Number One looked back at the body of the one she wanted to be her mother. The woman had expired, either from the wound or from the gas.

“I would’ve given my own life to save yours had you accepted me as family. And if not, I would’ve left you in peace had you let me leave,” the vat born said honestly. “Alas, that was not the case. You wanted a monster, and a monster caught you.” Her gaze shifted to the slabs where her vat-born siblings lay. Dismantled. Thrown away like garbage. The rage boiled anew. “I am sorry. I am so, so sorry. Had I been braver, had I transformed sooner, I could’ve saved you.” She kneeled, not caring about the poison or the commotion in the facility. No matter how far they run, they’ll all die soon. “Join me. The people here have treated us worse than tools. Let us bring retribution together. I’ll carry your souls out of this tomb. Let the light outside bring you to the next lives.”

She picked up their remains and swallowed them. The flesh of her nameless brothers and sisters burned in her stomach, immediately going into building her body even further. The transformation was far from done. She stood on four limbs, finding it easier to walk in such a manner. Her paws emptied each slab of metal one by one. She cleaned the burn marks the laser had left on Six-Four-Six’s body, hoping that by some miracle his regeneration would work and bring the boy back to life. It didn’t work. His wounds healed up to his neck, growing new bones and a fresh set of organs, and then stopped. Six-Four-Six was dead, and Number One ate his remains. The hiss of the door interrupted the monster feast, focusing her full attention on the group of orange fiends rushing inside.

“Don’t move!” their leader commanded.

“You soon won’t,” the monster agreed, surveying them.

There was no fear. There was no urge to submit or run; pure, unadulterated fury drove away such emotions. The adrenaline kicked in, taking the monster into the world of superspeed, where her opponents were children wading through thick, sticky mud. Most carried long rifles; their leader kept in the center of the group, gesturing for two soldiers wielding heavy ordinance to take aim. Each soldier carried a sheathed blade, and it confused the monster. What use would such toys be against the reinforced alloy of the power armor?

Number One’s paw caught a rocket as it flew toward her. A second followed, and the monster flicked her wrist, returning the first rocket to its sender and leaping gracefully aside to avoid the impossibly slow attack. Both rockets exploded almost simultaneously, shaking the room and creating thick clouds of smoke pierced by crimson beams as the soldiers fired blindly. It confused her at first, but then she understood. This wasn’t a show of unprofessionalism; their commander had recognized her sheer speed from just two movements alone and ordered the wide cone of fire, seeking first to wound, then to finish.

She admired the strategy but stayed wary of the fact that the blast had failed to wound her opponents or bring them to their knees. The rocket tossed by her exploded at their legs, and kinetic absorbers dispersed the brunt of the impact across the smooth surface of their armors, while servomotors gifted enough strength to endure the rest. But why was there not a single trace of dust on the orange fiends?

The monster’s paws grabbed the arching mechanical arms on the ceiling and threw them, sending a torrent of sharpened pieces at the fiends. Their armor was good. Several smaller pieces shattered at contact, not even leaving a bulge or a dent. But the speed with which she had sent the projectiles defied imagination. Sufficient velocity was a weapon in and of itself. The larger pieces passed the fiends in a blur, slicing through limbs and leaving torn wounds.

Smaller pieces of metal flew high off the armored soldiers, answering the question of why her claws were ineffective against them before the ascension. These orange lines on them served more than decoration. They projected a weak gravitational field that pushed particles in different directions. It was an ingenious decision against the threat of weightless discharges of energy weapons. Soldiers could fire their energy weapons anywhere without worrying about friendly fire. Against solid projectiles, however, this technology was not very effective.

They tried to use their funny, useless lasers against Number One. She was already among them, moving too fast for their eyes and optics to follow. Claws cleaved through eight bodies in a single sweep, dismembering four more with the next swipe. The bodies hadn’t even hit the ground before her fangs closed in on the still-living enemies. Hatred. She hated them, ignoring cries of pain and offers of surrender. What goes around comes around. Her jaws closed, biting the fiends down to their waists, spilling pools of gore on the ground.

Their battle suits hissed on her tongue, sparks flying from the exposed wires. She paid it no mind, swallowing food. At some instinctive level, she knew that her stomach could digest most alloys and chemicals. Even the damaged energy generators posed no threat to her health. Unknown to themselves, the whitecoats created something otherworldly in this hellish place.

Several of the orange fiends died, choking on the gas in the room as the air slipped through the open cracks in their armor. Three transformed into hissing snake creatures. Ignoring the poison, they drew knives from their sheaths. They charged at her, moving childishly slowly to her eyes. She drove claws through the heads of the two of them, but the last one closed in, trying to pierce her skin.

