As the walls crumbled around him, Reis found himself in another world, where everything had turned into small fragments of scattered mana. He was only thinking of escaping this prison.
Suddenly, with a surge of internal momentum, he stretched out his hand and expanded the mana field around him. In that moment, he felt his power accelerating; nothing could stop him. The field surpassed the boundaries of the crumbling room, and everything around him began to collapse. The sound he heard was like thunder, filling the space.
Then, the light exploded.
The walls shattered, the floor crumbled, and existence faded away. The faces that passed in front of him lost their features, and the sounds in his ears shattered. The world flipped upside down.
He suddenly opened his eyes to find himself in a long corridor. Rooms, closed doors, empty walls scattered with pieces of iron. Everything was falling apart, just like in the room he had been in. He looked around, and when he saw the doctors rushing through the hallways, they appeared to him as nothing more than glowing red entities. He saw them, but he couldn't tell if they were human or just moving ghosts. Everything seemed like floating mana particles.
He felt nothing.
No emotions. No regret. No fear. Everything was tainted with mana; everything had turned into mere energetic interactions.
He moved toward the forward corridor, continuing to expand his field. He now knew, as if he had discovered something that had never crossed his mind before, that the lab was much larger than he had imagined. Every floor, every room, was an extension of the dark place that had trapped him. And the floor he had been on just moments ago, the fourth floor, was just a small part of this massive structure.
As he ran, he felt something change in the air. There was an alert in space, approaching signals. He felt it, it was Ellen. But this time, she wasn't human as he had known her. She was merely a mana entity. A glowing beam in the aura around him. He saw her approaching, seeing her as a mass of red mana, vibrating and moving toward her target.
But there was no time. He knew he had to escape.
As Ellen got closer, he stretched out his hand into the air, beginning to manipulate the mana in the atmosphere. He felt the energy flowing through his hands, wrapping around him, scattering in all directions. The air itself seemed to change, as if he was imposing order upon it. The air around him exploded, the rooms exploded, the surfaces exploded, as if the entire place was shattering under his influence.
The doctors were mere fragile beings in this huge explosion. He killed them all with those explosive energy bursts, watching them fall like wax pieces under the storm's pressure.
As he continued fleeing, the ground began to shake more. Everything in the place was collapsing. But Reis did not stop. His eyes scanned around, and everything had become nothing more than a form of mana no living beings, no humans, none of that. The entities were merely particles in the air.
He closed his eyes for a moment, and as soon as he opened them, he had envisioned the place he wanted. The third floor. He saw it in his mind as a moving room of mana. He pulled himself through the field, and the space around him contracted, suddenly finding himself on the third floor.
His eyes gleamed, but he didn't feel relief or success; he just knew that he had taken a bigger step toward escape.
---
On the third floor, the rooms were narrow, dark, crowded with children, machines, and hidden equipment bearing the scars of failed experiments. The place was foggy, filled with the sharp scent of chemicals, and the constant buzzing of machines. It was as if the place itself was breathing, every corner filled with broken life.
But Reis didn't see that human life as it was. No. All he saw in this place were red entities, distorted and moving forms, as if every person and everything here were nothing more than accumulated mana particles. They weren't spirits or bodies; they were just disordered energy intermingling, forming entities unable to escape his grasp.
He looked around, and the world he saw was incomprehensible. There was no distinction between human, child, or monster. They all appeared as entities affected by mana, entangled with it.
He pulled his hand into the air, manipulating the mana around him, just as he had done during moments of destruction in previous rooms and floors. The air surrounding him began to stir, shifting and twisting unnaturally. Mana responded to him, moving in a terrifying way, as though it was melting under his hands. Then, with a sudden motion, all the equipment around him exploded.
The small rooms, filled with children and machines, tore apart, and their walls flew into pieces. The children, submerged in fluids inside narrow iron tubes, began to scream. But no sound reached his ears. Reis heard nothing, only the sight of the red forms dying, obliterating themselves under the influence of the mana he mercilessly unleashed.
Everything was collapsing.
The human mind couldn't comprehend the scale of destruction occurring in a single moment. But Reis, at that moment, was no longer human. He didn't feel anything, just one thought circling in his mind: escape. Escape from this lab, from this prison surrounding him.
Yet, his body trembled, and his eyes fixated on every movement around him. He saw mana exploding in every direction, walls crumbling, and everything around him shattering. He knew he had to move quickly. The ground beneath his feet began to shake. He instinctively knew that time was running out.
But amid the chaos and destruction, he noticed something else: despite the disorder, he felt the presence of something strange in the air. There was a hidden force approaching him.
It was Ellen again.
