1

The monster laughed as if he was happy and ran to welcome his enemy with open arms. With all his arms.

Sylvester didn't reciprocate nor did he utter the slightest sound. If he had the oxygen for that, he should focus it on the attack. He intended to end it all in this clash. He wasn't going to let it drag on a second longer.

Overclocking.

It was a state that affected the entire system called his body. If he was careless, all his components could burn out and be rendered useless. But he didn't need much time. In the millisecond before the clash, his sword flowed like water countless times.

He cut the arms trying to reach him. He cut even the black lines that grotesquely traced the creature's face as it laughed and laughed. He saw pieces of bone fly like debris. They would all eventually fall, but some were even thrown upward by the force of his sword.

He used one of those pieces of debris to leap at the creature again, attacking it from the side this time.

Sylvester let out a grunt of pain. His arms were already burning, but he couldn't stop so soon.

A single spinning attack was enough to snap the creature that was all spine in half. He heard his own bones break as well. He was approaching the breaking point of the entire system. He knew it, but still he didn't think for a second about backing out just yet.

He landed on the top half of the spine, the one that hadn't fallen to the ground, that is, and started running upwards. Toward the head.

As he did so, gray arms brushed his ankles as he passed. He never gave them enough time to squeeze, though.

The end of the road.

Sylvester leapt upward and landed on that creature's head, pushing the sword inward with both hands and the full weight of his body. That creature's "skull" was filled with cracks. Its body too.

It was about to fucking explode.

Literally and figuratively, but he knew which of the two was more important to him.

Andrew and his work were making him furious. They churned his guts. Even though it had been the right thing to do, a considerable part of him regretted killing him so quickly.

He deserved to suffer.

As he had said before executing the coup de grace, he had tasted only a fraction of the fear and pain of his victims. It was not nearly enough. It couldn't be said that he had done justice.

But he would put an end to this nightmare.

Sylvester exerted more force and completed the final attack.

The cracks spread until they disappeared with a bang. The enemy had reached the breaking point before him. That was what mattered, in the end. Not how you were at the end, but being the last one standing.

He was great at that.

He landed a few seconds before the creature's massive body, joining the half he'd cut off to begin with, shaking the ground and kicking up dust. He wasn't touched by it. It didn't even land very close.

And he...

He had at least four broken ribs. His katana fell to the ground because his arms were even worse, they felt like the limbs of some straw doll, he couldn't put even a little strength into them.

He had overdone it and this was the result. But he could climb out of the hole he had dug himself. Fortunately, he only needed his mind to manipulate the display of his stats and distribute the points.

Health: 14 > 15

His regeneration accelerated considerably. The pain of his bones recovering at that speed was far worse than what he had gone through so far. His mind went blank.

Before he knew it he was on the ground. He must have lost strength in his legs as well.

The good thing about it being such an extreme regeneration was that it was over quickly. Sylvester took a deep breath. He didn't know why, but when he upgraded his health he not only increased his health bar, but it filled up all over again.

For that reason he always kept at least one skill point undistributed, for emergencies.

This shouldn't have been an emergency no matter how he looked at it. It was a low level creature that he should have been able to take care of easier and faster.... But he had gone too far, so that was the way things were. He would be more careful from now on.

The case was getting to him emotionally.

He had to be more careful before he made a mistake he couldn't fix. Without more experience points, he lacked that safety net. Counting on gaining enough experience to have one more point to invest in his skills was unreliable, to say the least.

He bent down to pick up his katana. He turned his back on the defeated abomination and walked out of there, he had a lot of ground to cover, even without counting the ground he had to make up, boy oh boy.

He walked out of there trying not to think too much about that thing still being there, not dissolving into the energy that had created it like all the Lunar Remnants.

Without transforming into butterflies that would fly to the moon, looking for the way home.

Trying not to think about the fact that this was, without a doubt, an abomination created by human hands.

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So, it meant that what he had just killed had to be…

2

Cynthia walked through the facility with revolvers raised, ready to stop anyone who got in her way. As she had promised herself, she hadn't turned around to look around once.

She only did so when she heard a loud bang behind her, and that wasn't breaking the promise.

She obviously had to pay attention to threats, she just hadn't wanted to look for a very specific reason.

And there it was, in front of her.

Alive, albeit barely.

Standing, albeit with help from the wall. That had been the blow. His fist hitting the wall. Ryan was breathing heavily on shaky legs, and it gave the feeling that a breeze a little too strong might knock him down.

But he'd made it this far. No choice but to admit it.

He may have been human trash, but he possessed great willpower.

"I'm... not finished yet."

"I can see that. Imagine how many kids wished the people you served were finished."

"I only worked for Andrew for a little over six months."

"Look, the boss seems to want to give you the benefit of the doubt for whatever reason. I don't know. Maybe he's getting old, softening up. But don't give me that shit. You could have known about this long before we threw the evidence in your face. But you looked the other way, because it was easier, because you were getting paid."

Ryan was silent, completely speechless. That was saying enough. She supposed he wasn't a complete piece of shit, since he could at least acknowledge that he had no right or means to defend himself. That it was the truth, period.

Cynthia turned her back on him. In that state, even if he attacked her from behind she'd be rid of him before he could blink.

"So come on. Crawl forward until you drop dead, you disgusting piece of shit."

3

The thoughts dancing through his head were terrible enough.

