The alarm klaxons of Sector 5 were not designed to alert the prisoners. They were designed to terrify them. It was a low, infrasonic thrum that vibrated the liquid in the inner ear, inducing nausea and panic.
Varian stood in the center of his glass cell in Sector Zero, ignoring the nausea. He watched the blast door at the end of the corridor.
"Something is coming," Varian whispered.
Beside him, in the adjacent cell, The Architect was cowering under his bunk, scratching formulas into the floor with a bloody fingernail. "The variables are wrong... the timeline is shifting... the Rat is early."
The Rat?
The blast door didn't open. It dissolved.
A patch of the heavy steel door turned purple, then transparent, then simply ceased to exist. Through the hole stepped—or rather, flowed—a small figure.
Rix.
The Rat-Captain looked terrible. His fur was standing on end, sparking with static. His body flickered in and out of reality like a bad hologram. Using the Void Essence to phase through miles of rock had taken a heavy toll.
He stumbled, vomiting a glob of black bile onto the pristine white floor.
"Rix... found you," the mutant squeaked, his voice sounding like it was coming from underwater. "Walls are thick. Rix's head hurts."
"You crazy rodent," Varian breathed, relief washing over him. He pressed his hand against the glass. "Get me out."
Rix shambled to the control panel outside Varian's cell. He didn't hack it. He simply phased his hand through the console casing and ripped out the wires.
Spark. Hiss.
The magnetic locks disengaged. The glass wall slid open.
Varian stepped out. He grabbed Rix before the mutant could fall.
"You did good," Varian said, checking Rix's pupils. They were dilated, almost entirely black. "Rest now. Gorgon and I will handle the heavy lifting."
"Gorgon is stuck," Rix wheezed. "Upstairs. Glue-foam."
"We'll get him."
Varian turned to the Architect's cell. The old man was staring at Rix with wide, milky eyes.
"A Void-Walker?" The Architect whispered. "Natural talent? Or induced mutation? Fascinating. The probability of survival is less than 4%."
"Open it," Varian ordered Rix.
Rix phased the second lock. The Architect's cell opened.
The old man didn't move. He hugged his knees. "I can't leave. The equation isn't finished. If I leave, the numbers fall out of my head."
Varian walked in. He didn't have time for therapy.
"The numbers are out there," Varian lied, pointing to the door. "The variables you need. The Xenolith. The Sovereign. It's all outside."
The Architect paused. "The Xenolith... yes. I need to measure its growth rate."
He scrambled up, surprisingly agile for a skeleton wrapped in skin. "Lead the way, Subject 744."
The Release of the Monsters
They moved into the main corridor of Sector Zero. It was a long hallway lined with twenty cells.
"We need a distraction," Varian said. "The Warden will be waiting at the lift."
He looked at the control console for the sector. It required a retinal scan and a keycard.
"Rix, can you phase the master lock?"
"Can try," Rix nodded weakly. He shoved his entire head through the console screen. ZZZT.
[System Error: Security Override.][Releasing All Assets.]
Click-Click-Click-Click.
Twenty doors slid open simultaneously.
For a second, there was silence. Then, the screaming started.
From Cell 4, a creature emerged. It looked like a man turned inside out, with bone spikes protruding from every joint. The Porcupine Flayer.
From Cell 9, a cloud of toxic yellow gas rolled out. Inside the cloud walked a woman whose skin was a colony of living fungus. The Spore-Witch.
From Cell 15, a massive, four-armed cyborg roared. Unit Omega.
"Free!" The Flayer shrieked, driving a bone-spike into the wall. "Meat! Fresh meat!"
They saw Varian.
"Ignore them!" Varian grabbed the Architect and Rix. "Run!"
They sprinted toward the lift shaft. Behind them, the prisoners collided. They didn't work together. They were monsters. The Flayer attacked the Cyborg. The Spore-Witch choked the life out of a screaming guard who had rushed in.
It was a chaotic, bloody mosh pit of super-powered psychotics.
"Beautiful entropy!" The Architect cackled as Varian dragged him along.
They reached the gravity lift. But the beam was red. Locked.
And standing in front of the shaft was a figure in black armor.
The Warden.
He held his purple stun-baton loosely. Behind him floated four heavy combat drones.
"I expected a riot," The Warden's voice was calm, amplified by his helmet. "But unlocking the Monster Wing? That's desperate, Scavenger."
"Desperate is my middle name," Varian said, stopping ten meters away.
He felt heavy. The Suppression Collar around his neck was humming angrily. His connection to Onyx was still a dead line. He was just a man with dense bones.
"You can't fight me," The Warden said, stepping forward. "Not here. Not without your toys."
He raised his hand. He didn't use the baton. He clenched his fist.
[Ability Detected: Gravity Manipulation.][Symbiote Class: Graviton-Beast.]
Varian felt the air pressure drop.
CRUNCH.
It felt like the ceiling had fallen on his shoulders. Varian's knees buckled. Rix was flattened instantly, pressed into the floor tiles like a specimen. The Architect wheezed, his frail bones creaking.
"Gravity," The Warden lectured, walking closer. "The ultimate cage. You weigh four times your normal mass right now. Your heart is struggling to pump blood to your brain."
Varian grit his teeth, forcing himself to stand. His leg muscles trembled violently.
"Is that... all you got?" Varian spat.
"Defiant," The Warden noted. "Let's try ten times."
He twisted his wrist.
SLAM.
Varian was forced to his hands and knees. The floor tiles cracked under his palms. He couldn't breathe. His vision was tunneling.
