Suguru hurtled through the facility’s corridors, his pace frantic, erratic, his breath coming too fast. He barreled past workers who flattened themselves against the walls, their startled protests drowned out by the soft, broken laughter slipping from his own throat. The fluorescent lights overhead burned white and merciless, strobing against his vision, but he welcomed the pain. It kept him awake. It kept him hungry.

3 a.m. The hour when boundaries thinned. When the world forgot what it was supposed to be.

He burst into the laboratory, palms slamming against cold steel. “Where?” he demanded, voice shaking with barely leashed delight. “Where is she?” The word left his mouth like a prayer—and a confession. His grin twitched wider than it should have, teeth bared as though he were already mirroring her.

They pointed him toward Containment Unit A.

The biggest. Reinforced three times. Built after the first two failed.

A breathless sound escaped him. Of course. Beauty like that needed room. Wings—vast ones, rumored to blot out moonlight. They said she was magnificent, terrible in the same breath: bone-white horns curling from her skull like a crown, fangs long enough to split a man’s throat with a careless kiss. Suguru had read the reports until the words blurred, tracing every grainy image with reverent fingers, memorizing descriptions written by men who had wept as they typed.

“Boss… please,” his assistant called after him, voice cracking. “She leveled half the forest when we tried to bring her in.”

Suguru laughed softly. Not in mockery—no, in awe. “Did she?” he murmured, swallowing hard as heat coiled low in his gut. As she should have.

The corridor darkened as he advanced, the lights thinning until shadows swallowed the walls whole. When the reinforced door slid shut behind him, the sound rang like a coffin sealing. His pulse thundered, not with fear, but with anticipation so sharp it made his hands tremble.

He stepped into the forest biome of Containment Unit A.

The air was heavy, humid, alive. Trees lay splintered and clawed, bark shredded by something powerful enough to tear through steel restraints. Deep gouges scored the earth—talon marks, unmistakable.

Suguru’s breath stuttered. His eyes darted hungrily through the shadows, searching for movement, for wings unfolding, for the glint of fangs behind a beautiful, impossible smile. They said she was radiant—devastatingly so. That men froze not from fear alone, but because some part of them wanted to kneel.

Somewhere in the darkness, something exhaled.

Suguru’s grin spread, unhinged and breathless. “I’m here,” he whispered, voice trembling with devotion. “You can come out now.”