Chapter 8: Belief in a New God

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"This is my family. I found it all on my own. It's a little broken but still good."
—Stitch, (Lilo and Stitch)

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<(Omniscient POV)>

"Come on, eat my darn claws if you want more of me. You all are like cockroaches, no matter how many I kill, you just don't seem to end." A girl in her late teens cursed as she thrust her clawed knuckles into the throat of a fur-covered humanoid creature and tore it apart, immediately killing the critter.

There were still scores of the same creature still following her. They all looked mostly similar to each other with sharp ears, wolfish faces, huge claws, and furry bodies. None of them tried to converse with her, all they did was try to attack and kill her. These wolfish creatures had been stalking her for a long time now, ever since she had escaped from her previous place of confinement but it was only until recently that they had begun to actually act.

The girl was none other than Laura Kinney previously named X-23 by the Facility, a secretive criminal organization that had made her artificially as a clone in one of their laboratories using Wolverine's DNA. She was made as a potential weapon by the organization to be used at their discretion, something similar to the Weapon Plus program. She was supposed to be brainwashed from her childhood to be their loyal tool but fortunately for her, her kind surrogate mother who was also the chief researcher of the cloning program had tried to provide her with the kindness and the familial affection that she desired and very much needed.

Dr. Sarah Kinney was the one who gave Laura her current name instead of calling her X-23 like some company product. She was one of the few reasons Laura could differentiate good from evil in her initial days. But her good old days ended once the man in charge of the program found out about their mother-daughter relationship. Her mother was restricted from ever meeting her again and it was decided that Laura would be trained in the cruelest of ways to make her the best weapon for the Facility, one that would never be limited by trivial stuff like kindness or mercy.

Laura had thought this to be the end of her joys and the relationship that she had built with her mother. But she didn't resist because she knew that if she did, her mother could be the one getting hurt because of her. She would have done anything for the facility just to ensure her mother's survival even if it was to kill others. And she would not blame anyone else for her own situation but fate itself. It was perhaps her destiny to be someone else's pet.

But only a month after her harsh training to be the perfect weapon started, the people in the Facility became afraid and less active for some reason. Not only their regular activities, their scale of projects, and their members, but even her training under them, everything decreased steadily like the organization was itself declining steadily for some reason but Laura could never understand why. Not until that day, when she met them, her rescuers, the acolytes of her god. They were his servants sent to her by him to rescue her and her mother. They were the divine help that she and her mother were praying for all those years. It had arrived a little late but arrived nonetheless.

After she along with her mother, all the other children and prisoners were rescued, her God took them all in, fed them, and took care of them. He kept all of them safe and even trained them how to use their powers. He even introduced her to her biological father, another guy who worked with her father in a school, Wolverine. After the guy heard about a potential daughter, he had been trying his best to be a responsible father ever since she met the guy. For the last few years, Laura couldn't even remember the last time she was actually unhappy after she was rescued. It almost seemed like she got everything she wished for served on a golden plate. That was enough of a reason for both Laura and her mother Sarah to trust the god of metahumans and work for him.

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