Victor stood framed in the shattered doorway of his office, his torn lab coat flapping in the disturbed air. The smear of dark blood on his pale lips stood out starkly. His prized mechanical arm hung grotesquely at his side, the elbow joint visibly deformed, hairline cracks spiderwebbing the metal casing. The embedded crystals were dull, the runic arrays flickering erratically like failing bulbs, emitting unsettling pops and crackles. Yet, his cold eyes burned with a near-manic excitement, locked onto the barely conscious Alan slumped against a console.
"Hah… cough…" He choked, spitting blood, utterly unconcerned. His voice was hoarse from injury but vibrated with pathological fervor. "Perfect 'Neutralizer'… Tolerance threshold exceeded projections… Extraordinary 'ordering' perturbation…" His gaze seemed to pierce Alan's weakened form, fixated on the unique energy within. "Not mere resistance… Transformation… Reconstruction! Forcing coherence onto inherent conflict… Compelling chaos into transient, destructive order!"
His functional left hand snapped up, not to attack, but to point at Alan, finger trembling with fervor! "You are the key! The door! The shortcut… to the 'Prime'! I saw it! In the moment your field was torn and reshaped… the fragments of the blueprint beyond mortal ken… the echo of the ancient 'Authority'!"
"Prime Glyph!" Victor practically roared the words, his eyes ablaze with religious zeal, like a pilgrim witnessing a miracle! "Must be acquired! Must be parsed! Only by grasping the 'Prime' can one touch the ultimate laws of creation! Can achieve true… 'Loom of Life'!" He drew in a deep, ragged breath, savoring the acrid cocktail of smoke, acid, and residual energy like the sweetest perfume. "This decaying flesh… these inefficient conversions… mere degraded mimicry! Only the 'Prime' can bestow supreme authority! Can make me… the 'Weaver' of a new world!"
He looked down abruptly at his damaged mechanical arm, a flash of cold resolve and… disdain?… crossing his face, as if regarding obsolete equipment. "Obstacle… a temporary obstacle…" he muttered. Then his head snapped up, the fanatical, all-seeing gaze piercing Alan once more, twisting his lips into a grotesque smile of triumph. "We will meet again, Key… Underground… At 'Mimir's Forge'… the crucible of lost knowledge… There lies my true stage!"
Before the words fully faded, Victor's damaged mechanical arm swung down with brutal force! Not at anyone, but onto the metal floor at his feet! A crystal embedded near the fractured elbow joint shattered under the impact!
HUM—!
A complex, ancient rune, glowing with an ominous dark crimson light and radiating intense spatial distortion, flared to life on the floor beneath him! Its core pulsed with the residual energy of the shattered crystal!
"NO! He's escaping!" Lena, just regaining her balance after her desperate strike, saw the rune ignite! Fear lanced through her. She lunged forward recklessly, hurling her rusted shock baton, channeling the last dregs of her Anima towards Victor! Fenrir, pushing through agony and weakness, roared a ragged challenge and heaved a massive chunk of shattered equipment towards the alchemist!
Too late.
The dark crimson rune beneath Victor blazed with incandescent light! Space warped violently, like disturbed water! Victor's form blurred, distorted, becoming a flickering hologram just as Lena's baton and Fenrir's missile would have struck! His burning, ambitious eyes pierced the spatial distortion, locking onto Alan one final, searing time.
"Underground… Waiting for you…" His voice echoed, layered, ethereal, carrying both a cold pronouncement and a fervent invitation. "…Come witness… the ultimate miracle… of the 'Loom of Life'! HAHAHAHA—!"
His mad laughter reverberated, cut off by a final, earsplitting RIP of tearing space!
POP!
Where Victor stood, only a scorched, circular mark etched with fading crimson lines remained, along with tendrils of acrid smoke reeking of oil and decay. He, and his damaged arm, were gone. Lena's baton and Fenrir's projectile crashed harmlessly into the office wall behind the fading afterimage.
"DAMN IT!" Lena slammed her fist onto a nearby console, frustration and deep unease warring within her. Victor had escaped, carrying vital data on Alan's ability and his fanatical obsession with the Prime Glyph! The implications were dire.
At that moment, the entire Vita Biotech tower woke like a wounded steel behemoth, unleashing a deafening roar.
WOOOO! WOOOO! WOOOO!
The ear-splitting shriek of a new alarm—infinitely more urgent than before—shattered the air! Not a localized breach, but the facility-wide Total Self-Destruct Alarm! Stark, strobing red emergency lights replaced the harsh white glare, painting the devastated lab in hellish hues.