The monsters from the hallway were catching up. The Porcupine Flayer saw them.
"The Warden!" The Flayer screeched. "Kill the Warden!"
The Flayer charged.
The Warden didn't even look. He flicked a finger.
The Flayer stopped mid-run. Gravity crushed him.
SPLAT.
The monster was reduced to a puddle of gore and bone shards on the floor.
"Disgusting," The Warden sighed. "Drone 1. Clean that up."
He turned back to Varian.
"You have valuable intel. I'm going to crush your limbs, one by one, until you tell me where you hid the Sun-Piercer."
Varian couldn't speak. The collar was choking him.
"He doesn't understand," The Architect whispered.
The old man was pressed flat on the floor, his nose bleeding. But he was smiling.
"Understand what?" Varian wheezed.
"Physics," The Architect giggled. "Gravity affects mass. It affects matter. But Xenoliths... they don't follow the rules."
He looked at Varian's left arm.
"It's not asleep, boy. It's bored. Wake it up. Tell it to eat the weight."
Eat the weight?
Varian focused on the black tattoo. He focused on the silence.
Usually, he tried to push energy into the Symbiote. He tried to force it awake.
But Onyx was a Juggernaut now. A Warrior. And as the Architect said... an Alien.
Don't fight the gravity, Varian thought. Adapt to it.
"Onyx," Varian projected the thought, screaming internally. "CONSUME."
The Warden raised his baton to break Varian's arm.
Suddenly, the collar around Varian's neck sparked.
CRACK.
It didn't break. It dissolved.
Black liquid surged out of Varian's pores. It wrapped around the iron collar.
Metal? Edible. Energy field? Edible. Gravity? Just another form of pressure.
The Warden paused. "What?"
The black sludge swallowed the collar. Then it swallowed the gravity field pressing down on Varian.
The sludge turned dense. Super-dense.
It formed the Quicksilver Armor instantly. But it wasn't chrome. It was a deep, swirling purple—the color of a bruised sky.
[Evolution Adaptation: Gravimetric Absorption.][Onyx Status: Awake.]
Varian stood up.
He didn't struggle. He stood up as if he weighed nothing.
The Warden stepped back. "Impossible. The Dampeners are at 100%!"
"Your dampeners work on terrestrial biology," Varian's voice came from behind the chrome mask of Onyx. "My friend here... he's not from around here."
Varian raised his hand.
"Gravity check."
He didn't cast a spell. Onyx shifted its mass. The arm became incredibly heavy—tons of weight concentrated in a fist.
Varian punched the air.
The shockwave of condensed mass hit the Warden like a cannonball.
BOOM.
The Warden's personal gravity shield shattered. He was thrown backward, crashing into the elevator doors. The steel doors crumpled inward.
"Drones! Kill him!" The Warden screamed, blood leaking from his visor.
Four combat drones opened fire. Lasers and bullets rained down.
Varian didn't dodge.
"Onyx. Scatter."
The armor on Varian's chest exploded outward into a thousand droplets of liquid metal. Each droplet was hard as diamond.
They shredded the drones instantly.
Then, the droplets flew back to Varian, reforming the armor.
Varian walked toward the Warden. The man was trying to crawl away, his gravity powers useless against a being that ate physics for breakfast.
"You run a prison," Varian said, grabbing the Warden by the neck and lifting him up. "But you forgot the first rule of holding monsters."
The Warden clawed at Varian's armored hand. "What... rule?"
"Don't get in the cage with them."
Varian squeezed.
CRUNCH.
He threw the Warden's body into the open elevator shaft. It fell silently into the dark.
Varian turned around.
The other monsters—the Spore-Witch, the Cyborg, the mutants—had stopped fighting. They were watching him.
They saw what he did. They saw the Warden fall.
"The Warden is dead!" The Cyborg roared.
"The Warden is dead!" The prisoners chanted.
Varian pointed to the open lift shaft.
"The way is clear," Varian announced. "Go. Burn the Union. Tear this place apart."
He didn't need to lead them. He just needed to aim them.
The monsters surged past him, clambering up the shaft, hungry for revenge on the guards above.
Varian knelt down and picked up Rix, who was starting to solidify again. He grabbed the Architect's arm.
"Time to go, Doc."
The Architect looked at Varian's armor. He touched the shifting black metal.
"Beautiful," The Architect wept. "The Variable is finally correct."
The Escape
They rode the emergency service ladder up the shaft, bypassing the riot in Block C.
Gorgon was waiting for them at the landing pad. He had broken free of the foam and was using a detached blast door as a shield to hold off a squad of guards.
"Took you long enough!" Gorgon yelled, smashing a guard flat. "I was getting bored!"
"We got the package," Varian shouted, shoving the Architect into the back of the transport vehicle. "Drive!"
Gorgon jumped into the driver's seat. Varian hopped in back with Rix and the old man.
The transport roared to life. Gorgon slammed the accelerator.
They sped across the bridge, leaving the chaos of Sector 5 behind.
Behind them, the prison was burning. Smoke poured from the vents. The screams of the liberated monsters echoed into the night.
Varian watched the flames. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the Sun-Piercer, which Rix had thoughtfully phased out of the evidence locker on his way out.
He felt the hum of the spear. He felt the pulse of Onyx. He heard the insane muttering of the Architect.
He had his Army. He had his General. He had his Weapon. And now, he had his Maker.
"Next stop," Varian said, looking at the distant lights of the Industrial Belt.
"Home."