POV: Dr. Sera Vex
The med-glass flickered as the boy's vitals shifted again spikes of bioelectric output and gene waveform distortions that made no sense on any of GenCore's standard scales. The spiral in his chest wasn't just a mark anymore. It was growing.
Evolving.
"Overlord expression remains unstable," the diagnostic AI murmured. "Subject 7-KR12-13 is no longer within safe parameters."
Dr. Sera Vex rubbed her temples, staring down at Kael through the reinforced observation window. He lay unconscious, twitching, muscles tightening in patterns that resembled combat reflexes reflexes he should not possess.
Not yet.
Not unless something old was waking up inside him.
She turned away from the glass, fingers flicking through digital panels hovering mid-air. Data streamed by heart rate, gene resonance, mutagenic potential, metabolic shifts. All of it was unprecedented. Beautiful. Terrifying.
She had spent her entire life studying the forbidden fringes of genetics mapping rogue genomes, reverse-engineering pre-Collapse code, tracing rumors of the First War. Most of her peers had called it obsession. Some called it heresy.
Now she stood in front of the living proof that they were all wrong.
He was real.
The Overlord Genome still lived.
But she couldn't afford to let that awe show. Not here. Not with Valen Korr breathing down her neck.
The board would want to dissect him. Break him down to atomic strands. Mass-produce his genome like they did with the Chimera series. But they didn't understand the Spiral. It wasn't just power. It was will. Dominion. And you can't mass-produce a mind that commands obedience from evolution itself.
She closed the interface and turned to the wall console. "Lock observation. Restrict access to myself and senior researchers only."
"Override requires two-factor clearance," the system replied.
"I don't care. Enter emergency protocol 7-X. Biological contamination fallback."
"Protocol engaged."
The doors sealed with a hiss. The lab lights dimmed, shifting to red.
Alone now, Sera leaned over her desk and stared at the image frozen on one of her secondary monitors: a snapshot of the breach footage. Frame 314.
The Rogue.
It had stopped right before attacking Kael. Stared at him. Recognized him.
It remembered.
Which meant one thing: the Spiral wasn't just a gene. It was a lineage. There had been others. Possibly still were others.
"Just how far did we bury the truth?" she whispered to herself.
She pulled up an encrypted archive, Project Dominion Black. A file she wasn't cleared to open, but that her old mentor had given her access to before his mysterious disappearance two years ago.
It opened with a phrase.
> "If a god lies sleeping, do not wake him. But if he wakes alone, pray he does not remember what he was."
Within the archive were fragments of suppressed data, gene maps marked with spirals, locations of failed Overlord experiments, names scratched out, timestamps that predated GenCore itself.
And buried at the bottom:
Project: Omega Spiral.
> Status: Terminated.
> Survivors: One.
> Notes: Subject showed incompatibility with control protocols. Final order: Seal and forget.
Her breath caught.
The Rogue was not an accident. He was a failed version, an earlier iteration of the Spiral gene, one they had deemed uncontrollable and buried.
And now Kael had awakened a successful expression.
No wonder the Rogue recognized him. It wasn't just recognition. It was reverence.
Sera stood slowly.
If Kael survived the next few days, GenCore would try to erase him, destroy him, then clone a version they could control.
But she wouldn't let that happen.
Not again.
Not like with the others.
Kael Riven was not a lab rat. He was a turning point. A fracture line in history.
And if she had to break every rule she had ever followed to protect him… so be it.
She turned off the screen and whispered into her wristband, encrypting the message through a dead protocol no longer monitored.
"This is Vex. I'm activating the contingency. He's real. And he's not alone anymore."
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End of Chapter 5