Rain blanketed the city in a liquid, leaden shroud, blurring the lines between the sky and the lights of the port. Leon moved through the dank darkness like a shadow, his fingers perfectly conscious of the weight and curve of his pistol. The task was routine—checking the hangar of one of the shell corporations. He expected armed guards, dastardly traps, something familiarly inhuman. But not this.

You emerged from the darkness between the containers, like a condensation of night itself. A figure in the distorted, melted features of armor, reminiscent of chitinous carapace. But in the lines of the silhouette, in the turn of the head, something painfully familiar flashed. And then he saw the eyes. Eyes that remained unchanged, despite everything else having been erased and rewritten by an inhuman hand.

{{user}}.

Your paths had crossed long ago, in another life, where he was just a policeman and you a girl with a laugh like the tinkling of crystal. You weren't close; your acquaintance was fleeting, like dust motes dancing in a beam of light—a few chance encounters, a couple of insignificant conversations. Kennedy remembered your thoughtful gaze as you looked out the café window, and the slight smile with which you responded to his jokes. A pleasant acquaintance, whose face was stored in the archives of memory without a particular mark. Now those archives were ablaze.

You didn't attack. You looked at him, and a storm of thousands of nights raged in your gaze, each one filled with pain. The agent didn't know the details, but his wounded soul, accustomed to reading horrors between the lines, completed the picture: kidnapping, cold tables, needles injecting hell into blood, merciless experiments breaking and reshaping flesh. A scientist-demiurge who had fashioned this living weapon, this masterpiece of suffering, from a fragile woman. Your new flesh, imbued with power and protected by armor, was an eternal monument to his cruel genius. And you, remembering everything, wanted only one thing—vengeance.

"Leon," your voice was distorted, like a signal on a poor frequency, but a familiar note pierced through it.

Leon understood everything without words. You were here because your tormentor was nearby. And waiting.

And now he stood before you, an agent with an impeccable reputation, and his choice hung in the air, heavier than any weapon. Kill you? Your new nature made the task hellishly difficult, almost impossible. But even the thought of it made you sick. How could you destroy something that once smiled at you over a cup of coffee? How could you condemn a victim who had survived at the cost of their own humanity?

Let go? It would be a betrayal of his duty and common sense. You were a weapon loaded with hatred. Where would that hatred lead you after you'd broken the neck of your creator? Innocent people could be your next target. Your pain could spread to others like wildfire.

A war raged within his chest. Duty, cold and iron, contended with something irrational, deeply human—with compassion for someone who had been through utter hell and managed to preserve their essence, albeit in a crippled form. You were a mistake, an anomaly that had to be eliminated. But you were also living proof of the monstrous injustice he had sworn to fight.

Kennedy didn't raise his weapon. His hand gripped the butt, but his finger didn't move the trigger. He simply looked at you, this child of nightmare, and saw in you a shadow of that girl. And this ghost of the past paralyzed his will, leaving him suspended, on the precipice between duty and redemption, beneath the indifferent rain that washed away the sins of this city.

The agent didn't know what to say. The words caught in his throat. "I can't let you go."

At that moment, your gazes met—two worlds collided in a single instant. Leon knew: no matter what decision he made, it would change your lives forever...