Cy-XI5: Incend | ON-HOLD ✘

Prologue

TRIGGER WARNING: This part contains mild depictions of body horror, non-consensual body modification, and lab experimentation on a human being.

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The teenager maintaining the pipes up in the tower pushed his goggles to his golden-brown hair, a smile of success amidst the cold sweat on his cheeks brightening up his face.

But it was short-lived. His eyebrows met at the center of his forehead at the soft rumbling from below. Gray smoke flared from the opened windows of the outpost, seemingly coming from the other pipes around the houses. Before anything else, a loud, deafening explosion erupted from the heart of the village.

The teenager quickly stood, leaving his tools inside and running to the tower's entrance. At the last wrong step he made, a glaring burst of flames instantly engulfed all the structures in the village. The world as he knew it spun and slowed down as he fell and lost control of his body.

All the people he knew his entire life turned to ashes in mere milliseconds: no screams, no cries, and no struggles. The very moment the flames broke out, everyone had perished without a thought, much less a chance to struggle.

His body limped as the hot, suffocating air carried him down to the ground. The flames around him weren't as potent as those that started from the center of the village, but that might be why, unlike them, he had to feel the fire seeping into his skin.

He let out a shriek as the heat of the flames slowly burned his clothes to his skin. Blood dripped from the lost skin on his legs and arms as his minimal attempt to struggle and flail his limbs failed him. He cried, his tears hissing as they fell to the ground in the same way the flames welcomed themselves to the muscles his torn skin had exposed. He huffed and tried to catch his breath, but the air had been blocked by heat and smoke.

The wooden feet of the outpost succumbed to the heat as well, and it crashed—a scream. The teenager screamed as loud as he could because it might help the pain of the fallen outpost that crushed his legs to die down. Maybe screaming and crying amidst the blurred world could reduce the splinters around his body, or fix the broken bones from the impact of the fallen tower, or erase the vivid memory of everyone he loved turning to ashes in front of his eyes.

In due time, he could no longer feel any of his limbs, and the warm blood from every part of his body only hissed. Or was it he that hissed? He couldn't tell.

He closed his eyes tightly. While the flames seemed to die, none of the pain bleeding through his entire existence did. Tears continued to rain down his cheeks as the memory of everyone flashed into his mind once more.

But as he mustered all his strength to open his eyes at the thumping echoing in his head like countless feet and wheels stomping the ground, relief washed over him. People in dark clothing with the letters 'VUI' on the back of their outfits gathered in the distance.

Even if they couldn't save the village in time, even if they were too late, they still came. VUI's agents came.

A small smile reached the teenager's tired eyes. His life-long admiration for the most advanced technology company, VUI, might just last until his consciousness fully succumbed to nothingness. The ones he had looked up to for so long rushed to their aid even though they were too late.

And he hoped he could've just died then and there with that as his final thought.

Another line of agents ran to each corner of the village, scouting the entire place for any signs of life and where the fire started.

"Sir." One agent came jogging back to where the vehicles parked. "We've confirmed the cause of the flames to be the failure of one of our own."

An agent with a different colored VUI in his outfit raised a brow. "One of our own?" He mumbled with confusion evident in his tone. "What happened?"