Chapter Text
The room had gone quiet before anything actually happened. It settled into something tense, a kind of anticipation that didn’t feel empty but sharpened everything inside it. The self-made computer hummed on the table, low and uneven, like it wasn’t built to carry what they were about to ask from it. The casing didn’t fully close, wires still slightly exposed where Phuwin had forced connections to hold, and the screen flickered every few seconds, a faint pulse of light washing over their faces before dimming again. It wasn’t stable or clean, but it worked, and that was all they needed.
Phuwin sat closest to it, shoulders slightly hunched forward, attention fixed on the screen.
Pond was beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched without either of them acknowledging it. The contact stayed, steady and unspoken, like neither of them had considered moving away.
Pond wasn’t just watching the screen. His focus stretched past it, following the system itself, the way it responded, the way the current moved through something that should not have held together but did anyway. He didn’t think of reaching for it. Just being in its presence was enough to feel something, feel the energy running through his body.
Behind them, the others had settled into place, and everyone had found their nook to make themselves comfortable. Joong sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, hands loosely linked. He looked relaxed at a glance, but there was something hidden in the way he sat, something beneath the surface, that made him look slightly restless. Dunk leaned against the wall, one shoulder pressed into it, arms crossed, his stance easy but his attention never still. His gaze moved between the door and the window, then back to the table, where the flickering screen caught his attention, not for long, but for a brief moment, before his gaze flicked back to the door, making sure they were safe.
Aou stayed close to Santa, as if that were his designated place. It would’ve been out of the ordinary at this point to not see him hovering by the youngest's side. His hand rested lightly against Santa’s arm, fingers barely brushing the fabric. Santa leaned into it without thinking, his body settling against that point of contact like it belonged there. Perth sat on the other side of Santa. Not touching. But close enough that the space between them didn’t feel like distance. He wasn’t looking at the screen, not yet. His attention moved between them instead, reading reactions before they fully formed, tracking the way tension settled into bodies and the way silence changed shape depending on who it landed on. His gaze lingered on Santa a fraction longer than the others, like something there held his focus.
Boom hadn’t sat down. He couldn’t. His gaze was fixed on the screen, watching, heart beating in his throat.
The USB lay on the table between them, small and plain, nothing about it suggesting weight or importance. Phuwin stared at it for a second longer than necessary before reaching for it. His fingers closed around it, turning it once, and then he leaned forward and plugged it in. The machine reacted immediately. The screen dimmed and flickered harder, the system stuttering in a low mechanical hesitation that traveled through the table and into Phuwin’s hands. Pond’s head tilted slightly, focus sharpening.
“Hold,” he said quietly. Phuwin froze. The cursor stalled, then shifted, and steadied again. Pond exhaled, just barely. “It’s stable.”
The screen changed. A new window opened, and there was no password or delay. Everyone in the room seemed to hold their breath as their eyes were fixed on the screen and at the letters that appeared there now.
SYSTEM LOG INITIATED
FILE ACCESS GRANTED
E-12 ARCHIVE NODE
The text appeared line by line, clean and organized. Outsiders wouldn’t be familiar with anything written on the screen, but the people gathered in the room knew.
E12-ASSET-A
E12-ASSET-B
E12-ASSET-C
E12-ASSET-D
Joong didn’t move. His gaze was frozen on the file names blinking in front of him. Dunk shifted, adjusting his weight slightly, restless from the sudden surge of discomfort washing through the room. Santa had gone still, not tense, but quiet. Aou’s hand pressed firmer against the other’s arm now as if to make sure Santa knew he was not alone. Perth shifted a bit closer to Santa, just wanting to stay in his presence. Pond’s fingers rested on the table next to Phuwin’s, not touching, just close enough. Boom took a deep breath as Phuwin moved the cursor and opened the first file.
--- SYSTEM LOG INITIATED ---
--- FILE ACCESS GRANTED ---
--- E-12 ARCHIVE NODE ---
FILE OPEN: EXPERIMENT_A
The screen filled with text, structured and cold.
