiously, their faces illuminated by the subtly flickering overhead lights.
A hint of awe flashed over their apprehension, quickly replaced by scientific curiosity.
"Subject 13," Dr. Threl murmured, his voice hushed. "Congratulations! You have actually survived. Lived for the hundredth time!"
The scientists smiled and cheered amongst one another, while Thirteen simply thought, 'Only a hundred tests?'
It felt as if he'd suffered through far more in the past ten years.
Thirteen offered no verbal response to the scientists' queries.
A cold, reptilian focus had settled within him, telling him words were no longer needed.
The pain in his body lingered beneath his new, hardened skin, but the blooming strength numbed it with a silent promise.
The promise of absolute power.
Thirteen willed his fingers to move, watching them twitch, before clenching them into a determined fist.
Unfamiliar muscles flexed in his forearm, reinforced with tough scales.
Then, with a violent, liberating tremor that shuddered through his entire frame, his sleek, obsidian skin cracked.
The purple-black scales peeled away, like fragments of shattered onyx, revealing the creature beneath.
An ethereal voice whispered into his ear just then, but none reacted to it.
Thirteen vaguely noted glowing runes shimmering in his peripheral vision.
But his focus remained on the agony he'd felt and the power he'd been blessed with to punish those who'd made him feel that way.
[Assimilation of Basilisk Venom: Achieved!]
[Divine Spark: Brightened!]
[Phase: (Emergent)]
[Stage: (Stark)]
[Vital Specks: (100/100)]
Upon this declaration, Thirteen burst out from under his onyx scales into a being that was only half human.
Defying the weakness that should have held him captive, he pushed himself upright.
His limbs felt heavier now, but also strangely more responsive to his will.
Threl's smile withered as he took a hesitant step away from the bed, his eyes still blazing with a crazed, feverish triumph.
The dying screams of his other subjects, the blood on the floor trailing to his shoes, the lifeless bodies of a dozen children around him—none of it mattered to Threl.
The mad doctor only concerned himself with the outcome of his experiments.
"Observe!" Dr. Threl declared, his voice high and strained with exhilaration. "The Basilisk Venom… the integration was successful! The cellular structure has undergone the desired supernatural mutation. We've finally created our very own—"
The spectacled old man's clinical pronouncement was abruptly cut short.
In that precise moment, when Thirteen sensed the doctor's horrifying satisfaction at the chaos he'd created, something primal and long-dormant fractured within his mind.
Years of endured torment, of being reduced to a mere number in their cruel experiments, ignited into a singular, burning desire for retribution.
The Basilisk Venom, now intrinsic to Thirteen, responded with terrifying swiftness.
His thrown fist was a blur, exceeding even his own expectation of his newfound power.
As his sharpened vision intensified the overhead lights, they revealed every minute detail of the cold experiment room.
Thirteen saw the shadow of primal fear in Threl's eyes.
In the next instant, his scaly knuckles smashed the doctor's spectacles into his skull, the force behind his hardened fist almost taking the bald man's whole head off.
Frozen with shock and dread, only stunned incomprehension etched the expressions of Threl's assistants as he collapsed to the bloodied ground.
Thirteen's serpentine eyes kept glaring at Threl's corpse.
Eyeing that monster with nothing but hateful rage, an unfamiliar pressure grew behind Thirteen's eyes, a sensation both alien and instinctively understood.
The very air around him seemed to distort as he continued to do so, an ominous emerald radiance emanating from his irises.
The ethereal voice whispered into his ear again.
And again, he heard the words, saw faint, glowing lines of runes appear, but his gaze was locked only onto his prey.
[Petrify even Light: Unleashed!]
[Vital Specks: (50/100)]
[Divine Spark: Dulled!]
Thirteen climbed to his feet, his gleaming serpentine eyes causing the remaining scientists to freeze, horror spilling over their ashen faces.
Their bodies remained still, even as their minds screamed at them to move.
But the moment Thirteen passed by them, their rigid forms lost balance, collapsing into heaps of stiff flesh and bones.
Then they slowly recovered, screaming and scrambling to escape his wrath.
Thirteen hunted them with a newfound litheness, a snakelike grace now innate to his altered being.
The ethereal voice kept whispering into his ear.
The strange runes flickered in his vision for a third time, but his immediate need was simply speed.
[Slither through Silence: Unleashed!]
[Vital Specks: (40/100)]
[Divine Spark: Dulled!]
Each limb shifting with predatory fluidity, Thirteen propelled himself through the chamber as the scientists tried running away from their sentence.
While closing behind them, he noted his skin had returned to its regular tan complexion, but now it was faintly scaled and possessed superhuman resilience.
Lunging with raw speed, Thirteen intercepted Eana first before she could fall behind two other assistants shoving their way out of the bright room.
Eana was a young scientist whose demeanor had always held a shade less cruelty than her colleagues.
But she wore a white coat, so Thirteen wasn't fooled.
White coats were all the same to him.
