Chương 33: 32: The Twelve Prototypes

The frozen proving grounds stretched beyond every horizon, an endless continent of fractured glaciers, jagged peaks, and blue-white ice beneath a pale northern sun. Gale-force winds screamed across the ice, driving razor-thin snow through air cold enough to kill within minutes. The landscape should have been lifeless. Instead, it was alive. High overhead, twelve figures tore through the sky like artillery shells. BOOOOOM!

One punched through an ice mountain without slowing, erupting from the far side in a spray of crystal and snow. Another skimmed a frozen valley, fingertips throwing up twin walls of powder. Cliffs lay carved smooth by impacts that would have erased mountains elsewhere. Here, they were merely training scars. Anti-gravitic observation platforms floated overhead.

Behind reinforced glass, scientists, engineers, physicians, and military analysts monitored holographic telemetry while drones tracked every heartbeat, muscle contraction, and microscopic fluctuation. Prototype Program. Conflict Drop Trial 01. The twelve volunteers represented the best of the New Zealand Faction. Some had been Stepper trainees with only months of combat instruction, others had spent years as engineers, analysts, physicians, or instructors, never expecting to become test subjects themselves.

All had willingly accepted administration of the experimental Conflict Drop serum, surrendering their former roles for the chance to become humanity's next generation of super-soldiers.

"Cellular degradation holding at point-zero-three percent."

"Regeneration continuing."

"No structural fatigue." One scientist adjusted his spectacles.

"The serum continues exceeding projections." Another watched a display of living tissue where millions of cells devoured one another in controlled waves.

"Conflict Drop forces every cell to attack itself. They destroy themselves, regenerate stronger, then repeat until there's nothing left to improve." Nearby, a technician nodded at another screen.

"Simulation uploads complete." Brain scans glowed as lifetimes of flight, combat, spatial awareness, and battlefield instincts integrated seamlessly into every nervous system. They hadn't gained memories, only mastery. None had ever learned to fly, yet all moved like veterans. Outside, the prototypes laughed. Their uniforms were simple.

Matte charcoal compression suits traced with cobalt-and-silver hexagonal threading monitored their bodies, while white tracking stripes allowed observers to follow them at hypersonic speed. Reinforced magnetic boots locked onto metallic surfaces, and short sleeveless white mantles snapped behind them in flight. Black serial numbers across their backs were the only markings. They weren't soldiers. They were prototypes.

"Race you!" Prototype Nine shot skyward. Victor Hale was broad-shouldered, bronze-skinned, painfully handsome, with short black curls and effortless confidence. Less than a tenth of a second later... BOOOOOM! He crashed back into the glacier, shattering the ice beneath his boots.

"The sun's still hot. Little cooler today, though." Prototype Three sighed. Naomi Eze was lean, dark-skinned, with a shaved head except for a single braid, shaved eyebrows, and calm amber eyes.

"You timed that?"

"Ninety-six milliseconds."

"Liar."

"Ninety-seven." Nearby, Prototype Eleven balanced six glacier-sized boulders overhead. Mateo Ruiz had a crooked nose, uneven teeth, and permanently unruly brown hair.

"One..." The boulders spun.

"Two..." They blurred.

"Three..." Scientists scribbled furiously.

"Coordination unaffected under extreme mass load." Prototype Eight landed beside him. Cass Vega looked almost ordinary, with average height, average features, and a brown ponytail, except for liberty spikes at the front of her hair and brilliant gold eyes.

"No hands." Mateo shrugged. The boulders kept orbiting through perfectly timed bursts of flight. Pens moved even faster. Across the valley, Prototype Two hung upside down beneath a neutron-matter dumbbell no larger than a basketball yet carrying the mass of a mountain. Linh Dao was petite, with short black hair, sharp green eyes, three freckles beneath her left eye, and a hooked nose.

"Three hundred ninety-eight..."

"Three hundred ninety-nine..."

"Four hundred." The reinforced supports groaned.

"She keeps getting stronger," an engineer muttered.

"She shouldn't."

"Yet she is." Prototype Five burst into laughter. Miriam Holt's dark skin was dusted with freckles and broken by soft patches of vitiligo across her jaw, neck, and hands. Thin eyebrows framed warm honey-brown eyes that sparkled with mischief, and every grin seemed just a little too infectious.

"I could throw this thing into orbit!" Linh shrugged.