DATA_RECORD
designation: EXPERIMENT_A
subject_name: NONE
intake_age: NEWBORN
ability_classification: NATURAL_INTERFACE
risk_level: MEDIUM RISK
ability_notes:
↳ technological manipulation
↳ system interference potential
facility_directive:
DENY ACCESS TO INTERNAL SYSTEMS
RESTRICT CONTACT WITH NETWORKED DEVICES
staff_annotation:
subject displays unusual curiosity toward electronic terminals
recommend minimal exposure to control systems
Phuwin didn’t scroll, he let it sit there and let the others take it in. He read it out loud, his voice trembling, realizing this had to be about Pond. It didn’t seem like this had been written about a person. Just a number, an asset, just something that had been studied.
Pond leaned forward slightly. His expression barely changed, but the shift was there. Perth didn’t understand everything that had been said, but he felt the shift and the stillness that followed. The way Pond didn’t react outwardly, something in him settled deeper instead of rising. “Curiosity,” Pond said. Perth’s gaze flicked to him. The word didn’t sound like something new. It sounded like confirmation. Phuwin took a deep breath before scrolling further. The system logs followed. Cold and precise. Wrong in a way that didn’t need explanation.
SYSTEM INCIDENT LOG
event: unauthorized system response
no direct input detected.
subject proximity recorded.
system behavior altered without command
“They knew,” Pond said quietly. “They always knew.” He turned to Phuwin. “They knew I talked to you.” Phuwin's jaw tightened, not at Pond, not even really at the words themselves, but at the way they were written. Like something happening without permission had been reduced to a malfunction. A line in a log. Something to monitor.
Perth leaned forward slightly, elbows resting on his knees now, mirroring Joong without realizing it. Phuwin became aware of the space between his hand and Pond's. So Phuwin closed that distance. Simple without hesitation. His fingers brushing lightly against Pond’s, not asking, not forcing, just there, steady and real in contrast to everything on the screen. Pond didn’t look at him. But his hand shifted just enough to fit. Dunk let out a quiet breath somewhere behind them, the sound low enough that it didn’t break anything. It just slipped into the space between the lines on the screen.
OBSERVATION ENTRY
subject present in restricted corridor
no terminal interaction recorded
adjacent system node experienced delayed response
cause: undetermined
recommendation: increase monitoring
The repetition made it worse. Subject. Subject. Subject.
Joong shifted slightly on the bed, not restless, just adjusting his position like he needed a different angle to look at it from. He didn’t speak. Didn’t need to.
Boom hadn’t said anything either, but his attention had moved away from the screen at some point, settling instead on Pond in a way that was quieter, more deliberate.
Phuwin swallowed once, then let his gaze return to the screen. The cursor blinked at the bottom, patient, waiting for the next command like none of this mattered. He didn’t move it immediately.
Let the silence stretch just a second longer. Not dragging it out. Just giving it space.
“Keep going?” Phuwin asked to no one in particular. He didn’t expect an answer, but Pond, slightly squeezing his hand, felt like one. The next file opened the same way as the first, clean and immediate, but the moment stretched anyway, like something in the room resisted catching up to it. Phuwin’s hand stayed where it was for a fraction longer before he clicked, his eyes already moving ahead of the motion, scanning, bracing, and understanding before the others had even seen it.
SYSTEM LOG INITIATED
FILE ACCESS GRANTED
E-12 ARCHIVE NODE
FILE OPEN: EXPERIMENT_B
DATA_RECORD
designation: EXPERIMENT_B
subject_name: AOU
intake_age: NEWBORN
ability_classification: BIO_MANIPULATION
risk_level: HIGH RISK
ability_notes:
↳ cellular interference
↳ biological destabilization
↳ lethal potential under stress conditions
staff_annotation:
subject exhibits unstable biological output.
direct exposure risk to personnel remains high.
recommend controlled interaction protocols only.
facility_directive:
24H SURVEILLANCE REQUIRED
RESTRICT HUMAN CONTACT
MEDICAL STAFF ACCESS ONLY
Phuwin read it once in silence. Then again, slower. Not because he needed to understand it, but because he was choosing how much of it he would let hit all at once. Aou wasn’t looking at the screen. His gaze rested somewhere lower, unfocused, waiting in that quiet, patient way of his, the way you learn when information never comes to you directly, when it always has to pass through someone else first. This time, Perth looked at the screen. To understand what the words were doing to the person they belonged to. Boom noticed the pause.
