panted heavily, his breaths shallow and frantic.
"Why did this happen…?"
Blood dripped from the arm of a wounded man as he staggered toward a sealed lab door. The hallway behind him flickered with red warning lights and distant explosions. With trembling fingers, he tapped in the code. The door slid open.
The lab was chaos incarnate—scattered notes, shattered glass, and a massive monitor blinking with emergency alerts. At the far end, a capsule stood upright, encased in a containment rig. Inside it floated a being that looked human—too human. Pale. Still. Sleeping.
"How did they find this place…?" the man whispered, stumbling toward the control panel. "Nothing is going right. Everything is falling apart. I need to get it off the planet—no matter the cost."
He slammed his hand down, initiating the launch sequence. Mechanical arms released the capsule from its support frame and gently cradled it. A launch hatch opened in the roof above. Steam hissed from the floor. A countdown began.
Twenty seconds.
Then, the blast.
The lab entrance exploded inwards with a deafening roar. Smoke poured in. From it emerged a towering humanoid figure, eyes glowing red, a sword of crimson energy pulsing in its grip.
"Hand over the capsule," it said coldly, "and this mere planet will be spared."
The man turned, fury in his eyes. "So you can use it to destroy entire civilizations? Over my dead body."
The figure lunged, sword arcing through the air—only inches from the man's throat.
But the man didn't flinch. Instead, he stabbed a blue serum into his neck. The chemical surged through him instantly.
The figure hesitated. "What did you just do?"
The man smirked, defiant. "Nothing that will save me… but enough to stop you."
Up above, a blinding streak of light shot into the sky—the capsule. The figure whipped around, realizing too late. "No!"
It blasted upward, breaking through the lab roof, chasing the capsule. But a monstrous roar echoed behind him.
The figure turned.
A mutated beast—a hulking, kaiju-like creature with warped flesh and burning eyes—stood where the man had been.
"You mutated your own body?" the figure snarled. "Futile."
The beast roared, charging. They clashed—sword versus claw, speed versus brute strength. The ground cracked beneath them as they fought, shaking the ruins of the lab.
In the end, the beast fell—half-human, half-monster, twitching and broken.
"I told you," the figure muttered, brushing dust off its armor, "futile."
It turned to the stars, searching. "Where's the pod…?"
"Unknown," came a voice through its comms. "It's gone—equipped with a warp drive. Hundreds of light-years away."
The figure screamed in rage, crashing back down to the battlefield. It found the man—what remained of him—barely conscious.
"Where did it go?" the figure growled, lifting him by the head.
The man looked up, blood in his teeth, and whispered, "Good luck finding it."
The figure's sword ignited once more.
A clean cut. Silence.
The first piece had been moved.
The game had begun.
The figure's sword ignited once more.
A clean cut. Silence.
The man's lifeless body dropped to the ground. The lab, the project, the secret—gone.
The entity stood still for a moment, breathing heavily, his rage boiling over. He looked to the stars, to the emptiness where the capsule had vanished.
"All this… for one creation?"
The ground trembled beneath him as he extended his arms to the sky. Dark energy surged around him, crackling with fury. He didn't just want revenge.
He wanted erasure.
High above, the clouds parted, revealing a satellite array locking into position. With a furious roar, the entity unleashed a massive surge of power into the sky—directing it to the orbital weapons, turning Earth's own defenses against itself.
From orbit, beams of pure destruction rained down.
Continents shattered.
Oceans boiled.
The Earth cracked apart in silence, and in moments… it was gone. Reduced to scattered debris.
The figure watched the destruction unfold, unmoved.
"Let that be your legacy," he muttered. "A planet that failed to protect its greatest weapon."
He turned, disappearing into the void of space.
The hunt had begun.