The gladiator ring was underground.
Not metaphorically—literally beneath the facility, carved out of raw stone and reinforced with industrial-grade containment barriers. The floor was concrete, worn smooth in places from years of use. The walls were thick glass panels backed by energy dampening fields, offering the scientists a clear view of everything that happened inside while keeping whatever happened inside from getting out.
Above the ring, observation platforms had been built into the walls at three different levels. Rows of seats. Banks of monitors. Tablets and recording equipment and the quiet, focused attention of dozens of people in white coats who watched what was about to happen with the same casual interest one might bring to a sporting event.
Nana stood in the center of the ring.
No weapons. No gun. No backup. Just her body and the fury that had been building since she'd woken up in this place, compressed and burning like a star about to go supernova.
The dampening fields had been reduced—enough to monitor her aether core output but not enough to suppress it entirely. They wanted to see what she could do. Wanted data on her combat performance in a controlled environment with creatures they could release and retract at will.
A gladiator ring. That's exactly what it was. A ring where specimens fought monsters while scientists watched and took notes.
The first creature was released through a reinforced hatch in the floor.
A hybrid. Medium-sized. Fast, aggressive, exactly the kind of creature Nana had fought hundreds of times in Avalon.
It emerged snarling, its twisted body coiling into an attack stance. Red eyes locked on Nana immediately—prey instinct, engineered to be aggressive and relentless.
Nana didn't wait for it to come to her.
She moved.
Three steps closed the distance. Her right leg came up in a spinning kick that connected with the hybrid's head with enough force to send a visible shockwave rippling through the air. The creature's neck snapped sideways. Its body went limp before it hit the ground.
One kick. One second. Dead.
Silence from the observation platforms above.
Then the scratching of pens on tablets. The quiet tapping of data being entered. The clinical murmur of scientists exchanging observations.
"Remarkable force generation," one of them said into a recording device. "Single-strike elimination. Aether core output at 34% during the attack. Emotional state appears to be sustained anger—note the elevated cortisol indicators on the biomonitor."
Nana stood over the hybrid's dissolving remains and breathed. In. Out. The fury didn't diminish. If anything, it burned hotter.
Good.
The second creature was released before the first had fully dissolved.
A demon. Larger than the hybrid. Faster. Its body was a nightmare of sharp edges and pulsing dark energy, its movements fluid and predatory in a way that spoke of something almost intelligent.
Nana met it head-on again. This time she used both hands—catching the demon's lunging claws and redirecting its momentum, using its own force to drive it into the ground. It cratered the concrete on impact. She followed up with a kick to its chest that shattered whatever passed for its ribcage.
Two seconds. Dead.
More notes. More observations. More data being collected from the suffering of a woman who had spent her entire life being shaped into exactly this—a killing machine that could take anything they threw at her and destroy it without breaking a sweat.
The third creature was a monster—one of the massive, lumbering predators that had terrorized Avalon's outer districts. It was bigger than Nana by a factor of four, its body armored with plates of crystallized Wanderer energy that deflected standard weapons.
A soldier dropped something through a slot in the observation platform above. Twin axes, crude but functional, clattered to the concrete at Nana's feet.
A gift. Compensation. An acknowledgment that even their prize specimen might struggle against a giant without a weapon.
Nana picked up the axes without looking at them. Felt their weight. Adjusted her grip.
The monster charged.
She moved like water around its first strike—a massive claw sweep that would have bisected a normal human at the waist. Nana ducked beneath it, drove one axe into the creature's armored side with a strike powered by her aether core, and felt the crystallized energy crack beneath the impact.
The monster roared and turned. Nana was already moving—vaulting onto its back, driving the second axe into the gap between two armor plates at the base of its skull. The creature seized, its entire body going rigid.
She twisted the axe. Pulled. The armor plates shattered.
The monster collapsed.
Five seconds. Dead.
From the observation platform, Captain Jenna watched. Her expression was carefully neutral—the professional mask she wore like armor. But something shifted behind her eyes as she watched Nana fight. Not pride exactly. Something more complicated. Something that might have been the recognition of what they had created and the quiet horror of seeing it in action.
Or maybe it was just data assessment. Jenna had always been good at separating emotion from analysis.
The scientists exchanged glances. One of them—a younger woman with sharp eyes and a tablet pressed against her chest—leaned toward her colleague and whispered something. The colleague nodded, made a note, and tapped a command into his device.
Another hatch opened.
Nana turned to face whatever was coming next, axes still in hand, her aether core burning steady and blue in her chest—
And stopped.
The creature that emerged from the hatch was not a hybrid. Not a demon. Not a monster or a giant or any of the engineered predators she'd been fighting for the past ten minutes.
It was a woman.
