Finally, he had found TRASK Industries’ last functioning facility.
The men were easy. Weapons failed in their hands, mechanisms locked, systems collapsed. They were obstacles, nothing more.
The facility itself was harder.
He tore through it anyway — composite doors splintering, ceramic-reinforced walls cracking under pressure, synthetic locks turning to dust. The deeper he went, the more intentional the design became: layered polymers, adaptive ceramics, materials that didn’t respond to him at all. Whoever built this had studied him.
Good. They should have feared him.
Alarms rose through the structure, low at first, then screaming as deeper systems activated. Power shifted below, defensive protocols unfolding like something waking up.
He descended.
At the lowest level waited a containment chamber — no seams, no windows, a seamless composite vault that felt like a dead zone in his awareness. Not metal. Nothing he could command.
He forced it open anyway.
The chamber exhaled cold, sterile air.
Inside stood the rig.
A single body suspended in the center.
Restraints made of hardened polymer bands held her wrists, throat, waist, ankles — not just securing her, but positioning her like something engineered for study. Filament electrodes at her temples fed into the walls themselves.
And the room was alive with interference.
The suppression lattice worked in layers:
A low-frequency neural field that fractured intent before it formed.
An artificial psionic echo designed to mimic telepathic pressure — not reading her mind, but smothering it.
For most mutants, it would collapse ability at the source.
For her, it was worse.
Because it adapted.
It learned.
And then there was the tube.
A thick translucent line ran from her arm into a humming unit, carrying a luminous blue substance.
Krysalith Compound.
It didn’t block mutant powers.
It rewrote the brain so it stopped reaching for them.
Every neural spike met chemical correction. Every attempt at focus was flattened before it could stabilize. The system didn’t silence her.
It trained her not to try.
The blue infusion pulsed in sync with the lattice — when her mind stirred, it surged faster, dulling pathways, erasing intent mid-formation.
Containment inside the bloodstream.
Even the room responded to him. The lattice tightened as he entered, recalibrating instantly, as if the facility itself recognized a threat beyond its design.
It had been built for mutants.
It had been built for him.
His jaw tightened.
Then her fingers twitched.
The system reacted instantly — a sharper pulse of blue flooded the tube, and the field compressed, crushing the movement before it could become anything more.
No resistance allowed.
No spark permitted.
Then her head shifted.
Dark hair fell away from a face he knew better than his own reflection.
The world stopped.
“—Valeria.”
The name came out broken.
She was too pale. Lips colorless. Skin cold under sterile light. Her eyes fluttered weakly, awareness constantly interrupted — like thought itself was being torn apart before it could fully form.
The room wasn’t just holding her.
It was rewriting her in real time.
Something inside him collapsed — not loudly, not visibly — but completely.
And the silence that followed wasn’t from the machine.
It was from him.