"A god does not grieve when stars die. He merely writes brighter ones."
The weeks had peeled away the world outside, but not the sound of the laboratories below Schicksal.Time passed there like breath in a glass coffin — slow, deliberate, preserved.
Inside his cathedral of steel and light, Otto Apocalypse watched perfection decay in beautiful symmetry.
The chamber once called the Garden of Glass had grown smaller. Many pods now stood dark — empty, shattered, or sealed in failure.The living ones pulsed weakly, the rhythm uneven, as though each heart beat to a different memory.
Otto moved through the remnants like a patient gardener pruning the unworthy."F-02-7 terminated during field simulation," a technician reported. "Neurological collapse. The fragment disassociated completely."
"And the others?" Otto asked without looking up.
"F-02-11 remains stable. F-02-13 displays increased aggression. F-02-15… cries when left unattended."
That made Otto pause. "Cries?"
"Yes, sir. No physiological trigger. She repeats the same word: sister."
Otto almost smiled. "Ah… so even a divided soul remembers its shape."
He turned toward the observation deck overlooking the stasis chamber. Beyond the glass, the original Florence floated in silence — her pod dim, her body ageless. The faint gold within her veins still shimmered, patient and alive.
"The link persists," Otto murmured. "Even now, after dozens of iterations."
Down below, F-02-13 thrashed against her restraints. Her eyes glowed faintly gold, like sunlight bleeding through cracked ice.She screamed not in rage but in confusion — a hollow echo that made the other clones stir in their pods.
Monitors flickered.F-02-09's vitals spiked. F-02-15 began to weep again. The sound was small but endless.
Otto watched with something like reverence. "They grieve for one another. They learn empathy through death. Fascinating."
The technician beside him shifted uneasily. "With respect, sir… they seem aware of her." He gestured toward the suspended original. "It's as if they feel her watching."
"They do," Otto said simply. "She dreams, and they hear her. The Holy Blood grants connection even in silence."
In the pod, Florence's body did not move, but her mind shuddered.
She floated in a space that was not space, between waking and the kind of sleep that forgets itself.Through the static of her half-consciousness, she felt warmth, fear, and then the sharp snap of a life extinguished.
Each clone's end was a light going out inside her.Sometimes she saw their faces.Sometimes she felt their pain.Always she whispered the same words into the void.
"Please stop."
No one heard her but the machines.
Otto's voice filtered through her fractured dream, distant and cold.
"Suffering is the most honest form of data, Florence. Do not mourn. Learn."
Her heart fluttered once in protest — the monitors above her pod blipped and steadied again.
Weeks passed.F-02-13 and F-02-15 were both terminated. Their genetic material harvested, catalogued, and archived under Project Durandal Reference.
Otto stood alone one night, reading the compiled report.
"Their failures were instructive," he dictated. "Holy Blood adaptation improves under emotional saturation. The Kaslana strain requires restraint to maintain structural harmony. Next batch: increase Accelerated Body stability by twelve percent."
He paused, fingers hovering over the console.The room was quiet except for the rhythmic hiss of coolant and the faint whisper of breath through glass.
"You're lonely down there, aren't you?" he murmured. "But don't worry, my dear. The others will join you soon."
Inside the golden pod, Florence stirred again — a ripple beneath the still surface.This time, when she dreamed, the voices were fewer.The silence pressed in heavier.
She reached out in her mind, searching for the fragments that had been her, and found only echoes fading one by one.
Her fingers twitched.A spark of gold drifted through the stasis fluid like a sigh.
And somewhere behind the observation glass, Otto smiled, unaware that the creation he called masterpiece had begun to mourn itself.
"Perfection is a slow collapse," Otto wrote in his journal later."Each iteration dies a little closer to godhood."
He set down the pen, looked at the rows of pods, and whispered the word again like a prayer.
"Godhood."
The lights dimmed.The heartbeat monitors pulsed.And deep within her endless dream, Florence felt another piece of herself vanish — leaving only the faint, stubborn glow of the part that refused to die.