For a long time following the explosion, Fyn's world was one of boiling heat and crushing pressure.

It felt like he was trapped within a blast furnace as it collapsed on top of him.

The ceiling of the room crumbled, raining down tonnes of melting steel and stone, and all the while, he couldn't move even an inch, trapped in a burning sarcophagus.

A concrete pillar collapsed through the heap above him, sending a jagged steel rod straight through his waist and nailing him to the operating table. But he couldn't feel any of it happening. Fyn existed in a dream state where he was simply observing the slow, agonised death of the body he inhabited. Everything was so far away; the heat was so distant, so far from real.

It was like he was viewing the world through tempered glass. Everything felt fuzzy and out of focus.

His blood painted the operating table red, running down the side in tiny rivers and sizzling as it touched the burning ground below. He could smell burnt meat, and it took him a long time to realise it was him he was smelling.

He could also smell the iron and chemicals in the air. They hung so thick he could almost taste the acrid clouds of bitter smoke as they wafted through the debris.

Flames clawed at him, charring his skin to the point that it started to bubble like melted sugar. His hair and eyebrows went up in flames that he couldn't feel, and somewhere within him, he felt his blood begin to boil.

Fyn was helpless to stop this, pinned beneath the weight of a fallen building with a body that didn't listen when he told it to escape. All he could do was watch his life ebb away one bloody drop at a time. He tried and tried to wrestle control back from whatever the doctor had done to him, but nothing worked. Mind over matter was only relevant in marathons, it seemed.

Smoke billowed over him, choking his lungs and making every breath he took hurt… it hurt.

Fyn had never been so excited to feel pain in his entire life. He took another deep breath, one that sent him spluttering from the bitter black smoke that choked his lungs. The putrid air scraped his throat raw, and yet, he couldn't help but grin. It was a gruesome sight if anyone had been there to see it.

He could feel that, the pain. It was real. He was real.

Desperately, he tried to move, managing to shift a little beneath the rubble. But only a little. Still pinned by the steel rod through his waist, he could only twist and turn minutely, each motion bringing waves of pain crashing down on him. He felt like Atlas, with the weight of the world pressing down on him.

Cursing himself for being in this position, Fyn wondered what had possessed him to agree to this in the first place. Was he stupid?

... While Fyn's intelligence was not necessarily in the upper echelons of people, he wasn't dumb. And he definitely wasn't dumb enough to offer himself up as a test subject to a humanist!

So... why had he done it?

It all boiled down to a long-kept obsession of his. As a child, he had dreamt of becoming a sentinel - like the man who wielded the shadows. He imagined the good he could bring with that strength, the people he could save... but... in the end, Fyn was not so lucky.

He had not been chosen. Simple as.

So, naturally, when the opportunity arose… well… he had been so busy accepting the offer that he hadn't read the fine print.

And look where that had gotten him.

Trapped beneath burning rubble in a building that looked like it had been hit by a bunker buster. Not only that, he had only just regained his ability to feel in time to discover precisely how much burning alive hurt.

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A lot. As it turned out.

And he had burning for ages now...Which was strange.

The process of burning alive didn't usually take this long. Or at least, Fyn hadn't expected it to. He had been trapped under the rubble for nearly ten minutes - in conditions that were more than lethal, and yet death hadn't come knocking. Shouldn't he have seen the light already? Where was his grandmother to usher him through the pearly gates?

He frowned and took another deep breath, finding the smoke not quite as suffocating as it had been. A cursory glance at his charred body showed the blackened skin falling away, revealing tender new skin beneath. It was like his whole body was a scab peeling off to reveal the fresh flesh underneath. How was this possible?

And now that he was paying attention, he noticed the hole in his waist wasn't bleeding any more. The wound had closed around the metal rod, using it to seal the gaping hole like a plug in a sink.

He took another breath, finding it even easier.

Impossible. That's what it was. Impossible.

Another breath, this one no different than if he had been breathing fresh air. It didn't taste or smell good, but his lungs made no protest. And now that he was paying attention, the incredible heat no longer felt quite so incredible.

It was hot, too hot, but not deadly.

Fyn tried to wrap his head around this. He wasn't dying. How?

Immediately, his mind went to whatever the doctor had done to him. Fyn didn't even know the man's name; he had never bothered asking. All he knew was that the doctor was a humanist, meaning he could change the body of any human he touched.

In the hands of a humanist, they said, the human body was no different to putty in a child's grip.

Hearing that there was an opportunity to become a sentinel himself, Fyn had jumped at the chance to be a test subject. He had nothing to lose, anyway.

But this didn't seem right. Or rather, it hadn't been what he was expecting. Sentinel abilities came in all shapes and sizes, but whatever was happening to him in this burning building was not one he had ever heard of.

How was - not burning alive - an ability?

And besides, it had been his understanding that a sentinel first needed a star seed from the lighthouse before they could actually awaken anything. You couldn't just awaken a power through grit and determination. First, you had to tangle with the government of the Aegis.

It was almost funny that the biggest blockade between a person and superpowers was bureaucracy.

Fyn took another breath. The black smog felt like fresh mountain air to his lungs. He shifted a little, feeling sharp pain run up from the wound in his waist.

'So that hasn't changed,' he thought. But the flames that reached him through the rubble no longer burned his skin, nor did they feel particularly hot. As far as flames went, these were now on the lukewarm side of the equation. Which seemed to fly in the face of the very idea of flames if you thought about it.

Fyn could sense his body adapting to the hellish environment - feel it changing to suit everything that was thrown at him. He wasn't sure how or why it was happening, but whenever something pushed, his body pulled.

'Perhaps I'll make it out of this,' he thought. It wasn't a thought he'd been expecting to have.

But he wasn't out of danger yet. There was definitely a difference between not dying immediately and escaping. He still had a metal rod through his waist and tonnes of rubble pressing down from above… he still…

His eyes drooped as a tonne of mental pressure crashed down on him. Exhaustion like he had never felt before hit him like a freight train. He felt even more drained than he would after coming home from a shift in the graveyard. And that was gruelling work. Back-breaking stuff.

If he'd been standing, Fyn would have collapsed in a blubbering heap.

Luckily, Fyn was about as far from standing up as a person could possibly be. In this case, he simply passed out in the midst of the rubble, sleeping the sleep of the dead. In the meantime, his body constantly shifted and changed, keeping him alive. If barely.

And while he slept, Fyn dreamt of sentinels. In his dreams, he was one of them, saving Earth from the blight and the hordes of the Breach. In those dreams, he was revered.

He was a hero.

Of course, in his dreams, Fyn always won. In his dreams, Fyn hadn't spent the last five years wallowing in depression. In his dreams, Fyn had become a sentinel the traditional way.

But that was the difference between dreams and reality. In one, things always worked out for you.

In the other...

Well, Fyn was a perfect example of the other. Things had certainly not worked out for him, far from it.

But maybe... Despite his current predicament, that might change soon.

After all, it's not like things could get any worse...