An eerie atmosphere hung over the place.
Cyclops and Colossus couldn't shake the uneasy feeling creeping up on them.
The four had scouted outside the research facility for quite a while. They hadn't seen a single living person—no, not even a trace of any living creature.
"What the hell is going on here?" Cyclops took a deep breath. This wasn't playing out anything like he'd imagined.
"Could it be our own kind took them out?" Pyro John suggested, flicking his lighter as he strode straight toward the facility's main entrance.
He was naturally defiant, hot-tempered, and impatient. Waiting around for the others to figure things out wasn't his style.
In his eyes, mutants like them had no reason to fear human guards. Those were just ordinary people, while they were the next step in evolution.
"Don't act recklessly!"
Colossus tried to stop him, but Pyro had already shoved the doors open and walked in on his own.
"See? Nothing wrong here at all."
Moments later, Pyro reappeared.
With a smug grin, he waved the others over.
Cyclops, Colossus, and Angel exchanged looks before stepping inside. An oval-shaped hall stretched out before them.
At the far end, two completely different corridors branched off.
"Your behavior was incredibly reckless! What if there had been an ambush?" Colossus snapped, unable to hold back his anger.
"Nothing happened, did it? I'm not some clueless kid! I can judge danger on my own!" Pyro shot back, just as defiant.
"Enough. I'll take him down one side, you and Angel check the other." Cyclops stepped in to mediate, pulling Pyro toward the left corridor.
"Let's go take a look."
Angel tugged the still-fuming Colossus along, and the two headed into the right corridor—a passage that sloped steadily downward.
Before long, they reached the end. Every office they passed was deserted, layers of dust covering the equipment inside.
"A basement?"
Angel glanced at the heavy iron door sealing off the end of the passage.
"Evil research like this can't stand the light of day." Colossus's body turned silver as he ripped the door off its hinges.
"What a stench..."
Angel immediately caught a whiff of something rotting and covered his nose in disgust.
"Here. Put this on."
Colossus handed him a gas mask.
Angel quickly strapped it on.
"Is this really a research facility? Smells worse than a livestock farm." Angel grumbled as he followed Colossus into the basement.
They pressed on cautiously, but aside from the overwhelming stench, nothing blocked their path.
No people.
No living things at all.
The walls were cracked and mottled, as though they had been decaying for years. Angel guessed the foul odor was seeping straight out of them.
At last, they reached the end of the basement corridor.
They stepped into a wide, open chamber. Once again, not a single living soul was inside. Not even a corpse.
The only thing the two X-Men found was a collection of instruments.
"Someone carried out biological experiments here."
Colossus frowned at the shattered glass container in the center of the room, quickly drawing his conclusion. He had seen setups like this in plenty of Trask's facilities.
"On our fellow mutants?"
Angel crouched by the broken container, speculating, "Maybe the test subjects fought back?"
The guess sounded reasonable at first, but it didn't explain the total absence of any signs of struggle.
It was as if the entire facility had been abandoned in an instant. In one office they'd passed, a cup of coffee still sat on a desk—long since spoiled.
"We'll have to dig deeper."
Colossus tried booting up the computer in the room. To his surprise, it powered on normally without any password required.
Inside he found mountains of data he couldn't decipher, which he quickly copied onto a USB drive. Then he pulled up the facility's surveillance system.
Dozens of stored camera feeds popped up. Colossus selected the recordings from their current area, determined to find out what had really happened in this room.
"God... they're experimenting on children?"
Angel stepped closer, staring in shock at the researchers in protective suits, all frantically working at their machines.
Inside what was now a shattered containment tank, pale green fluid once filled the space. Suspended in it was a young girl, eyes closed.
She couldn't have been more than five or six years old. Her face was doll-like in its delicacy, her small body completely exposed, tubes and wires piercing her skin from head to toe.
She lay there as if peacefully asleep... but only as a subject for research.
"Those damned animals!"
Colossus was stunned at first, then fury twisted his features. He never imagined Trask could fall to such depths of inhuman cruelty.
As he crushed a piece of metal in his hand, the little girl—who had appeared asleep on the monitor—suddenly opened her eyes.
"ALERT! ALERT!"
A deafening alarm blared through the room. Researchers panicked, scrambling to the machines.
"She wasn't supposed to wake up yet!" one of them cried out.
The next instant, Colossus and Angel watched on the surveillance feed as the containment tank shattered, its pale green liquid spilling across the floor.
The little girl was still standing inside.
Her eyes snapped open, pitch black like a bottomless abyss. As she awakened, torrents of thick, black sludge poured from her body.
The substance spread uncontrollably, coating the room in seconds and engulfing every researcher.
They had no time to run. Within moments, the black sludge consumed the entire feed, leaving the two X-Men blind to what was happening.
From the speakers came only the researchers' agonized screams, chilling both men to the bone.
"This mutant... her powers are terrifying," Angel said, his face pale.
Something about the girl's abilities unsettled him to his core.
"They did this to her. Maybe it's—"
Colossus cut himself short as he suddenly felt the air temperature drop sharply. The words froze in his throat.
"Something's not right!"
Angel felt it too—danger closing in.
Both turned toward the room's entrance.
Their expressions changed instantly.
The already crumbling walls were now covered in black mold, spreading at an unnatural speed.
Just like in the surveillance footage, it was already surging toward them.
"You... want to play with me too?"