“Phuwin,” he said, quietly, not urging, just grounding. Phuwin exhaled and shifted slightly, enough to face Aou without turning away from the screen completely.
“They flagged you high risk,” he said, voice steady but not untouched. “Bio manipulation. They restricted contact. Medical staff only.” Perth watched Aou’s face, the way the words didn’t hit all at once and the way they settled instead of striking. “They considered you lethal.”
Aou blinked once. “Lethal,” he repeated quietly, almost asking.
Santa’s hand tightened around his sleeve. Small. Immediate. Like his body answered before anything else could. Perth’s gaze dropped to that immediately. Aou didn’t look at him, but his arm shifted slightly, enough to let him hold on without resistance, without making it something bigger than it was.
Phuwin’s eyes flicked back to the screen. There was more. There was always more.
SYSTEM MEDICAL NOTE
subject exposure to unprotected personnel discouraged.
incident probability:
↳ biological reaction unpredictable
↳ potential harm to external subjects
status:
ongoing monitoring required
Phuwin didn’t read this one out loud immediately. His jaw tightened instead, eyes tracking the wording, the way everything was reduced to probability, to outcome, to risk, like the person attached to it had never been the point. Aou spoke before he did.
“They didn’t let people near me.” His voice was quiet, certain, like a confirmation. “Well not unless they had to.”
“They were afraid.” Boom stepped forward. Closing the distance like it shouldn’t have been there in the first place. ”And I was part of the system that treated that fear like truth.” Perth didn’t miss the way he said it. Boom was remorseful, the words filled with truth. Perth leaned back slightly now, gaze moving between them, building something out of pieces he wasn’t supposed to have. Patterns. Connections. Not from the files. From them. The room shifted.
“They had protocols for what you could do at your worst." Boom exhaled, sharper this time, something controlled slipping for half a second before he steadied again.
“So they were right? About me?” Aou’s voice was shaking.
“They built restrictions around outcomes. Around scenarios. Not around you.” Boom explained. “I worked inside that system,” he added. “Signed off on parts of it. Followed rules I didn’t agree with because I thought staying meant I could protect you better than leaving.” Aou’s fingers flexed once at his side, then stilled again.
“They still decided I was dangerous.”
“They did, and they were wrong for it.” Boom swallowed. “You are dangerous, but not in the way they wrote it in their protocols. They just didn’t know how to handle you. They forgot you are human and that they could’ve just talked to you.” Aou looked at Boom, still confused about what the other meant by that.
“You are dangerous,” Boom repeated. “In the same way anything powerful is,” he continued. “In the same way, anything pushed far enough can become something it was never meant to be.” Aou didn’t look away, he held the gaze with Boom, even though his heart felt like it would jump out of his chest at any second. “That’s not who you are. And I should have said that louder back then.” Santa’s grip tightened slightly again, still quiet, still grounding, his presence constant against Aou’s side, something real against everything that wasn’t.
Phuwin looked back at the screen. At the directives. The way proximity itself had been turned into a threat. He didn’t scroll yet, didn’t move forward. The room felt heavier now. Boom had sat down on a chair, a bit further from them, gaze still fixed on Aou, knowing that it would be a long night ahead of him, with lots of uncomfortable questions.
The cursor blinked at the bottom of the screen. Waiting. Phuwin’s voice came quieter now.
“Do you want me to keep going?” This time, he looked at Aou. Aou’s gaze dropped briefly, just once, to Santa’s hand still holding onto him, then lifted again, settling somewhere between Boom and the screen. A small nod.
“Yeah.” Phuwin clicked.
