The world he saw was not the world of men. It was a world of heat signatures, structural weaknesses, and biological rhythms. The room was bathed in a sharp, high-contrast crimson filter. He looked at the Scientist standing over him. The drug had distorted his perception, but not into a fantasy. It had sharpened it into a hyper-focused reality.
And suddenly, Raven realized something terrifying. He knew this feeling. He had felt it before. In the underground fighting pits. In the moments when death was inches away. He remembered how time would slow down, how his opponents would seem to move underwater, how his punches would land with the force of a hydraulic press.
He had always thought it was just adrenaline. He thought it was a survival instinct. He was wrong. It wasn't adrenaline. It was this. This power had always been there, humming beneath his skin, waiting. He had spent his whole life unknowingly holding it back, putting a leash on it to pass as a human. The drug didn't give him strength. The drug simply cut the leash.
In Raven's eyes, the man in the white coat was holding something wet, red, and pulsing in his gloved hand.
A Heart.
My heart, Raven thought. His mind was operating on cold logic. He is holding the target. He is holding the vital function. He watched the Scientist's fingers twitch, in reality, adjusting a pen, but to Raven, he was squeezing the organ.
Thump-thump. A phantom pain shot through Raven's chest. Thump-thump. It was the loudest sound in the universe.
"You..." Raven choked out. The sound that left his throat was human, but stripped of all restraint. It was the sound of an engine revving past the red line. The Scientist leaned in, fascinated. "Yes? What do you feel?"
"You... are... fragile." He said it like a soldier identifying an obstacle.
The Scientist stopped. He lowered the pen. He looked closely at Raven's eyes. The dark brown was gone. In their place, two circles of glowing crimson burned. They were not reptilian. They were human irises, but flooded with a supernatural energy, shining like laser sights in the dim room. "Interesting," the Scientist muttered, stepping back, sweat beading on his forehead. "The compound didn't cause a mutation... it merely stripped away the inhibition. This physiology... it was dormant."
He was too slow. Raven didn't struggle against the straps. He engaged and just stopped holding back.
SNAP.
The sound was like a gunshot. The reinforced leather strap on his right arm didn't just break; it sheared apart from the sheer, focused torque of his movement. Raven's hand shot out. It moved with a precision, a blur of speed that the human eye couldn't track. He grabbed the Scientist's face. His large hand encompassed the Scientist's entire jaw and mouth. It was a vice grip. He silenced the man instantly.
Raven sat up. The motion was fluid, dangerously efficient. The remaining straps on his chest popped off one by one, unable to contain the kinetic force of a body that was finally using 100% of its capacity. He lifted the Scientist. He lifted the full weight of the grown man off the ground with a single arm. Raven's arm didn't even tremble. He held him as easily as a man holds a pen.
Raven turned his head. The red trails of his eyes lingered in the air like tracers. He looked at the man dangling in his grip. The hallucination flickered. For a second, he saw the Red Iron Muzzle that had been on his face for years, the muzzle of "being human", shatter into dust. Then he looked at the Scientist's chest. Through the white coat, through the skin, through the ribs, Raven's enhanced hearing picked it up.
"Heart..." Raven stated, tilting his head with a terrifying, blank curiosity. "Your heart is too loud."
"Stop..." the Scientist wheezed, his legs kicking uselessly, his fingers clawing at Raven's forearm, which felt like granite. "Override... code... Alpha..." Raven tightened his grip. The sound of the Scientist's jaw creaking was audible, a mechanical pressure applied to bone.
"No codes," Raven whispered. His face was a mask of cold fury.
Raven threw him. He didn't just push him. He launched him. The Scientist flew across the room, a white blur, and crashed into the massive glass cabinet filled with chemical vials. The sound of shattering glass was deafening. The cabinet exploded outward. Vials of blue, green, and purple liquids rained down, mixing on the floor into a hissing, toxic cloud. The Scientist crumpled into the mess, unmoving.
Raven slid off the table. His heavy combat boots hit the floor with a dull thud. He stood up to his full height. He looked like a god of war carved from marble, naked from the waist up, covered in sweat and blood, his scars looking visible. He stood perfectly straight, his posture imposing. He breathed in deep. The acrid smoke of the chemicals filled his lungs. He didn't cough. His metabolism was already burning it off.
He looked around the ruined laboratory, his crimson eyes scanning for threats, calculating escape routes. He didn't remember his name. He didn't know who he was. But deep in his mind, the memory of the little girl crying in the corner remained.
She was calling him. She needed him. The Creator. He had to find the Creator. And he would dismantle this castle, brick by brick, until he secured her.
The silence in the laboratory was heavy, broken only by the hissing of spilled chemicals eating into the floor tiles. Raven stood amidst the wreckage, his chest heaving not from exertion, but from the sheer intake of oxygen his new metabolism demanded.
He looked down at his hands. They were covered in the Scientist's blood, but to his crimson-tinted vision, the blood wasn't just red fluid. It was a cooling thermal signature. A spent resource. He flexed his fingers. The skin felt tighter, harder. The scars that mapped his torso, the "tapestry of trauma" as the Scientist had called it, were no longer sources of pain. They were structural history. Reinforcements.
A sound pierced the quiet.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
It wasn't coming from the room. It was coming from the corridor outside. Multiple rhythms. Rapid, chaotic.
Heartbeats.
Six of them. Approaching fast.
Raven turned toward the heavy steel door. To a normal man, it was a barrier. To Raven, in this state of hyper-focused reality, it was just a plate of metal held in place by three hinges and a locking mechanism.
He walked toward it. He didn't run. Weapons don't run; they arrive.
He reached the door just as the handle began to turn.
Raven didn't wait for it to open. He drove his fist into the center of the steel.
The metal buckled inward, the lock shattering like glass. With a heave of his shoulder, Raven tore the door from its frame and hurled it into the hallway.
It struck the first two guards, sending them flying back like ragdolls.
Raven stepped out into the corridor. The air here was cooler, smelling of old stone, dust, and the ozone of the storm raging outside. Four guards remained. They raised their shock batons, their faces twisting in fear as they looked at the man standing before them. "Halt!" one screamed, his voice cracking. "Subject, stand down!"
Raven tilted his head. The command registered in his brain as a meaningless noise.
"Subject..." he repeated, the word tasting like ash in his mouth. "Incorrect."
He moved.
It wasn't a fight. It was a dismantling.
Raven ducked under a swinging baton, the movement so fast the air cracked. He didn't punch the guard; he pushed him, a palm strike to the chest that collapsed the man's ribcage with a wet crunch.
Fragile, Raven's mind filled.
The second guard tried to run. Raven grabbed him by the back of his tactical vest and threw him into the stone wall. The third and fourth attacked simultaneously. Raven caught the third guard's wrist, twisting it until the bone snapped, and used the man's body as a shield to block the fourth guard's strike.
In less than ten seconds, the corridor was silent.
Raven stood over the groaning bodies. He felt no satisfaction. He felt no anger. He only felt the pull.
That magnetic, desperate pull in the center of his chest.
His target. The Creator.
He started walking. The castle was a labyrinth, a nightmare of endless hallways and shadows, but Raven didn't need a map. He followed the scent of rain and ink.