The decision was made not by courage, but by necessity. The last of the emergency lights in the cryo-bunker had begun to flicker erratically, their soft, red glow occasionally plunging the dusty corridors into a terrifying, absolute blackness. The automated voice, his only companion in the tomb, had long since fallen silent, the backup batteries that powered it having finally died. The silence that remained was deeper, more profound. It was the silence of a machine that had finally, after centuries of faithful service, given up the ghost. The tomb was failing, and he would not be buried in it.
Damien stood before the massive, circular vault door, the only thing separating him from the unknown world outside. He had spent days subsisting on the last of the tasteless, gelatinous nutrient packs, forcing his stiff, unused limbs into submission through a grueling regimen of stretches and exercises. His new body was a strange vessel, a machine of immense potential that he did not yet know how to operate. His muscles, perfectly preserved and enhanced by the long-depleted military drugs, were dense and powerful, but they were also uncoordinated, like a priceless orchestra with no conductor. This journey would be its first, true diagnostic.
He placed his hand on the release panel. With a deep, grinding groan of metal that had been still for an age, the massive, missile-resistant alloy door began to retract. He took one last look at the dusty, silent cryo-chamber, at the failed pods that were the graves of his fellow subjects, and stepped through into a long, dark service tunnel that sloped gently upwards.
He had not gone more than twenty meters, his steps clumsy on the rubble-strewn floor, when a soft chime echoed in the silence. A thin, red line of light from a hidden emitter in the ceiling scanned his body from head to toe. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the tunnel ahead flooded with a cold, sterile, white light. An automated, impersonal voice spoke from hidden speakers, its tone flat and devoid of malice.
"Biometric signature confirmed. Subject Alpha. Sanction protocol engaged."
There was no warning. No taunt. Just a cold, clinical declaration. A death sentence delivered by a ghost. Damien broke into a run, his heart hammering against his ribs with a sudden, primal fear. He burst into a wider section of the tunnel, a junction where several smaller passages converged.
BOOM!
The first concussive blast erupted from a circular emitter in the wall, hitting him not with fire or shrapnel, but with a wave of pure, pulverizing force. The sound was a deafening, physical blow that seemed to liquefy the air itself. Damien was thrown violently, his body ragdolling through the air before slamming into the far wall with a sickening crunch. His ears rang with a high-pitched whine, the world a disoriented, spinning blur. His enhanced constitution, the miracle of pre-apocalypse science, was the only thing that kept his bones from shattering and his organs from turning to paste, but the internal damage was still significant. He felt a deep, blooming agony in his chest, as if his ribs had been struck by a battering ram.
He staggered to his feet, tasting blood in his mouth. Another BOOM! erupted from an emitter behind him, the shockwave shoving him forward, his feet stumbling on the uneven ground. He realized with a surge of cold dread that this was not a random trap. It was a systematic purge. He pushed on, his head pounding, and found himself at the entrance to a long, straight corridor.
As he entered, a series of automated turrets, each the size of a small suitcase, descended from hidden panels in the ceiling on articulated arms. Their targeting lasers, a spiderweb of flickering red dots, swept across the corridor. They were ancient, defective, their movements jerky and unpredictable, but they were still lethal.
CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!
The first turret opened fire, spitting solid slugs at a terrifying velocity. The bullets sparked and ricocheted off the metal walls, filling the air with the scream of tortured steel. Damien dove behind a large, fallen support beam, the slugs punching deep craters into the concrete where he had just been. He was pinned down. His mind, trained for the boardroom, not the battlefield, raced. He needed a shield.
With a surge of his new, unfamiliar strength, he wrenched a large, rectangular maintenance panel from the wall, the bolts groaning and snapping. It was heavy, clumsy, but it was cover. He braced it in front of him and began to advance. The slugs hammered against the metal plate, the impacts deafening, the force of each blow a jarring shock that traveled up his arms and into his shoulders. The metal groaned, dented, and began to deform under the relentless punishment. He moved from cover to cover, a slow, brutal advance under a hail of fire, his new body screaming in protest, but performing with a strength he had never known. He finally reached the end of the corridor, threw the mangled, useless shield aside, and plunged into the next section of the deathtrap.
He found himself in a long, narrow passage. A grid of high-intensity cutting lasers sprang to life, a silent, terrifying lattice of red light that sliced the space into deadly, shifting cubes. The system was clearly defective after centuries of neglect; the grid flickered and spasmed in an unpredictable, chaotic pattern, the beams appearing and disappearing in a dizzying, random sequence.
There was no time to think, only to react. He moved on pure instinct. His enhanced reflexes, stiff and unpracticed as they were, took over. He dove, rolled, and contorted his body through the shifting gaps in the deadly light. The air hissed and sizzled around him, the smell of ozone sharp in his nostrils as the lasers sliced through metal pipes and concrete like they were nothing. He was clumsy, his movements lacking their former grace, but he was impossibly fast. A flicker of the grid caught his side, not cutting deep, but searing through his cryo-suit and instantly cauterizing the flesh beneath in a deep, agonizing burn. He cried out, the smell of his own cooked flesh a nauseating perfume. He stumbled, but scrambled forward, his body a blur of motion through the deadly dance, each successful dodge a small victory in a war of a thousand cuts.
He cleared the laser grid, his side a canvas of searing pain, and found himself at the base of a long, upward ramp, a heavy, rusted maintenance hatch visible at the very top. This was the final stretch. As he stepped onto it, nozzles in the walls erupted with a loud hiss, spewing jets of high-temperature, jellied fire that clung to every surface. The entire ramp became a churning, roaring inferno. There was no way around it.
His only option was to run.
He took a deep breath, the superheated air scorching his lungs, and sprinted. The fire was a living thing, a roaring, hungry beast that clawed at him from all sides. His cryo-suit, already shredded, ignited instantly, melting and fusing to his skin before burning away in blackened flakes. The flames licked at his enhanced skin, searing him with a pain that made his laser burn feel like a distant memory. But he kept moving, his powerful legs pumping, his mind focused on the single point of relative safety at the top of the ramp. He was a burning man, a revenant running through hell itself, fueled by a sheer, indomitable will to live.
Throughout the brutal gauntlet, a strange, terrifying clarity had settled in his mind. The life-or-death struggle was a violent, agonizing form of physical therapy. The stiffness in his limbs was burned out by the need to dodge lasers. The clumsiness was replaced by a desperate, emerging grace. He was acutely aware of his own impossible resilience. The concussive blasts that should have turned his organs to paste, the bullets that should have pierced him, the lasers that should have severed limbs, the fire that should have incinerated him—he was surviving them. He was beginning to understand, on a primal, cellular level, that the body he woke up in was no longer merely human. It was a weapon, forged in a crucible of science and time, and this tunnel was its first, brutal activation test.
Battered, burned, and utterly exhausted, but with a new, hard-won control over his powerful body, Damien finally cleared the flame ramp. He saw the final exit hatch high above, but he was too weak to continue. His vision was swimming, his body a single, screaming nerve of pain. He found a small, protected maintenance alcove to the side of the tunnel, just out of the range of the malfunctioning traps. He collapsed into the small space of relative safety, his body a canvas of burns, cuts, and deep bruises. He lay there, listening to the hum and click of the still-active deathtrap behind him, his breath coming in ragged, painful gasps. He had survived the gauntlet, but he was still trapped in the tunnel, with the final exit, and the unknown world beyond it, still to come.