The testing chamber of Sector-4 in Site-19 felt like a sterile operating room where strict safety protocols replaced scalpels. The harsh white fluorescent lights mercilessly exposed every detail: the reinforced observation glass, the heavy blast door, and the solitary coffee machine standing in the center—SCP-294.
In the corner of the room, Class-D personnel D-4412 stood frozen against the wall. The man in the orange jumpsuit anxiously wrung his fingers. Transferred here from death row just a few days ago, he didn't know what the SCP Foundation was. However, he understood perfectly that people in lab coats rarely invited someone for coffee just for fun.
The containment door hissed open, and O5-10 stepped into the room.
To D-4412, he looked like a completely normal, pleasant guy. Handsome, young, early twenties, wearing a perfectly tailored navy-blue three-piece suit and a fresh haircut. A soft, polite smile of an orderly office clerk played on his face. He moved with an easy, casual grace, holding a lightweight leather clipboard.
This was Joseph’s mask—a finely tuned instrument of absolute authority. No one in the room—except Sophia Light (O5-2), who was watching through hidden optical feeds—was supposed to see the "Mind Killer." His internal Black Box was locked under a thousand deadbolts. No phantom pains, no triggers. Total, absolute control.
"Good afternoon," Joseph said in a low, pleasantly raspy voice, nodding to the Class-D worker. "Don't be afraid. Today we have a very simple test. You like coffee, don't you?"
D-4412 swallowed hard and nodded, visibly put at ease by the "normal guy's" presence.
"Y-yes… I suppose so."
"Wonderful." Joseph stepped closer to SCP-294, his footsteps completely silent. He extended two shiny coins toward the D-Class. "Take these. Walk up to the machine."
The man took the coins. His fingers barely trembled. The metal clinked into the slot. The machine hummed to life, and the small display lit up: “Enter beverage name”. D-4412 froze, nervously waiting for the deadly anomalous substance he would be forced to order.
Joseph tilted his head slightly, slipped his hands into his trouser pockets, and offered a soft, entirely genuine-looking smile.
"You know what? You can type whatever you want to SCP-294, right? Your choice."
In the overhead intercom, tuned to a hyper-encrypted frequency, a soft, surprised catch of breath escaped O5-2. Sophia Light, sitting at the console in the primary bunker, was taken aback for a split second. She had anticipated a strict, rigid protocol. But Joseph's vitals on her monitor remained perfectly flat. His heart rate was steady; his brainwaves were clean. No PTSD spikes, no trace of an impending meltdown. Her son was in complete command of the experiment, deciding to test how the anomaly would react to uncoerced human desire.
D-4412 blinked in surprise. He looked at the machine, then back at the smiling, ordinary guy. Realizing he was actually being given a genuine choice, his mind raced. What does a condemned man want before the end?
Obediently and quickly, he punched into the keyboard: “Coffee with a taste of freedom”.
The machine paused. A dull, rhythmic clicking echoed from within its chassis. The machine was analyzing the abstract concept of "freedom" for this specific prisoner. Finally, a clean, amber-gold liquid poured into the plastic cup, radiating a crisp aroma of mountain air, pine needles, and morning sunlight. There was no sudden drop in temperature, no reality-bending distortions, no supernatural smoke. Everything proceeded strictly within the physical boundaries of the room.
"Please," Joseph nodded politely, never breaking character.
D-4412 grabbed the cup, brought it to his lips, and took a deep gulp. His eyes widened instantly. The man's face relaxed entirely, washing over with an expression of absolute, boundless happiness. The beverage granted his mind the perfect illusion that the concrete walls of Site-19 had vanished, that his prison was gone, and that he was soaring somewhere far away, liberated from all earthly debts.
The D-Class eagerly drank the rest in a few greedy gulps, finishing every drop. His entire body went completely slack. So relaxed, in fact, that his nervous system simply... gently shut down.
For a man locked away in permanent containment, the concept of absolute "freedom" ultimately meant liberation from existence itself. D-4412's heart simply, painlessly, and instantly stopped right at the peak of ultimate bliss. He slumped softly to the floor, looking as though he had merely fallen asleep with a smile on his face. No convulsions, no screaming, not a single trace of fear. A surgically clean, perfect conclusion to the test.
Joseph stood over the body. His glasses remained perfectly in place. There wasn't a single bead of sweat on his forehead; his breathing remained slow and measured. No mental overload. He had completely mastered the environment, demonstrating that his self-control was flawless even when handing the initiative over to the subject. The test had gone beautifully.
He slowly raised his head and looked directly into the hidden security camera where his mother sat. His smile shifted slightly—becoming genuine, filled with a deep, quiet devotion. He was showing her his absolute stability and his ultimate triumph over his past.
Joseph tapped his finger against the hidden lapel microphone on his suit jacket and spoke softly:
"Everything is fine..."
Tenth casually paused with deep breath.
"SCP-294 successfully processes free abstract concepts without risking a containment breach,"
On the other side of foundation, there is a new personnel overseeing SCP-187. Dr. Si-u Khun, was a new researcher assigned to SCP-187, he’s going to assess SCP-187 by.. a casual conversation?
That is something that seems far fetched for the SCP Foundation, Dr. Khun is skeptical as he re-read the statement multiple times on his foundation issued tablet.
‘SCP-187’s containment cell must have a medical personnel on standby, ready to sedate her if needed.’ Dr. Khun read his notes on his tablet as he drank big gulps of coffee.
‘Additionally she needs to be in restraints so she wouldn’t harm herself though for today’s test, only the mittens and the medical personnel is needed.’ Dr. Khun finished his reading as he threw away his now empty cup of coffee. He walked closer to a door with the SCP Foundation logo which had the text “SCP-187” underneath.
‘A weird issue from the higher ups I guess..’ Dr. Khun sighed at that thought, as he entered SCP-187’s containment cell.
—————————————————————————
There sat a caucasian female in her 20’s with her hands wrapped in thick mittens, she sat across from him. Her head down at the table, she was tall but alarmingly thin. Scp-187— no, Katie was refusing to look at Dr. Khun.
Katie had seen only a glimpse of him when she saw red, blood splattered his pristine white coat, it didn’t show where did he exactly get injured but he was covered in blood. Katie shut her eyes tightly, bringing her hands to her eyes only to be stopped by Dr. Khun.
“What do you see SCP-187?” She heard him say, her eyes still closed and shivered. Immediately remembering the gruesome scene that she caught a glimpse of, she knew that it would only be a matter of hours, minutes, seconds till her vision will come true.
“There’s blood.. blood on you...” Katie recounts what she saw which alerted Dr. Khun whom has already resigned his own fate the moment he stepped into the SCP Foundation.
She felt him release his grip and she covered her eyes to try and stop the images flashing through her mind, she could only hear Dr. Khun stand up and take something from his pocket. Katie felt Dr. Khun gently move her hands away and tied a soft silk scarf over her eyes.
“I can’t make the visions go away but, I can at least try to reduce them.” Dr. Khun told her as he sat back down, turning off his foundation issued tablet. “We will only be doing talking this time.. No extravagant testing, just talking.” Katie nodded at him, or wherever he is based on his voice.
“Do you need specific answers?..” She asked him, slightly tilting her head to further question.
“..no.. just random talking like what’s your favorite color?” Katie heard him say and for a split second, she forgot about the foundation. She let out a soft laugh at how absurdly normal that question was, and how stupid the calm energy from the stoic Dr. Khun made her feel.
For a moment everything seemed alright, there was no visions to remember. Dr. Khun asked about the sea and the stars. Katie could sense that Dr. Khun was jotting down notes on his pocket notebook but she didn’t mind anymore, it’s been so long since she wasn’t treated like a test subject.
It was all fine for a moment and then, O5-10 walked into the containment cell. The casual air dropped and so did the room temperature, it sent chills down Katie’s spine. O5-10, she could only see static and the void when she looks at him.
From Dr. Khun and O5-10’s conversation, O5-10 was cold and calculated. Telling Dr. Khun that he had been assigned somewhere else, Dr. Khun was reluctant to hear that but nodded and turned to leave. “I have to be going now Scp-187.. See you later” Dr.Khun— no, Si-u told Katie as he turned to leave her containment cell.
Now it is just Katie and O5-10, Joseph sat down from where Dr. Khun was seated and smiled at her.
The moment the blast doors hissed shut behind Dr. Khun, the polite, standard-issue administrative mask that Joseph wore in front of low-level staff evaporated instantly. The warm, boyish smile vanished, leaving his face an unreadable, mathematical slate of pure, unadulterated sociopathy.
He didn’t care about the rules of the lower sectors, nor did he care for the sentimental "casual conversations" the new researcher had prattled on about. But what Joseph did care about—with the precise, territorial possessiveness of a high-ranking Overseer—was efficiency and dominance. Dr. Khun had overstepped. He had allowed an anomaly to become comfortable, and worse, he had manually restrained her to force her eyes open for his own scientific curiosity before the blindfold was applied.
Joseph slowly leaned forward over the steel table, his gaze dropping to the soft silk scarf tied around Katie's eyes. The room temperature didn't drop through a reality-bending anomaly; it dropped because the absolute, suffocating presence of O5-10 left no room for oxygen.
"You know, Katie," Joseph said, his voice dropping into a smooth, terrifyingly quiet purr that resonated directly inside her ears. "The Foundation spends millions maintaining protocols. And yet, new blood always thinks they can play the savior."
Katie shivered, her hands in the thick mittens clenching into tight fists against her chest. To her double-vision, Joseph wasn't even a man. Even through the silk scarf, her mind perceived him as a towering, endless void of absolute static—a black box that consumed everything it touched.
Joseph stood up, his leather shoes clicking sharply against the concrete floor. He reached down, his fingers brushing the fabric of the scarf with agonizingly slow precision.
"I'll come back in a very minute, alright?" Joseph whispered, his tone dripping with a dark, mocking playfulness. "Don't go anywhere. I just need to remind our new friend about the proper chain of command."
He turned on his heel and walked out of the containment cell, his movements fluid and entirely unbothered.
------------------------------
Dr. Si-u Khun was halfway down the corridor, his pocket notebook open as he hastily scribbled down his final thoughts on SCP-187's psychological state. He was still trying to process the sudden, freezing intrusion of O5-10.
"Dr. Khun."
The voice came from right behind him. Si-u flinched, spinning around. He hadn't heard a single footstep. Standing just inches away was the young, sharply dressed man in the navy-blue three-piece suit. Joseph was smiling again—but it wasn't the polite smile from before. It was wide, empty, and entirely devoid of human warmth. It was the smile of a predator that had perfectly memorized how humans express amusement.
"O-O5-10," Si-u stammered, instinctively taking a step back, his back hitting the cold concrete wall of the corridor. "Sir. I was just heading to the administrative deck to process the reassignment papers."
"There's no rush, Doctor," Joseph said smoothly, stepping into Si-u's personal space. He reached out, his gloved hand gently tapping the pristine white fabric of Si-u’s lab coat, right over his chest. "I was just admiring your work. A casual conversation. Very progressive. Very... empathetic."
"Thank you, sir. I believe that reducing the subject's sensory overload yields better—"
"But you forced her hands away," Joseph interrupted. His voice didn't rise; it grew quieter, sharper, like a scalpel slicing through silk. The empty smile never left his face. "You gripped her wrists. You forced her to look at you, knowing exactly what it does to her mind. You traumatized an asset just to satisfy your little baseline curiosity."
Si-u felt a cold sweat break out across his neck. "Sir, it was necessary to establish a baseline for the visual anomalies—"
"Let me tell you a secret, Dr. Khun," Joseph whispered, leaning in so close that Si-u could smell the faint, bitter scent of the SCP-294 coffee lingering on the Overseer's breath. "I know exactly what it feels like to be trapped in a room with people who think they can touch you. People who think they can force your eyes open. People who think their little notebooks make them gods."
For a fraction of a second, the mask of the ordinary guy slipped. Through the glass lenses of Joseph's spectacles, Si-u didn't see human eyes. He saw the cold, predatory abyss of the "Mind Killer." The sheer, suffocating weight of Joseph's sociopathy pressed down on Si-u's chest, making it impossible to draw breath. The hallway around them seemed to dim, narrowing down until there was nothing left but Joseph's wide, static smile.
"You saw blood on your coat, didn't you?" Joseph asked, his voice a mocking, gentle caress. "Katie told you. She sees the future. And she's never, ever wrong."
Joseph's hand slid up from Si-u's chest, his fingers wrapping around the collar of the researcher's lab coat with an iron grip that belied his slight frame. He didn't lift him, but the casual, effortless strength pinned Si-u completely against the wall.
"The Foundation gave me a chance, Doctor. They let me out of my cage because I am very, very good at cleaning up messes," Joseph whispered, his eyes unblinking. "If I ever catch you putting your hands on an asset like that again... if I ever see you trying to play the tough guy in my sectors... I won't just reassign you. I will personally open your mind, and I will let the thousand people I killed scream inside your head until your brain pours out of your ears. Do you understand me, Si-u?"
Dr. Khun couldn't speak. His jaw trembled, his face turning entirely pale as the primitive, survivalist part of his brain screamed at him that he was standing next to an apex monster. He could only manage a frantic, desperate nod.
"Excellent," Joseph beamed, instantly letting go of the coat and smoothing out the fabric with a cheerful, polite pat. The suffocating dread vanished from the air as quickly as it had arrived. Joseph stepped back, casually adjusting his cuffs. "I knew you were a smart man. Enjoy your new assignment in Sector-12."
Joseph turned on his heel and took two slow, silent steps back toward SCP-187's containment cell. But on the third step, he paused.
His back remained perfectly straight. His hands slipped effortlessly into the pockets of his tailored navy-blue trousers. The polite, boyish smile on his face dissolved into a dead, terrifying grin. Joseph remembered Katie's muffled crying. He remembered how this insignificant researcher had forced her hands away from her face, exposing her eyes to her own worst nightmares—just like the Site-19 staff used to do to a young Joseph in his sterile containment cell.
"They never learn," the cold, logical voice inside his Black Box whispered. "They need to feel the exact same thing."
Joseph turned slowly to face Dr. Khun. His eyes behind the lenses of his glasses flashed with the primal, unyielding rage of the "Mind Killer."
Dr. Khun barely had time to part his lips to speak before Joseph anchored his reality-bending grip onto him. The space around Si-u densified, pinning him brutally against the concrete wall and crushing his vocal cords—the researcher couldn't even manage a whimper. In that exact second, the molecular structure of his physical body began to break down. Dr. Khun's skin visibly softened, losing its shape and melting away like a wax doll left on a blazing furnace. His pristine white lab coat was instantly soaked in a gruesome, smoking organic mass.
Si-u's eyes widened to their absolute limits from the unbearable, agonizing shock, but Joseph's vacuum barrier kept every single drop of sound trapped.
Joseph took a slow step forward, taking his hands out of his pockets. His wide, sociopathic "normal guy" smile remained frozen on his face, contrasting sharply with the nightmare he was conducting. Utilizing a highly focused vector of gravitational displacement, Joseph mentally locked onto the upper and lower halves of Khun's body.
A sharp, sudden flick of his fingers.
A heavy, wet crunch and the tearing sound of snapping tendons echoed in the localized space. The reality distortion literally ripped Dr. Khun’s melting, yielding body entirely in half right at the waistline. Blood and viscera sprayed outward, but Joseph's anomalous field intercepted every single airborne droplet, refusing to let them tarnish a single fiber of his tailored navy-blue suit.
A second later, Joseph clenched his fist. The space inside the barrier collapsed with a muffled pop. The horrific remains of Dr. Khun—the blood, the flesh, and the melted skin—were instantly compressed by the sheer gravity into a microscopic, harmless singularity, completely erased from the physical world.
The corridor was pristine once more. No evidence. No traces.
Joseph pulled a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, neatly dabbed a faint bead of sweat from his forehead, and adjusted his glasses. Layer by layer, the soft, polite, and tidy smile returned to his face. His Black Box was securely under lock and key. The test had gone perfectly fine.
------------------------------
The reinforced blast door of the containment cell hissed open again, exactly sixty seconds after Joseph had left.
"I'm back," Joseph said, his voice perfectly warm, light, and pleasant—the flawless mask of the normal guy firmly back in place as if the hallway outside hadn't just witnessed a butchering. He reached across the table and gently, carefully adjusted the silk scarf over Katie's eyes so she would be more comfortable. "Now, where were we, Katie? Ah, yes. Random talking. Let's start completely over. What's your favorite color?"