"Do it." She did. The neutron-matter dumbbell shot into the sky so quickly it became a distant speck, and every telescope on the continent swung upward to follow its ascent. One engineer pinched the bridge of his nose.

"…We'll retrieve that later." Farther across the range, Prototype One flew straight into an ice mountain. Elias Mercer, with silver eyes, shoulder-length black hair, and impossibly handsome features, simply stopped inside the glacier. Folding his arms, he leaned against the ancient ice.

"Nice."

"So peaceful." Cracks spread through the mountain before the glacier collapsed into a roaring avalanche. Elias stepped from the snow, stretching.

"Needed that." Prototype Six snorted and tried the same thing. Gideon Marsh was tall and painfully thin, with shoulder-length blond hair, oversized ears, a pronounced chin, crooked teeth, and a hopeless bowl cut. CRAAASH! Almost a minute later, his head slowly emerged from the ice.

"I meant to do that." Nobody believed him. A scientist sighed, updating his report.

"Prototype Six continues demonstrating extraordinary durability despite... everything." If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Nearby, Cass floated upside down with her hands behind her head.

"So... what're you lot doing after this?"

"Buying an island," Victor said.

"With what money?" Miriam asked. Victor's grin faded.

"…Good point."

"I'd like to fly somewhere nobody can tell me what to do," Naomi said.

"I just wanna see Jupiter," Mateo replied.

"You know we'd suffocate."

"We can survive the sun." Naomi nodded.

"Also fair." Freya Holm rested a neutron-matter weight on one shoulder. Pale, with half her head shaved and long icy-blond braids over the other, she gazed toward the horizon.

"I'd like to visit my grandmother." The group fell silent.

"She still thinks I work in logistics." Linh drifted upside down beside them.

"I wonder if airplanes are fun anymore."

"We'd accidentally win," Mateo laughed.

"True." Their conversation drifted from dreams to jokes to plans. They sounded less like living weapons than young adults who had discovered gravity was optional. An observation platform descended.

"Weapon Trial Seven." The announcement echoed across the frozen wasteland. Every prototype turned. Beneath the ice, a massive rail platform unfolded as hydraulics screamed and an enormous cannon rose into view. Engineers hurried into reinforced bunkers.

"Prototype Four." Selene Armitage stepped forward. She wore a short, curly black pixie cut that framed a face marked by a thin scar crossing her upper lip. Calm gray eyes regarded the colossal weapon without the slightest hint of concern.

"Ready."

"Impact test." KSHOOOM! A tungsten penetrator slammed into her chest. The explosion erased half a mountain, blasting snow into the stratosphere. When the whiteout settled, she was still standing. Her uniform smoked gently.

"…Rude." The scientists barely reacted.

"Increase yield." Another weapons platform rotated into position, carrying an experimental plasma accelerator.

"Fire." A river of blue-white plasma engulfed Prototype Four. The glacier beneath her feet vaporized, clouds boiled overhead, and temperature sensors overloaded almost instantly. When the beam ceased, she yawned.

"It's warm." Victor called from high above.

"Told you the sun's better!" Several prototypes laughed.

"Next test." A reinforced containment sphere, nearly thirty feet across, rolled onto the ice. Something roared inside. The sound alone shook the glacier, sending fractures racing for miles. Thick armor plating bulged outward as six massive limbs hammered against the walls hard enough to leave deep dents in alloy built to contain orbital weapons.

"Previous containment attempts?"

"Twenty-three failures."

"Personnel?"

"Classified." One engineer swallowed.

"Release Subject Delta." Hydraulic locks disengaged. The sphere burst open.... Subject Delta crashed onto the glacier with a shockwave that brought down an ice mountain. Its roar knocked observation drones from the sky, and as it turned, one idle sweep of its claws cleaved an entire glacier in half. The creature stood over twenty feet tall on six muscular limbs wrapped in black, chitin-like armor.

A long, whip-like tail shattered boulders with casual sweeps, while four amber-gold eyes tracked movement independently. Its head split open into concentric rings lined with hundreds of ivory teeth, revealing a throat that burned with an eerie electric violet glow. It lunged. The glacier behind it detonated from the force alone.

"The creature had already exterminated three experimental divisions before they managed to cage it." Earlier trials had recorded it tearing through reinforced bunkers, ripping armored transports apart, and carving straight through solid mountains with its claws. Conventional artillery had failed to slow it. Missile batteries had only made it angry. Prototype Six pointed at himself.

