Fyn stared down into the yawning chasm that was his chest... and felt that something was missing.
Nothing physical, of course.
He would be able to see if there was something physical missing, clear as day.
Never before had someone been so intimately familiar with their own entrails.
Every little bloody piece was laid out below him in extremely gory detail. A gash ran from his collarbone to down below his belly button, and both sides had been pulled apart like two halves of a purse, revealing a gruesome pulsating mass of flesh within.
It would be impossible not to notice something missing with this view.
Inside the wound, bits pulsed while others wriggled and throbbed like masses of worms pushing up through dirt.
It reminded him of staring into the inside of someone's throat and watching as their tonsils bobbed up and down like a buoy in the ocean. And much like the inside of someone's throat, everything was wet and dark. Sounds came from the trench, squelching sounds that made him want to wriggle and squirm against the tight leather straps that bound him... Not that he was able to.
He couldn't move and, strangely enough, that had nothing to do with the straps pinning him down. His body just wasn't listening to him. It felt like the connection to all his muscles and nerves had been cut; like someone stepping on a hose pipe to stop the water flowing.
All he could do was watch, which was deeply unsettling.
However, despite the general gruesomeness of the scene, Fyn still felt that something was missing. That, perhaps, the whole experience lacked a rather important piece of the puzzle.
The pain.
He felt none of it.
Which was undeniably odd.
Now, it has to be said that Fyn was no doctor, far from it, in fact. But even he was fairly confident in saying that when a person had their chest sliced open... It ought to hurt. Right?
He lay on a cold, steel operating table, with the hum of stark white lights blazing down from all sides. They were the sort of blinding and uncomfortable that only lights from the dentist are capable of being. They pierced his eyes like a thousand tiny needles. Agitating, but not painful. Like an itch he couldn't scratch.
The room was uncomfortably white. Everything – from the tiles on the floor to the plastic coating on the chairs - was wipe down and smelt of fresh bleach, making him wonder what exactly had stained the tiles before he arrived.
Nothing good, he imagined.
The only sounds in the room were the faint rasp of Fyn's breathing – which he was somehow managing to do despite the gaping hole in his chest – and the click of a scalpel as it tapped against the side of the operating table impatiently.
Click. Click. Click. It was rhythmic and oddly sinister, as though the sharp metal instrument was just itching to be used.
"Hm… that wasn't quite what I wanted," the man holding the scalpel said. His voice was dry and scratchy.
He was peering into Fyn's chest with all the fascination of a child watching an ant hill be washed away by a flood. Seemingly immune to the gore, the man was nothing but curious.
"There shouldn't have been this big of a reaction."
The man wore no operating mask or scrubs, simply donning a fading grey apron like that you might see a butcher wearing. It even had a faint bloody stain in the centre, as though someone had repeatedly used that spot to clean a knife. He did not need a hair net, since his bald head shone like polished pottery. It reflected the light from the harsh lamps into Fyn's unblinking eyes like a mirror, dazzling him.
All Fyn could do was stare up into the glare. Unblinking. Unmoving. Still as a corpse. Perhaps stiller.
It would have helped if he could close his eyes or raise his hand to shade them from the blinding light, but Fyn couldn't move a finger. Which was strange, since he hadn't been given any sedatives. When he'd entered the room, the doctor had simply tapped his shoulder, and he had crumpled onto the operating table like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Ever since, Fyn had lain there like a living cadaver, numbly watching himself be dissected and put back together again and again.
All the whole, he was but a passenger in his own body.
He almost missed the pain. At least then, he would know this was real. That would be something, at least.
Fyn watched as the man reached over and grabbed the two sides of his open chest, pressing them back together. If this were any other doctor, Fyn would expect them to bring out a needle and sew him up, but instead, his chest simply closed over on its own, healing without even a scar in the blink of an eye.
Perhaps, if this was the first time the man had performed such a miracle, Fyn would have been excited. Unfortunately, it was not.
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"This time," the man was muttering to himself with all the raving passion of a zealot. "I should focus less on the brain and more on the meridians; unblocking them seems to be the sticking point. But I'm close, so close. I can feel it."
He closed his eyes and placed a hand above Fyn's heart, concentrating intensely. The doctor was still as a statue, save for the occasional flutter of an eyelid or spasm in his hand. Those were the only signs he wasn't carved from stone.
As time passed, tiny things changed within Fyn's body. On a grand scale, they were minor changes. But much like sand piling up to make a dune, soon, these miniscule differences compiled into an enormous shift within him.
Neurons realigned. Blood vessels widened. Muscles grew and contracted - while arteries warped, sliding into gaps that hadn't existed before. And beyond the physical, there were changes that even Fyn couldn't sense. Ethereal things that moved and realigned. Things that couldn't be seen even through the most powerful microscope.
If anything, these were the most monumental differences.
Fyn could sense his body changing, yet couldn't feel any of it. It was like his body wasn't his - but simply a thing he happened to be viewing the world through. He felt none of the disgust or pain he should have, merely a clinical, detached curiosity at the changes being made. It felt like he was reading a transcript of what was happening to him and not actually experiencing any of it. Almost as though Fyn and his body were two separate things.