Then Sylvester came to a room full of cages. All of them empty... and too small. No adults would fit in there, dogs and cats would, but they'd be cramped anyway.

And children.

He could feel the mask of professionalism he was trying so hard to maintain slipping from his face, again. He gritted his teeth as if to keep everything in place and walked over to one of the cages. In front of it, he crouched down.

He peered through the bars as if looking for something, even though there was evidently nothing there.

After a while, more time wasted, he jumped up. He grabbed the cage, lifted it and threw it against a wall.

Nothing happened, of course.

He hadn't expected anything to happen either. He just...

"They were kids. They were just kids, for fuck's sake."

He needed to kill someone.

He needed to get even or he was gonna go crazy.

"Where the fuck are you? Let's get this over with!"

There was a camera circling overhead, in the corner of the room, probably others less obvious as well. There was someone watching their every move. Dozens of people, considering the size of this operation.

But there was no response.

Nor had he expected it.

Sylvester continued at last to run through the facility, thirsting for blood.

Each room revealed new horrors, traces of the tragedies that had befallen this hellish place, some of them, no doubt, painfully recent. Hours or days.

If only they had been better, if only they had come faster....

There was no use thinking about what might have been. What was would always be. He couldn't turn back the clock.

He didn't know how many rooms he had left behind.

In any case, he'd finally met someone else. Only that wasn't the right word, of course. They were monsters in white coats, running too.

Running away from him.

He gritted his teeth. Thought they could do this and then escape the consequences, huh? And why shouldn't they believe it? The fact was, they'd been escaping for far too long.

But no more, not another second, damn it.

Sylvester jumped.

Like a cannonball, he struck and smashed through the glass. The screams of those human-shaped creatures were almost shriller than the glass shattering. He landed among them and his sword flew.

It was the first thing to fly, followed by arms and legs. He tried to avoid bathing in their blood, however. Even a single drop of blood from those abominations touching him would be disgusting, it would churn his guts.

He couldn't tolerate existing in the same world as things like these and the fact that he breathed the same oxygen as them.

They were normal human beings, if only physically. Without weapons, without too many cybernetic enhancements, it was almost as easy as cutting paper.

He had the opportunity to make these guys suffer, who were just as responsible as Andrew. Or even worse. That man had set things in motion, but these guys, the workers, were what kept the operation running. The ones who made sure the atrocities were carried out day in and day out. Whereas to Andrew they were just statistics, successes and failures, related to his vague plans.

Yes.

Well, one way or another...

One way or another he found himself unable to contain himself. He was finishing them off too quickly.

He kicked one of the scientists, sending him flying spinning into a wall. The force of the impact was strong enough that he doubled over and vomited. There was blood there too.

He jumped on top of that guy before he could recover, get back on his feet and split him in half with his katana.

Cleanly and decisively. His insides slid out like the stuffing of a straw doll as his two halves fell to the ground.

He felt dirty. He felt dirty in too many ways. He couldn't wait to put an end to this for real.

Sylvester swung the sword. A head rolled down, leaving a thick trail of blood. There wasn't a wasted move. Every attack was effective. It was, naturally, as if they had fallen into a lion's cage, they could do nothing but be torn apart.

But it wasn't satisfying at all. It was too late for that.

He knew that whatever team they had sent probably wouldn't have been able to overcome the Lunar Remnant that had attacked the plane.

But still, he wished they had sent anyone else here.

He wished he was home now, trying to put all this shit behind him.

Sylvester punched another in the chest. His fist went clean through him, his fingers almost grazing his heart. But what he intended wasn't to rip it out and show it to him while it was still beating in the last seconds of his life. Nothing so macabre as that. Instead...

It exploded.

The energy released created thousands of thorns that quickly spread down the hallway, digging into many of the survivors and growing even faster, tearing their insides apart.

A quick death, but a very painful one.

He turned around quickly.

Nimble as a panther, he lunged at the last one remaining. He couldn't add on his feet as he was lying on the ground like the trash bag he was.

His right arm disappeared up to his elbow.

The hallway was filled with screams again.

They weren't the only sounds, unfortunately, though it took him a while to realize it from those screams. Cages considerably larger than the ones he had seen in that room opened and many more, too many.

They opened and let in organic abominations.

For example, there was some kind of huge caterpillar. Its face was humanoid, but it had no eyes or ears. However, it was obvious that it saw in some other way, it crawled with purpose. The slime it left behind wasn't slime at all, but some kind of poison or acid. They were already making a dent in the ground as it passed.

For example, if he had to name it, there was also a giant bat with a maw as big as a car wide open. But not on the head, on the chest.

No organs were visible inside, only the darkness of its maw. The wings appeared to be vestigial. It was unable to fly. It tried and barely rose a few feet before it fell back to the ground. Too heavy, too wrong. Twisted.

All sorts of horrors created by human hands.

With...

He felt like throwing up.

"Why do you look pleased? Those poor creatures can't stop me. And even if they could, you're not getting out of here. Not with how much you're bleeding. You're going to die..." Sylvester stopped suddenly, "You're going to die exactly the way you deserve to die."

Sylvester grabbed the last surviving scientist in the corridor by the neck and dragged him to the edge.

Now he was screaming even louder. But it had nothing to do with pain.

"May you eat well."

"Please, I'll tell you anything you want, I'll give you…"

Without listening, Sylvester threw some food into the children's cage.