"…Mine?" The scientist nodded.

"Yours." Delta struck with enough force to flatten a fortress. Gideon caught it by the face. CRACK. Its charge stopped instantly. The monster's armored skull collapsed beneath his fingers like wet paper. The shockwave flattened the surrounding snowfield before Gideon casually slammed the corpse into the glacier, burying it hundreds of feet beneath the ice. Silence settled across the valley.

"… Neat." Across every observation platform, pens flew over notepads. Conflict Drop remained stable. Psychological cohesion showed no deterioration. Adaptive growth continued, and combat instincts remained exceptional despite none of the subjects having experienced real combat before today. Behind armored glass, holographic graphs climbed relentlessly. Power output, reaction speed, cell density, neural efficiency, thermal resistance, gravitational tolerance, and recovery rates all continued rising.

Every graph looked wrong. Biology simply wasn't supposed to do this. An elderly scientist watched one prototype punch through three mountains in rapid succession while another returned from the edge of space, frost steaming from his shoulders as he landed effortlessly on the glacier.

"They're remarkable." His colleague slowly shook his head.

"No."

"They're unfinished." The old man smiled as another sonic boom rolled across the frozen continent.

"And that's the remarkable part." Two distant streaks tore back through the atmosphere, twin sonic booms rolling across the frozen continent before they landed hard enough to crack the glacier. Prototype Ten dusted frost from his shoulders with a grin. Atlas Okoye looked carved from granite, towering over everyone with a broad, immensely muscular frame.

A rugged jaw sat beneath a short beard streaked with white, a jagged scar cut from his right temple into his hairline, and his once-broken nose contrasted with relaxed amber eyes.

"Mars has terrible gym equipment." Prototype Twelve rolled her eyes. Yuna Akiyama looked almost delicate beside him, petite and slender with pale skin, softly slanted violet eyes, and shoulder-length cyan hair with matching dyed eyebrows. A beauty mark rested beneath her right eye, while a tiny gap between her front teeth appeared whenever she smiled.

"You broke half of it." Atlas shrugged.

"Not my fault the moons were lighter than I expected." Yuna nodded toward the stunned scientists.

"We were bench-pressing them over Mars." Silence settled across every observation platform. One scientist slowly lowered his tablet.

"…You were what?" Atlas frowned.

"What?"

"You told us to keep training." Silence lingered. Then every pen on every observation platform began moving again. No alarms had sounded. No limits had been reached. Every experiment, every weapon, every simulation had arrived at the same conclusion. They still hadn't found the limits. Only more mountains waiting to be broken in search of them. — Snow whipped across the observation platforms bolted directly into the mountainside.

The cold kept equipment cool, while the visibility allowed scientists to observe every trial without relying solely on drones. Thick heated walkways crissrossed the platforms as holographic displays floated above waist-high consoles, protected by invisible fields that kept snow from settling on their surfaces. Researchers stood bundled in heavy white thermal coats over laboratory uniforms, steaming mugs of coffee forgotten beside tablets as gale-force winds tugged constantly at their clothing.

Below them, the proving grounds continued erupting with impossible displays of strength. Prototype Three punched through another glacier. Prototype Two disappeared into orbit. Prototype Nine continued shoulder-pressing stabilized neutron weights. No one even looked anymore. They'd become accustomed to impossible. Dr. Adrian Matthias folded his arms, watching telemetry update across a hovering display.

"Conflict Drop remains stable." Dr. Mireille Vos glanced toward the flying soldiers.

"Twenty-six days."

"What?"

"Twenty-six days to create twelve soldiers capable of replacing entire battalions." The words lingered in the frozen air until one engineer quietly voiced what nearly everyone had begun thinking.

"…Apis is getting old." Several heads turned. Dr. Henrik Stahl nodded slowly.

"It served its purpose."

"But?"

"Technology moves." His gloved hand swept across the frozen proving grounds.

"Apis was revolutionary. Conflict Drop is newer. Cleaner. Cheaper." Another scientist adjusted the scarf around his neck.

"Magpie serum still has advantages."

"For now," Henrik replied. He watched Victor Hale dive into the horizon before reappearing less than a heartbeat later.

"Our investors didn't fund this because they love Apis. They funded it because they want whatever comes after Apis." Quiet chuckles spread across the platform. Everyone understood investors. Loyalty only lasted until something better appeared. Dr. Mireille looked back toward the prototypes.

"If scaling works..."

