Seven Years Ago...
The room was cold. Too cold. Not in temperature, but in feeling. Sterile walls. Buzzing overhead lights. The scent of chemicals and blood soaked into the floor tiles.
Chains clinked as the boy moved, barely a teenager, skin pale, body bruised, shirtless and strapped to a reinforced chair. His eyes were still more brown than red back then.
Dr. Caulfield adjusted her glasses, tapping something on the console. "Subject 09 appears stable. Begin Phase Four stimulus."
A low hum rose from the floor. The boy's back arched violently as electricity coursed through him, veins glowing faintly black under the skin. His scream echoed off the steel walls.
"Again," Caulfield ordered. "We need to break him before we build him."
The second shock came without delay. Then the third. Then the sedative injection. Then the questions.
"Who do you fear?"
"Where is your power?"
"Tell us how to summon it."
When he didn't answer, they changed tactics.
Starvation. Isolation. Hallucinogens. Simulated executions.
One day, they brought in a dog. A real one. Kind. Gentle. The boy's first friend ever.
A month later, they forced him to kill it with his own hands.
And when his screams faded into silence, and the glow in his eyes began to shift from brown to crimson, when the shadows in the corners of the room started curling toward him like they were listening, that's when they knew.
It had worked.
…
Seven years later...
Bob's eyes shot open, drenched in sweat. He gasped for air, chest rising and falling like he'd just run a marathon.
His hand went to his chest instinctively, remembering the electrodes. They weren't there. They were never there anymore. But the skin still remembered.
He sat up slowly, running a hand through his hair, exhaling hard.
The nightmare again.
Across the room, Alex stirred under his blanket, blinking sleepily. "Bob?" he mumbled. "You okay?"
Bob hesitated.
Then, quietly, "Yeah. Just… a dream."
Alex didn't pry. He simply turned over and fell back asleep.
Bob stayed sitting there.
The monsters in the dream were long gone.
But the one they created?
He was still here.
And he was wide awake.
…
Seven Years Ago
Subject Age: Fifteen
The screaming didn't start right away. It began with a flicker.
In the dead silence of Cell Block D, a surveillance light blinked out. Then another. One by one, the facility's sensors began failing, each in perfect sequence.
Inside a reinforced containment chamber, Subject 09 sat on the floor, eyes closed, heartbeat slow. Calm. Too calm.
The guards outside barely noticed the shadow pooling in the corner of the room.
Then it moved.
Within seconds, the power surged. Lights exploded above. Darkness swept through the facility, not absence of light, but a crawling, breathing thing that reeked of terror itself.
Sirens wailed. Red emergency lights flickered. The intercom crackled with panic.
"Containment breach! All units to—"
Then silence.
Rafael stood in the middle of the hall. Eyes glowing like embers. A grin stretching across his face. Not joy, madness.
He took his first step outside the chamber.
The floor beneath him cracked with pressure. Shadows dragged behind him like a cloak.
Two guards ran at him.
They didn't even make it halfway.
One collapsed mid-step, screaming in terror at something only he could see. His eyes rolled back, veins blackening as he convulsed.
The other pulled his weapon, only to find it gone. Melted into shadows. Seconds later, so was his hand.
And then his scream stopped, torn from his throat as if fear itself had swallowed him whole.
In the research wing, Dr. Caulfield watched the monitors in horror.
"This isn't a breach," she whispered. "It's judgment."
She hit the emergency purge button.
Too late.
Bob was already there.
She turned just in time to see the wall behind her ripple like water, a dark hand reaching out.
The security tapes would later show the entire room going black in a heartbeat. No footage survived. No personnel did either.
He didn't just escape.
He erased Helix Point.
By dawn, 116 people were confirmed dead.
There were no survivors.
Only rumors.
And a name whispered in fear across the underground science community.
"The God of Wrath."
He was fifteen.
…
The night sky burned red as fire alarms blared futile warnings into the wind.
The facility lay in ruins behind him, windows shattered, walls cracked, floors torn up like paper under a monstrous hand. Inside, nothing lived. Not the scientists. Not the guards. Not even the patients in other wings. Their fears had been weaponized, their nightmares made flesh, and then silenced.
And in the heart of that silence…
Rafael Azar stepped into the open air.
He looked no older than fifteen, but his eyes were a thousand years old. Unblinking. Wild. A storm behind those red irises, slowly his eyes turned black. His black hair hung loose over his pale face, sweat and blood clinging to his skin. He wore no shoes. No shirt. Only the tattered remnants of his containment suit.
And he was smiling.
That crooked, cracked smile that said:
"I've finally become what you tried to create."
Behind him, the building creaked, metal and concrete groaning like a wounded animal. He lifted one hand lazily.
"You called me a weapon…"
Dark tendrils writhed around his fingers, pulsating like veins.
"…so let me show you how right you were."
Then he clenched his fist.
The entire central core of Helix Point collapsed in on itself. Steel folded like paper. Fires erupted from every crack. There was no elegance in the destruction, only cruelty. The buildings around the hidden facility collapsing along with it.
Over fifty innocent people died that day.
The death toll rose to one hundred and seventy-nine.
And Rafael?
He walked barefoot down the cracked asphalt of a nearby country road, leaving burning footprints in the tar. Sirens wailed far behind. He didn't care. His expression had fallen blank again, but his eyes still burned.
Then,
A gust of wind.
A shadow overhead.
He stopped.
From above, a voice boomed:
"Stop right there."
He looked up slowly, squinting against the light of the moon.
There, Gleaming white suit, golden trim, hovering in midair like a demigod.
Broad-shouldered. Commanding presence. Face half-shadowed by the moonlight.
"My name is Hope," the hero said.
Rafael tilted his head, curious. Then… he grinned.
"Hope," he echoed.
"That's cute."