They brought him back to the metal bed as they always did, following the same cold rituals, the same merciless hands, locking steel bands around his wrists and anchoring his legs to the lower brace with practiced indifference, their movements mechanical, precise, devoid of feeling as they reattached the sensors to his chest and scalp one after another. But this time, Reis didn't move; he didn't resist, didn't flinch, didn't even sigh. The sound that once escaped just before the screaming had vanished. His body gave nothing—no tremor, no breath—only a profound stillness, as if whatever life remained had retreated far inside, coiled in silence, or had begun the slow, quiet process of dying in a place no one could reach.
His eyes, once caught between agony and defiance, now stared blankly at nothing—hollow windows opening into something unreachable. But there was no emptiness behind them, no surrender, no fracture. Something inside him boiled silently, like a volcano sealed under centuries of stone, its pressure mounting beneath the surface, rage condensing into a perfect, unmoving core. They, as always, mistook it for exhaustion. They saw the limp arms and shallow breaths and thought it was failure, the last stage before collapse. What they failed to recognize—what they had never understood—was that they were witnessing not an end, but a threshold. This was the stillness before metamorphosis, the moment when something ancient coiled inward, preparing not to die, but to become something else entirely.
Reis's resistance hadn't died—it had shifted. He no longer fought their chains, their instructions, their commands. That struggle had ended long ago in places they had no instruments to measure. His battle had withdrawn to a plane unreachable by sensors or eyes, a place where the body no longer held any significance. Deep within that silence, where his mana core still pulsed like a dying ember under ash, something began to form—not a flare, not an eruption, but a decision: cold, absolute, final. He wasn't resisting because there was no longer anything to resist. What was coming next would not be stopped—not by him, not by them.
He lay motionless, like a corpse not yet buried, but behind those darkened eyes something began to stir—not weakness, not resignation, but a slow ignition. A fire not born of rebellion, but of intent. A will that turned to flame, quiet and sure, spreading with each breath of silence. It wasn't emotion. It was realization. His core had turned inward and seen the truth—no one would come for him. No one would save him. There would be no rescue, no hand reaching down. And in that absolute certainty, something deep within him chose. It wasn't a plea or a prayer. It was a severing. A spark without hesitation. A calm, precise refusal.
He didn't know whether it was mana or something else, some new awareness or a truth unsealed after long burial, but he felt it fracture through him—not a scream, but a whisper: this is enough. No more. Perhaps it wasn't even a voice. Perhaps it was the self itself, stripped of everything false, rising from what remained, as if the boy named Reis had only ever been a shell, and now something else—formless, complete—was beginning to surface from within the ruin.
At that moment, he wasn't the only one who changed. Behind the cold glass, Elin Valeris observed without blinking. Her expression held no empathy, only detached precision—the gaze of someone watching something unfold that wasn't in the data. She stepped toward the wall panel with practiced calm, activated the monitor with steady fingers, and watched the readings spike:
[152%]
[160%]
[173%]
[185%]
until suddenly the numbers vanished. Not a death. A flatline in measure. The system froze, unable to compute. Red lights flickered, then disappeared, replaced by silent messages:
[Activity exceeds threshold.]
[Rating: ★★★★★]
[Type: Unclassified.]
Elin didn't panic. She raised one eyebrow, not in fear, but recognition—something in her had expected this. She stared at the monitor, silent for a long breath, then looked back at Reis. And for the first time, she no longer saw a subject. She saw something beyond classification. "It's begun," she whispered, voice nearly lost to the room. Then colder: "He's crossed the threshold." But what she didn't know—what her numbers could never explain—was that this wasn't a threshold by her definition. Not a stage, not a category. It was a decision made in silence, in breath, in stillness, one that rewrote everything it touched.
And once that decision was made, there was no return. No delay. No restraint. Though his body lay limp and the wires still fed signals into unseen databases, his eyes lifted with quiet clarity to a ceiling that no longer held meaning. His breath slowed. His body steadied. Not in surrender, but in alignment. Every part of him shifted into rhythm with something older than the walls, older than the science, older than their understanding. In a place no monitor could reach, the voice returned—clearer this time. Final.
"This ends… only if I destroy everything."
There was no sound, but the force of the words radiated like waves through the room. He wasn't speaking of the walls, or the tools, or the people. He meant the foundation. The machine that turned him into data. The system that turned children into samples. And Elin, with all her training and all her years, could not comprehend what stood before her. She believed she was watching. She wasn't. She was standing in the shadow of something that had no intention of escaping. It intended to erase.
She had tracked every hormone, documented every shift, monitored his life to the microsecond. And yet, in the stillness between readings, her authority had already died. Without warning. Without noise. She no longer saw what he saw, no longer felt what he felt. When the screens began to flicker and the data collapsed into static, something inside him surged. Not mana. Not energy. A rupture. Silent. Unmeasured. The sensation that reality itself had leaned toward him, uncertain.
He didn't move. But his eyes pierced everything—steel, concrete, pain, routine—through to something greater. And for the first time, he didn't want to survive. He didn't want to flee. He wanted to see the light. True light. Untouched, unmeasured, beyond the reach of this place. And somewhere within him, that image—a sky-like openness, something endless—began to take shape. Not as a thought. As instinct. Real and undeniable.
But it didn't last.
The mana core slipped. It pulsed once, then resisted him. It expanded, pushed outward, as if it had gained will of its own. It no longer followed. It no longer belonged. The flow erupted—not as controlled threads, but floods. Unguided, unrestrained, mana long imprisoned found a weakness—and poured out. Not as a weapon. As something alive. Something with its own form. His field widened. His vision deepened. His purpose cleared.
Escape didn't matter. Only one thing did: destruction.
No anger. No vengeance. Just the final, quiet clarity that this had to end. The labs. The commands. The cycle. He wouldn't allow it to continue. Wouldn't allow another child to be born into it. Elin was no longer a woman. Not even a captor. She was just mass. Just motion. Just mana. He had severed every point of recognition.
And then, it happened.
There was no trigger. No call. Just memory—a flicker of sky. the mana field burst forth with a sudden surge, not with structure or thought, but pure, focused intent. The air cracked. The walls tore apart. Steel and spell dissolved like paper. There was no explosion. Only collapse. Everything between him and the world broke.
His core had passed the edge. It was no longer a source. It was a sun. A raw, unstable star inside a boy who was no longer just a boy. Its light wasn't metaphor—it poured from every inch of him. Skin and bone could no longer hold it. It wasn't heat. It wasn't light. It was unraveling.
And for the first time, Elin faltered. Not because of what she saw. But because of what she understood. This wasn't failure. This was the end of the system. Her voice trembled as it returned: "We're too late..." But time had already vanished.
Reis wasn't climbing. He wasn't escaping. He was releasing. He wasn't inside the field. He was the field. And when he raised his hand, he didn't strike or flee. He disappeared. Not as a boy. Not as a force. As convergence. His essence dissolved outward, indistinct from the storm around him. No cry. No flash. Only light. Not white. Not gold. But something from beyond language. A light born of undoing. It tore through wall, and stone, and code, and meaning—until nothing remained.
And in that final breath, the lab ceased to exist.
And Reis became something the world has no word for.