"…we slowly replace Apis divisions." Henrik nodded.

"Not overnight. Conflict Drop handles conventional deployment. Apis becomes specialized. Eventually..." He shrugged.

"…obsolete." One younger researcher frowned.

"…Commander Zeinai won't like that." Henrik barely looked at him.

"He doesn't have to like it. It just has to be better. He likes results. We give him that." A sonic boom rolled across the mountains as Cass Vega laughed her way through three ice peaks. Henrik pointed.

"Those... are results." He turned toward the engineers farther down the platform.

"Continue stress testing." Technicians acknowledged immediately.

"Anesthetic bombardment." Launchers hidden beneath the snow unfolded. THUNK. THUNK. THUNK. Dozens of capsules arced overhead before bursting across the proving grounds, releasing dense white clouds. Prototype Eight sniffed once.

"…Mint." Victor inhaled dramatically.

"I've smelled worse." Nobody slowed down. The monitors updated.

"No respiratory suppression."

"No neurological response."

"No muscular inhibition." Henrik didn't blink.

"Escalate." The next volley carried experimental sedatives, military paralytics, designer neurotoxins, and reality-disruptive aerosols. Again... Nothing. Roman Volkov scratched his beard.

"I think they're poisoning us again." Freya glanced up.

"They're persistent." Cass waved cheerfully toward the observation platform.

"Morning!" One embarrassed engineer slowly lowered his binoculars.

"… Continue." Electromagnetic pulses. Localized gravity wells. Microwave arrays. Sonic resonance weapons. Every non-lethal prototype the Antarctic Branch possessed. Every result returned the same conclusion. Negligible effect. Pens scratched furiously despite thick gloves making writing awkward. Nearby, another group of researchers gathered around a floating hologram. Dr. Alistair Voss pushed his dark-rimmed glasses farther up his nose. His black hair remained perfectly slicked back despite the relentless wind.

Watching the prototypes with quiet satisfaction, he murmured, "… I'll surpass her." A nearby scientist glanced sideways.

"Pardon?"

"Dr. Isolde." Alistair smiled.

"I'll surpass her." Several exchanged uncomfortable looks. Dr. Rowan Pierce exhaled slowly, white breath disappearing into the frozen air.

"That's nearly impossible. She was an outlier. There are still arguments over whether she was ever truly human. As a teenager, she accomplished what entire scientific teams couldn't in decades."

"She also lost," Alistair replied without hesitation.

"I won't." Rowan looked back toward the mountains.

"She survived longer than anyone expected. She built half the systems we're still using."

"She also couldn't stop Lucien." Alistair laughed. A short, dismissive sound.

"Oh, not this again. No one can stop Lucien." Several scientists looked away. They'd had this conversation before.

"You people talk about Lucien like he's folklore."

"Because he is."

"No. He's a story. A convenient excuse." Alistair folded his arms.

"One catastrophic containment failure. One destroyed research branch. Then suddenly..." He raised two fingers in exaggerated quotation marks.

"'Lucien did it.'" A couple of younger researchers laughed nervously. Rowan didn't.

"I knew people stationed there."

"So?"

"They all described the same man."

"They could've shared stories."

"They couldn't."

"Why not?"

"Interviewed separately. Months apart. Different facilities. No communication." Alistair shrugged.

"Coincidence."

"The same eyes."

"Coincidence."

"The same suit."

"Coincidence."

"The same voice."

"Coincidence."

"The same warning." Alistair raised an eyebrow.

"What warning?" Rowan looked toward the frozen horizon where twelve white contrails crisscrossed the sky.

"They all remembered one sentence." The wind howled between them.

"…Run." Silence settled over the platform as snow drifted between their boots. Alistair adjusted his glasses again.

"…Or maybe Isolde destroyed her own faction. She was ambitious enough. She had access. She had motive. People don't like admitting geniuses can fail, so they invent monsters." Nobody answered immediately. Finally, Henrik watched Prototype Two return from another orbital sprint, telemetry continuing to climb across every display.

"I don't particularly care whether Lucien exists," he said quietly.

"But if he does..." His gaze settled on the Conflict Drop soldiers carving brilliant arcs through the frozen mountains.

"…I'd rather these be finished before he visits us." Another scientist cracked his knuckles with a grin.

"Fuck Lucien. I'd love to have a talk with him." Several burst into laughter, shaking their heads.

"One conversation," someone muttered, "then we'd be writing your obituary."