Bearing the devastating weight of those final words echoing in her mind, she slowly rose from the edge of the bed. Feeling the chill of the hardwood floor against her bare soles, she stepped toward the table dead center of the room. The sharp screech of the chair dragging backward sliced through the deafening desolation of the cell like a rusted blade. The moment she sat down, the rich, intoxicating aroma bleeding from beneath the silver cloche and mixing with the air entirely hijacked her senses. For years, she had filled her lungs with nothing but the rust of acid rain and the choking smog of Caduta. Now, the steaming fragrance of fresh spices, melted butter, and perfectly seared meat striking her nostrils forged a contrast so feral it numbed her mind.
She struggled to swallow as she stared at the flawless arrangement on the tray. Out in the blood-soaked ruins, she had to sink her nails into other people's flesh and fight to the death in the mud just to tear away a single, mold-choked, stone-hard crust of bread. She had grown so accustomed to that familiar, acid-burning void of starvation gnawing her stomach from the inside out that this steaming feast felt like a cruel, twisted illusion. Finding a meal fresher and more decadent than anything she could have ever dreamed of in her entire life resting on her table in this white hell of Sarcos twisted her stomach not with joy, but with profound, venomous suspicion.
It contained no poison—the blue-eyed executioner had proven that with his own lips; but what was the true price of this absolute generosity? Her fingers reached hesitantly for the fork. Only two or three agonizing days had passed since she plummeted into this damned white box. The flawless portions the servant delivered without fail at the crack of dawn and sundown had violently purged the toxic, chronic exhaustion from her veins.
Not a single shred remained of that sick, trembling wreck writhing in fever and rotting from infection when they first dragged her here. Her cells regenerated shamelessly, fueled by these hot meals and pure water, replacing the aged ache in her muscles with a brand-new, vigorous power. As she slipped the juicy piece of meat skewered on her fork between her lips and began to chew, she involuntarily closed her eyes against the unrivaled flavor dissolving across her palate. The enemy holding her execution warrant meticulously feeding and resurrecting their victim before the slaughter served as a psychological torture far more diseased and terrifying than all of Sarcos's absolute brutality combined.
She plunged the tines of the silver fork into the dark, thickly creamed stew one last time. The tender texture of the cooked meat falling apart shred by shred and the sharp, throat-burning aroma of the spices had completely sealed the bottomless, pitch-black pit in her stomach. Serevia felt entirely gorged, beginning to sense a sweet, numbing weight in her chest even as she drew breath. Despite this, nearly half of the porcelain plates resting on the metal tray remained full to the brim.
The portions hauled here from the Sarcos kitchens were so colossal, so overwhelmingly excessive, that her stomach simply lacked the capacity to finish this feast—a banquet that completely shattered the wildest dreams of the skin-and-bone people starving in the streets of Caduta. Out in the streets, the feral gangs would slit each other's throats without a second of hesitation for the leftovers currently resting on this smooth steel table.
She dropped the fork against the edge of the plate with a heavy clink. If she loved a single thing in this four-square-meter dungeon—far too sterile to be called a prison and far too luxurious to be a clinic—it was absolutely these feasts laid out before her. The rich taste of spices lingering on her palate numbed her mind, forcing her to forget reality for a fleeting second.
Yet the most intolerable, suffocating aspect of this counterfeit paradise... was the absolute absence of a single pane of glass breaking the smooth surface of the walls, not even a tiny crack to glimpse the outside world. Whenever she anchored her gaze to the soulless, bone-white concrete, she felt the sensation of being buried alive down to her very marrow; even the filtered air flooding her lungs choked her throat like a venomous vine. She desperately, madly craved to look out at the acid rain, to just stare at that hazy gray sky.
At the exact second she slowly chewed the final tender piece of meat and felt the rich spices lingering on her tongue, a familiar mechanical grind sliced through the absolute silence of the cell like a blade. The heavy gears inside the door turned with a deep, hollow groan. Serevia instantly stopped chewing, pulling every muscle taut like a bowstring as she snapped her gaze toward the sound. The heavy metal door swung backward, and the blinding light of the corridor bled into the room.
The silhouette materializing on the threshold was none other than the brunette girl in the white floral overalls—the very same servant who had whispered a sliver of hope to her only minutes ago before vanishing.
Serevia drove a deep crease between her brows, slashing an interrogative glare at the figure standing in the doorway.
The brunette girl's delicate hands hung completely empty at her sides. The timid servant usually only breached the cell to deliver steaming meals, quietly disappearing with the empty trays from the previous feeding on her way out. Now, her fingers clutched neither a tray nor a glass. This abnormal return instantly triggered every defense mechanism and blared every alarm bell in Serevia's mind all at once.