Phuwin didn’t stop this time. The cursor moved almost immediately, like pausing had started to feel worse than continuing, like the only way through this was forward. The screen shifted again, replacing Aou’s file without hesitation, without transition, like nothing they had just seen mattered to the system at all.
The new file opened.
SYSTEM LOG INITIATED
FILE ACCESS GRANTED
E-12 ARCHIVE NODE
FILE OPEN: EXPERIMENT_C
DATA_RECORD
designation: EXPERIMENT_C
subject_name: JOONG
intake_age: 9-12
ability_notes:
↳ full environmental barrier formation
↳ external interference ineffective
↳ subject difficult to eliminate once ability activated
ability_classification: ABSOLUTE_BARRIER
risk_level: MEDIUM RISK
facility_directive:
CONTROLLED SOCIALIZATION PROTOCOL ACTIVE
GROUP INTERACTION PERMITTED
ASSIGN DESIGNATED COMBAT TRAINER
Joong leaned forward slightly, close enough for the light of the screen to settle across his face, and for a moment, he didn’t say anything. His eyes moved over the file quickly, taking it in without effort, the structure familiar, the language something he didn’t need help understanding.
“Yeah,” he said quietly.
Phuwin glanced at him. “Yeah?”
Joong didn’t look away from the screen. “They didn’t keep me alone.” Perth’s gaze snapped to him. That hadn’t been said before. The shift in the room was immediate, subtle but sharp enough to be felt. Aou stilled. Pond’s attention fixed on him completely. Even Santa moved slightly in his sleep, closer without waking.
“They didn’t isolate you?” Phuwin asked.
“I had people.”
That changed something immediately. Not just for him. For the others. Perth saw it in Aou’s expression, in the way Pond stilled, in the way Santa’s grip tightened again.
Aou frowned. “We knew there were others, but…” He stopped, because that wasn’t the same thing. Joong looked at him, steady, already understanding what Aou couldn’t quite put into words.
“I didn’t just know they existed,” he said. “I knew them.” Silence stretched between them. “We trained together,” Joong continued after a deep breath. “Not always the same group. They rotated us sometimes. But there were people I kept seeing. Same rooms. Same time.”
Phuwin leaned forward slightly. “Like friends?”
Joong hesitated for a moment, then nodded.
“Yeah.” Aou’s chest tightened at that, something unfamiliar and sharp pressing in, because that word didn’t belong to his memories like that.
“You spar with someone enough, and you get to know them,” Joong said. “Not just how they fight. How they move when they’re tired. When they get careless.” His gaze drifted slightly, not unfocused, just pulled somewhere else for a moment.
“You start expecting them to be there.” That expectation stayed in the room. “They’d talk,” Joong added. “Complain. Joke. Make it a competition sometimes. Who got hit less? Who lasted longer?” Joong chuckled. “You truly got used to them.”
“And then?” Pond asked quietly.
“They disappeared.” No hesitation. “They’d be there one day. Gone the next. They never lasted.” Aou’s fingers curled into the fabric beneath him. Pond didn’t move at all.
“No explanation?” Pond asked quietly. Joong shook his head.
“I learned not to ask.” The sentence sat heavy, like it had been repeated enough times to become something permanent.
Phuwin swallowed. “Did you ever…” He stopped. Joong answered anyway.
“Yeah.” A small breath escaped his lips. “At first.” Silence pressed in again.
“And then?” Aou asked. Joong looked at him.
“And then I stopped…stopped asking..stopped caring…stopped talking to the new kids.”
Phuwin scrolled, the screen shifting again, pulling up another entry beneath the main file. This one wasn’t structured the same way. It felt different.
STAFF NOTE
COMBAT TRAINING UNIT
subject shows strong response to drills
protective behavior observed in group settings
push further
TAWAN
Joong went still. Not sharply. Not visibly to anyone who wasn’t watching him closely. His eyes just stopped moving.
“Tawan was my trainer.” Speaking of him almost made Joong choke up. “He saw us, not just assets or subjects. He truly saw us. He wasn’t just our trainer…he…” Joong swallowed hard. “...he was our friend.”