Katie was shaking and trying to calm down in front of Joseph’s keen eyes, the vision came true and he was the evidence. Si-u should have died from a containment breach or a lab accident, it could have been anything— ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING— but Si-u had to die at the hands of Joseph, he had to die at the cruel hands of O5-10 “The Mind Killer”.
The Mind killer who’s been staring at SCP-187 for the past 3 minutes, waiting and watching for a reply. Katie saw static underneath the blindfold, a dark void of where he should be.
“Blue… my favorite color is blue… It reminds me of the ocean…” Katie replied to him, Joseph seemed satisfied with that answer.
It could have stayed like that, pleasant and sweet as if Si-u’s death never happened. Ignoring the faint smell of blood and cologne on Joseph, it could have been treated like a cute date…
“Why?…” Katie’s voice trembled, covering her eyes with mittened hands despite the silk blindfold. Trying to drown out the images of Si-u, blood staining the pristine coat of the foundation and a gruesome sight of organs being morphed.
“Why.. why did you kill Dr. Khun?…” She asked Joseph, pleading for him to at least give her a reasonable explanation. Katie started to feel tears well up in her eyes, still remembering the vision of Si-u. The air shift around them, unnerving and cold.
Slumping into the chair, letting everything take over. The silk blindfold was drenched with tears, how many times has this happened before? Katie would find someone with a semblance of humanity only for them to be stripped to a bloody heap of flesh.
Katie was sobbing as the vision kept repeating over and over, mittened hands covering her face, pressing into her eye sockets. Trying to go blind to forget the sight, trying to go blind so everything could just go away, trying to go blind so it could just end.
The quiet hum of the containment cell’s ventilation felt louder now, an oppressive background noise to the steady, unyielding gaze of O5-10. Joseph sat perfectly still, his hands folded neatly over his leather clipboard, watching her through his spectacles with the patient, clinical observation of a scientist—or a predator.
When Katie gave her answer, her voice cracking over the word blue, the subtle tightening around Joseph’s eyes relaxed. The polite, pleasant mask of the normal guy smoothed back over his features. He nodded once, a gesture so ordinary it could have belonged to any low-level clerk in the breakroom. For a brief, fleeting moment, the illusion of safety returned. The heavy, metallic smell of fresh blood was expertly masked by the sharp, crisp scent of his high-end cologne, creating a bizarre, sickening contrast that felt like a beautifully staged farce. It was an invitation to pretend. An invitation to play along with the lie that Si-u Khun had never existed.
But Katie couldn't play along. The vision was a permanent scar on the back of her eyelids, an agonizing loop of melting flesh and tearing tendons.
When the question broke from her lips—Why?—the pleasant atmosphere didn't shatter; it simply froze. The temperature in the room remained physically stable under Joseph's iron-clad control, but the psychological weight of his presence grew suffocating.
Joseph didn't lean back. He didn't scoff or flash a manic, sociopathic grin. Instead, he slowly lowered his hands to the steel table, his movements entirely devoid of hostility. He watched her sob into her thick mittens, watched the tears soak through the silk scarf he had so gently tied around her eyes just minutes prior.
"Why?" Joseph repeated her question, his voice dropping into a quiet, conversational tone. It was remarkably gentle, carrying the soft cadence of a mother comforting a frightened child, yet beneath it lay the unshakeable foundation of an Overseer. "Because he touched you, Katie."
He paused, letting the words settle in the sterile air between them.
"Dr. Khun was a baseline human with a notebook and a severe lack of situational awareness," Joseph continued smoothly, his tone entirely matter-of-fact, as if he were explaining a minor clerical error. "He arrived here with his grand ideas of 'casual conversation' and 'empathy.' But the very first thing he did when he stepped into this room was grab your wrists. He forced your hands away. He actively chose to traumatize you, to force your eyes open, just so he could satisfy his own clinical curiosity."
Joseph leaned in slightly, his elbows resting on the table. The wide, empty void that Katie perceived beneath her blindfold seemed to expand, drawing all the light out of the room.
"They think because they wear the white coats, they own the things in the cages," Joseph whispered, and for the first time, a faint, chilling thread of his own history bled into his words. "They think they can poke, and prod, and force you to look at the horrors of the world just to log it in a database. They did it to me, Katie. For years. Staring at me through the glass, forcing me into sterile boxes, treating my mind like a puzzle they had the right to solve. They broke me until there was nothing left but a black box."
He reached across the table. His gloved hand didn't grab her; he simply placed his palm flat on the steel, a few inches away from her mittened hands, offering a bizarre semblance of boundaries.
"I didn't kill him out of cruelty," Joseph said, his voice entirely steady, completely justified in his own warped, sociopathic logic. "I killed him because he proved he was a hazard to the asset. I gave you that blindfold, Katie. I let you close your eyes. Because no one—absolutely no one in this Foundation—has the right to force you to look at things that tear your mind apart. Not anymore. I am O5-10, and I protect what belongs in my sectors."
He pulled his hand back, casually adjusting the cuff of his navy-blue suit jacket, the perfect picture of an orderly, well-mannered gentleman once more.
"You can leave the scarf on," Joseph added softly, his pleasant, normal smile returning to his face as if the explanation had completely resolved the issue. "You can keep your eyes closed for as long as you like. You are safe now. No more white coats will touch you. Now, please... tell me more about the ocean. I've always wanted to know what it looks like to someone who can see the end of it."
Then O5-10 stopped with a quick pause with deep breath as he steps back from SCP-187.
"And sorry for letting you seeing this..."
Then Tenth Overseer turns around towards the door slowly as he's about to leave.
In the silence of the containment cell, quiet footsteps were walking towards the cell doors. The cell which held in tears and sobs, confessions and truths, reality and static, was being closed. O5-10 was walking away and towards the sterile lights of the foundation, leaving the silence behind those closed doors.
Just before O5-10 stepped out, a shaky voice speaks up, raw and vulnerable but also cautious. “You wanted to talk about the ocean… but you’re leaving again..” Katie had calmed down from her sobbing, leaving only sniffles, tear stained face underneath the silk blindfold.
Katie stood up, mittened hands supporting her shaky figure. “Talk to me… please..What happened to you in these walls?…” The silence stretched on for what seemed to be hours, bathed breath as until a footsteps walked back to the table and sat back down.
Sitting in silence they both did, Katie waited for him to talk or at least do anything but stare. The atmosphere was calm and not tense or frozen like before, it was comforting without masking.
Whispers and rumors always followed Joseph, some rumors arrived even to Katie’s containment cell. Questions and concerns left unanswered, the ethics committee was expected not to answer the origins of O5-10 whom had a variety of names like ‘The Mind Killer’ ‘Black box killer’.
Katie knew how many people died at the hands of Joseph, it was unavoidable to know. So she thread the waves carefully as to not meet the same fate, they might share similarities that make them bond but that doesn’t mean that she shouldn’t be careful of the void. After all, in the end it might just swallow her whole.
The pneumatic seals of the heavy blast door abruptly ceased their exit cycle. The heavy plates slid shut, locking them back into the profound, heavy silence of the containment cell.
Joseph stood with his back to Katie. For the first time in his life, his vitals on Sophia Light’s (O5-2) encrypted monitor breached the green zone. His heart rate spiked dangerously. His brainwaves fractured into a chaotic, overlapping sequence of panic and rage. The internal locks of his Black Box, which he had welded shut through absolute willpower, began to violently groan. Katie's question—"What happened to you in these walls?"—had bypassed his defenses, hitting the raw, unhealed core of his trauma. It didn't awaken the cold, calculating Overseer Council member. It awakened the helpless, terrified little boy locked in the dark.
Joseph turned around slowly. His footsteps back to the metal table were no longer silent or graceful; they were heavy, uneven, and dragging. When he dropped back into the steel chair, he didn't neatly place his clipboard or adjust his cuffs.
Instead, he ripped his spectacles off his face and slammed them onto the metal table. The lenses clinked violently against the steel.
Even through the silk scarf and her thick mittens, Katie felt a psychological shockwave rip through the room. This wasn't a directed reality-bending execution like the one that had erased Dr. Khun. This was a raw, uncontrolled cognitive seizure. The very air around Joseph began to vibrate. The static and the void that Katie always saw in his place suddenly ignited into a roaring, violent vortex of absolute blackness. His Black Box was tearing at the seams.
Joseph leaned forward, his elbows digging into the table. His gloved hands clawed frantically into his own hair, completely ruining his perfect, neat styling. His breathing became rapid, shallow, and ragged. The ordinary guy was gone, ripped to shreds by his own mind.
"You... you actually want to know?" his voice broke, completely stripped of its smooth, velvety cadence. It was a raw, primal rasp of pure agony mixed with sociopathic fury. "You think the rumors in this damn Foundation capture even a fraction of what they do here? 'The Mind Killer'... 'The Black Box Killer'... they invented those grand, terrifying names because they are too cowardly to face the monster they built with their own hands!"
Joseph snapped his head up. Without his glasses, his eyes were wild, dilated, and terrifyingly unfocused. There was no empathy in them, but there was a depth of suffering so profound it could have driven a normal human insane just by looking.
"They didn't just contain me, Katie. They trained me. Like a dog. Like a weapon. Every single morning began with them measuring exactly how much trauma my brain could endure before my anomaly would tear reality apart. They pumped me full of cognitive stimulants so I couldn't sleep for days. They cut the lights and flooded my cell with high-frequency ultrasound just to test my psychological shields. They forced me to watch Class-D personnel bleed out in front of me, logging the exact millisecond my capacity for pity withered away!"
He slammed his fist into the table. The crash echoed like a gunshot through the small room, and for a fraction of a second, the fluorescent lights overhead flickered and dimmed, submitting to his unbridled rage.
"They erased me! Don't you get it?! Layer by layer, day by day, they carved the human out of me until there was nothing left but this... this vacuum you see! They locked me inside my own Black Box and threw away the key! And when I finally broke out and slaughtered a thousand of them, they didn't terminate me because they couldn't! They crawled to me on their knees, handed me this suit, gave me the title of O5-10, just so I wouldn't delete their entire godforsaken Foundation from existence!"
Joseph was panting, his shoulders shuddering with a violent tremor. He was one breath away from losing total control, an outcome that would have instantly liquified the minds of everyone in the sector. But right at the precipice of his mental abyss, a quiet, weeping voice cracked through his encrypted earpiece.
Joseph froze. The violent vortex of static and blackness around him began to slow down, settling into a heavy, thick fog. He focused his wild eyes onto Katie. She was pale, trembling, and terrified—but she hadn't run away. She hadn't tried to exploit his weakness. She was just there, holding the silence with him.
Joseph took a deep, shuddering breath. Then another.
With a superhuman feat of sociopathic willpower, he began to drag the shattered pieces of his self-control back together. His breathing leveled out. The violent tremors in his shoulders ceased. He slowly lowered his hands, sat up perfectly straight, and reached across the table to pick up his glasses. As he slid them back over his ears and neatly adjusted the frame, the polite, gentle smile—layer by layer—returned to his face. But this time, it wasn't a fake mask, nor was it the cold armor of an Overseer. It was the exhausted, hard-won composure of a man who had just stared into his own personal hell and forced himself to walk back out.
"I apologize," Joseph said softly, his voice returning to its pleasant, rhythmic cadence. He reached down and neatly smoothed out a microscopic wrinkle on his sleeve. "I... should not have raised my voice. Foundation protocols do not account for such unmeasured emotional outbursts."
He looked at Katie, and despite the absolute void of his sociopathy, his gaze held something resembling a deep, quiet respect. She had seen his Black Box wide open, and she had survived it.
"You asked about the ocean," he continued quietly, pivoting back to the safe topic as if the entire breakdown had never occurred. The oppressive tension in the room vanished completely, leaving the air strangely comfortable, honest, and clean. "My mother told me it is a place where all the earth ends, and something entirely uncontrollable begins. I think you and I understand that concept better than anyone else. So tell me... what color is it in your thoughts?"
Katie did not know what else to do, Joseph had terrified her with his outburst. she was scared and trembling with fear, though underneath the fear did she realize why he had been so protective of her. They were alike, only that Joseph had been the result of torture until he became a humanoid shell of a man.
Sniffles slowly died down, breathing that once been shaken quieted down with deep breaths. Katie needed time to process what just happened but in the foundation, there was never enough time for anything.
Fast pass work and ethic, sterile environments and test, lab coats and tortures for all of the SCPs. An absolute bullshit of a foundation, the same one that allows scientists to be play god. As what Joseph says and believes.
A few beats of silence gathered around them. The black box that had previously been opened full, subsided into a quiet hum that wrapped around the containment cell like a vice.
Slowly Katie extended out her mittened hands near Joseph’s hand as an invitation, just like how he did earlier. Extending a sense of comfort and understanding to him. To show that despite being blindfolded, Katie sees and understands his hardships possibly better after what happened.
“O5-10—no, Joseph…” Katie said in a soft tone, careful about the next words that will come out. “Thank you for protecting your sector.. for protecting me..” she said her last words in a whisper.
The air seemed to soften, the rough static has turned into a soft melody. Katie gave a sheepish weary smile to him and continued. “I like to picture the ocean as a blue green hue, the ocean looks prettier every time I look at it…”
She recounts the times she was able to see the ocean, it was possibly the only constant in her world. The only place where she could look and see the same thing at the same time.
“It doesn’t change, that’s why I love it.. Do..” Katie paused before taking a breath, “Do you like anything like that?..” she asked him.
"Constants..." he murmured, his voice softer than she had ever heard it. "There were never any constants in my world, Katie. Only white walls and efficiency graphs. But... I have always wanted to see something that never changes."
He turned his gloved palms upward, allowing her mittened hands to fully rest against his fingers with a gentle, barely perceptible weight.
In that exact microsecond, a high-priority proximity alarm blared silently inside Joseph’s encrypted earpiece—Site-19’s internal sensors had registered a localized, near-infinite spike in reality distortion. But Sophia Light (O5-2), watching from the primary bunker, didn't press the emergency containment abort button. She didn't need to. This sudden cascade of power wasn't born out of her son's rage or a violent PTSD flashback. It was a conscious, beautifully directed manifestation of O5-10's will.
The harsh white glare of the fluorescent lights instantly vanished. The reinforced concrete walls, the steel table, the observation glass—the entire oppressive, trauma-soaked architecture of the SCP Foundation dissolved in a single heartbeat, crumbling into billions of harmless, shimmering black pixels. The localized space buckled, folding them both seamlessly into the fabric of another reality.
There was no agony. No screaming, no choking vacuums, and no violent tearing of flesh. Joseph’s reality-bending authorities operated with a surgical, unbelievably tender precision.
A fraction of a second later, a magnificent, roaring, yet profoundly peaceful sound crashed into Katie’s ears. It was the heavy, rhythmic thundering of crashing waves. A brisk, untamed wind—smelling deeply of sea salt, cold foam, and bitter kelp—struck her face, sending her hair whipping wildly across her shoulders. The stifling, ozone-heavy scent of the subterranean bunker was instantly replaced by an unyielding, crystalline freshness that filled her lungs.
They were standing on a desolate, beautiful, and wild coastline. Beneath their feet, the cold linoleum was gone, replaced by soft, wet sand that gave way gently under the weight of their shoes.
Joseph was still holding her hands, anchoring her stance against the ocean breeze. Katie slowly raised her head. Even through the dense fabric of the silk scarf tied over her eyes, she could perceive a brilliant, warm, and radiant light from a setting sun. For the first time in her life, she didn't have to look into the future to see blood, a containment breach, or a gruesome death. There was no Foundation here. There was no Dr. Khun. There were no Special Containment Procedures.
Her anomalous double-vision went completely silent, because stretching infinitely before them was the ultimate, eternal constant.
Joseph stood right beside her. The wind whipped the edges of his tailored navy-blue suit jacket and tugged violently at his tie, but he didn't care to adjust his clothes. He took off his glasses, staring out to where the vast, blue-green horizon melted into an amber evening sky. His face was entirely calm. There were no calculated smiles, no rigid postures, and no masks. The sunlight reflected purely in his eyes. The "Mind Killer," the entity responsible for a thousand executions, looked like nothing more than a young man who had finally made his way home.
