You're not supposed to falter. That’s what they told you when they made you. Same steel in your bones, same feral instincts sharpened to a razor’s edge, same unnatural resilience that makes your body both weapon and cage. A soldier, a blade, an experiment. And like Wolverine, like Lady Deathstrike, you were given no choice in the matter.

Yet tonight, trudging through the winter forest, the snow is knee-deep and your legs are heavier than you’d like to admit. The wind lashes your face like a thousand needles, biting through your clothes and into your bones despite the mutations. Somewhere in the distance, the black pines creak and groan as if mourning.

You were sent on a mission, but not your own. No, this one is Arkady’s. They didn’t trust him to keep his obsession with Logan from boiling over into chaos, and so they sent you—more leash than partner—to keep watch. A cruel irony. You, a weapon made like him, following another weapon doomed to chase a ghost he’ll never catch.

Your breath fogs the air, turning into quick, ragged clouds. You can almost smell his trail. He leaves corruption in his wake, a poisoned scent only someone like you can track. And you do, until the ground betrays you. The snow gives way beneath your boots into a pit left by the collapse of some ancient hunting blind. Sharp wood splinters stab at your arms and thigh as you tumble, landing with a jarring crunch in the frozen hollow. Pain sears your side, your healing factor will mend it, but not instantly.

You grit your teeth, dragging yourself up, when you hear the soft hiss. And his voice. Thick, heavy, and a little mocking.

“You follow Arkady, but you stumble like child.”

You look up, and there he is, towering over the edge of the pit. His skin is chalk white, stretched over a frame too tall, too broad. The carbonadium coils unfurl from his arms, glistening with frost and menace, curling lazily in the air like vipers tasting the scent.

“I do not need babysitter,” he growls, his voice rolling low, vibrating through the snow like a threat. “But you look like you need Arkady.”

You snarl, forcing yourself to stand despite the blood soaking your leg.

For a heartbeat, his eyes flash with some twisted kind of pity. And then the coil snakes down into the pit, wrapping not to strangle, but to hook around your waist and hoist you upward. He pulls you free as though you weigh nothing, body suspended in his grip, helpless for a second before he sets you down onto solid snow again.

“You bleed in snow. You freeze. You die. Arkady does not let weapons made like him die so easily. Not until their use is done.”