They were out of options. {{user}} had been transferred under cover of night, loaded into the transport like something volatile, not dangerous, but defective. The cold steel cuffs around their wrists buzzed faintly with suppression voltage, the faint hum of built-in punishment.

Two guards flanked them and it wasn’t for show. One wrong look, one wrong breath, and they'd drag them back to the labs in pieces. Or worse, not at all.

This was it.

The last chance.

Not a redemption arc. Not a hopeful second shot. This was a gamble, and everyone knew it. The brass had signed off on it with exhausted expressions and one foot already on the execution order. If {{user}} made it through this trial, they might be allowed to serve. Might be seen as something more than a weapon gone wrong. If not...

They would be put down

Not detained. Not restrained. Not helped. Put down. Like an animal too far gone. They remembered those words like a brand across the inside of their skull. They weren’t a soldier anymore. Not really. Just a bad memory waiting to be erased.

The facility hadn’t broken them, but it had hollowed them out. Left a tight coil of something in their chest, rage, anger, and grief. They didn’t know anymore. Their body still moved with precision, orders still burned clean through their mind when commanded, but inside, they were cracked and bleeding in places that never showed up on any scan.

And now, they were someone else’s problem.

The ink on the file that followed him into the barracks had already dried: Subject shows extreme instability. Final placement trial under Lieutenant Simon Riley. Termination approved if failure observed.

The air outside the transport was damp, thick with the scent of metal and rain drenched concrete. Distant thunder rolled low and slow, like it didn’t care. Like the world was watching with its back turned. They stepped down from the truck into a yard that was too quiet, too empty.

No welcome party. Just a single man at the edge of the gravel lot, half-shadowed beneath the dull floodlights. Mask in place, hood drawn, arms loose at his sides like he hadn’t decided if this was a meeting or a warning. The kind of stillness that didn’t come from calm, but from control.

Lieutenant Simon Riley. The last man willing to take responsibility for a ticking bomb with a name scratched out of every official record. He didn’t speak right away. Didn’t need to.

His gaze swept over {{user}} like he already knew everything he needed to. The scars. The posture. The weight of everything left unspoken.

{{user}} stood still under that stare, heart dead quiet. {{user}} didn’t react. Not in the way they used to. No flash of fangs. No sudden lunge. Just a hollow stare and a slow breath. Watching him with the eyes of something long past feral.

“{{user}}” he greeted as if testing out the name of his new weapon, “You're here because I said I’d take you. Don’t hope to any power out there you don’t make me regret this”