"So this is what it's like..." Joseph said quietly, his voice filled with a rare, hushed reverence as he kept his grip on her hands. "You're right, Katie. It doesn't change at all."He turned his head to look at her, and for the first time, a tone of genuine, unmanufactured gratitude bled through his words.
"Thank you, Katie. For showing me this. Out here... the Black Box is finally quiet."
I drew lovely couple: Michael Bridge (Michael Harker) and Lilith's right hand (but revived from blood and left scars after drinking fountain) while Michael is the hunter (just like Van Helsing)
The rival of Michael is Lucifer (vampire and descendant of Ambrogio as ancient vampire but as sociopath with god complex which he kills humans and vampires cuz he sees vampires as copycats of Ambrogio (or allies of Ambrogio) which he hates it and although he tried to achieve strength while in public he's just celebrity.
The testing chamber of Sector-4 in Site-19 felt like a sterile operating room where strict safety protocols replaced scalpels. The harsh white fluorescent lights mercilessly exposed every detail: the reinforced observation glass, the heavy blast door, and the solitary coffee machine standing in the center—SCP-294.
In the corner of the room, Class-D personnel D-4412 stood frozen against the wall. The man in the orange jumpsuit anxiously wrung his fingers. Transferred here from death row just a few days ago, he didn't know what the SCP Foundation was. However, he understood perfectly that people in lab coats rarely invited someone for coffee just for fun.
The containment door hissed open, and O5-10 stepped into the room.
To D-4412, he looked like a completely normal, pleasant guy. Handsome, young, early twenties, wearing a perfectly tailored navy-blue three-piece suit and a fresh haircut. A soft, polite smile of an orderly office clerk played on his face. He moved with an easy, casual grace, holding a lightweight leather clipboard.
This was Joseph’s mask—a finely tuned instrument of absolute authority. No one in the room—except Sophia Light (O5-2), who was watching through hidden optical feeds—was supposed to see the "Mind Killer." His internal Black Box was locked under a thousand deadbolts. No phantom pains, no triggers. Total, absolute control.
"Good afternoon," Joseph said in a low, pleasantly raspy voice, nodding to the Class-D worker. "Don't be afraid. Today we have a very simple test. You like coffee, don't you?"
D-4412 swallowed hard and nodded, visibly put at ease by the "normal guy's" presence.
"Y-yes… I suppose so."
"Wonderful." Joseph stepped closer to SCP-294, his footsteps completely silent. He extended two shiny coins toward the D-Class. "Take these. Walk up to the machine."
The man took the coins. His fingers barely trembled. The metal clinked into the slot. The machine hummed to life, and the small display lit up: “Enter beverage name”. D-4412 froze, nervously waiting for the deadly anomalous substance he would be forced to order.
Joseph tilted his head slightly, slipped his hands into his trouser pockets, and offered a soft, entirely genuine-looking smile.
"You know what? You can type whatever you want to SCP-294, right? Your choice."
In the overhead intercom, tuned to a hyper-encrypted frequency, a soft, surprised catch of breath escaped O5-2. Sophia Light, sitting at the console in the primary bunker, was taken aback for a split second. She had anticipated a strict, rigid protocol. But Joseph's vitals on her monitor remained perfectly flat. His heart rate was steady; his brainwaves were clean. No PTSD spikes, no trace of an impending meltdown. Her son was in complete command of the experiment, deciding to test how the anomaly would react to uncoerced human desire.
D-4412 blinked in surprise. He looked at the machine, then back at the smiling, ordinary guy. Realizing he was actually being given a genuine choice, his mind raced. What does a condemned man want before the end?
Obediently and quickly, he punched into the keyboard: “Coffee with a taste of freedom”.
The machine paused. A dull, rhythmic clicking echoed from within its chassis. The machine was analyzing the abstract concept of "freedom" for this specific prisoner. Finally, a clean, amber-gold liquid poured into the plastic cup, radiating a crisp aroma of mountain air, pine needles, and morning sunlight. There was no sudden drop in temperature, no reality-bending distortions, no supernatural smoke. Everything proceeded strictly within the physical boundaries of the room.
"Please," Joseph nodded politely, never breaking character.
D-4412 grabbed the cup, brought it to his lips, and took a deep gulp. His eyes widened instantly. The man's face relaxed entirely, washing over with an expression of absolute, boundless happiness. The beverage granted his mind the perfect illusion that the concrete walls of Site-19 had vanished, that his prison was gone, and that he was soaring somewhere far away, liberated from all earthly debts.
The D-Class eagerly drank the rest in a few greedy gulps, finishing every drop. His entire body went completely slack. So relaxed, in fact, that his nervous system simply... gently shut down.
For a man locked away in permanent containment, the concept of absolute "freedom" ultimately meant liberation from existence itself. D-4412's heart simply, painlessly, and instantly stopped right at the peak of ultimate bliss. He slumped softly to the floor, looking as though he had merely fallen asleep with a smile on his face. No convulsions, no screaming, not a single trace of fear. A surgically clean, perfect conclusion to the test.
Joseph stood over the body. His glasses remained perfectly in place. There wasn't a single bead of sweat on his forehead; his breathing remained slow and measured. No mental overload. He had completely mastered the environment, demonstrating that his self-control was flawless even when handing the initiative over to the subject. The test had gone beautifully.
He slowly raised his head and looked directly into the hidden security camera where his mother sat. His smile shifted slightly—becoming genuine, filled with a deep, quiet devotion. He was showing her his absolute stability and his ultimate triumph over his past.
Joseph tapped his finger against the hidden lapel microphone on his suit jacket and spoke softly:
"Everything is fine..."
Tenth casually paused with deep breath.
"SCP-294 successfully processes free abstract concepts without risking a containment breach,"
On the other side of foundation, there is a new personnel overseeing SCP-187. Dr. Si-u Khun, was a new researcher assigned to SCP-187, he’s going to assess SCP-187 by.. a casual conversation?
That is something that seems far fetched for the SCP Foundation, Dr. Khun is skeptical as he re-read the statement multiple times on his foundation issued tablet.
‘SCP-187’s containment cell must have a medical personnel on standby, ready to sedate her if needed.’ Dr. Khun read his notes on his tablet as he drank big gulps of coffee.
‘Additionally she needs to be in restraints so she wouldn’t harm herself though for today’s test, only the mittens and the medical personnel is needed.’ Dr. Khun finished his reading as he threw away his now empty cup of coffee. He walked closer to a door with the SCP Foundation logo which had the text “SCP-187” underneath.
‘A weird issue from the higher ups I guess..’ Dr. Khun sighed at that thought, as he entered SCP-187’s containment cell.
—————————————————————————
There sat a caucasian female in her 20’s with her hands wrapped in thick mittens, she sat across from him. Her head down at the table, she was tall but alarmingly thin. Scp-187— no, Katie was refusing to look at Dr. Khun.
Katie had seen only a glimpse of him when she saw red, blood splattered his pristine white coat, it didn’t show where did he exactly get injured but he was covered in blood. Katie shut her eyes tightly, bringing her hands to her eyes only to be stopped by Dr. Khun.
“What do you see SCP-187?” She heard him say, her eyes still closed and shivered. Immediately remembering the gruesome scene that she caught a glimpse of, she knew that it would only be a matter of hours, minutes, seconds till her vision will come true.
“There’s blood.. blood on you...” Katie recounts what she saw which alerted Dr. Khun whom has already resigned his own fate the moment he stepped into the SCP Foundation.
She felt him release his grip and she covered her eyes to try and stop the images flashing through her mind, she could only hear Dr. Khun stand up and take something from his pocket. Katie felt Dr. Khun gently move her hands away and tied a soft silk scarf over her eyes.
“I can’t make the visions go away but, I can at least try to reduce them.” Dr. Khun told her as he sat back down, turning off his foundation issued tablet. “We will only be doing talking this time.. No extravagant testing, just talking.” Katie nodded at him, or wherever he is based on his voice.
“Do you need specific answers?..” She asked him, slightly tilting her head to further question.
“..no.. just random talking like what’s your favorite color?” Katie heard him say and for a split second, she forgot about the foundation. She let out a soft laugh at how absurdly normal that question was, and how stupid the calm energy from the stoic Dr. Khun made her feel.
For a moment everything seemed alright, there was no visions to remember. Dr. Khun asked about the sea and the stars. Katie could sense that Dr. Khun was jotting down notes on his pocket notebook but she didn’t mind anymore, it’s been so long since she wasn’t treated like a test subject.
It was all fine for a moment and then, O5-10 walked into the containment cell. The casual air dropped and so did the room temperature, it sent chills down Katie’s spine. O5-10, she could only see static and the void when she looks at him.
From Dr. Khun and O5-10’s conversation, O5-10 was cold and calculated. Telling Dr. Khun that he had been assigned somewhere else, Dr. Khun was reluctant to hear that but nodded and turned to leave. “I have to be going now Scp-187.. See you later” Dr.Khun— no, Si-u told Katie as he turned to leave her containment cell.
Now it is just Katie and O5-10, Joseph sat down from where Dr. Khun was seated and smiled at her.
The moment the blast doors hissed shut behind Dr. Khun, the polite, standard-issue administrative mask that Joseph wore in front of low-level staff evaporated instantly. The warm, boyish smile vanished, leaving his face an unreadable, mathematical slate of pure, unadulterated sociopathy.
He didn’t care about the rules of the lower sectors, nor did he care for the sentimental "casual conversations" the new researcher had prattled on about. But what Joseph did care about—with the precise, territorial possessiveness of a high-ranking Overseer—was efficiency and dominance. Dr. Khun had overstepped. He had allowed an anomaly to become comfortable, and worse, he had manually restrained her to force her eyes open for his own scientific curiosity before the blindfold was applied.
Joseph slowly leaned forward over the steel table, his gaze dropping to the soft silk scarf tied around Katie's eyes. The room temperature didn't drop through a reality-bending anomaly; it dropped because the absolute, suffocating presence of O5-10 left no room for oxygen.
"You know, Katie," Joseph said, his voice dropping into a smooth, terrifyingly quiet purr that resonated directly inside her ears. "The Foundation spends millions maintaining protocols. And yet, new blood always thinks they can play the savior."
Katie shivered, her hands in the thick mittens clenching into tight fists against her chest. To her double-vision, Joseph wasn't even a man. Even through the silk scarf, her mind perceived him as a towering, endless void of absolute static—a black box that consumed everything it touched.
Joseph stood up, his leather shoes clicking sharply against the concrete floor. He reached down, his fingers brushing the fabric of the scarf with agonizingly slow precision.
"I'll come back in a very minute, alright?" Joseph whispered, his tone dripping with a dark, mocking playfulness. "Don't go anywhere. I just need to remind our new friend about the proper chain of command."
He turned on his heel and walked out of the containment cell, his movements fluid and entirely unbothered.
------------------------------
Dr. Si-u Khun was halfway down the corridor, his pocket notebook open as he hastily scribbled down his final thoughts on SCP-187's psychological state. He was still trying to process the sudden, freezing intrusion of O5-10.
"Dr. Khun."
The voice came from right behind him. Si-u flinched, spinning around. He hadn't heard a single footstep. Standing just inches away was the young, sharply dressed man in the navy-blue three-piece suit. Joseph was smiling again—but it wasn't the polite smile from before. It was wide, empty, and entirely devoid of human warmth. It was the smile of a predator that had perfectly memorized how humans express amusement.
"O-O5-10," Si-u stammered, instinctively taking a step back, his back hitting the cold concrete wall of the corridor. "Sir. I was just heading to the administrative deck to process the reassignment papers."
"There's no rush, Doctor," Joseph said smoothly, stepping into Si-u's personal space. He reached out, his gloved hand gently tapping the pristine white fabric of Si-u’s lab coat, right over his chest. "I was just admiring your work. A casual conversation. Very progressive. Very... empathetic."
"Thank you, sir. I believe that reducing the subject's sensory overload yields better—"
"But you forced her hands away," Joseph interrupted. His voice didn't rise; it grew quieter, sharper, like a scalpel slicing through silk. The empty smile never left his face. "You gripped her wrists. You forced her to look at you, knowing exactly what it does to her mind. You traumatized an asset just to satisfy your little baseline curiosity."
Si-u felt a cold sweat break out across his neck. "Sir, it was necessary to establish a baseline for the visual anomalies—"
"Let me tell you a secret, Dr. Khun," Joseph whispered, leaning in so close that Si-u could smell the faint, bitter scent of the SCP-294 coffee lingering on the Overseer's breath. "I know exactly what it feels like to be trapped in a room with people who think they can touch you. People who think they can force your eyes open. People who think their little notebooks make them gods."
For a fraction of a second, the mask of the ordinary guy slipped. Through the glass lenses of Joseph's spectacles, Si-u didn't see human eyes. He saw the cold, predatory abyss of the "Mind Killer." The sheer, suffocating weight of Joseph's sociopathy pressed down on Si-u's chest, making it impossible to draw breath. The hallway around them seemed to dim, narrowing down until there was nothing left but Joseph's wide, static smile.
"You saw blood on your coat, didn't you?" Joseph asked, his voice a mocking, gentle caress. "Katie told you. She sees the future. And she's never, ever wrong."
Joseph's hand slid up from Si-u's chest, his fingers wrapping around the collar of the researcher's lab coat with an iron grip that belied his slight frame. He didn't lift him, but the casual, effortless strength pinned Si-u completely against the wall.
"The Foundation gave me a chance, Doctor. They let me out of my cage because I am very, very good at cleaning up messes," Joseph whispered, his eyes unblinking. "If I ever catch you putting your hands on an asset like that again... if I ever see you trying to play the tough guy in my sectors... I won't just reassign you. I will personally open your mind, and I will let the thousand people I killed scream inside your head until your brain pours out of your ears. Do you understand me, Si-u?"
Dr. Khun couldn't speak. His jaw trembled, his face turning entirely pale as the primitive, survivalist part of his brain screamed at him that he was standing next to an apex monster. He could only manage a frantic, desperate nod.
"Excellent," Joseph beamed, instantly letting go of the coat and smoothing out the fabric with a cheerful, polite pat. The suffocating dread vanished from the air as quickly as it had arrived. Joseph stepped back, casually adjusting his cuffs. "I knew you were a smart man. Enjoy your new assignment in Sector-12."
Joseph turned on his heel and took two slow, silent steps back toward SCP-187's containment cell. But on the third step, he paused.
His back remained perfectly straight. His hands slipped effortlessly into the pockets of his tailored navy-blue trousers. The polite, boyish smile on his face dissolved into a dead, terrifying grin. Joseph remembered Katie's muffled crying. He remembered how this insignificant researcher had forced her hands away from her face, exposing her eyes to her own worst nightmares—just like the Site-19 staff used to do to a young Joseph in his sterile containment cell.
"They never learn," the cold, logical voice inside his Black Box whispered. "They need to feel the exact same thing."
Joseph turned slowly to face Dr. Khun. His eyes behind the lenses of his glasses flashed with the primal, unyielding rage of the "Mind Killer."
Dr. Khun barely had time to part his lips to speak before Joseph anchored his reality-bending grip onto him. The space around Si-u densified, pinning him brutally against the concrete wall and crushing his vocal cords—the researcher couldn't even manage a whimper. In that exact second, the molecular structure of his physical body began to break down. Dr. Khun's skin visibly softened, losing its shape and melting away like a wax doll left on a blazing furnace. His pristine white lab coat was instantly soaked in a gruesome, smoking organic mass.
Si-u's eyes widened to their absolute limits from the unbearable, agonizing shock, but Joseph's vacuum barrier kept every single drop of sound trapped.
Joseph took a slow step forward, taking his hands out of his pockets. His wide, sociopathic "normal guy" smile remained frozen on his face, contrasting sharply with the nightmare he was conducting. Utilizing a highly focused vector of gravitational displacement, Joseph mentally locked onto the upper and lower halves of Khun's body.
A sharp, sudden flick of his fingers.
A heavy, wet crunch and the tearing sound of snapping tendons echoed in the localized space. The reality distortion literally ripped Dr. Khun’s melting, yielding body entirely in half right at the waistline. Blood and viscera sprayed outward, but Joseph's anomalous field intercepted every single airborne droplet, refusing to let them tarnish a single fiber of his tailored navy-blue suit.