“Was?” Dunk asked carefully.
“He died in there.” Joong didn’t look up. “He wasn’t supposed to,” he added. “But nothing in there worked the way it was supposed to.” Joong leaned back fully now, posture settling into something controlled again, something present. “They gave me a world,” he said. The others looked at him. “Just enough of one. Then they kept taking pieces of it away. And the last piece was Tawan during whiteout.”
Joong’s gaze shifted back to Phuwin.
“Next,” he said. Phuwin moved the cursor again. Then he opened the last file.
SYSTEM LOG INITIATED
FILE ACCESS GRANTED
E-12 ARCHIVE NODE
FILE OPEN: EXPERIMENT_D
DATA_RECORD
designation: EXPERIMENT_D
subject_name: SANTA
intake_age: NEWBORN
ability_classification: EMOTIONAL_MENTAL_OVERRIDE
risk_level: HIGH RISK LETHAL
ability_notes:
↳ emotional manipulation
↳ cognitive override potential
↳ prolonged exposure increases influence
facility_directive:
LIMIT HUMAN EXPOSURE
NO DIRECT CONVERSATION
COMMUNICATION THROUGH INTERCOM ONLY
Perth’s attention stayed on Santa, not the screen.
Phuwin read it in silence. Santa couldn’t read the screen. He had to wait.
“They marked you high risk and lethal,” Phuwin said quietly. “They weren’t supposed to talk to you directly.”
“I talked,” Santa said. “They didn’t like it.” Perth’s jaw tightened slightly. Not visibly, but it was there. “They thought you could influence people. I wasn’t supposed to talk.” Aou’s hand pressed more firmly against him.
“I thought I was doing something wrong.” Perth leaned forward again without realizing it, closer now, like distance didn’t make sense anymore. Phuwin scrolled further.
SEDATION LOG
reason: talking
action: sedation
“They sedated you for talking,” Phuwin said.
Santa nodded faintly. “They did that a lot.” Perth’s gaze dropped briefly to his hands, then back up, grounding himself in the room instead of the words.
“They spread…” Santa said, “feelings they spread…” Perth exhaled slowly through his nose.
“They thought you were the problem,” he said quietly. Santa didn’t look at him. But he didn’t pull away either.
“They were wrong,” Boom said. Perth’s gaze flicked to him. He didn’t disagree. But he didn’t look convinced it mattered to Santa.
“I could hear them,” Santa said.
Pond’s attention sharpened. “Hear them?”
“Not words. Everything else. Too loud. Their feelings were screaming at me.”
Phuwin scrolled further again.
STAFF NOTE
verbal restriction insufficient
increase isolation
“They thought silence would fix it,” Phuwin said.
“It didn’t,” Santa answered. “It just got louder.”
Boom didn’t look away from him.
“They were wrong,” he said. Santa looked at him.
“I should have done more,” Boom added quietly. Santa exhaled faintly. “You talked to me.”
“Yes.”
That was the difference. Santa looked down again.
“I didn’t want to hurt anyone.”
“You didn’t,” Boom said. Santa didn’t answer. Phuwin didn’t open anything else.
There was nothing left. The cursor blinked at the bottom of the screen. The room didn’t move.
Santa leaned slightly more into Aou. Pond stared at the screen without reading. Joong sat back, contained again. Boom watched them.
“They documented everything,” Phuwin said quietly.
“They built different systems for all of us,” Joong said.
“Different approaches,” Pond added.
“They tried to block you. Restricted you. Kept you away.” Dunk couldn’t believe what he just learned
“They were managing outcomes,” Boom said.
“Variables,” Pond added.
“So what does that give us?” Aou asked. Phuwin’s hand rested on the keyboard.
“It tells us how they think.”
Pond nodded. “It tells us where they’re wrong.”
Santa’s fingers tightened again. “They don’t understand it,” he said quietly.
“No,” Pond agreed. “They don’t.” The room didn’t move. But something in it had changed.