The hum began as a low, almost subconscious thrum, a constant vibration beneath Kiran's bones that had become as familiar as his own heartbeat. He floated in the inky black liquid, a sensory void designed to strip away all distractions, leaving only the raw, nascent power within. Dr. Koval's voice, a cool, precise whisper, echoed through the insulated chamber, amplified directly into his mind. "Conjure it, Subject 07. Focus. Bend time, or it will break you." Kiran pressed his eyes tighter, willing his latent abilities to manifest, to silence the faint tremor of fear that always accompanied these deeper experiments. Liam, Subject 12, a protective older boy who'd vanished weeks ago, had once said the hum was the facility breathing, a monstrous serpent in the dark. Kiran had believed him.
Then, the hum escalated. Not gradually, but with an abrupt, terrifying lurch, like a beast taking a sudden, gasping breath. It deepened, amplified, became a piercing shriek that vibrated not just through his bones, but through the very essence of the world around him. Lights above the observation window flickered erratically, strobing like a failing heart, before exploding in a shower of brilliant, deadly sparks. The black liquid surrounding Kiran, designed to suppress and amplify his senses in equal measure, began to churn violently, thickening, transforming. It became a viscous, abrasive black sand, grinding against his skin, pulling him down, a thousand tiny, burning needles.
Alarms blared, a discordant, guttural roar that mingled with a new, far more horrifying sound: the screams of other subjects echoing through the compound. Through the rippling distortion of the observation window, Kiran saw the girl from Unit 3, her eyes wide with uncomprehending terror. Her body, once solid, now flickered in and out of existence, a horrifying strobe light against the chaos, her screams cutting off as she vanished, only to reappear a moment later, still screaming. In Unit 8, a boy Kiran vaguely recognized shrieked as his skin rippled, shifting, one moment solid, the next dissolving into shimmering vapor, then back again, caught in a terrifying, unending phase shift. Their powers, unstable and raw, were turning against them.
Survival instinct, honed by years of relentless training and desperate clinging to life, slammed through Kiran's fear like a physical blow. He reached for it, that cold, familiar power, the ability to make the world stutter, to bend the very fabric of time. Five seconds. That's all you get. Make it count. He focused, a vein throbbing in his temple, and the world around him snapped to a halt. The churning black sand hung suspended, a frozen, jagged tide. The alarms became a silent, deafening hum. The screaming faces of the other subjects were distorted, agonized masks of silence. Kiran strained, the cost already a dull throb behind his eyes, and pushed off the solidifying wall of sand. His gaze darted, scanning for any weakness in the crumbling structure. He spotted a hairline fracture, barely visible, in the reinforced observation glass.
With a guttural cry that echoed only in his own frozen perception of time, he slammed his fist into it, every ounce of his adrenaline-fueled strength behind the blow. The impact reverberated through his bone-deep exhaustion. The glass shattered, not into sharp shards, but dissolving into more of the sinister black grit, a substance that seemed to consume everything. Through the widening gap, he glimpsed Dr. Rhea Koval, his handler. She wasn't fleeing in panic. She was deliberately, methodically smashing a control console, circuits sparking and dying in gruesome farewells. Then, with a speed that belied her usually composed demeanor, she snatched a small, armored data-drive from a hidden compartment within the console, her eyes, usually cold and assessing, meeting his for a fraction of a second – a flicker of something he couldn't decipher, a fleeting emotion that was gone before he could name it – before she vanished into a collapsing service tunnel. On the shattered remnants of the console, a faint, newly etched symbol pulsed with a sickly green light before fading into nothing: a stylized, three-pronged mark, vaguely reminiscent of a claw or a broken star. The mark of the "Zero Cabal," though Kiran wouldn't know its name until much, much later. He threw himself through the opening just as the entire section of the facility gave way, tumbling into the torrential rain of the outside world, the black sand already solidifying into unnatural, shifting dunes behind him, swallowing the monstrous structure whole, as if it had never existed. He landed hard, the cold rain a shock against his skin, and gasped, pulling air into lungs that felt burned raw. The hum was gone, replaced by the relentless drumming of the rain and the frantic beat of his own heart. He was free, but the chilling memory of the black sand, and the unreadable look in Dr. Koval's eyes, would forever be etched into his soul.