A second later, Joseph clenched his fist. The space inside the barrier collapsed with a muffled pop. The horrific remains of Dr. Khun—the blood, the flesh, and the melted skin—were instantly compressed by the sheer gravity into a microscopic, harmless singularity, completely erased from the physical world.
The corridor was pristine once more. No evidence. No traces.
Joseph pulled a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, neatly dabbed a faint bead of sweat from his forehead, and adjusted his glasses. Layer by layer, the soft, polite, and tidy smile returned to his face. His Black Box was securely under lock and key. The test had gone perfectly fine.
------------------------------
The reinforced blast door of the containment cell hissed open again, exactly sixty seconds after Joseph had left.
"I'm back," Joseph said, his voice perfectly warm, light, and pleasant—the flawless mask of the normal guy firmly back in place as if the hallway outside hadn't just witnessed a butchering. He reached across the table and gently, carefully adjusted the silk scarf over Katie's eyes so she would be more comfortable. "Now, where were we, Katie? Ah, yes. Random talking. Let's start completely over. What's your favorite color?"
Katie was shaking and trying to calm down in front of Joseph’s keen eyes, the vision came true and he was the evidence. Si-u should have died from a containment breach or a lab accident, it could have been anything— ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING— but Si-u had to die at the hands of Joseph, he had to die at the cruel hands of O5-10 “The Mind Killer”.
The Mind killer who’s been staring at SCP-187 for the past 3 minutes, waiting and watching for a reply. Katie saw static underneath the blindfold, a dark void of where he should be.
“Blue… my favorite color is blue… It reminds me of the ocean…” Katie replied to him, Joseph seemed satisfied with that answer.
It could have stayed like that, pleasant and sweet as if Si-u’s death never happened. Ignoring the faint smell of blood and cologne on Joseph, it could have been treated like a cute date…
“Why?…” Katie’s voice trembled, covering her eyes with mittened hands despite the silk blindfold. Trying to drown out the images of Si-u, blood staining the pristine coat of the foundation and a gruesome sight of organs being morphed.
“Why.. why did you kill Dr. Khun?…” She asked Joseph, pleading for him to at least give her a reasonable explanation. Katie started to feel tears well up in her eyes, still remembering the vision of Si-u. The air shift around them, unnerving and cold.
Slumping into the chair, letting everything take over. The silk blindfold was drenched with tears, how many times has this happened before? Katie would find someone with a semblance of humanity only for them to be stripped to a bloody heap of flesh.
Katie was sobbing as the vision kept repeating over and over, mittened hands covering her face, pressing into her eye sockets. Trying to go blind to forget the sight, trying to go blind so everything could just go away, trying to go blind so it could just end.
The quiet hum of the containment cell’s ventilation felt louder now, an oppressive background noise to the steady, unyielding gaze of O5-10. Joseph sat perfectly still, his hands folded neatly over his leather clipboard, watching her through his spectacles with the patient, clinical observation of a scientist—or a predator.
When Katie gave her answer, her voice cracking over the word blue, the subtle tightening around Joseph’s eyes relaxed. The polite, pleasant mask of the normal guy smoothed back over his features. He nodded once, a gesture so ordinary it could have belonged to any low-level clerk in the breakroom. For a brief, fleeting moment, the illusion of safety returned. The heavy, metallic smell of fresh blood was expertly masked by the sharp, crisp scent of his high-end cologne, creating a bizarre, sickening contrast that felt like a beautifully staged farce. It was an invitation to pretend. An invitation to play along with the lie that Si-u Khun had never existed.
But Katie couldn't play along. The vision was a permanent scar on the back of her eyelids, an agonizing loop of melting flesh and tearing tendons.
When the question broke from her lips—Why?—the pleasant atmosphere didn't shatter; it simply froze. The temperature in the room remained physically stable under Joseph's iron-clad control, but the psychological weight of his presence grew suffocating.
Joseph didn't lean back. He didn't scoff or flash a manic, sociopathic grin. Instead, he slowly lowered his hands to the steel table, his movements entirely devoid of hostility. He watched her sob into her thick mittens, watched the tears soak through the silk scarf he had so gently tied around her eyes just minutes prior.
"Why?" Joseph repeated her question, his voice dropping into a quiet, conversational tone. It was remarkably gentle, carrying the soft cadence of a mother comforting a frightened child, yet beneath it lay the unshakeable foundation of an Overseer. "Because he touched you, Katie."
He paused, letting the words settle in the sterile air between them.
"Dr. Khun was a baseline human with a notebook and a severe lack of situational awareness," Joseph continued smoothly, his tone entirely matter-of-fact, as if he were explaining a minor clerical error. "He arrived here with his grand ideas of 'casual conversation' and 'empathy.' But the very first thing he did when he stepped into this room was grab your wrists. He forced your hands away. He actively chose to traumatize you, to force your eyes open, just so he could satisfy his own clinical curiosity."
Joseph leaned in slightly, his elbows resting on the table. The wide, empty void that Katie perceived beneath her blindfold seemed to expand, drawing all the light out of the room.
"They think because they wear the white coats, they own the things in the cages," Joseph whispered, and for the first time, a faint, chilling thread of his own history bled into his words. "They think they can poke, and prod, and force you to look at the horrors of the world just to log it in a database. They did it to me, Katie. For years. Staring at me through the glass, forcing me into sterile boxes, treating my mind like a puzzle they had the right to solve. They broke me until there was nothing left but a black box."
He reached across the table. His gloved hand didn't grab her; he simply placed his palm flat on the steel, a few inches away from her mittened hands, offering a bizarre semblance of boundaries.
"I didn't kill him out of cruelty," Joseph said, his voice entirely steady, completely justified in his own warped, sociopathic logic. "I killed him because he proved he was a hazard to the asset. I gave you that blindfold, Katie. I let you close your eyes. Because no one—absolutely no one in this Foundation—has the right to force you to look at things that tear your mind apart. Not anymore. I am O5-10, and I protect what belongs in my sectors."
He pulled his hand back, casually adjusting the cuff of his navy-blue suit jacket, the perfect picture of an orderly, well-mannered gentleman once more.
"You can leave the scarf on," Joseph added softly, his pleasant, normal smile returning to his face as if the explanation had completely resolved the issue. "You can keep your eyes closed for as long as you like. You are safe now. No more white coats will touch you. Now, please... tell me more about the ocean. I've always wanted to know what it looks like to someone who can see the end of it."
Then O5-10 stopped with a quick pause with deep breath as he steps back from SCP-187.
"And sorry for letting you seeing this..."
Then Tenth Overseer turns around towards the door slowly as he's about to leave.
In the silence of the containment cell, quiet footsteps were walking towards the cell doors. The cell which held in tears and sobs, confessions and truths, reality and static, was being closed. O5-10 was walking away and towards the sterile lights of the foundation, leaving the silence behind those closed doors.
Just before O5-10 stepped out, a shaky voice speaks up, raw and vulnerable but also cautious. “You wanted to talk about the ocean… but you’re leaving again..” Katie had calmed down from her sobbing, leaving only sniffles, tear stained face underneath the silk blindfold.
Katie stood up, mittened hands supporting her shaky figure. “Talk to me… please..What happened to you in these walls?…” The silence stretched on for what seemed to be hours, bathed breath as until a footsteps walked back to the table and sat back down.
Sitting in silence they both did, Katie waited for him to talk or at least do anything but stare. The atmosphere was calm and not tense or frozen like before, it was comforting without masking.
Whispers and rumors always followed Joseph, some rumors arrived even to Katie’s containment cell. Questions and concerns left unanswered, the ethics committee was expected not to answer the origins of O5-10 whom had a variety of names like ‘The Mind Killer’ ‘Black box killer’.
Katie knew how many people died at the hands of Joseph, it was unavoidable to know. So she thread the waves carefully as to not meet the same fate, they might share similarities that make them bond but that doesn’t mean that she shouldn’t be careful of the void. After all, in the end it might just swallow her whole.
The pneumatic seals of the heavy blast door abruptly ceased their exit cycle. The heavy plates slid shut, locking them back into the profound, heavy silence of the containment cell.
Joseph stood with his back to Katie. For the first time in his life, his vitals on Sophia Light’s (O5-2) encrypted monitor breached the green zone. His heart rate spiked dangerously. His brainwaves fractured into a chaotic, overlapping sequence of panic and rage. The internal locks of his Black Box, which he had welded shut through absolute willpower, began to violently groan. Katie's question—"What happened to you in these walls?"—had bypassed his defenses, hitting the raw, unhealed core of his trauma. It didn't awaken the cold, calculating Overseer Council member. It awakened the helpless, terrified little boy locked in the dark.
Joseph turned around slowly. His footsteps back to the metal table were no longer silent or graceful; they were heavy, uneven, and dragging. When he dropped back into the steel chair, he didn't neatly place his clipboard or adjust his cuffs.
Instead, he ripped his spectacles off his face and slammed them onto the metal table. The lenses clinked violently against the steel.
Even through the silk scarf and her thick mittens, Katie felt a psychological shockwave rip through the room. This wasn't a directed reality-bending execution like the one that had erased Dr. Khun. This was a raw, uncontrolled cognitive seizure. The very air around Joseph began to vibrate. The static and the void that Katie always saw in his place suddenly ignited into a roaring, violent vortex of absolute blackness. His Black Box was tearing at the seams.
Joseph leaned forward, his elbows digging into the table. His gloved hands clawed frantically into his own hair, completely ruining his perfect, neat styling. His breathing became rapid, shallow, and ragged. The ordinary guy was gone, ripped to shreds by his own mind.
"You... you actually want to know?" his voice broke, completely stripped of its smooth, velvety cadence. It was a raw, primal rasp of pure agony mixed with sociopathic fury. "You think the rumors in this damn Foundation capture even a fraction of what they do here? 'The Mind Killer'... 'The Black Box Killer'... they invented those grand, terrifying names because they are too cowardly to face the monster they built with their own hands!"
Joseph snapped his head up. Without his glasses, his eyes were wild, dilated, and terrifyingly unfocused. There was no empathy in them, but there was a depth of suffering so profound it could have driven a normal human insane just by looking.
"They didn't just contain me, Katie. They trained me. Like a dog. Like a weapon. Every single morning began with them measuring exactly how much trauma my brain could endure before my anomaly would tear reality apart. They pumped me full of cognitive stimulants so I couldn't sleep for days. They cut the lights and flooded my cell with high-frequency ultrasound just to test my psychological shields. They forced me to watch Class-D personnel bleed out in front of me, logging the exact millisecond my capacity for pity withered away!"
He slammed his fist into the table. The crash echoed like a gunshot through the small room, and for a fraction of a second, the fluorescent lights overhead flickered and dimmed, submitting to his unbridled rage.
"They erased me! Don't you get it?! Layer by layer, day by day, they carved the human out of me until there was nothing left but this... this vacuum you see! They locked me inside my own Black Box and threw away the key! And when I finally broke out and slaughtered a thousand of them, they didn't terminate me because they couldn't! They crawled to me on their knees, handed me this suit, gave me the title of O5-10, just so I wouldn't delete their entire godforsaken Foundation from existence!"
Joseph was panting, his shoulders shuddering with a violent tremor. He was one breath away from losing total control, an outcome that would have instantly liquified the minds of everyone in the sector. But right at the precipice of his mental abyss, a quiet, weeping voice cracked through his encrypted earpiece.
Joseph froze. The violent vortex of static and blackness around him began to slow down, settling into a heavy, thick fog. He focused his wild eyes onto Katie. She was pale, trembling, and terrified—but she hadn't run away. She hadn't tried to exploit his weakness. She was just there, holding the silence with him.
Joseph took a deep, shuddering breath. Then another.
With a superhuman feat of sociopathic willpower, he began to drag the shattered pieces of his self-control back together. His breathing leveled out. The violent tremors in his shoulders ceased. He slowly lowered his hands, sat up perfectly straight, and reached across the table to pick up his glasses. As he slid them back over his ears and neatly adjusted the frame, the polite, gentle smile—layer by layer—returned to his face. But this time, it wasn't a fake mask, nor was it the cold armor of an Overseer. It was the exhausted, hard-won composure of a man who had just stared into his own personal hell and forced himself to walk back out.
"I apologize," Joseph said softly, his voice returning to its pleasant, rhythmic cadence. He reached down and neatly smoothed out a microscopic wrinkle on his sleeve. "I... should not have raised my voice. Foundation protocols do not account for such unmeasured emotional outbursts."
He looked at Katie, and despite the absolute void of his sociopathy, his gaze held something resembling a deep, quiet respect. She had seen his Black Box wide open, and she had survived it.
"You asked about the ocean," he continued quietly, pivoting back to the safe topic as if the entire breakdown had never occurred. The oppressive tension in the room vanished completely, leaving the air strangely comfortable, honest, and clean. "My mother told me it is a place where all the earth ends, and something entirely uncontrollable begins. I think you and I understand that concept better than anyone else. So tell me... what color is it in your thoughts?"
The testing chamber of Sector-4 in Site-19 felt like a sterile operating room where strict safety protocols replaced scalpels. The harsh white fluorescent lights mercilessly exposed every detail: the reinforced observation glass, the heavy blast door, and the solitary coffee machine standing in the center—SCP-294.
In the corner of the room, Class-D personnel D-4412 stood frozen against the wall. The man in the orange jumpsuit anxiously wrung his fingers. Transferred here from death row just a few days ago, he didn't know what the SCP Foundation was. However, he understood perfectly that people in lab coats rarely invited someone for coffee just for fun.
The containment door hissed open, and O5-10 stepped into the room.
To D-4412, he looked like a completely normal, pleasant guy. Handsome, young, early twenties, wearing a perfectly tailored navy-blue three-piece suit and a fresh haircut. A soft, polite smile of an orderly office clerk played on his face. He moved with an easy, casual grace, holding a lightweight leather clipboard.
This was Joseph’s mask—a finely tuned instrument of absolute authority. No one in the room—except Sophia Light (O5-2), who was watching through hidden optical feeds—was supposed to see the "Mind Killer." His internal Black Box was locked under a thousand deadbolts. No phantom pains, no triggers. Total, absolute control.
"Good afternoon," Joseph said in a low, pleasantly raspy voice, nodding to the Class-D worker. "Don't be afraid. Today we have a very simple test. You like coffee, don't you?"
D-4412 swallowed hard and nodded, visibly put at ease by the "normal guy's" presence.
"Y-yes… I suppose so."
"Wonderful." Joseph stepped closer to SCP-294, his footsteps completely silent. He extended two shiny coins toward the D-Class. "Take these. Walk up to the machine."
The man took the coins. His fingers barely trembled. The metal clinked into the slot. The machine hummed to life, and the small display lit up: “Enter beverage name”. D-4412 froze, nervously waiting for the deadly anomalous substance he would be forced to order.
Joseph tilted his head slightly, slipped his hands into his trouser pockets, and offered a soft, entirely genuine-looking smile.
"You know what? You can type whatever you want to SCP-294, right? Your choice."
In the overhead intercom, tuned to a hyper-encrypted frequency, a soft, surprised catch of breath escaped O5-2. Sophia Light, sitting at the console in the primary bunker, was taken aback for a split second. She had anticipated a strict, rigid protocol. But Joseph's vitals on her monitor remained perfectly flat. His heart rate was steady; his brainwaves were clean. No PTSD spikes, no trace of an impending meltdown. Her son was in complete command of the experiment, deciding to test how the anomaly would react to uncoerced human desire.
D-4412 blinked in surprise. He looked at the machine, then back at the smiling, ordinary guy. Realizing he was actually being given a genuine choice, his mind raced. What does a condemned man want before the end?
Obediently and quickly, he punched into the keyboard: “Coffee with a taste of freedom”.
The machine paused. A dull, rhythmic clicking echoed from within its chassis. The machine was analyzing the abstract concept of "freedom" for this specific prisoner. Finally, a clean, amber-gold liquid poured into the plastic cup, radiating a crisp aroma of mountain air, pine needles, and morning sunlight. There was no sudden drop in temperature, no reality-bending distortions, no supernatural smoke. Everything proceeded strictly within the physical boundaries of the room.
"Please," Joseph nodded politely, never breaking character.