She swallowed the bite in her throat hard, desperately trying to decipher the bizarre expression burning in the hazel eyes across from her.
She chose to shatter the heavy tension in the cell with the dismissive, biting attitude forged in the streets. She slouched slightly against the seat of the chair and crossed her arms over her chest. She had already carved that dangerous, mocking smirk onto the corner of her lips. Her voice carried the jagged edge of a rusted nail, dripping with the darkest sarcasm.
"What is it?" she asked, tilting her chin slightly upward. "Did you miss me that quickly?"
The chalk-white, bloodless expression on the brunette's face—violently contrasting her delicate, floral overalls—practically glowed beneath the artificial lights of the cell. As she slipped across the threshold, her steps completely lacked their usual timid yet steady rhythm; her feet caught on the hardwood floor, expending invisible effort just to keep from stumbling. She spun around and violently shoved the massive, heavy door shut.
The heavy clunk of metal striking the steel frame echoed through the room. Yet, the soulless, mechanical snap of the lock that Serevia had permanently burned into her mind—the sound that should have immediately followed... never came. The locking gears hadn't turned. This absolute silence proved more than enough to turn the thief's blood to ice within seconds. A closed but unlocked door never happened by coincidence in this militaristic hell. Either someone was about to walk in... or they wanted her to walk out.
Every muscle in the figure advancing toward the table amidst the rustle of the floral overalls shuddered like a taut bowstring on the verge of snapping. Serevia clamped her fingers tightly around the cold metal backrest of her chair and slowly raised her head. The dismissive, mocking smirk she had carved onto her lips mere seconds ago vanished completely from her features, leaving behind a sinister, pitch-black gravity.
She had silently observed this delicate servant for days, burning every micro-expression into her mind. Yet the silhouette standing right beside her now was no mere timid child; she was someone fighting to mask pure terror, her pupils blown wide and her breath ragged. As the steaming aroma of the spiced meal hung suspended in the air, the silence between them grew agonizingly heavy.
The sensation of fullness in her stomach instantly warped into a freezing, toxic knot of acid. The tender bites she had swallowed with such appetite moments ago now dug into her throat like rusted nails. Without peeling her back from the chair, she thrust her chin forward slightly, dissecting the violently trembling body standing before her with the lethal focus of a predator eyeing its prey. The silence thickened until the air inside the room became completely unbreathable.
Before parting her dry lips, she had to swallow hard, violently shattering the rigid, agonizing knot in her windpipe.
"What is happening?" Her voice completely shed its mocking, street-forged tone, striking the cell walls in a jagged, razor-sharp whisper that cut straight to the core of the danger. "What happened out there?"
Crushed beneath the sheer weight of the question, the brunette girl’s chest heaved violently with a deep, jagged gasp. The air she dragged into her lungs seemed to tear at her throat, choking back the words she fought to vomit out. Her hazel eyes desperately clawed for Serevia’s gaze, yet the sheer violence of her terror sent them darting frantically around the room, tracking the baseboards every single second. She ground her teeth together, her lips twitching violently as if bracing to spill an agonizing truth. The ragged, wheezing breath she forced past the colossal, thorny lump in her throat served as the clearest herald of impending ruin.
"They..." The word tore from her mouth like a slow, agonizing drop of blood. Her vocal cords were pulled so violently taut by terror that her whisper decayed into a trembling moan. "They want you."
As she finished the sentence, her frail shoulders collapsed entirely. Those two simple words dropped dead center into the cell like a live grenade stripped of its pin, instantly obliterating every fresh crumb of hope Serevia had managed to build while she still drew breath.
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Before the terror-soaked whisper tearing from the servant’s lips could even hang in the air, the unlocked door of the cell crashed open with deafening violence. A colossal, rigid shadow instantly swallowed the brunette girl's delicate silhouette and completely choked the threshold. The figure stepping inside was a hulking brute of a soldier, bearing the merciless, death-dealing uniforms of Sarcos forged from steel and black leather. The heavy, crushing echo of spiked, thick-soled combat boots grinding against the hardwood floor shattered the sweet, lethargic warmth the hot meal had injected into Serevia’s veins just seconds ago like fragile glass.
The reek of gunpowder, sweat, and the rusted, toxic acid of the outside world clinging to the enforcer ruthlessly sliced through the spiced aroma of the food and rapidly flooded their lungs. The broad-shouldered man dismissively shoved aside the violently trembling body in the floral overalls and began taking heavy, menacing strides straight toward the table.
Even as the brunette servant violently pressed her back against the wall, shrinking down to avoid being pulverized beneath those massive combat boots, she didn't tear her eyes away from Serevia for a single millimeter. The shattered, helpless expression drowning her hazel eyes was the silent shriek of a violently approaching apocalypse. Her gaze harbored more than simple panic; it held a freezing, agonizing mourning for a victim whose gravestone was already carved, a sacrifice stepping into a bloody darkness with absolutely no return.