Thirteen felt only a cold, detached purpose driving his following actions.
Reaching out with a hand, his fingers brushed against her soft cheek.
It was wet from tears as she recoiled, her moist eyes wide with terror.
"Please…" she choked out, her voice but a fragile whimper. "I'm… sorry."
A flicker of his former self, an ember of empathy from before these hundred experiments were forced upon him, flashed within Thirteen.
But the Basilisk Venom's frigid blaze extinguished it at once.
"I forgive you," Thirteen hissed.
Eana's eyelids flicked tears off them while closing and opening rapidly, the corner of her mouth slightly twitching upward. "T-thank you—"
Glancing at his dead brothers and sisters, Thirteen's hand fell from her crying face, his grip tightening about her throat. "But they don't."
The ethereal voice whispered with more glowing symbols appearing, but the only thing that mattered to Thirteen was executing his captors.
[Venom for Vengeance: Unleashed!]
[Vital Specks: (2o/100)]
[Divine Spark: Dulled!]
The Basilisk Venom within him was a malicious killer, its toxins invading his target by the merest touch made with violent intent.
Eana gasped, her body stiffening momentarily before she collapsed limply to the cold tiles with the same spasms and convulsions she'd made his brothers and sisters suffer.
Thirteen left her corpse to stalk the rest of the laboratory before even a single one of his tormentors escaped.
The white coats ran from him through the bright corridors blaring with deafening alarms.
But they were far too slow.
Each termination was swift, efficient, and devoid of any emotion.
Thirteen observed their extinguishing life force with only detached indifference.
[Banal Mortal: Butchered!]
[Banal Mortal: Butchered!]
[Banal Mortal: Butchered!]
The whisper kept repeating.
White tiles and white walls under white lights were splattered with crimson gore.
The halls echoed with the screams of those who never raised their voices while torturing them.
Thirteen found no satisfaction in this carnage, only a chilling sense of necessity.
The white coats had turned him into this; now they suffered its consequences.
After the bloody business was done, Thirteen returned to the experiment room while the alarms kept blaring.
Kneeling, he touched his forehead to that of each of his dead brothers and sisters.
'I died with you,' he told their wronged spirits. 'You'll live through me.'
Hoping they'd find peace in a better world, Thirteen moved on to get his meager possessions: a plain white shirt and trousers.
Stepping out of his sleeping unit with them on, Thirteen caught his reflection in a broken shard of polished metal, gleaming with the red glow of an alarm light.
What stared back was undeniably him—yet now, disturbingly altered.
Not quite human.
A subtle shift in his hair had darkened it to a deep viridian hue shot through with threads of onyx.
The sharp angles of his jaw seemed more defined, his cheekbones more prominent, lending him a predatory cast.
But it was his eyes that held the most profound transformation.
They were no longer the mundane dark brown as he'd known them to be all his life, but now gleaming with a striking emerald green flecked with molten gold.
Burning with a cold and unsettling primal intensity, each eyeball was slashed with vertical slits for pupils that hid behind them the lethal potency now residing within him.
Even without looking at his reflection, it was quite obvious he was no longer Subject 13, a mere experiment of Dr. Threl and his assistants.
Now he was an exception.
A harbinger of vengeance unleashed upon the world by those trying to enslave him.
A survivor, forever marked by the essence of a fallen god.
And finally: he was free.
Thirteen stepped out of the main hall, leaving the subjects of his judgment behind.
'Thirteen…' He chewed on its bitter taste, the foulness it carried spreading over his forked tongue, serving as a needless reminder. 'I'm Thirteen no longer.'
Prowling through the front doors of the laboratory, a piercing siren ripped through the air.
The cool embrace of the night felt strangely invigorating against his scaly skin, even as the facility remained an immediate threat.
The nameless young man lifted his gaze to the vast expanse of the star-scattered sky, a celestial canvas imprinted with the birth and death of many divine and demonic deities.
Now, it acknowledged the emergence of something stranger, of a man born from what remained of a fallen god.
His initial act was complete.
The taste of the bittersweet drug called revenge lingered upon his forked tongue.
The obvious next step was understanding.
Understanding the profound changes within him, and the implications of this newfound power in a world still haunted by the echoes of dead deities.
The ethereal voice in his ear and the glowing runes before his eyes were his first leads—only the first step in his journey of discovering who he truly was.
A journey, he hoped, marked with better things than blood and brutality.
But, of course, he knew better than to expect good things out of life.
'Hope only hollows the heart,' Nameless told himself, remembering his hopeful siblings.
The distant thrum of heavy footsteps, the crackle of comms, and the shouts of guards grew louder.
Alarms blared throughout the facility, a cacophony of warning.
The sounds of enraged men echoed all over the complex.
Nameless listened to the chaos calmly, his altered senses tracking every approach, preparing him for more slaughter.
He was out of the main laboratory, but the facility was still his prison.
Meaning: there were more captors to punish.
'Not yet free.'