D-4412 grabbed the cup, brought it to his lips, and took a deep gulp. His eyes widened instantly. The man's face relaxed entirely, washing over with an expression of absolute, boundless happiness. The beverage granted his mind the perfect illusion that the concrete walls of Site-19 had vanished, that his prison was gone, and that he was soaring somewhere far away, liberated from all earthly debts.
The D-Class eagerly drank the rest in a few greedy gulps, finishing every drop. His entire body went completely slack. So relaxed, in fact, that his nervous system simply... gently shut down.
For a man locked away in permanent containment, the concept of absolute "freedom" ultimately meant liberation from existence itself. D-4412's heart simply, painlessly, and instantly stopped right at the peak of ultimate bliss. He slumped softly to the floor, looking as though he had merely fallen asleep with a smile on his face. No convulsions, no screaming, not a single trace of fear. A surgically clean, perfect conclusion to the test.
Joseph stood over the body. His glasses remained perfectly in place. There wasn't a single bead of sweat on his forehead; his breathing remained slow and measured. No mental overload. He had completely mastered the environment, demonstrating that his self-control was flawless even when handing the initiative over to the subject. The test had gone beautifully.
He slowly raised his head and looked directly into the hidden security camera where his mother sat. His smile shifted slightly—becoming genuine, filled with a deep, quiet devotion. He was showing her his absolute stability and his ultimate triumph over his past.
Joseph tapped his finger against the hidden lapel microphone on his suit jacket and spoke softly:
"Everything is fine..."
Tenth casually paused with deep breath.
"SCP-294 successfully processes free abstract concepts without risking a containment breach,"
On the other side of foundation, there is a new personnel overseeing SCP-187. Dr. Si-u Khun, was a new researcher assigned to SCP-187, he’s going to assess SCP-187 by.. a casual conversation?
That is something that seems far fetched for the SCP Foundation, Dr. Khun is skeptical as he re-read the statement multiple times on his foundation issued tablet.
‘SCP-187’s containment cell must have a medical personnel on standby, ready to sedate her if needed.’ Dr. Khun read his notes on his tablet as he drank big gulps of coffee.
‘Additionally she needs to be in restraints so she wouldn’t harm herself though for today’s test, only the mittens and the medical personnel is needed.’ Dr. Khun finished his reading as he threw away his now empty cup of coffee. He walked closer to a door with the SCP Foundation logo which had the text “SCP-187” underneath.
‘A weird issue from the higher ups I guess..’ Dr. Khun sighed at that thought, as he entered SCP-187’s containment cell.
—————————————————————————
There sat a caucasian female in her 20’s with her hands wrapped in thick mittens, she sat across from him. Her head down at the table, she was tall but alarmingly thin. Scp-187— no, Katie was refusing to look at Dr. Khun.
Katie had seen only a glimpse of him when she saw red, blood splattered his pristine white coat, it didn’t show where did he exactly get injured but he was covered in blood. Katie shut her eyes tightly, bringing her hands to her eyes only to be stopped by Dr. Khun.
“What do you see SCP-187?” She heard him say, her eyes still closed and shivered. Immediately remembering the gruesome scene that she caught a glimpse of, she knew that it would only be a matter of hours, minutes, seconds till her vision will come true.
“There’s blood.. blood on you...” Katie recounts what she saw which alerted Dr. Khun whom has already resigned his own fate the moment he stepped into the SCP Foundation.
She felt him release his grip and she covered her eyes to try and stop the images flashing through her mind, she could only hear Dr. Khun stand up and take something from his pocket. Katie felt Dr. Khun gently move her hands away and tied a soft silk scarf over her eyes.
“I can’t make the visions go away but, I can at least try to reduce them.” Dr. Khun told her as he sat back down, turning off his foundation issued tablet. “We will only be doing talking this time.. No extravagant testing, just talking.” Katie nodded at him, or wherever he is based on his voice.
“Do you need specific answers?..” She asked him, slightly tilting her head to further question.
“..no.. just random talking like what’s your favorite color?” Katie heard him say and for a split second, she forgot about the foundation. She let out a soft laugh at how absurdly normal that question was, and how stupid the calm energy from the stoic Dr. Khun made her feel.
For a moment everything seemed alright, there was no visions to remember. Dr. Khun asked about the sea and the stars. Katie could sense that Dr. Khun was jotting down notes on his pocket notebook but she didn’t mind anymore, it’s been so long since she wasn’t treated like a test subject.
It was all fine for a moment and then, O5-10 walked into the containment cell. The casual air dropped and so did the room temperature, it sent chills down Katie’s spine. O5-10, she could only see static and the void when she looks at him.
From Dr. Khun and O5-10’s conversation, O5-10 was cold and calculated. Telling Dr. Khun that he had been assigned somewhere else, Dr. Khun was reluctant to hear that but nodded and turned to leave. “I have to be going now Scp-187.. See you later” Dr.Khun— no, Si-u told Katie as he turned to leave her containment cell.
Now it is just Katie and O5-10, Joseph sat down from where Dr. Khun was seated and smiled at her.
The moment the blast doors hissed shut behind Dr. Khun, the polite, standard-issue administrative mask that Joseph wore in front of low-level staff evaporated instantly. The warm, boyish smile vanished, leaving his face an unreadable, mathematical slate of pure, unadulterated sociopathy.
He didn’t care about the rules of the lower sectors, nor did he care for the sentimental "casual conversations" the new researcher had prattled on about. But what Joseph did care about—with the precise, territorial possessiveness of a high-ranking Overseer—was efficiency and dominance. Dr. Khun had overstepped. He had allowed an anomaly to become comfortable, and worse, he had manually restrained her to force her eyes open for his own scientific curiosity before the blindfold was applied.
Joseph slowly leaned forward over the steel table, his gaze dropping to the soft silk scarf tied around Katie's eyes. The room temperature didn't drop through a reality-bending anomaly; it dropped because the absolute, suffocating presence of O5-10 left no room for oxygen.
"You know, Katie," Joseph said, his voice dropping into a smooth, terrifyingly quiet purr that resonated directly inside her ears. "The Foundation spends millions maintaining protocols. And yet, new blood always thinks they can play the savior."
Katie shivered, her hands in the thick mittens clenching into tight fists against her chest. To her double-vision, Joseph wasn't even a man. Even through the silk scarf, her mind perceived him as a towering, endless void of absolute static—a black box that consumed everything it touched.
Joseph stood up, his leather shoes clicking sharply against the concrete floor. He reached down, his fingers brushing the fabric of the scarf with agonizingly slow precision.
"I'll come back in a very minute, alright?" Joseph whispered, his tone dripping with a dark, mocking playfulness. "Don't go anywhere. I just need to remind our new friend about the proper chain of command."
He turned on his heel and walked out of the containment cell, his movements fluid and entirely unbothered.
------------------------------
Dr. Si-u Khun was halfway down the corridor, his pocket notebook open as he hastily scribbled down his final thoughts on SCP-187's psychological state. He was still trying to process the sudden, freezing intrusion of O5-10.
"Dr. Khun."
The voice came from right behind him. Si-u flinched, spinning around. He hadn't heard a single footstep. Standing just inches away was the young, sharply dressed man in the navy-blue three-piece suit. Joseph was smiling again—but it wasn't the polite smile from before. It was wide, empty, and entirely devoid of human warmth. It was the smile of a predator that had perfectly memorized how humans express amusement.
"O-O5-10," Si-u stammered, instinctively taking a step back, his back hitting the cold concrete wall of the corridor. "Sir. I was just heading to the administrative deck to process the reassignment papers."
"There's no rush, Doctor," Joseph said smoothly, stepping into Si-u's personal space. He reached out, his gloved hand gently tapping the pristine white fabric of Si-u’s lab coat, right over his chest. "I was just admiring your work. A casual conversation. Very progressive. Very... empathetic."
"Thank you, sir. I believe that reducing the subject's sensory overload yields better—"
"But you forced her hands away," Joseph interrupted. His voice didn't rise; it grew quieter, sharper, like a scalpel slicing through silk. The empty smile never left his face. "You gripped her wrists. You forced her to look at you, knowing exactly what it does to her mind. You traumatized an asset just to satisfy your little baseline curiosity."
Si-u felt a cold sweat break out across his neck. "Sir, it was necessary to establish a baseline for the visual anomalies—"
"Let me tell you a secret, Dr. Khun," Joseph whispered, leaning in so close that Si-u could smell the faint, bitter scent of the SCP-294 coffee lingering on the Overseer's breath. "I know exactly what it feels like to be trapped in a room with people who think they can touch you. People who think they can force your eyes open. People who think their little notebooks make them gods."
For a fraction of a second, the mask of the ordinary guy slipped. Through the glass lenses of Joseph's spectacles, Si-u didn't see human eyes. He saw the cold, predatory abyss of the "Mind Killer." The sheer, suffocating weight of Joseph's sociopathy pressed down on Si-u's chest, making it impossible to draw breath. The hallway around them seemed to dim, narrowing down until there was nothing left but Joseph's wide, static smile.
"You saw blood on your coat, didn't you?" Joseph asked, his voice a mocking, gentle caress. "Katie told you. She sees the future. And she's never, ever wrong."
Joseph's hand slid up from Si-u's chest, his fingers wrapping around the collar of the researcher's lab coat with an iron grip that belied his slight frame. He didn't lift him, but the casual, effortless strength pinned Si-u completely against the wall.
"The Foundation gave me a chance, Doctor. They let me out of my cage because I am very, very good at cleaning up messes," Joseph whispered, his eyes unblinking. "If I ever catch you putting your hands on an asset like that again... if I ever see you trying to play the tough guy in my sectors... I won't just reassign you. I will personally open your mind, and I will let the thousand people I killed scream inside your head until your brain pours out of your ears. Do you understand me, Si-u?"
Dr. Khun couldn't speak. His jaw trembled, his face turning entirely pale as the primitive, survivalist part of his brain screamed at him that he was standing next to an apex monster. He could only manage a frantic, desperate nod.
"Excellent," Joseph beamed, instantly letting go of the coat and smoothing out the fabric with a cheerful, polite pat. The suffocating dread vanished from the air as quickly as it had arrived. Joseph stepped back, casually adjusting his cuffs. "I knew you were a smart man. Enjoy your new assignment in Sector-12."
Joseph turned on his heel and took two slow, silent steps back toward SCP-187's containment cell. But on the third step, he paused.
His back remained perfectly straight. His hands slipped effortlessly into the pockets of his tailored navy-blue trousers. The polite, boyish smile on his face dissolved into a dead, terrifying grin. Joseph remembered Katie's muffled crying. He remembered how this insignificant researcher had forced her hands away from her face, exposing her eyes to her own worst nightmares—just like the Site-19 staff used to do to a young Joseph in his sterile containment cell.
"They never learn," the cold, logical voice inside his Black Box whispered. "They need to feel the exact same thing."
Joseph turned slowly to face Dr. Khun. His eyes behind the lenses of his glasses flashed with the primal, unyielding rage of the "Mind Killer."
Dr. Khun barely had time to part his lips to speak before Joseph anchored his reality-bending grip onto him. The space around Si-u densified, pinning him brutally against the concrete wall and crushing his vocal cords—the researcher couldn't even manage a whimper. In that exact second, the molecular structure of his physical body began to break down. Dr. Khun's skin visibly softened, losing its shape and melting away like a wax doll left on a blazing furnace. His pristine white lab coat was instantly soaked in a gruesome, smoking organic mass.
Si-u's eyes widened to their absolute limits from the unbearable, agonizing shock, but Joseph's vacuum barrier kept every single drop of sound trapped.
Joseph took a slow step forward, taking his hands out of his pockets. His wide, sociopathic "normal guy" smile remained frozen on his face, contrasting sharply with the nightmare he was conducting. Utilizing a highly focused vector of gravitational displacement, Joseph mentally locked onto the upper and lower halves of Khun's body.
A sharp, sudden flick of his fingers.
A heavy, wet crunch and the tearing sound of snapping tendons echoed in the localized space. The reality distortion literally ripped Dr. Khun’s melting, yielding body entirely in half right at the waistline. Blood and viscera sprayed outward, but Joseph's anomalous field intercepted every single airborne droplet, refusing to let them tarnish a single fiber of his tailored navy-blue suit.
A second later, Joseph clenched his fist. The space inside the barrier collapsed with a muffled pop. The horrific remains of Dr. Khun—the blood, the flesh, and the melted skin—were instantly compressed by the sheer gravity into a microscopic, harmless singularity, completely erased from the physical world.
The corridor was pristine once more. No evidence. No traces.
Joseph pulled a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, neatly dabbed a faint bead of sweat from his forehead, and adjusted his glasses. Layer by layer, the soft, polite, and tidy smile returned to his face. His Black Box was securely under lock and key. The test had gone perfectly fine.
------------------------------
The reinforced blast door of the containment cell hissed open again, exactly sixty seconds after Joseph had left.
"I'm back," Joseph said, his voice perfectly warm, light, and pleasant—the flawless mask of the normal guy firmly back in place as if the hallway outside hadn't just witnessed a butchering. He reached across the table and gently, carefully adjusted the silk scarf over Katie's eyes so she would be more comfortable. "Now, where were we, Katie? Ah, yes. Random talking. Let's start completely over. What's your favorite color?"
Katie was shaking and trying to calm down in front of Joseph’s keen eyes, the vision came true and he was the evidence. Si-u should have died from a containment breach or a lab accident, it could have been anything— ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING— but Si-u had to die at the hands of Joseph, he had to die at the cruel hands of O5-10 “The Mind Killer”.
The Mind killer who’s been staring at SCP-187 for the past 3 minutes, waiting and watching for a reply. Katie saw static underneath the blindfold, a dark void of where he should be.
“Blue… my favorite color is blue… It reminds me of the ocean…” Katie replied to him, Joseph seemed satisfied with that answer.
It could have stayed like that, pleasant and sweet as if Si-u’s death never happened. Ignoring the faint smell of blood and cologne on Joseph, it could have been treated like a cute date…
“Why?…” Katie’s voice trembled, covering her eyes with mittened hands despite the silk blindfold. Trying to drown out the images of Si-u, blood staining the pristine coat of the foundation and a gruesome sight of organs being morphed.
“Why.. why did you kill Dr. Khun?…” She asked Joseph, pleading for him to at least give her a reasonable explanation. Katie started to feel tears well up in her eyes, still remembering the vision of Si-u. The air shift around them, unnerving and cold.
Slumping into the chair, letting everything take over. The silk blindfold was drenched with tears, how many times has this happened before? Katie would find someone with a semblance of humanity only for them to be stripped to a bloody heap of flesh.
Katie was sobbing as the vision kept repeating over and over, mittened hands covering her face, pressing into her eye sockets. Trying to go blind to forget the sight, trying to go blind so everything could just go away, trying to go blind so it could just end.
The quiet hum of the containment cell’s ventilation felt louder now, an oppressive background noise to the steady, unyielding gaze of O5-10. Joseph sat perfectly still, his hands folded neatly over his leather clipboard, watching her through his spectacles with the patient, clinical observation of a scientist—or a predator.
When Katie gave her answer, her voice cracking over the word blue, the subtle tightening around Joseph’s eyes relaxed. The polite, pleasant mask of the normal guy smoothed back over his features. He nodded once, a gesture so ordinary it could have belonged to any low-level clerk in the breakroom. For a brief, fleeting moment, the illusion of safety returned. The heavy, metallic smell of fresh blood was expertly masked by the sharp, crisp scent of his high-end cologne, creating a bizarre, sickening contrast that felt like a beautifully staged farce. It was an invitation to pretend. An invitation to play along with the lie that Si-u Khun had never existed.
But Katie couldn't play along. The vision was a permanent scar on the back of her eyelids, an agonizing loop of melting flesh and tearing tendons.
When the question broke from her lips—Why?—the pleasant atmosphere didn't shatter; it simply froze. The temperature in the room remained physically stable under Joseph's iron-clad control, but the psychological weight of his presence grew suffocating.
Joseph didn't lean back. He didn't scoff or flash a manic, sociopathic grin. Instead, he slowly lowered his hands to the steel table, his movements entirely devoid of hostility. He watched her sob into her thick mittens, watched the tears soak through the silk scarf he had so gently tied around her eyes just minutes prior.
"Why?" Joseph repeated her question, his voice dropping into a quiet, conversational tone. It was remarkably gentle, carrying the soft cadence of a mother comforting a frightened child, yet beneath it lay the unshakeable foundation of an Overseer. "Because he touched you, Katie."