Serevia felt the gears in her head lock with a massive, violent grind, paralyzing her thoughts. Her brain stubbornly refused to process the chaos suddenly detonating around her. What the hell had just happened? How had the flawlessly operating system turned so violently and lethally fast? Minutes ago, she was silently filling her stomach within these sterile four walls; how had the executioner’s bloody claws suddenly materialized right at the nape of her neck? Her pulse hammered against her skin with a rhythm savage enough to tear her temples apart from the inside out, her mind ground to dust beneath the crushing weight of these unanswered questions.
The moment the soldier reached the edge of the table, he offered absolutely no warning; he didn't even draw a breath. This man, whom Serevia had never laid eyes on in her life, wasn't the true authority in the room, merely a hulking Sarcos grunt bred solely to butcher whatever he was ordered to. Not a single shred of mercy existed on his smooth yet stagnant face, entirely stripped of humanity by the system. His coarse fingers, sheathed in synthetic leather gloves, struck forward with the speed of lightning and clamped around Serevia’s slender arm as if intending to tear it entirely from its socket.
As the freezing, agonizing pressure biting into her flesh beneath the fabric violently forced the young girl to swallow her breath, the coarse voice tearing through the silence of the room sounded exactly like a rusted saw.
"The feast is over," the man spat, driving his fingers a fraction deeper into the girl's flesh as he hurled the words. "On your feet. If you don't walk on your own two legs, I'll drag you by your hair."
This command bore no resemblance to the melodramatic, counterfeit execution theater staged in the squares; it carried the soulless, absolute reality of an executioner silently dropping the axe.
Violently jolted in her chair by the uncontrolled force bearing down on her arm, Serevia faltered for a fraction of a second. As the blood drained from her stomach, her parted lips wore the naive mask of pure shock. Yet, the instant her mind thrashed to break free of this trap of flesh and steel, the feral instinct violently injected into her by the blood-soaked streets of Caduta completely seized her nervous system. She dug her nails into her own palms until they bled, viciously ripping that fragile expression from her face.
When she thrust her chin into the air with the purest form of absolute arrogance and locked her eyes onto the man's stagnant gaze, pure, unadulterated hatred had entirely replaced her panic. Despite the inhuman pressure grinding against her bone, she neither flinched nor pulled back. The mountain of flesh towering before her wasn't a breathing brain, but merely a blind mass of muscle that blindly obeyed orders.
Like a feral street predator who refused to hesitate to bare her fangs even at the end of a barrel, Serevia carved that dark smirk onto her lips. "If you don't have permission to bite..." she hissed with a voice like pure venom, gutting the man's rigid ego in a single strike. "...don't bother barking at my door."
This insolent degradation triggered an uncontrolled spasm across the soldier's disciplined face. As the thick veins at his temples twitched as if threatening to tear through his skin, his face flushed with uncontainable fury. A feral hiss, entirely pulverizing the strict order of his Sarcos uniform, spilled through his teeth.
"Understood..." He hurled the words with pure, unadulterated malice. "So you prefer the hard way!"
The exact second he finished his sentence, he violently hauled backward with all his brute force, drawing power from the fingers clamped like a steel trap around her arm; he moved with pure savagery to rip his prisoner straight out of the metal chair. Yet Serevia remained absolutely determined to refuse surrendering her body to this brutal tyranny. She violently drove the soles of her boots into the hardwood floor, stubbornly dropping her dead weight into the chair. With her free hand, she instantly braced herself against his broad chest, wrapped in the thick fabric of his uniform. As her muscles screamed and burned with the resistance, she violently shoved the soldier backward with every ounce of her strength, desperate to shatter his crushing brute force on its own axis. The absolute absence of a protective vest beneath the uniform allowed Serevia to dig her fingertips directly into his stone-hard mass of muscle.
Dead center of this violent struggle, of flesh brutally colliding against flesh, the girl who had frozen in pure terror in the corner of the cell suddenly launched herself forward. The brunette servant violently cast aside the mute panic paralyzing her veins and threw herself into the fray, her chest heaving like a heavy bellows. Without a single second of hesitation, she wrapped her delicate, frail fingers around the soldier's free arm. She hung from his limb with her entire dead weight, thrashing desperately to halt the savage assault. Not a single coherent word managed to tear through her terror-locked throat; she only spilled helpless, shattered gasps of pure shock.