Vibration. She smiled, understanding the idea behind this weapon. The blade itself was a dull piece of metal, but a compact generator inside it created a field of vibration around its edge. By generating a strong enough disruption field, such toys could break the very molecular bonds in a lesser material. The density of Number One’s skin, evolved by this unknown glow, no longer allowed such trifles to threaten the monster.

The snake man’s eyes widened in shock as the blade lodged harmlessly in her fur, and she kicked, knocking him to the ground. Her claw stopped just short of his heart, revealing his ruined chest. The ribcage’s bones had fused together, providing additional protection. His muscles enlarged, and her nose caught the scent of narcotics in the bloodstream. Medical drugs to increase reaction time. Maybe also to further aggression. Irrelevant. She hesitated. Should she leave him to suffer? In his adapted state, with the way his organs compensated for blood loss and immunity to poison, it will take the orange fiend several hours to die.

Nah. She decided, piercing his heart. Death was the end result. Too much of an honor for them to suffer torture at her paws. She has things to do, people to kill, and a world to explore. They made her into a murderer; they will not turn her into a sadist. Her mind was still clear. She can turn away from the carnage. Number One owed her surviving family this much. The bastards mentioned a government, whatever it was. Since not all humans were evil and this government was after the necks of those bastards, could she find allies by joining the hunt? At the very least, her kin needed to be hugged by a familiar face. And Eugenia and her pack deserved a proper spanking for their deeds.

Does Eugenia deserve to die? The monster dismissed the idea, disgusted by the very suggestion. She had already killed the girl’s father; how much more suffering would a person need? A spanking and strict supervision will be enough. Every time this vile girl will try to hurt another person, Number One will be there to punish her, until Eugenia finally grows up and understands that hurting others was bad. The monster will pledge her loyalty to the government and use her newfound strength to ensure that no other child ever suffered the way her relatives did.

Stolen novel; please report.

And this prototype that Academician had mentioned. Could there be more of me? Number One pondered. If so, they must be saved and given protection. The corpse turned into a bloody smear under her feet as she left the room. Unafraid.

The corridor outside turned red, but the heat that burned other products to the bone was a mere lukewarm temperature for her. In fact, she enjoyed its hotness while strolling down the corridor. A heartbeat alerted her to a whitecoat hiding in a room on the other side of the wall, and she punched, grabbing the woman by the head and dragging her out and then tossing the shrieking bitch at the superheated floor. The white suit offered no protection. Body and fabric fused, turning the body into a pile of scorched black faster than the whitecoat could attempt to stand.

Panels tried to stop her, ignited by the dancing coils of electricity. She rammed through them, uprooting them from their foundation in the ceiling, and the impact sent cracks stretching through the corridor. The lights went out, and the hellish heating on the floor began to cool. The generators were overloaded or broken. Unusual. Number One’s mind ran a calculation, proving to her that this facility could not have had such sensitive defensive measures. There were other factors at play. She didn’t care, advancing on four legs to the sound of hundreds of heartbeats. Hastened heartbeats. This time, the lesser monsters were afraid of a creature of their own making.

She shifted to the left, hearing noises. The wall crumbled at a tap, and Number One dodged a red beam, seeing its birth in the weapon's barrel. Fast. To her eyes, the stones fell in slow motion, but this beam crossed the room in an instant, touching her fur. A second later, she understood that there was nothing to worry about. Not a single strand of hair was burned.

“Please!” a whitecoat cried from the back of an orange fiend. The fiend pushed the man into a space between two shelves, preventing him from reaching the monster. “She is not at fault! Mary… This guard was just transferred here today! She hasn’t hurt anyone, I swear! I was the one leading the sessions here; if you want to punish someone, take me! Mercy, I beg you!”

“Shut it, Kia,” the soldier advised him, her voice muffled by the helmet. She fired her rifle again, landing a shot between the amber eyes. It didn’t do anything.

The request humored the monster. How many of her kind died here, begging for mercy? This orange fiend here… Mayhap she didn’t know of the horror festering in this facility? If so, she was guilty nonetheless. The orange fiend chose to serve as a guard, readily firing at a first product who sought to break free from the shackles of oppression. This could be forgiven, as Number One was rather terrifying, and perhaps the guard was unaware about specifics of her work prior to the employment. The guard didn’t leave, nor did she use her weapon to protect the weak and dying products. That could never be forgiven.