He moved his hand through the air, expanding the mana field that surrounded him, like a fierce wind. The ground exploded beneath his feet, but that wasn't enough. He continued to expand the field, and it became like a storm devouring everything in its path. The laboratory walls exploded, surfaces scattered, and everything on the third floor collapsed.
Ellen couldn't stop him.
Everything was falling apart before him. He was playing with the mana around him, watching it scatter everywhere, as if it was melting and transforming into something else. He could no longer hear the children's screams or the sounds of the doctors running through the corridors.
He was alone here, in a world filled only with destruction and mana.
As he was fleeing from this floor, he felt something heavy moving between the walls and the lower floors, something more terrifying than Ellen, closing in on him quickly.
He didn't know what it was.
But at that moment, he decided to escape even further.
He knew the third floor wasn't enough. He had to go somewhere else. He had heard noises on the second floor, and he felt a stronger presence there, but at that moment, nothing mattered. Only escape.
He stretched out his hand, focusing on the mana filling the air above him, then imagined himself in another place. At the far end of the second floor, away from this timeless, endless space.
And he transferred himself again.
To the floor above, trying to escape the pursuit, but he knew time wasn't on his side. The second floor was different from the floors he had passed. It was dark, filled with the thick smell of decay, and the stench from the cells and closed facilities made the air suffocating. The walls were covered with the marks of failed experiments, and the only sound in the place was the breaking of glass now and then and the echo of his rapid footsteps on the concrete floor.
Here, there were no high-tech equipment or torture devices like those on the third or fourth floors; instead, there were monsters and cells, where experiments were conducted on creatures that had lost their humanity. He saw them with his eyes—the distorted beings, the mutated animals—and all that remained of them were massive carcasses of flesh and blood, disfigured for unknown purposes.
They were all like red entities entangled with mana, strange, brutal, as if they were devouring each other in an endless cycle of suffering. He saw them all as if they were part of this laboratory, to the point where he couldn't distinguish them from humans anymore. They were all just dead meat, feeding mana, and when they moved under the influence of mana, every movement became unnatural, incomprehensible.
But Reis didn't care about these creatures. He saw them as pieces of chess, worthless in his new world. While the mana flowed around him at an unprecedented rate, he was rushing through the corridors, sweeping his eyes across the monster cells as if they were nothing but faint lights dissipating quickly in the air.
But suddenly, he stopped his steps, watching the distance ahead of him. In the darkness, he saw unusual movement. A current of mana was flowing in the air, and from among the shadows, another being emerged. It wasn't an ordinary creature; it was large, terrifying, with dark light flowing from it, surrounded by a vast amount of energy. He saw it as a dark entity slithering between the walls, as if the darkness itself had manifested into a living form. Its eyes were glowing with a deadly red hue, and it moved through the walls with all its power, controlling everything around it.
This creature was what Reis believed to be the owner of this lab. Who was it? What was its purpose? Why was it chasing him? But he had no time to think about the answers.
Ellen, of course, was chasing him too. But he didn't care about her at that moment. He knew he couldn't stand against this dark entity alone, so he had to escape quickly. In one instant, the mana began to accumulate around him, and he pushed his mind to increase its strength. The mana gathered and swirled around him in a terrifying manner, like an enormous fireball, then exploded in mere seconds.
The fire particles exploded, scattering around him like a fiery storm, shattering everything in their path. Reis watched them move in front of him, exploding in the air, creating walls of fire that scattered around him. Everything was exploding. The ground beneath his feet, the surfaces, the creatures in the cells, everything.
And Reis was in the heart of the storm. He felt nothing. He had no sense of time or place. Only his eyes, gleaming in the dark, saw how the walls shattered, the machines exploded, and the monsters ripped apart as if they were ancient animals crushed under the weight of the force.
The air was saturated with fire, but mana controlled everything, as if it were part of the air he breathed. And before he felt anything else, he sensed something. This terrifying creature, the owner of the lab, was closing in on him quickly. Its eyes were glowing brighter, and the shadows were gathering around it, as if trying to devour him.
In a terrifying moment, Reis decided to escape once again. The fire was consuming the place around him, and the glowing light filled the area, but mana was pressing down on him. His mana reserves were running out, and his core was about to explode, but Reis knew there was no choice.
And in the final moment, just before the dark creature touched his hand, a huge light exploded in the sky, and as the fire erupted around him, he teleported to the first floor.
Underground, on the first floor, there were thick walls, laser machines, guards, and fighting Awakened. The area was fortified and filled with terrifying defense systems. The atmosphere was charged with anger and energy, but Reis didn't care about any of that. He knew the battle had just begun, and he wouldn't stop.