Yet the frail resistance the brunette girl applied felt no different to the colossal machine of death than a fly landing on his shoulder. The enforcer completely ignored the weak servant clinging to his arm like a gnat. Burning with absolute, uncontrollable fury, he violently locked his gaze back onto Serevia’s resisting frame. He stubbornly plowed forward with unstoppable, crushing strides.
He dropped his free right hand to the black holster at his waist with the speed of lightning.
Shhhk.
The heavy, metallic rasp of cold steel tearing free from the leather instantly sucked every shred of oxygen out of the room in a single strike. The soldier brutally rammed the freezing barrel of the heavy pistol dead center into Serevia's forehead, pressing it with enough lethal force to crush her skin and fracture her skull.
"Before I spill your brains all over this floor," the man roared, a feral, deafening snarl tearing from his throat. "Get on your own two feet!"
The pressure at the end of the barrel was so ruthless that it violently snapped Serevia's head backward. In that exact second, muffled, terror-stricken moans tore from the lips of the brunette girl locked onto the freezing spectacle playing out at the end of the gun. Her hazel eyes blew wide with horror as her slender fingers desperately crushed the thick fabric of the uniform.
The freezing steel didn't shatter the suffocating, lethal silence of the cell; the violently trembling, helpless rebellion tearing from the throat of the brunette cowering in the corner shattered it.
"Don't even think about it, Cairon! Don't!"
The words flew like shattered glass from the delicate girl's knotted throat, striking the sterile walls of the room to forge a deafening echo. Her bare fingers crushed the soldier's thick uniform so violently that the blood entirely drained from her knuckles, turning them bone-white. The exact second the name spilled from her lips, the air inside the room practically froze solid.
This brute named Cairon didn't shift the freezing barrel pressed against the thief's forehead a single millimeter; he merely slashed his bloodshot, feral glare for a fraction of a second toward the delicate body hanging from his shoulder. The muscles in his face twitched violently, and every breath he exhaled through his nose bled into the room like gunpowder and acid.
"Stay the hell out of this!"
This jagged, razor-sharp roar tearing from his throat was violent and merciless enough to make the girl physically flinch. The soldier instantly wiped this fragile obstacle from his mind, snapping his head back to ruthlessly lock his feral focus dead center on his primary target at the end of the barrel without wasting a single heartbeat.
"I said get up!"
Elevating his voice loud enough to vibrate the cell walls and rupture eardrums, he angled the black metal weapon into her skull with a far more lethal, dangerous trajectory. The freezing barrel buried itself mercilessly into her skin, its heavy, paralyzing pressure crushing her flesh to grind directly against her bone. The mechanical rasp grinding inside the pistol played a chilling melody, screaming that only fractions of a second remained before the hammer fell.
Even standing at the end of that bloody barrel crushing her forehead, the razor-sharp mask on Serevia's face didn't slip a single millimeter. She merely felt the mute, freezing dread quietly rearing its head beneath her ribs and instantly buried it deep in her stomach with a hard swallow. She slid her gaze smoothly toward the brunette girl behind Cairon. The fleeting look she offered the violently trembling servant, whose hazel eyes had blown wide with horror, remained utterly stormless. The pure, uncontrolled terror in the room had collapsed entirely onto the servant's shoulders; Serevia, conversely, stood against that panic like an impenetrable wall of solid ice.
Then, she slowly dragged her irises back to the hand gripping the gun, aiming her focus directly at that rigid, hollow mind. She stared at the enforcer before her with a dark, filthy disgust, as if she were inspecting a nauseating insect rotting in the deepest sewers of Caduta. Completely ignoring the metal grinding against her temple, she slowly pulled herself to her feet with an immensely degrading and arrogant motion.
Right at that moment, the heavy, synchronized thud of combat boots erupted from the corridor behind the cracked door.
Thud.
Thud.
When two more fully uniformed guards stormed inside, they entirely consumed the room's already vanishing oxygen, suffocating the atmosphere into rigid density. Swallowing the crushing humiliation of failing to pull the trigger with his own hands, Cairon turned toward the newcomers with a violently twitching jaw.
"Get her out of my sight!"
Right after these spite-filled words spilled from the man's lips, the breaching guards descended like shadows on either side of Serevia with heavy, silent resolve. Thick hands sheathed in tactical gloves locked in an iron grip around her arms, forcibly dragging her body outward toward the corridor washed in blinding white light. Just before stepping past the threshold, right before being dragged into that unknown darkness, Serevia craned her neck and cast one final look over her shoulder.
The final frame burned into her mind served as a flawless summary of the room she left behind: on one side, that brunette servant crushed beneath the sheer weight of terror... And dead center stood that pathetic soldier, breathing with helpless malice like a viper violently stripped of its venom.
Then, leaving the weight of that aborted execution and the man's toxic breath trapped inside, the heavy metal door slammed shut with a deafening crash.