A woman with dark hair pulled back in a practical braid. A woman with calloused hands and a fighter's stance and eyes that burned with the mindless aggression of a demon but wore a face that Nana would have recognized anywhere.
Mina.
Not the real Mina. Nana knew that—knew it with the same rational certainty that had carried her through nine months of survival in Avalon. The real Mina had died. Had been taken by Avalon and consumed, and whatever remained of her was gone beyond recovery.
This was a demon wearing Mina's face. A creature engineered from Wanderer dust and shaped—deliberately, cruelly, specifically—to look like the woman who had taught Nana how to survive. Who had become a sister. Who had died protecting her.
But knowing it wasn't real didn't stop the world from shattering.
"No," Nana breathed. The axes slipped from her fingers and clattered to the concrete.
The demon-Mina moved toward her. Its movements were wrong—too fluid, too predatory, nothing like the careful, measured way the real Mina had carried herself. But the face. The face was perfect. Every detail exactly right. The slight scar above her left eyebrow from a childhood accident. The way her jaw set when she was focused on something.
They had studied Mina. Had recorded every detail of her appearance across every rebirth cycle and used that data to create this. This thing. This weapon shaped like someone Nana had loved.
"Fight it," one of the scientists said through a speaker mounted in the ring's ceiling. His voice was calm, instructional. "Miss Wang. The creature will not stop until one of you is destroyed."
Nana shook her head. Backed away as demon-Mina advanced, its red eyes tracking her with predatory focus. "I can't. I can't do this."
"The creature will kill you if you don't."
"Then let it."
A pause. Then: "That would be a waste of our most valuable specimen. Fight it, Miss Wang."
Demon-Mina lunged.
Nana dodged—barely. The creature's claws raked across her forearm, drawing blood. She stumbled backward, her back hitting the glass wall of the ring.
Demon-Mina came again. Faster this time. Learning. Adapting.
Nana caught its wrist mid-strike and held. The demon snarled—Mina's voice, distorted and wrong, coming out of Mina's mouth. It pulled against Nana's grip with strength that matched her own.
"I'm sorry," Nana whispered.
She pulled demon-Mina into a hug.
The creature struggled—thrashing, clawing, trying to tear free. But Nana held on. Held tight, the way she'd held Mina when she'd died in Avalon, the way she held Zayne when he was afraid, the way someone holds on to something precious even after it's already gone.
Demon-Mina's struggles weakened. The engineered aggression in its system fought against the physical restraint, burning through its energy reserves faster than a normal creature would. Nana felt the moment it gave out—felt the demon's body go slack in her arms, felt the Wanderer energy destabilize and begin to dissolve.
She held on until there was nothing left to hold.
Then she was on her knees, arms wrapped around empty air, and crying.
Not the angry tears she'd shed in the facility corridors. Not the frustrated tears of someone fighting a situation she couldn't control. These were the deep, broken tears of grief—the kind that came from losing someone twice. From watching a monster wear the face of someone she'd loved and having to be the one to end it.
Above her, in the observation platforms, the scientists watched. Recorded. Noted the elevated emotional indicators and the sustained aether core activity and the way Specimen 21's distress response exceeded all projected parameters.
One of them—the younger woman with sharp eyes—glanced at Nana's mother, who sat in the front row of the observation platform with her tablet in her lap.
Nana's mother made a small note. Her expression didn't change.
Nana knelt on the concrete floor of the gladiator ring, tears streaming down her face, and felt something inside her crack open. Not break—crack. Like ice fracturing under pressure, the fault lines spreading in every direction but the structure holding. Barely.
She looked up at the observation platforms. At the dozens of faces watching her from behind glass and dampening fields. At her mother, calm and clinical, taking notes on the emotional destruction of her own daughter.
And then her gaze fixed on Captain Jenna, who was watching with that complicated expression—the one that might have been guilt or might have been professional assessment.
"Why Mina?" Nana's voice was raw, scraped hollow. "Why did you have to use her face?"
No one answered.
Nana stood. Slowly. Her legs shook but held. She wiped her face with the back of her hand and looked at the nearest glass wall—at her own reflection staring back at her, bloodied and tear-streaked and broken.
Then she turned and slammed her fist into the glass.
The dampening field flared—a visible pulse of energy that absorbed most of the impact. The glass cracked but didn't shatter. Nana hit it again. And again. Each blow sending fractures spreading further across the surface, the dampening field struggling to compensate for the force she was generating.
Soldiers moved immediately—six of them, descending from the observation platforms with restraint devices and stun batons, closing in from multiple angles.
Nana fought. Of course she fought. She took down two of them before the third caught her with a stun baton across the back of her knees. She went down but was already rolling, already rising, already—
The fourth soldier's restraint device caught her wrist. The dampening pulse hit her aether core and she felt it dim—that terrible squeezing sensation that cut her off from her own power.