"WARNING! MAXIMUM SECURITY PROTOCOL ENGAGED! EXPERIMENTAL DATA PURGE INITIATED! STRUCTURAL DISINTEGRATION PROTOCOL INITIATED! COUNTDOWN… 3 MINUTES!" A cold, synthetic voice boomed from every speaker—the voice of doom.
The lab descended into further nightmare. The shattered, cracked vats—their monitoring screens went dark, then sparked violently at their connection points! Thick, murky green nutrient fluid gushed from the fractures like arterial blood, releasing a nauseating stench! Horrifyingly, the twisted organic fragments within the fluid began to swell and writhe uncontrollably upon exposure to air and residual energy!
The massive Entropy Catalyzer at the center, bereft of Victor's control and suppression, went berserk! Its low thrum escalated into a shrieking, skull-splitting whine! The alchemical runes on its ringed structure flashed chaotically, flickering wildly as cracks spread like spiderwebs! The pipes feeding it spewed boiling, corrosive liquid energy (sickly green and crimson), eating into everything nearby! The entire device radiated lethal heat and suffocating Anima radiation!
"MOVE!" Lena screamed, snapping instantly from fury to survival instinct. Death was imminent! "Self-destruct is live! This place is coming down!"
"Alan!" Fenrir, ignoring his own agony and weakness, lunged to Alan's side. With a grunt of effort, he hauled the unconscious youth onto his broad, battered shoulders! "Hang on, pup!"
"The data! Simon! Did you get it?!" Lena yelled into her comms, sprinting towards the lab exit. She spotted a data port near where Simon had interfaced, its tiny transfer light still blinking frantically.
Simon's voice, high-pitched with terror and nearly gibbering, came through the comms, backgrounded by the shrieking alarms and the roar of overloaded servers: "…Still transferring! Core database is massive! Damn bio-lock sealed the 'Mimir's Forge Blueprint'! Only… only grabbed about 40% of secondary research and logs! Structural Disintegration active! Server racks are melting! Runes are backlashing!"
"Abandon the rest! Evacuate NOW! Bring what you have! Rally point! GO!" Lena ordered without hesitation. She reached the still-active port, saw a fingernail-sized silver data chip lodged within, its indicator light flashing manically. She ripped it out; the chip was searing hot to the touch!
"GO!" Lena clenched the burning chip in her fist like a live coal, knowing its value outweighed the pain. She turned and bolted for the door.
The three of them (Fenrir carrying Alan) stumbled out of the hellish lab. The corridor was a cacophony of alarms and strobing red chaos. The ceiling trembled, dust raining down. Emergency lights along the walls popped and shattered! Ventilation ducts began spewing streams of foul-smelling, emerald-green vapor—some alchemical toxin or corrosive agent released by the purge protocols!
"This way!" Lena led, relying on memory and instinct, guiding Fenrir towards the nearest fire stairwell. The heavy door yielded to Fenrir's desperate kick! The stairwell echoed with the deafening klaxon and the building's deepening groans.
They pounded down the stairs! Behind them, from the direction of the 48th-floor lab, came a deep, earth-shaking BOOM, followed by a cascade of secondary explosions and the horrific screech of rending metal! The entire tower seemed to shudder in agony! Thick, black smoke and waves of dark crimson energy-light billowed out from the level they'd just fled, churning upwards through the stairwell shaft!
"FASTER!" Lena gasped, lungs burning. Fenrir, burdened by Alan's weight, lumbered downwards, every step a torment, wounds tearing open, raw survival instinct the only thing driving him.
They burst through the ground-level emergency exit into blinding sunlight and the wail of sirens (police, fire). It felt jarringly unreal. But the danger wasn't over. The Vita Tower loomed like a smoldering volcano. Glass rained from upper floors, smoke poured out, and ominous flashes of deep red energy pulsed within its core.
"Over here!" Simon's voice called from a side alley. He looked ghostly pale, clutching a portable server terminal whose casing was half-melted and smoking. Relief warred with terror in his eyes. "…Data… most of what I got… is intact… Blueprint… only fragments…"
Lena looked at Alan, unconscious on Fenrir's shoulder, then back at the shuddering, self-destructing tower. Victor's cold, fanatical words echoed in her mind:
"…Underground… Waiting for you… Witness the miracle of the Loom of Life!"
"Mimir's Forge…" Lena whispered the ominous name, her grip tightening on the still-hot data chip. The trail led down, into deeper, older darkness. And Alan, the "Key" Victor named him, had only just begun his descent into the storm engulfing London's shadowed world.