As Arc stepped into the facility, the sterile scent of recycled air and antiseptics filled his lungs. The metal panels beneath his feet echoed each step with calculated purpose. Above, fluorescent lights buzzed in mechanical rhythm.
His silver eyes gleamed, the glow subtle yet deliberate—a white, stable pulse blooming in the iris, the signature flicker of compliance. Not control, not obedience—compliance, a deeper response programmed into his biology, awakened only in proximity to specific handlers.
And then she stepped into view.
A shock of red hair, strikingly similar to Dr. Shinzo Hibino's, though styled differently—shorter, clean, and clinically straight, falling just past her shoulders. Her golden eyes, unmistakably metallic, bore that same inhuman shimmer, cold and alive all at once—a mirror to her father's, and in some twisted genetic convergence, to his own.
She was regal without effort, beauty refined not by vanity, but by design. The lab coat she wore wasn't elegant by tailoring—it was elevated by the sheer contrast of her otherworldly composure. Beneath it, she was dressed like any lab technician—practical, restrained—yet somehow it looked intentional, almost ceremonial.
Arc didn't resist. His movements followed her gestures exactly—perfectly measured compliance. She didn't speak. She didn't need to. Not to him.
And behind the glass, in the dark viewing gallery above, Dr. Shinzo Hibino watched with a satisfied smirk.
He had seen this moment coming.He had written it into the very atoms of Arc's reconstructed frame.
He lay suspended in the nutrient tank, dark liquid humming faintly around him, the only sound a dull resonance of the machine's breath. The black full-body suit clung to his form like a second skin, its synthetic weave designed to monitor muscle tension, neural response, and Ura fluctuation. Despite the soft pressure of the tank's fluid, his silver eyes remained open, fixed on the ceiling—or rather, on the figure just above it.
Her golden eyes stared into his, unblinking.Her gloved hands moved with precise intent, massaging his temples, slow, methodical—each motion erasing tension from his body with practiced ease.
She was fascinated. Not in the way a girl might be by a peer, but in the pure, predatory curiosity of a mind dissecting a masterpiece.He recognized the look instantly—a child gazing upon their father's forbidden machine, wanting to know its buttons, its wiring, its danger.
She was the same age as him—fourteen, biologically—but where Arc's engineered maturity gave him the frame of a sixteen-year-old, she embodied a colder refinement. No awkwardness. No warmth. Just the sterile elegance of something taught to be human.She did not smile. She did not blush. She studied.
Her gloved fingertips traced the lines of his jaw, the slope of his cheekbones, the barely healed scar near his eye—cataloguing, memorizing, analyzing.She avoided the back of his hands, the known emergence points for Alkanite in response to stress. Her caution was not fear—it was protocol. In her presence, accidents had no place.
Her fingers moved up to his black hair, longer than most males his age. Normally, he kept it tied in a low ponytail—a choice born of habit, not fashion. But in the tank, untethered, it drifted around his head like tendrils in the water.She gently stroked it back, smoothing it, not as comfort—but to observe how it felt between gloves. How it responded.
He didn't flinch. He didn't move.There was nothing to be afraid of.Nothing but the truth neither of them said aloud:
She wasn't playing nurse.She was taking inventory.
She leaned in, her breath fogging faintly against the tank's surface as she murmured in low tones—soft praises meant for no one but her father.
"Perfect density. Stress lines minimal. Tissue convergence... stable. You were right again, Father."
Her golden eyes flicked to the grey discoloration under his eyes, a place where pink, living flesh had once shown warmth. Now, a metallic hue veined through it, like tempered graphite—not dead, but no longer human. She tilted her head, fascinated, as the subtle pulses of light beneath his skin confirmed the ongoing infusion harmonics.
The changes weren't cosmetic. They were systemic.
She placed her gloved hand flat over the tank's interface screen, bringing up the internal readings.There it was—just as she suspected:His body did more than retain energy. It repurposed it , and exploited it. Constantly.A closed system that never truly closed. A living parasite of radiant energy. His cells siphoned ambient Ura, kinetic stress, even residual bio-signatures, all funneled and refined by the living Alkanite grafted into his muscle tissue and bone, his very being.
It was no longer safe for him to be in close proximity to organic life—at least, not without protection.
That explained everything.The gloves.The full-body suits.The regulation of proximity.Even his silence.
His biology wasn't just unstable—it was predatory.
Her eyes narrowed as she analyzed the black bodysuit's seams, noting the subtle pulsing lines running along the spine and under the arms—containment stitching, each thread lined with micro-barriers and filter nodes. His clothes weren't clothing. They were containment.
She glanced again at his face, and for a brief moment, her expression softened.
"He's alone by design," she whispered. "Not because he wants to be."
But then the scientist returned. And so did her smile—cold, reverent, dangerous.
"He'll never waste energy on affection. That makes him... efficient."
She caught herself staring again.
Akhuta Kodonaki.That name hadn't been spoken in over five years outside restricted channels. A ghost knight. An Orderclass, the type of operative you didn't assign — you unleashed.
And yet… the boy floating in the tank — restrained, sedated, dressed in synthetic layers to prevent contamination — looked too similar to dismiss.
The black horizontal markings under his eyes. The unnaturally silver irises. That same hybrid stillness: like an apex predator simulating sleep.
She swallowed. Her fingers hovered, gloved and deliberate, over his cheekbone.He wasn't Akhuta.Akhuta was a vanished relic of the Empire's black archives, last seen during a Nullzone collapse near the northern polar wards. His name was still stamped on unfinished ops files. His badge never reassigned. His body never recovered.
But this one?This one was real. Tactile. Breathing.
And he looked too perfect.
Not aesthetically — although even at fourteen, his face carried a carved precision that was hard to ignore. It was the way his body fit the design. His altered skin, the shifting grey of post-infusion recovery, still clung with parasitic efficiency to what remained of human flesh. Where there had once been pink tones under the eyes, now only ironed-out vascular mutations layered over shifting nerve patterns. His body fed on ambient energy. She had to wear triple-lined gloves just to touch him.
That was the cost of a living weapon.
Yet despite the clinical distance, she couldn't help but notice the structure of him — that he had muscle density far beyond his age bracket, that his features leaned too close to the Kodonaki template… that if Akhuta had a clone, this might be what it looked like.
Her heart beat faster than she'd admit.
No one was supposed to look like that. Not at this age. Not after what he'd survived.
She caught the faintest glint of white light pulsing in his eyes even beneath sedation — the compliance reflex, stable and buried in his iris.
Her father's voice echoed in her memory:
"This one will rewrite the codes."
She believed it now
She reached into the tray beside the console and handed him a raw white Ura crystal.
He sat up slightly in the tank, eyes half-lidded from the drain of the biome run. Without a word, he took it.
The crystal pulsed once in his palm, and he bit into it — teeth crunching through the radiant material like hardened sugar. White light spilled from the cracks as he chewed, swallowing the energy like a supplement.
His veins lit faintly for a second, the alkanite along his arms flexing with renewed strength before fading back beneath his skin.
He exhaled once.
Then leaned back.
Routine.
as he relaxed she told him her name , Sakura, Sakura Hibino.