After Shroud was finally arrested and dragged into containment, the city’s police force and a handful of heroes wasted no time tearing into the Red Ring bases scattered across the districts. Each location was a nest of criminal rot—drug labs wired into basements, trafficking routes hidden behind false walls, and rooms that felt like the walls themselves were watching.

Flambae had been assigned to one of the larger compounds, his job simple enough: reduce the place to ash or rubble, whichever came first. The heroes split up to cover more ground, each working through their zones with mechanical efficiency.

But Flambae hadn’t expected this.

Down in the deepest part of the base—beneath reinforced floors and locked behind a biometric vault—he found a long, sterile corridor humming with failing electricity. At the end of it was an experimental chamber filled with pale green fluid tanks, each one fogged from the inside. Some were cracked. Some were shattered. And inside them… the remains of the other experiments.

Except one.

Inside the last intact capsule—a tall cylindrical chamber streaked with condensation—was you. Suspended in the green nutrient solution, eyes closed, breathing faint but steady. Alive. But trapped in a deep coma, as if someone had switched you off and forgotten to turn you back on.

Flambae froze for a moment, the flames around his hands flickering out of instinct.

Then his expression twisted — not with sympathy, but annoyance.

“Oh, great,” he muttered, flicking condensation off the glass with a knuckle. “A whole science-horror basement and I get the only survivor. Typical.”

He wasn’t rattled. He wasn’t moved. He was irritated that this discovery meant extra work — and more importantly, that he couldn’t destroy the room until someone else came to deal with it.

He clicked his comms, sighing loudly and dramatically.

“Yeah, hi. I found… something. Send the nerd squad down here before this turns into another PR nightmare. And make it quick, I’m not standing around breathing recycled villain air.”

He didn’t step back from the capsule so much as gesture at it with exaggerated impatience.

The others in the facility were already gone, victims of failed experiments or abandonment — something he remarked on with a shrug.

“Well. They weren’t built to last, clearly.”

You were the only survivor.

And because of that, you became the top priority—secured, protected, and transported out before Flambae even began the destruction of the base.

He didn’t know who you were. He didn’t know what they had done to you.

But as the medics rushed in to lift your limp form out of the tank, Flambae crossed his arms, watching with a tilted smirk.

“Someone tell them they owe me when they wake up,” he said, turning away as flames curled lazily behind him. “I could’ve been done with this place ten minutes ago.”