After the outburst that shook the nation, Asm apologized to his siblings with a practiced, hollow sincerity. He retreated to his room, closing the door on the world of "family" and "humanity."
To any outsider, the room was a portrait of a typical fifteen-year-old. The sheets on the single bed were rumpled, as if he had just spent the night tossing and turning. His desk was a chaotic pile of history and math textbooks—some held open by heavy mugs, others forgotten and gathering dust. Posters of popular bands and sports stars lined the walls, and a flickering lamp sat beside the window, casting a warm, domestic glow.
It was a masterpiece of deception.
Asm walked to the bookshelf, his eyes scanning the titles until they landed on a nondescript leather-bound volume. He pressed his finger against a specific spot on the spine. A hidden biometric scanner hummed, recognizing a fingerprint that existed in no government database. A faint, clinical blue light pulsed through the room, and in a blink, the space where Asm stood was empty.
The Heart of the Abyss
The transition from the warm bedroom to the underground facility was a shock of cold air and the smell of ozone. This was Asm's true domain—a massive subterranean lab funded by the hidden channels of his siblings' empires. Endless rows of white LED strips stretched across the ceiling, illuminating a facility that defied every ethical law of man.
Asm walked with a rhythmic, steady gait. To his left and right, massive glass tubes reached from the floor to the ceiling. Inside, humans floated in a specialized saline solution. These were his "Invincibility Trials." He had pumped them with experimental drugs to see if the human spirit could survive a year of total submersion. He watched as their skin softened like wet paper and their muscles atrophied, his eyes recording the exact moment their minds shattered long before their hearts stopped beating.
He continued deeper. He passed the "Dissection Wing," where human components were preserved in jars like biological art. He walked past the "Trauma Ward"—a horrifying experiment where children and their parents were kept in adjacent glass rooms, connected to machines that harvested their bodies piece by piece. Asm wasn't looking for death; he was looking for the limit of suffering. He wanted to release them back into the world as living monuments of agony, ensured by his Gift that they would never die and never find the mercy of suicide.
As he reached the mutation chambers, he stopped. The air felt different. Static.
The Breach
The facility was usually buzzing with the white noise of hired scientists. Now, it was silent. Asm realized he hadn't seen a single employee since he arrived.
He reached the final, most secluded chamber. The stench hit him first—a rot so thick it would have driven rats to madness. In the center of the room, his entire staff of a hundred scientists lay bound and gagged on the floor, trembling in terror.
Standing over them were figures clad in the stark white uniforms of the Hero's Agency. These were the "protectors" of society, the ones tasked by the High Hero to monitor the Demon Lord and cull the "Outcasts."
A girl stepped forward from the troupe. Asm recognized her immediately. She was a girl from his class—someone who usually sat three rows back, quiet and unremarkable. Now, her face was contorted with a mixture of righteous fury and pure disgust.
Before Asm could speak, she lunged. Her fist connected with his jaw, the force of a Gift-enhanced strike sending a crack through the air.
"How could you?" she screamed, her voice cracking. "How could anyone be this much of a monster? Look at what you've done!"
The Peeling Mask
Asm didn't fall. He barely stumbled. He looked at the girl, then at the small troupe of Hero recruits behind her. They were young, inexperienced—rats who had stumbled into a lion's den while the lion was away.
A dark, twitching anger began to crawl up Asm's spine. How embarrassing, he thought. How utterly, certainly embarrassing. He had built a fortress of secrets, and it had been breached by a classmate playing at being a savior.
He placed his hand over his face, his fingers digging into the flesh of his cheek. With a slow, sickening sound, he dragged his hand downward, peeling the skin clean off his face. Beneath the tattered flesh, new tissue knitted together instantly, the raw red muscle turning back into smooth, pale skin in seconds.
He looked at her through the gaps of his fingers, his eyes wide and gleaming with a predatory light. He began to smile—a smile that stretched far too wide, far too high, until it seemed to reach from ear to ear.
"You have entered my home," Asm whispered, his voice vibrating with a frequency that made the glass tubes around them vibrate. "You have seen my work. And now, you think you can judge me?"
The girl stepped back, her bravado flickering as she realized the sheer scale of the aura beginning to leak from the boy in front of her.
"You who have angered me will pay very dearly with your life," Asm said, his voice dropping to a terrifying calm. "I will ensure you suffer so much that the concept of 'death' will seem like a distant, beautiful dream. My words are never empty, little mouse."
The girl gritted her teeth, her white suit glowing as she prepared her Gift for a final, desperate strike. "I will kill you, Asm! I'll end this nightmare right here!"
Asm's smile twisted into something unholy. The shadow behind him seemed to grow, devouring the white light of the lab.
"I WILL KILL YOU, PRINCESS!"