He paused, letting the words settle in the sterile air between them.
"Dr. Khun was a baseline human with a notebook and a severe lack of situational awareness," Joseph continued smoothly, his tone entirely matter-of-fact, as if he were explaining a minor clerical error. "He arrived here with his grand ideas of 'casual conversation' and 'empathy.' But the very first thing he did when he stepped into this room was grab your wrists. He forced your hands away. He actively chose to traumatize you, to force your eyes open, just so he could satisfy his own clinical curiosity."
Joseph leaned in slightly, his elbows resting on the table. The wide, empty void that Katie perceived beneath her blindfold seemed to expand, drawing all the light out of the room.
"They think because they wear the white coats, they own the things in the cages," Joseph whispered, and for the first time, a faint, chilling thread of his own history bled into his words. "They think they can poke, and prod, and force you to look at the horrors of the world just to log it in a database. They did it to me, Katie. For years. Staring at me through the glass, forcing me into sterile boxes, treating my mind like a puzzle they had the right to solve. They broke me until there was nothing left but a black box."
He reached across the table. His gloved hand didn't grab her; he simply placed his palm flat on the steel, a few inches away from her mittened hands, offering a bizarre semblance of boundaries.
"I didn't kill him out of cruelty," Joseph said, his voice entirely steady, completely justified in his own warped, sociopathic logic. "I killed him because he proved he was a hazard to the asset. I gave you that blindfold, Katie. I let you close your eyes. Because no one—absolutely no one in this Foundation—has the right to force you to look at things that tear your mind apart. Not anymore. I am O5-10, and I protect what belongs in my sectors."
He pulled his hand back, casually adjusting the cuff of his navy-blue suit jacket, the perfect picture of an orderly, well-mannered gentleman once more.
"You can leave the scarf on," Joseph added softly, his pleasant, normal smile returning to his face as if the explanation had completely resolved the issue. "You can keep your eyes closed for as long as you like. You are safe now. No more white coats will touch you. Now, please... tell me more about the ocean. I've always wanted to know what it looks like to someone who can see the end of it."
Then O5-10 stopped with a quick pause with deep breath as he steps back from SCP-187.
"And sorry for letting you seeing this..."
Then Tenth Overseer turns around towards the door slowly as he's about to leave.
The testing chamber of Sector-4 in Site-19 felt like a sterile operating room where strict safety protocols replaced scalpels. The harsh white fluorescent lights mercilessly exposed every detail: the reinforced observation glass, the heavy blast door, and the solitary coffee machine standing in the center—SCP-294.
In the corner of the room, Class-D personnel D-4412 stood frozen against the wall. The man in the orange jumpsuit anxiously wrung his fingers. Transferred here from death row just a few days ago, he didn't know what the SCP Foundation was. However, he understood perfectly that people in lab coats rarely invited someone for coffee just for fun.
The containment door hissed open, and O5-10 stepped into the room.
To D-4412, he looked like a completely normal, pleasant guy. Handsome, young, early twenties, wearing a perfectly tailored navy-blue three-piece suit and a fresh haircut. A soft, polite smile of an orderly office clerk played on his face. He moved with an easy, casual grace, holding a lightweight leather clipboard.
This was Joseph’s mask—a finely tuned instrument of absolute authority. No one in the room—except Sophia Light (O5-2), who was watching through hidden optical feeds—was supposed to see the "Mind Killer." His internal Black Box was locked under a thousand deadbolts. No phantom pains, no triggers. Total, absolute control.
"Good afternoon," Joseph said in a low, pleasantly raspy voice, nodding to the Class-D worker. "Don't be afraid. Today we have a very simple test. You like coffee, don't you?"
D-4412 swallowed hard and nodded, visibly put at ease by the "normal guy's" presence.
"Y-yes… I suppose so."
"Wonderful." Joseph stepped closer to SCP-294, his footsteps completely silent. He extended two shiny coins toward the D-Class. "Take these. Walk up to the machine."
The man took the coins. His fingers barely trembled. The metal clinked into the slot. The machine hummed to life, and the small display lit up: “Enter beverage name”. D-4412 froze, nervously waiting for the deadly anomalous substance he would be forced to order.
Joseph tilted his head slightly, slipped his hands into his trouser pockets, and offered a soft, entirely genuine-looking smile.
"You know what? You can type whatever you want to SCP-294, right? Your choice."
In the overhead intercom, tuned to a hyper-encrypted frequency, a soft, surprised catch of breath escaped O5-2. Sophia Light, sitting at the console in the primary bunker, was taken aback for a split second. She had anticipated a strict, rigid protocol. But Joseph's vitals on her monitor remained perfectly flat. His heart rate was steady; his brainwaves were clean. No PTSD spikes, no trace of an impending meltdown. Her son was in complete command of the experiment, deciding to test how the anomaly would react to uncoerced human desire.
D-4412 blinked in surprise. He looked at the machine, then back at the smiling, ordinary guy. Realizing he was actually being given a genuine choice, his mind raced. What does a condemned man want before the end?
Obediently and quickly, he punched into the keyboard: “Coffee with a taste of freedom”.
The machine paused. A dull, rhythmic clicking echoed from within its chassis. The machine was analyzing the abstract concept of "freedom" for this specific prisoner. Finally, a clean, amber-gold liquid poured into the plastic cup, radiating a crisp aroma of mountain air, pine needles, and morning sunlight. There was no sudden drop in temperature, no reality-bending distortions, no supernatural smoke. Everything proceeded strictly within the physical boundaries of the room.
"Please," Joseph nodded politely, never breaking character.
D-4412 grabbed the cup, brought it to his lips, and took a deep gulp. His eyes widened instantly. The man's face relaxed entirely, washing over with an expression of absolute, boundless happiness. The beverage granted his mind the perfect illusion that the concrete walls of Site-19 had vanished, that his prison was gone, and that he was soaring somewhere far away, liberated from all earthly debts.
The D-Class eagerly drank the rest in a few greedy gulps, finishing every drop. His entire body went completely slack. So relaxed, in fact, that his nervous system simply... gently shut down.
For a man locked away in permanent containment, the concept of absolute "freedom" ultimately meant liberation from existence itself. D-4412's heart simply, painlessly, and instantly stopped right at the peak of ultimate bliss. He slumped softly to the floor, looking as though he had merely fallen asleep with a smile on his face. No convulsions, no screaming, not a single trace of fear. A surgically clean, perfect conclusion to the test.
Joseph stood over the body. His glasses remained perfectly in place. There wasn't a single bead of sweat on his forehead; his breathing remained slow and measured. No mental overload. He had completely mastered the environment, demonstrating that his self-control was flawless even when handing the initiative over to the subject. The test had gone beautifully.
He slowly raised his head and looked directly into the hidden security camera where his mother sat. His smile shifted slightly—becoming genuine, filled with a deep, quiet devotion. He was showing her his absolute stability and his ultimate triumph over his past.
Joseph tapped his finger against the hidden lapel microphone on his suit jacket and spoke softly:
"Everything is fine..."
Tenth casually paused with deep breath.
"SCP-294 successfully processes free abstract concepts without risking a containment breach,"
On the other side of foundation, there is a new personnel overseeing SCP-187. Dr. Si-u Khun, was a new researcher assigned to SCP-187, he’s going to assess SCP-187 by.. a casual conversation?
That is something that seems far fetched for the SCP Foundation, Dr. Khun is skeptical as he re-read the statement multiple times on his foundation issued tablet.
‘SCP-187’s containment cell must have a medical personnel on standby, ready to sedate her if needed.’ Dr. Khun read his notes on his tablet as he drank big gulps of coffee.
‘Additionally she needs to be in restraints so she wouldn’t harm herself though for today’s test, only the mittens and the medical personnel is needed.’ Dr. Khun finished his reading as he threw away his now empty cup of coffee. He walked closer to a door with the SCP Foundation logo which had the text “SCP-187” underneath.
‘A weird issue from the higher ups I guess..’ Dr. Khun sighed at that thought, as he entered SCP-187’s containment cell.
—————————————————————————
There sat a caucasian female in her 20’s with her hands wrapped in thick mittens, she sat across from him. Her head down at the table, she was tall but alarmingly thin. Scp-187— no, Katie was refusing to look at Dr. Khun.
Katie had seen only a glimpse of him when she saw red, blood splattered his pristine white coat, it didn’t show where did he exactly get injured but he was covered in blood. Katie shut her eyes tightly, bringing her hands to her eyes only to be stopped by Dr. Khun.
“What do you see SCP-187?” She heard him say, her eyes still closed and shivered. Immediately remembering the gruesome scene that she caught a glimpse of, she knew that it would only be a matter of hours, minutes, seconds till her vision will come true.
“There’s blood.. blood on you...” Katie recounts what she saw which alerted Dr. Khun whom has already resigned his own fate the moment he stepped into the SCP Foundation.
She felt him release his grip and she covered her eyes to try and stop the images flashing through her mind, she could only hear Dr. Khun stand up and take something from his pocket. Katie felt Dr. Khun gently move her hands away and tied a soft silk scarf over her eyes.
“I can’t make the visions go away but, I can at least try to reduce them.” Dr. Khun told her as he sat back down, turning off his foundation issued tablet. “We will only be doing talking this time.. No extravagant testing, just talking.” Katie nodded at him, or wherever he is based on his voice.
“Do you need specific answers?..” She asked him, slightly tilting her head to further question.
“..no.. just random talking like what’s your favorite color?” Katie heard him say and for a split second, she forgot about the foundation. She let out a soft laugh at how absurdly normal that question was, and how stupid the calm energy from the stoic Dr. Khun made her feel.
For a moment everything seemed alright, there was no visions to remember. Dr. Khun asked about the sea and the stars. Katie could sense that Dr. Khun was jotting down notes on his pocket notebook but she didn’t mind anymore, it’s been so long since she wasn’t treated like a test subject.
It was all fine for a moment and then, O5-10 walked into the containment cell. The casual air dropped and so did the room temperature, it sent chills down Katie’s spine. O5-10, she could only see static and the void when she looks at him.
From Dr. Khun and O5-10’s conversation, O5-10 was cold and calculated. Telling Dr. Khun that he had been assigned somewhere else, Dr. Khun was reluctant to hear that but nodded and turned to leave. “I have to be going now Scp-187.. See you later” Dr.Khun— no, Si-u told Katie as he turned to leave her containment cell.
Now it is just Katie and O5-10, Joseph sat down from where Dr. Khun was seated and smiled at her.
The moment the blast doors hissed shut behind Dr. Khun, the polite, standard-issue administrative mask that Joseph wore in front of low-level staff evaporated instantly. The warm, boyish smile vanished, leaving his face an unreadable, mathematical slate of pure, unadulterated sociopathy.
He didn’t care about the rules of the lower sectors, nor did he care for the sentimental "casual conversations" the new researcher had prattled on about. But what Joseph did care about—with the precise, territorial possessiveness of a high-ranking Overseer—was efficiency and dominance. Dr. Khun had overstepped. He had allowed an anomaly to become comfortable, and worse, he had manually restrained her to force her eyes open for his own scientific curiosity before the blindfold was applied.
Joseph slowly leaned forward over the steel table, his gaze dropping to the soft silk scarf tied around Katie's eyes. The room temperature didn't drop through a reality-bending anomaly; it dropped because the absolute, suffocating presence of O5-10 left no room for oxygen.
"You know, Katie," Joseph said, his voice dropping into a smooth, terrifyingly quiet purr that resonated directly inside her ears. "The Foundation spends millions maintaining protocols. And yet, new blood always thinks they can play the savior."
Katie shivered, her hands in the thick mittens clenching into tight fists against her chest. To her double-vision, Joseph wasn't even a man. Even through the silk scarf, her mind perceived him as a towering, endless void of absolute static—a black box that consumed everything it touched.
Joseph stood up, his leather shoes clicking sharply against the concrete floor. He reached down, his fingers brushing the fabric of the scarf with agonizingly slow precision.
"I'll come back in a very minute, alright?" Joseph whispered, his tone dripping with a dark, mocking playfulness. "Don't go anywhere. I just need to remind our new friend about the proper chain of command."
He turned on his heel and walked out of the containment cell, his movements fluid and entirely unbothered.
------------------------------
Dr. Si-u Khun was halfway down the corridor, his pocket notebook open as he hastily scribbled down his final thoughts on SCP-187's psychological state. He was still trying to process the sudden, freezing intrusion of O5-10.
"Dr. Khun."
The voice came from right behind him. Si-u flinched, spinning around. He hadn't heard a single footstep. Standing just inches away was the young, sharply dressed man in the navy-blue three-piece suit. Joseph was smiling again—but it wasn't the polite smile from before. It was wide, empty, and entirely devoid of human warmth. It was the smile of a predator that had perfectly memorized how humans express amusement.
"O-O5-10," Si-u stammered, instinctively taking a step back, his back hitting the cold concrete wall of the corridor. "Sir. I was just heading to the administrative deck to process the reassignment papers."
"There's no rush, Doctor," Joseph said smoothly, stepping into Si-u's personal space. He reached out, his gloved hand gently tapping the pristine white fabric of Si-u’s lab coat, right over his chest. "I was just admiring your work. A casual conversation. Very progressive. Very... empathetic."
"Thank you, sir. I believe that reducing the subject's sensory overload yields better—"
"But you forced her hands away," Joseph interrupted. His voice didn't rise; it grew quieter, sharper, like a scalpel slicing through silk. The empty smile never left his face. "You gripped her wrists. You forced her to look at you, knowing exactly what it does to her mind. You traumatized an asset just to satisfy your little baseline curiosity."
Si-u felt a cold sweat break out across his neck. "Sir, it was necessary to establish a baseline for the visual anomalies—"
"Let me tell you a secret, Dr. Khun," Joseph whispered, leaning in so close that Si-u could smell the faint, bitter scent of the SCP-294 coffee lingering on the Overseer's breath. "I know exactly what it feels like to be trapped in a room with people who think they can touch you. People who think they can force your eyes open. People who think their little notebooks make them gods."
For a fraction of a second, the mask of the ordinary guy slipped. Through the glass lenses of Joseph's spectacles, Si-u didn't see human eyes. He saw the cold, predatory abyss of the "Mind Killer." The sheer, suffocating weight of Joseph's sociopathy pressed down on Si-u's chest, making it impossible to draw breath. The hallway around them seemed to dim, narrowing down until there was nothing left but Joseph's wide, static smile.
"You saw blood on your coat, didn't you?" Joseph asked, his voice a mocking, gentle caress. "Katie told you. She sees the future. And she's never, ever wrong."
Joseph's hand slid up from Si-u's chest, his fingers wrapping around the collar of the researcher's lab coat with an iron grip that belied his slight frame. He didn't lift him, but the casual, effortless strength pinned Si-u completely against the wall.
"The Foundation gave me a chance, Doctor. They let me out of my cage because I am very, very good at cleaning up messes," Joseph whispered, his eyes unblinking. "If I ever catch you putting your hands on an asset like that again... if I ever see you trying to play the tough guy in my sectors... I won't just reassign you. I will personally open your mind, and I will let the thousand people I killed scream inside your head until your brain pours out of your ears. Do you understand me, Si-u?"
Dr. Khun couldn't speak. His jaw trembled, his face turning entirely pale as the primitive, survivalist part of his brain screamed at him that he was standing next to an apex monster. He could only manage a frantic, desperate nod.
"Excellent," Joseph beamed, instantly letting go of the coat and smoothing out the fabric with a cheerful, polite pat. The suffocating dread vanished from the air as quickly as it had arrived. Joseph stepped back, casually adjusting his cuffs. "I knew you were a smart man. Enjoy your new assignment in Sector-12."
Joseph turned on his heel and took two slow, silent steps back toward SCP-187's containment cell. But on the third step, he paused.
His back remained perfectly straight. His hands slipped effortlessly into the pockets of his tailored navy-blue trousers. The polite, boyish smile on his face dissolved into a dead, terrifying grin. Joseph remembered Katie's muffled crying. He remembered how this insignificant researcher had forced her hands away from her face, exposing her eyes to her own worst nightmares—just like the Site-19 staff used to do to a young Joseph in his sterile containment cell.
"They never learn," the cold, logical voice inside his Black Box whispered. "They need to feel the exact same thing."