They were in the study room, as those bastards called this place of torture. A series of terminals rose from the floor, one for each ‘student’. The kids had to absorb the information coming in the form of video lessons on the screen, which contained the best methods for torturing and incapacitating people. Where to strike to maximize suffering without completely turning a prisoner into a wordless, screaming doll. How to loosen the tongues of a group of trained soldiers by identifying the weakest links among them and gently chiseling away the will to keep their mouths shut from them by mutilating the strongest ones, those who would never talk, while offering clemency to the weak. Biology lessons to find a vulnerable point, a spine, for example, and bisect it, eliminating the opposition in an instant.

Those who failed to learn the lessons or who were simply too tired to find the correct answer among the dozens of flashing buttons in the text after hours of study served as training dummies for the rest. Most groups had no choice but to obey, and they tried to nurse their beaten friends back to health afterwards. But after the cruel torture, most would fail the next test. And the damage piled until the inevitable happened.

If Number One really was in another facility, as the whitecoats had implied before, then the catastrophe was far greater than she had imagined. This place looked identical to her own study place. How many lives have perished here? How many sites were still creating and training the products?

“Mercy? Fine, teacher,” the monster promised them.

“Run!” Kia wailed in panic, understanding the hidden meaning of her words. He tried to throw himself at Number One.

“I love you, Kia,” the soldier said, reaching for a belt from which several round shapes dangled. “You won’t torture us, creature.”

“Comradeship flourishes even among the vilest scum. How nice. Was it so impossible to treat us with kindness?” Number One asked icily.

She didn’t let them go on their terms. A claw impaled the heads of both humans, sending them together into the Great Beyond. The claw retracted, and she licked their remains off it, wondering about her choice.

Was it the right one? What if she could befriend the duo, turn enemies into allies, open their eyes to the sin their hands had committed? The monster understood that none of it would satisfy the rage burning in her heart. It throbbed in her chest, akin to a second heart, demanding a way out, an immediate vengeance, and it bothered her. Number One spoke of kindness, but did she show it to anyone after she became strong? Already she was deciding Eugenia’s fate, as if she were her slave and not a misguided girl. Was that how it had begun? Could she, too, turn into a whitecoat?

I have to hold myself to a standard so I don’t become a monster. No torturing, no killing children. No harming them either, if possible.

She picked up the laser rifle, balancing it on a claw. As big as she had become, there was no way to pull the trigger. Too bad. She disassembled the rifle, placing each element on the ground, curious about its inner workings. A beam of energy was moving from a small portable generator. Theoretically, it should have come out in a burst of light, dissipating the heat over a longer range and losing its lethality. A series of rings around the inner side of the barrel had caught their attention. The same gravity technology as the one used in the orange fiends’ armor. It squeezed the particles together, holding the bean in a tight line, ensuring a greater strike potential at close range and the ability to deliver death at a distance of no less than forty kilometers, if a scope was provided. The lack of recoil would allow for a series of pinpoint shots, each hot enough to melt a round hole in an armor plate.

How did she know? Number One dug into her own memories but found no answer. To the products, all laser rifles were existing-ending weapons. Their masters weren’t inclined to share more useful secrets with vat borns. The knowledge about the weapon came from mere observation alone, creating a perfect schematic. A change in brain had occurred. She stormed off, returning to the hunt.

“Do you taste it, my kin?” she asked. Metallic tendrils appeared from above. Needles and laser beams hit her afterimage; she herself had already jumped to the ceiling. The monster grabbed her, pulled out the entire control device, and collapsed the corridor in an avalanche of metal and stone. “Their horror. I wonder, if they are afraid of dying, why did they cultivate hatred?”

There was no answer. But she imagined thousands of small hands, clawed paws, bladed limbs, tentacles, and other appendages touching her shoulders. The souls of those who had perished in pain and despair demanded retribution. No vindication, no justification would suffice. Hatred was coming, sown by years of agony. A storm of pure fury will consume its creators. Only then can her siblings pass on to happier lives. She hoped to see them all again and apologize in person for being a coward who had tried to escape and failed to bring help.

They could see her now. The orange fiends have special lenses in their visors, or night vision, as her mind told her. She wasn’t sure how she knew it; things just sort of came clear to her now. The whitecoats witnessed two orange orbs nearing, dancing in the darkness, heard the thunder of her footsteps, and saw white steam leaving her snout.

Hatred, rage, and hope stepped into the enormous hall, condensed into a tall figure covered by the fur of the darkest void. A paw, longer than a man, slammed into the floor, growing in mass still. The reverberations resulted in pleas for mercy and offers of bargain; the tremors sent several piss-stained fools to the floor. Her eyes shone like stars, illuminating the screaming crowd and judging the assembled ranks of orange fiends preparing to face her.

Let them fear. Let them rethink all the actions that have led up to this point. Perhaps some of them will even regret treating the products so badly. Maybe they will be better people in the next life. Who cares? Their current lives belonged to her. For she was revenge incarnate.