Finally, the man was done, lifting his hand off Fyn's chest and smiling broadly. "Yes, yes, I think that's it." The excitement seemed to bubble off him like vapour, and his hands twitched towards the scalpel impulsively, eager to verify their findings.
"But I must check everything before trying this on myself…" he mumbled. The knife flashed towards Fyn's chest in a bolt of cold steel lightning. "Wouldn't want to break something I couldn't fix." His voice was sing-songy and eerily light-hearted, like a kid humming a nursery rhyme.
Fyn watched the tip of the scalpel near his chest and wondered if it would hurt this time... It hadn't all those previous times, but maybe…
Bang!!
In a wave of heat and smoke, the scalpel was whipped from the man's hand and buried in the wall across the room. It stuck about an inch deep and vibrated like a tuning fork, pointing towards the opposite wall, which was now scattered across the floor in chunks of warped tiles and smouldering brick.
Light poured into the room through the gaping hole, and through it stepped men garbed in long cloaks and heavy tactical gear. They were covered head to toe in black, and when he first saw them from his place on the operating table, Fyn immediately thought that they were death's horsemen finally coming to take him away.
'About time,' he thought.
"WHO DO YOU TH-" The doctor never got to finish that sentence.
Before he could move or even blink, one of the black-clad soldiers had raised his hand, waving it like the conductor before an orchestra. In a flash, a lance of shadow burst from behind the soldier and speared straight through the doctor's chest, leaving him hanging like a marshmallow impaled on a stick. His limp body hung there for a long moment before sliding off the sharpened blackness and falling into a messy heap on the floor.
If Fyn could react, he would have squealed like a little girl getting a puppy for Christmas. The instant he had seen the soldier manipulating shadows, he had known what the man was. How could he not? He'd wanted to be one since he was a kid…
A Sentinel.
Perhaps you might think it morbid that he did not have a more severe reaction to seeing a man die. Unfortunately, Fyn had grown used to such things. Seeing a Sentinel in the flesh was far rarer and infinitely more exciting.
"Target neutralised," said the shadow Sentinel. He didn't even sound out of breath.
"Neutralised?" one of the other men scoffed as he walked up beside the first one. "You damn killed him."
The first man walked over, kicking the surgeon's limp body with a heavy boot. "Nah, it'll take more than that to kill this son of a bitch. Guys like him are... Different. They're sturdier." He turned the man over with his foot, inspecting the wound that was already starting to close. "These humanist freaks give me the creeps." He muttered darkly.
"Should you be that close to him?" Asked one of the other soldiers nervously. "What if he touches you?"
The first one scoffed. "Please, how's he going to reach me through our armour? They need skin on skin contact, remember?"
Fyn listened to this numbly, wondering if he should try and call for help… Probably. And yet, his body wasn't doing any of the things he told it to. It just lay there, limp and lifeless, like an abandoned doll.
"Right lads, let's burn this place down and get the hell off this backwater planet," said the man with the shadows. "I'm sick to death of raiding these creepy facilities and eating nothing but those damn rations."
"I second that," said another of the soldiers. "But I am curious how one planet could have so many humanists. I mean... is there something in the water?"
The shadow Sentinel shrugged. "That's just how these things go with new planets. Where are you from again? Gethel, was it?"
"Aye, I'm touched you remembered," said the soldier, with mock sincerity. "We've only been working together for, what? Nine years?"
"Ha. ha. Well, Gethel joined the Aegis a few centuries back, so it's had time to properly adjust. But new planets don't have the infrastructure..." he looked down darkly. "Especially not with the rising number of attacks."
"So, what? How does that change the number of humanists?"
"Well, I don't know the science behind it, if I'm honest. All I know is that when planets first arrive in the Aegis, there is a period where humanists are vastly more common than normal. That evens out eventually, but this place..." He paused to check a glowing screen on his wrist. "Earth, it's called, is still quite new to the Aegis, so it hasn't fully integrated yet. Call it a teething period, or something like that."
With a shake of his head, the other soldier glanced once at Fyn. "Shame about the test subjects though." He shuddered. "Half of them didn't even look… human anymore."
Fyn's eyes widened slightly. And he suddenly felt that crying out for help would indeed be an excellent idea. Not that he seemed capable of doing anything about this inspiration.
The shadow Sentinel growled and spat on the floor. "Bastards, the lot of them. Let's burn this place and be done with it. Scorch, if you would do the honours."
He spun on his heels and led the rest of the men out of the building. They climbed back through the smoking wreckage of the wall, and eventually, it was just Fyn and a single soldier who wore no gloves. Although this was hard to discern at first - considering that the man's hands were charred black as soot.
Fyn started to feel like he was in immense danger, which was odd... since he hadn't felt anything for a few hours now. But despite his numbness, he was now feeling the same dawning horror as a surfer seeing a dorsel fin rise above the water. He wanted to cry out, to scream and get help, but his body wasn't cooperating.
It just lay there.
Even as fire gushed out of the man's hands, flowing over the ground like a wave of liquid mercury, he was helpless but to watch as everything was consumed by red.