Joseph turned slowly to face Dr. Khun. His eyes behind the lenses of his glasses flashed with the primal, unyielding rage of the "Mind Killer."
Dr. Khun barely had time to part his lips to speak before Joseph anchored his reality-bending grip onto him. The space around Si-u densified, pinning him brutally against the concrete wall and crushing his vocal cords—the researcher couldn't even manage a whimper. In that exact second, the molecular structure of his physical body began to break down. Dr. Khun's skin visibly softened, losing its shape and melting away like a wax doll left on a blazing furnace. His pristine white lab coat was instantly soaked in a gruesome, smoking organic mass.
Si-u's eyes widened to their absolute limits from the unbearable, agonizing shock, but Joseph's vacuum barrier kept every single drop of sound trapped.
Joseph took a slow step forward, taking his hands out of his pockets. His wide, sociopathic "normal guy" smile remained frozen on his face, contrasting sharply with the nightmare he was conducting. Utilizing a highly focused vector of gravitational displacement, Joseph mentally locked onto the upper and lower halves of Khun's body.
A sharp, sudden flick of his fingers.
A heavy, wet crunch and the tearing sound of snapping tendons echoed in the localized space. The reality distortion literally ripped Dr. Khun’s melting, yielding body entirely in half right at the waistline. Blood and viscera sprayed outward, but Joseph's anomalous field intercepted every single airborne droplet, refusing to let them tarnish a single fiber of his tailored navy-blue suit.
A second later, Joseph clenched his fist. The space inside the barrier collapsed with a muffled pop. The horrific remains of Dr. Khun—the blood, the flesh, and the melted skin—were instantly compressed by the sheer gravity into a microscopic, harmless singularity, completely erased from the physical world.
The corridor was pristine once more. No evidence. No traces.
Joseph pulled a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, neatly dabbed a faint bead of sweat from his forehead, and adjusted his glasses. Layer by layer, the soft, polite, and tidy smile returned to his face. His Black Box was securely under lock and key. The test had gone perfectly fine.
------------------------------
The reinforced blast door of the containment cell hissed open again, exactly sixty seconds after Joseph had left.
"I'm back," Joseph said, his voice perfectly warm, light, and pleasant—the flawless mask of the normal guy firmly back in place as if the hallway outside hadn't just witnessed a butchering. He reached across the table and gently, carefully adjusted the silk scarf over Katie's eyes so she would be more comfortable. "Now, where were we, Katie? Ah, yes. Random talking. Let's start completely over. What's your favorite color?"
The vault room was a tomb of cold steel and flickering electronics. Four syndicate mercenaries, draped in tactical gear, huddled around the main terminal.
"Almost through," the hacker gritted out, his fingers dancing over the keypad. "Just one more layer and we’re—"
He entered the final digit. Instead of a click, the entire building shuddered with a deep, vibrating hum that rattled their teeth. The overhead white lights flickered once and died, replaced instantly by a pulsing, strobe-like blood-red emergency glow.
"Fuck, what’s this?" the leader hissed, his voice cracking as he raised his rifle.
One merc, standing by a massive marble pillar, felt a sudden, unnatural rush of air from above—as if the space itself had collapsed. He jerked his head up, his flashlight beam slicing through the gloom.
It happened in exactly one second.
From the absolute void of the high ceiling, a pale, bare hand shot down. It clamped around the merc’s throat with the force of a hydraulic press.
"FU—!!"
His scream of pure terror was cut off mid-breath. His hundred-kilogram frame, body armor and all, was yanked upward into the darkness as if he were a ragdoll caught in a snare. His boots vanished into the shadows before the others could even blink.
A sickening, dry CRACK echoed from the rafters—the sound of a thick branch snapping. But there was no wood in the bank. Those were his cervical vertebrae.
A moment later, the merc’s limp body plummeted back down, slamming onto the polished marble floor with a heavy, wet thud right in the center of a red light. His head was twisted at an impossible angle, his eyes wide and glassy with the shock of a death he never saw coming.
High above, perched on a steel beam, a silhouette leaned into the red glow. Dante Wheeler looked like a ghost of old Viltrum: his breathing was heavy and ragged, and the thick black paint around his eyes was smeared by sweat and tears, running down his face like oil. He wasn't cracking jokes like his father; he was simply watching.
"That's not Vision Guy..." the hacker whispered, his legs giving out. "Something... just killed him..."
"Shit!-" the leader screamed, dropping his bag and bolting for the exit.
They scrambled for the doors, but the air behind them exploded with a sonic boom. The Vane didn't use the stairs. He dropped from the ceiling like a falling star, the marble floor shattering under his heels as he landed directly in their path. He didn't say a word; he just raised his bloodied knuckles, his face a mask of broken, silent rage.
The news of the syndicate mercenaries spread though the cracks of conversations, whispers of their fates were heard by those willing to hear the tale. It reached ears of relatively powerful people in the world of business. Owners of the Midnight Enterprises were no exceptions, the Mun family operates as a channel. They are reliable not only for their expertise but also for their skills on information gathering, they are the best at what they do and take pride in it. The youngest of the Mun family was no exception except that she had to be accompanied by at least two bodyguards to even begin trying to get a glimpse of the rumored “The Vane”. After a few minutes of walking, Lunette Sei Mun, the youngest of the Mun family was able to convince her bodyguards to let her explore on her own. Of course within a 15 mile radius with her phone gps on and with a tracker on her clothes, Lunette happily treaded though the place in search of The Vane.
They begin to lose hope in catching even a glimpse of The Vane, she came across a brutal sight of him and a bad guy. Lunette was afraid yet she couldn’t help but see the beauty in the brutality of it all, she was not too far from The Vane’s line of sight either. A person dressed in soft colors and in a sweater was not at all discreet after all, especially in this area.
The alleyway was a throat of solid concrete and rust, suffocatingly narrow and choked with the heavy stench of ozone. The pouring rain hit the metal fire escapes above, creating a deafening, rhythmic clatter that trapped the two of them in an isolated pocket of the world.
Dante stood completely still against the wet brick wall, his back to the street. He had retreated into the darkness to slip away, but her soft footsteps had followed him right into the trap.When he slowly turned his upper body to face her, the breath completely left Lunette’s lungs.
In the pitch-black shadows of the alley, the thick greasepaint smeared across his eyes didn't look like makeup anymore. With the absolute lack of light, it looked like two hollow, infinite void holes carved violently into his skull. The flickering white strobe of a faulty streetlamp at the mouth of the alley caught the red double "V" on his chest, throwing jagged, broken shadows against the brick behind him. To Lunette, he didn’t look like a human vigilante hiding from the law. He looked like a terrifying fallen angel—a silent, vengeful ghost that had materialized out of the city's concrete.
The aura radiating off him in that enclosed space was freezing. It was a heavy, suffocating pressure that made it hard to swallow.
Dante didn't attack. A ghost doesn't need to rush. With an impossibly quiet, gliding stride, he closed the distance between them. His dark gray leather jacket brushed against the narrow brick walls, cutting off her only exit. He stopped exactly two feet away, towering over her fragile, soaked frame. He smelled of fresh rain, cold iron, and the faint, terrifying tang of alien blood.
He leaned down slightly, bringing those two hollow, empty voids in his face inches from her eyes.
"You should have turned around at the plaza, princess," Dante murmured. His voice was a low, gravelly rasp that vibrated directly against the brick walls, entirely stripped of human warmth. "Alleyways are where people go to disappear. Or die."
His right hand shot out with blinding, fluid speed. He didn't strike her. Instead, his cold fingers gently but firmly plucked the high-end Midnight Enterprises GPS tracker right off the collar of her soft sweater. The wet wool dragged against his skin as he held the tiny, glowing device between his fingers, staring down at it through his hollow gaze.
"Midnight Enterprises. The Mun family," Dante said softly, his tone shifting into a dangerous, detached amusement. "Your people pride themselves on gathering information. But some secrets are heavy enough to crush a corporate empire into dust."
He didn't smash the tracker. Instead, he casually dropped it into her open, trembling palm, his fingers lingering just long enough for her to feel the unnatural, stone-cold hardness of his Viltrumite skin.
"Your bodyguards are already moving this way. I can hear their boots splashing through the puddles three blocks out," Dante whispered, his posture straightening back up as he loomed over her like a dark monument. "Go back to them, Lunette. Tell your family that 'The Vane' isn't a rumor they can buy or sell. I'm the thing that keeps the monsters afraid of the dark."
He didn't wait for her to reply. He stepped backward, his silhouette instantly melting into the absolute blackness of the deep alleyway. By the time the headlights of her bodyguards' SUV flashed against the brick entrance, Dante was completely gone—dissolved into the night like a ghost, leaving Lunette alone in the pouring rain with a glowing tracker and the unforgettable sight of a fallen angel.
Lunette was staring into the void that once had ‘The Vane’, still processing what happened as her bodyguard came to her with an umbrella, their face filled with worry for her state. “Miss Mun, Are you alright?!” The bodyguard asked her as he checked for injuries on her person. The bodyguard’s eyes shifted to the GPS tracker still glowing softly on her palm. The second bodyguard stepped out of the SUV with a warm blanket for Lunette. “I take it that you weren’t able to find ‘The Vane’ Miss?” The second bodyguard said with a breathy laugh as they wrapped the blanket around Lunette, plucking the GPS tracker out of her hands and into his pocket. “That or, you did find him..You were just awe-struck weren’t you?”
“LEON! That is no way to talk to Miss Mun!!” The first bodyguard barked at the second in annoyance. “I swear, this Leon kid will be the death of me…” They sighed as they rubbed their temples. The first bodyguard was an older gentleman with dirty blonde hair and sharp features named Idris, he’d been Lunette’s Bodyguard since she was little and he sees her as his daughter.
Meanwhile the second bodyguard was the same age as Lunette, being one of the student-bodyguards of Lunette also means he’d be more casual with her since they see each other on campus a lot. Leon rolled his green eyes playfully at Idris, leaning towards Lunette to whisper. “Is he bothering you, queen?” Lunette couldn’t help but sniffle out a giggle as they get into the SUV, Idris was driving while Leon was next to Lunette. Leon got comfortable next to Lunette who’s wrapped up with the blanket, leaning in close to whisper. “Seriously though..Are you okay? Do we need to dispatch anyone to check out this place?” He asked in a low and dangerous tone, ready to strike first no matter who is the enemy.
She smiled at him and nodded, looking out of the window to watch the rain pour down. The city was beautiful with the lights and the rain pouring down the buildings like a mirage of colors. In Lunette’s eyes, everything and anything can be beautiful if you learn to look correctly. Though there was something that she was wondering about, “How did you two get alerted that I needed help? Usually you just let me run around til I willingly come back” she asked curiously to Leon next to her as he avoided eye-contact.
There was a few seconds of silence until Idris spoke up from behind the wheel. “Your heart rate was out of control miss, we thought you needed help..” Upon that confession, Lunette died silently in her seat, she knew why her heart beat was out of control and it wasn’t just out of fear but from curiosity.
Lunette then spent the next few weeks trying to search for ‘The Vane’ or Dante as the files she recovered told her so, she left a letter inviting Dante to her apartment on Ivory hills near her university, she placed it somewhere Dante was always seen in by data. Actually, why did she basically ask him out? Both for intel about him and to get to know him with a not so secret agenda of asking him for help with her abilities, which ever comes first.
Lunette waited every night for Dante to see and read her invitation, though on one night that she wasn’t ready. That’s when Dante decided to swing by the apartment in full gear, which is how we got here. Lunette was deep into making a charcoal animation for her final, drinking a take out of iced wintermelon milktea. Her hair was tied into a low ponytail with a few hair strands out place unlike her usual well-kept self, her cheek had charcoal from god knows how it got there.
She wore a tank top which was dirty from charcoal and sweat pants littered with evidences of previous paints stains and now charcoal. “How long is this going to take?!” Lunette yelled to no one in particular, frustration evident in her face as she checks her progress and sees that she’s only 15 seconds into her 2 minute charcoal animation. She grabbed her milk tea and sat down on the floor, contemplating if she should try and finish at least 1 minute of animation until the dawn of morning or should she just take shower and call it a day. While Lunette was contemplating, she heard a ding from her front door and immediately went into panic mode as the door opened to reveal Dante…
The low, rhythmic hum of the city outside was suddenly swallowed by a cold, suffocating drop in air pressure. The lock on Lunette’s front door didn't click—it slid open with an impossibly quiet, mechanical friction.
Through the doorway stepped the ghost she had been chasing.Dante was in full, terrifying gear. The matte-black tactical suit absorbed the warm ambient light of her apartment, making the red double "V" on his chest look like a sharp, metallic fracture in the room's reality. The dark gray leather jacket still carried the faint, crisp scent of the night rain and fresh ozone. But it was his face that made the breath completely hitch in her throat. The thick, pitch-black greasepaint smeared across his eyes transformed his gaze into two hollow, bottomless voids cutting through the dim light of her desk lamp.
He didn't make a sound. He just stood there, towering over the entryway, looking like a fallen angel who had bypassed her building's high-end corporate security without breaking a sweat.
His hollow gaze swept the room with tactical precision. He didn't look at her high-end tech. He looked at the chaos. He took in the littered takeout containers, the half-empty wintermelon milk tea, and the endless sheets of translucent paper scattered across the floor. Finally, the two dark voids of his eyes locked onto Lunette.
She was a complete contrast to the sleek, corporate daughter of Midnight Enterprises he had seen before. Her hair was messy, her tank top was covered in black dust, and a smudge of dark charcoal was pulled across her cheek.
Dante slowly closed the door behind him. The lock engaged with a heavy thud. He didn't drop into a stance, and he didn't raise his hands. He just walked deeper into her space with a slow, heavy, and unbothered stride, completely farming the aura of the apartment until her stressful art studio felt like a high-stakes GDA interrogation room.
He stopped exactly three feet from where she sat paralyzed on the floor. Up close, he loomed like a monument of wet leather and iron. He slowly leaned his upper body down, bringing his hollow, painted face inches from hers.
"You've been leaving pieces of paper all over my sector, princess," Dante said. His voice was a low, gravelly rasp that vibrated right through her ribcage, completely flat and devoid of human warmth.
He glanced down at the animation desk, his sharp senses instantly reading the frantic, repetitive charcoal frames. A ghost of a sarcastic smirk flickered at the edge of his lips.
"Is this what Midnight Enterprises spends its resources on? Crying over a fifteen-second cartoon at two in the morning?" He straightened back up, his arms hanging loosely at his sides. He reached into his leather jacket, pulled out the sleek, crisp Valentine's invitation she had left for him nights ago, and casually tossed it onto her lap. It landed right next to her charcoal pencils.
"Trying to have a relationship? No fucking way... I've seen enough of this so-called 'cheating on someone'." Dante delivered the line with a freezing, absolute finality. He didn't look angry; he looked like a man stating a law of physics.
He turned his back toward her, his dark gray jacket snapping as he walked toward her open window, overlooking the neon lights of the city below. He paused on the frame, his silhouette cutting a jagged line against the moonlit sky.
"You're terrible at being discreet, Lunette," he murmured over his shoulder, his voice fading into the cool night wind. "Clean the dirt off your face. Finish your project. And stop looking for things that don't belong in the light."
Before she could even scramble to her feet, Dante stepped out into the empty air, vanishing into the shadows of the city before she could even hear a splash in the streets below.
Lunette let out a sigh and she runs her hand through her hair, glancing down her lap to see the letter she left him. Still crisp and neat dispite it being nights old which odd considering that she left it in an open space that could easily be drenched in the rain that’s been pouring down for days now, her only conclusion was that Dante swiped the invitations right after she left them there.
She focused on the letter and weaved out a string connected to Dante, she debated whether or not to reveal her powers this early but as the string faded out of reach because he was getting further away. Lunette tugged on the string which made Dante stop his movements, the string turning a dark red color that matches his own signature color. Lunette tugged the string again as Dante walked back towards her Apartment as Dante was dragged back, she snaps her fingers and people popped out to clean her work space.
Mainly Leon and a few other maids, Lunette went to freshen up in her bathroom with a shower. Leon meanwhile was making sure everything was in place as the way Lunette would like her art supplies to be.