She fought anyway. Without her evol, without weapons, with nothing but her body and the fury that refused to die, she fought until the soldiers had her pinned and restrained and dragging her toward the exit hatch.
As they pulled her through the door, she caught one last glimpse of the ring.
And beyond it, visible through a second set of glass panels on the far wall—a corridor she hadn't noticed before. A corridor that led to another chamber. A chamber filled with glass cylinders.
Each cylinder was tall enough to hold a person. Each one was filled with the same amber liquid she'd seen earlier in the production line.
And each one contained a body.
A man's body. The same man. Over and over.
Zayne.
Version after version of the man she loved, suspended in amber liquid, their eyes closed, their faces peaceful in artificial sleep. Each one identical in appearance—the same dark hair, the same jawline, the same hazel eyes hidden behind closed lids.
But not identical in the details that mattered.
The first cylinder—the one closest to the door, labeled with a simple "01" on a small placard—held a Zayne whose skin was mottled with the grey-white discoloration of vampire transformation. Frozen mid-change, his body preserved at the exact moment his rebirth in Avalon had begun after his first death. The death Nana had witnessed—the one where vampire venom had taken him before she could save him, before the white mist had claimed him.
The second cylinder held a Zayne whose body was covered in burns. Extensive, horrific burns that covered most of his torso and arms. The fire spirit event. The one that had happened before Nana had returned to Avalon—a death she hadn't witnessed but had learned about later, from fragments of data she'd pieced together during her months of searching.
The third cylinder held a Zayne with wounds consistent with gang violence—stab wounds, blunt force trauma, the kind of injuries that came from being beaten to death by other humans rather than creatures. A version of Zayne that Nana had never met. A death that had happened during one of his rebirth cycles when she hadn't been there to find him.
The fourth—another Zayne, this one with deep claw marks across his chest and abdomen. Hybrid attack. The kind of wounds that killed instantly when they struck the vital organs beneath. Another death Nana hadn't witnessed. Another version of him that had lived and suffered and died without her ever knowing.
The fifth cylinder held the Zayne she remembered most clearly—the one from their shared timeline in Avalon. The one who had fought beside her, who had loved her, who had been bitten by a vampire in the tunnel beneath District 22 and asked her to end it before the transformation was complete. His body showed the bite mark on his neck, preserved exactly as it had been in the moment before dissolution.
The sixth cylinder was empty.
A small placard beside it read: "06 - ESCAPED. Memory reset protocol applied. Status: Active. Location: Surface."
Nana's legs gave out.
The soldiers holding her had to catch her weight as she collapsed, her knees hitting the concrete with a force that should have hurt but she couldn't feel anything anymore. Couldn't feel anything except the enormous, crushing weight of what she was seeing.
Six versions of Zayne. Five of them dead and preserved like specimens in a museum. One of them walking free on the surface, living his life, falling in love with her again, completely unaware that his previous incarnations were floating in glass cylinders in a government laboratory beneath the forest where he'd first been drawn into hell.
Every death. Every rebirth. Every moment of suffering he'd endured across multiple lifetimes—they had it all. Had watched it all. Had recorded every second of every death and kept the bodies and used them and catalogued them like samples in a collection.
"You kept them," Nana said. Her voice didn't sound like her own—flat, hollow, emptied out. "You kept all of them."
"The specimens are invaluable research material," the scientist's voice came through the speaker above her, calm and measured as always. "Each version provides unique data on the rebirth cycle's effects on human physiology. Dr. Li's repeated deaths and subsequent rebirths have been among our most productive data sources."
Data sources.
Zayne—the man who had kissed her on rooftops and carried strawberry candies and promised her forever—was a data source.
Had always been a data source.
Nana looked at the cylinders one more time. At five versions of the man she loved, preserved in amber, their faces peaceful in sleep that would never end.
Then she looked at the sixth cylinder. The empty one.
The one labeled "Active."
The one walking around on the surface right now, searching for her, terrified that something had happened to her, completely unaware of what was happening beneath his feet.
*Find me,* she thought again, the same desperate plea she'd sent into the void the night before.
*Please. Before they take you too.*
The soldiers dragged her away from the cylinders, back through the corridors, back toward the observation rooms where they would keep her contained until the next round of testing.
Behind her, the glass cylinders hummed softly in their amber light.
And Version 06 of Dr. Zayne Li—the one who had escaped, the one who had been reset, the one who had fallen in love with Nana all over again without knowing why—drove toward the outskirts forest with frost spreading across his steering wheel and terror burning in his hazel eyes.
.
.
.
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.
To be continued.