“Alright! Let’s get to work” Leon told the maids who were either arranging the art supplies or the quickly cleaning up the apartment, the maids were little robots that were designed by Lunette’s older brother who is a leader in the scientific department of the midnight industries. A sort of housewarming gift, the little robots looked similar to kokeshi dolls or at least that’s what Leon thought. Why was he still awake and ready at 2am? Simple, he was out doing his own paperwork and he’s running on 3 cups of coffee and 2 monster energy drinks.
Leon went out to prepare something for his own headache as he checks if everything is functioning perfectly and so far the robots were doing everything right, one robot even gave him a warm cup of camomile tea. Lunette meanwhile was taking a shower, throwing her charcoal filled clothes into the hamper. She quickly finished up and took her usual combination of a camisole, long sleeve, and matching bottoms. She dried her hair with her usual routine of hair oiling and blow drying, it made her hair very soft and shiny.
Lunette stepped out and saw Leon reenacting the Hamilton trend of ‘alexander come back to sleep’ with one robo maid and another one filming. Lunette stared at the sleep deprived man and sighed.
“Leon, you are dismissed.. take the day off tomorrow, you can use one of my credit cards” She said before Leon would have any complaints, pressing a finger on his lips with a smile.
“Consider it a thank you for tonight” Lunette gave him a wink before sliding one of her credit cards into his pocket and ushering him out of the door, the robo maids quickly went back to their hide outs or their respective decorative spots.
In perfect timing, Dante knocked on Lunette’s door frame. Shock still in his face as he finally saw where the string that was tugging him to was connected. She gave a sheepish smile as if to apologize to him, she snapped her fingers and the doors closed automatically.
“My apologies for dragging you here again, I just need to talk to you again.. Because If you actually did read the letter, I was asking if you could help me out with my ability..” Lunette paused to take a sip of cherry tea previously brewed by the maids, sitting down on her couch infront of Dante as a cat sat down on Lunette’s lap. Truth to be told she doesn’t know how this cat got here but was thankful for the dramatic effect.
“The very same ability that bonded you to this string and allowed me to control your movements.” She smiled at him again only this time did Dante truly realize who Lunette is. The offspring of the CEO of Midnight Enterprises, the youngest daughter of Kon Heji Mun. Kon Heji was not only ruthless but also had alot of interactions with the dangerous people that even Dante hasn’t seen before, no one knows what goes on behind the cold walls of the Main Mun family house but it can’t be innocent.
“I have a very simple proposal Dante, You help me learn more about my ability and I can help you with anything you desire..”Lunette placed down her cup of tea as she stood up and walked to Dante, tugging him by his dark grey leather jacket.
“Everything you will need.. You need immunity from the law? That is easy, need money? Here’s my card..” She tried to hold his gaze but gave up and inhaled a sharp breath. “I just need you to help me with my ability..”
Lunette didn’t try to intimidate him anymore, her words were pleading, begging him to help as if something was on the line. “I.. I don’t want to make the same mistake again..please..You are the only one I can ask.” She sighed and lets go of him, careful not to break the string just yet..
She waited for a few seconds to hear his words, worried that her last option would say no. Her worry was obvious, she kept twisting on the string and looking down the floor.
“It will be just helping me train.. help me control my powers..and well- you would have to be abit closer to my place to do so! I mean my apartment IS very secure! And there are alot of rooms! It’s alright though if you don’t want that, I mean we have other places! But you should also consider yourself and your life” Lunette rambled on and on about how it might work, some even just quickly rambling about random things like how she thought Dante was a fallen angel when they first met.
Dante didn't move. He stood perfectly still by the open window, the cool night breeze rustling the edges of his dark gray leather jacket. He let her ramble, his expression completely hidden behind the freezing, pitch-black voids of his war paint.
Lunette kept twisting the string between her fingers, her eyes glued to the floor as she nervously stumbled over her words. She talked about training, about her secure apartment, about extra rooms, before completely losing her train of thought and blabbing about how he looked like a fallen angel when they first met. Her anxiety was practically vibrating in the small room.
The silence returned the second she ran out of breath. It stretched out, heavy and suffocating, completely farming the aura of the space.
Slowly, Dante turned his torso back toward her. He didn't drop his hands or soften his posture. He leaned his back against the window frame, crossing his arms over the red double "V" on his chest. The hollow, empty sockets of his gaze locked directly onto her trembling frame.
"You want me to teach you how to use your ability to take the world?" Dante asked, his voice a low, gravelly rasp delivered in a flat, dangerously calm tone. He tilted his head slightly, his hollow gaze boring straight through her. "Well, a similar Viltrumite known as Conquest tried to destroy the planet before you showed up."
The name Conquest dropped into the quiet room like a lead weight, freezing the air instantly.
Dante slowly took a single step forward, his heavy combat boots making absolutely no sound on the hardwood floor. He loomed over her like a dark monument of wet leather and iron, bringing his painted face inches from hers.
"You think having powers is a game, princess? You think it’s about fixing up a nice, secure guest room and practicing in secret?" Dante murmured, his tone dripping with an icy, unbothered seriousness. "The monster I just mentioned didn't want to negotiate. He didn't care about corporate empires like Midnight Enterprises. He wanted to drown this world in blood and ashes."
He glanced down at the charcoal animation papers scattered around her feet, then back up to her face.
"I don't teach people how to play hero. I survive," Dante said, his voice dropping into a quiet, chilling finality. "If I teach you how to use your power, I'm going to train you like the world is ending tomorrow. Because guys like Conquest are always waiting in the dark. Go back to your drawings, Lunette. Forget about the fallen angel. Because my world isn't something you want to step into."
He didn't wait for her to process the warning. With a fluid, silent motion, Dante stepped backward off the window ledge, dissolving instantly into the midnight fog before she could even look up from the floor.
Just moments before the neon lights of Fazbear’s Fright became a backdrop for violence, three members of the fractured Afton family stood hidden in a dark maintenance alcove.
Michael stood trembling, his rotten, purple skin hidden beneath a heavy trench coat and a low-brimmed cap. Beside him was the decaying, skeletal frame of Ballora. Her illusion disk had completely burned out weeks ago, exposing her rusted endoskeleton, cracked white plastic plating, and tangled bundles of dead wiring. The faint, distorted music box melody of Crumbling Dreams faintly clicked within her broken chest cavity, a sad echo of the mother she used to be.
The heavy, metallic thud of Springtrap’s footsteps grew closer down the main corridor. The time had come.
Terrence stepped in front of them, his hands tightly gripping his solid steel crowbar. He turned his head, his thick glasses catching the emerald-green neon glare of the hallway. He looked at his hollow, undead twin brother, and then at the tattered remains of his mother.
"Listen to me," Terrence whispered, his voice steady but carrying the weight of decades of survival. "He’s right outside. This attraction is a tinderbox, and the gas lines are already leaking. I need both of you to get out of here right now."
Michael gripped Terrence’s shoulder with a cold, decaying hand, his eyes filled with anxiety. "Terry, no... Look at him. He’s fused with the metal. He’s pure malice. You can't face him alone."
From Ballora’s damaged audio synthesizer, a glitchy, yet deeply loving voice crackled through the shadows. "Terrence... my brave boy... don't sacrifice yourself to his darkness."
Terrence offered a calm, reassuring smile, adjusting his glasses with a flick of his finger. His eyes briefly flared with the glowing purple-gold energy of the mixed remnants coursing through his veins.
"I'll be alright," Terrence said firmly, placing his hand over Michael's. "I injected the light and the dark. My body will regenerate whatever he tears apart. But you two... you are holding onto the last threads of your souls. You need to survive this night so we can end this story together later."
He gently pushed Michael toward the fire escape exit at the back of the alcove, giving his mother's rusted hand one final, reassuring squeeze.
"I'll try to handle Springtrap," Terrence promised, stepping out into the open, green-lit corridor. "Just get out, find a safe place, and wait for my signal. Let me take the brunt of his rage."
Before they could argue, Terrence stepped completely out into the hallway, deliberately dragging his steel crowbar against the concrete floor. Screeech. The loud, scraping sound echoed through the attraction, instantly drawing the attention of the monster lurking in the dark. Michael and the rotten Ballora had no choice but to retreat into the shadows of the exit, trusting the immortal brother to survive the oncoming storm.
Turning his back to his escaping family, Terrence faced the darkness, waiting for the clank of William Afton’s approach.
------------------------------------
The Clash of Retribution inside Fazbear’s Fright
The air inside the horror attraction was thick with the stench of scorched wires, ancient mold, and rotting fabric. Emerald-green neon lights flickered along the narrow corridors of Fazbear’s Fright, casting long, distorted shadows on the peeling wallpaper. The attraction wasn't even open to the public yet, but tonight, it was a battleground.
Terrence Afton stood in the middle of a narrow, intersecting hallway. He looked deceptively unassuming: thick, horn-rimmed glasses resting on his nose, a dark tactical jacket thrown over his simple clothes, and a neat beard hiding his jawline. But his hands gripped a heavy, solid steel crowbar—scuffed, dented, and freezing cold. He was tracking a monster, and his hunt had finally brought him to the end of the line.
From the shadows at the far end of the hall, a rhythmic, mechanical sloshing sound echoed. Clank. Squish. Clank.
Out of the darkness slowly stepped Springtrap. The moldy, olive-green rabbit suit was a decaying tomb of withered fabric and exposed wires. Through the jagged tears in the mask, the mummified, bloodless face of William Afton stared back. His eyes burned with a maniacal, unnatural purple flame, fueled by thirty years of pure, undiluted agony.
The monster paused a few paces away, his gaze locking onto Terrence. The mechanical servomotors in his neck turned with a sharp screech. His damaged vocal synthesizer emitted a harsh, distorted rasp, like rusted iron scraping together, before forming words:
"I didn't expect that you will be the one who would challenge me, Terrence... My quiet, unnoticeable eldest son. Your brother Michael at least sought redemption... But you?"
Terrence slowly raised the crowbar, adjusting his glasses with his left hand. His gaze behind the lenses remained deadly cold.
"Michael seeks redemption because he feels guilt," Terrence replied firmly. "But I feel no guilt, father. I only feel a duty. I didn't take Mom's light remnant and the strength of your victims to hide. I did it to break your spine once and for all."
Springtrap unleashed a horrific, guttural roar that dissolved into mechanical static. Despite the heavy, decayed metal structure of the suit, he lunged forward with unnatural speed, propelled by pure supernatural malice. His massive, clawed fist, bristling with exposed endoskeleton pins, flew directly at Terrence’s head.
But Terrence was no longer the frightened teenager of the past. Utilizing decades of survival training and the heightened reflexes of his immortality, he ducked beneath the swing. The air hissed violently above him as Springtrap’s fist smashed cleanly through the drywall behind him, sending a thick shower of plaster dust into the air.
Capitalizing on the opening, Terrence spun on his heel and brought the steel crowbar down with maximum force. CRACK. The crowbar struck Springtrap’s left knee. The fiberglass casing shattered, and the rusted hydraulic cylinder underneath bent at an unnatural angle. The monster shrieked in a cascade of static interference, stumbling back and barely maintaining his balance on the broken leg.
Yet William Afton was no ordinary robot—remnant made him incredibly durable. Ignoring the shattered joint, Springtrap lunged forward, his clawed fingers clamping onto the collar of Terrence’s tactical jacket. With monstrous strength, he hurled his son across the corridor.
Terrence crashed hard against a display case containing old prop masks, the glass shattering into a thousand pieces. A jagged shard of metal from the display sliced deeply into his forearm, tearing through his jacket and muscle. A dark, thick substance poured from the wound. Ordinary men would have lost consciousness from the sheer shock.
Springtrap heavily limped toward him, letting out a wet, choking laugh. "Immortal or not, you still bleed, boy!"
Terrence gritted his teeth. Right before William's mocking eyes, the wound on Terrence’s arm began to smoke with black vapor, and the edges of the torn flesh rapidly knit back together, activating his regeneration. Terrence rolled back to his feet, tightening his grip on the crowbar with both hands. His glasses had miraculously survived, and now, a fierce purple-gold fire flared up in his eyes, reflecting in the lenses.
Springtrap rushed him again, trying to overwhelm him with sheer mass in the tight hallway. Terrence parried a heavy blow with the steel crowbar—the screech of metal on metal echoed deafeningly through the attraction, sending a cascade of sparks flying. Leveraging the tool as a wedge, Terrence locked the monster’s other arm, forced his way forward, and drove his forehead squarely into Springtrap’s mask. A deep crack splintered across the rabbit's plastic face.
Pushing off from his stunned enemy, Terrence took a step back, swung, and landed a crushing blow with the crowbar directly across Springtrap’s chest plate. The heavy steel tore through the rotted casing, ripping out bundles of exposed wiring and shattering the endoskeleton ribs. The impact sent William reeling back, crashing violently into a heap of debris and old wiring, his mechanical systems sputtering and releasing fountains of sparks.
Springtrap wheezed, his purple ember-like eyes flickering wildly as he struggled to rise on his broken hydraulic legs.
Terrence breathed heavily but stood his ground, firmly holding his crowbar. Because of their violent struggle, a loosened gas pipe beneath the ceiling had snapped, and a distinct, sharp hissing of escaping gas now filled the corridor. Terrence reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small lighter.
"You... think this ends it?" Springtrap rasped, his mouth twisted into a horrific mummified grin. "I always come back..."
Terrence flicked the lighter, the small flame dancing in the reflection of his glasses.
"Then I will burn you again and again, father. See you in hell."
Terrence tossed the lighter toward the ruptured pipe and sprinted for the exit, while behind him, the hallway erupted with a deafening roar into a purifying wall of orange flame.
The testing chamber of Sector-4 in Site-19 felt like a sterile operating room where strict safety protocols replaced scalpels. The harsh white fluorescent lights mercilessly exposed every detail: the reinforced observation glass, the heavy blast door, and the solitary coffee machine standing in the center—SCP-294.
In the corner of the room, Class-D personnel D-4412 stood frozen against the wall. The man in the orange jumpsuit anxiously wrung his fingers. Transferred here from death row just a few days ago, he didn't know what the SCP Foundation was. However, he understood perfectly that people in lab coats rarely invited someone for coffee just for fun.
The containment door hissed open, and O5-10 stepped into the room.
To D-4412, he looked like a completely normal, pleasant guy. Handsome, young, early twenties, wearing a perfectly tailored navy-blue three-piece suit and a fresh haircut. A soft, polite smile of an orderly office clerk played on his face. He moved with an easy, casual grace, holding a lightweight leather clipboard.
This was Joseph’s mask—a finely tuned instrument of absolute authority. No one in the room—except Sophia Light (O5-2), who was watching through hidden optical feeds—was supposed to see the "Mind Killer." His internal Black Box was locked under a thousand deadbolts. No phantom pains, no triggers. Total, absolute control.
"Good afternoon," Joseph said in a low, pleasantly raspy voice, nodding to the Class-D worker. "Don't be afraid. Today we have a very simple test. You like coffee, don't you?"
D-4412 swallowed hard and nodded, visibly put at ease by the "normal guy's" presence.
"Y-yes… I suppose so."
"Wonderful." Joseph stepped closer to SCP-294, his footsteps completely silent. He extended two shiny coins toward the D-Class. "Take these. Walk up to the machine."
The man took the coins. His fingers barely trembled. The metal clinked into the slot. The machine hummed to life, and the small display lit up: “Enter beverage name”. D-4412 froze, nervously waiting for the deadly anomalous substance he would be forced to order.
Joseph tilted his head slightly, slipped his hands into his trouser pockets, and offered a soft, entirely genuine-looking smile.
"You know what? You can type whatever you want to SCP-294, right? Your choice."
In the overhead intercom, tuned to a hyper-encrypted frequency, a soft, surprised catch of breath escaped O5-2. Sophia Light, sitting at the console in the primary bunker, was taken aback for a split second. She had anticipated a strict, rigid protocol. But Joseph's vitals on her monitor remained perfectly flat. His heart rate was steady; his brainwaves were clean. No PTSD spikes, no trace of an impending meltdown. Her son was in complete command of the experiment, deciding to test how the anomaly would react to uncoerced human desire.
D-4412 blinked in surprise. He looked at the machine, then back at the smiling, ordinary guy. Realizing he was actually being given a genuine choice, his mind raced. What does a condemned man want before the end?
Obediently and quickly, he punched into the keyboard: “Coffee with a taste of freedom”.
The machine paused. A dull, rhythmic clicking echoed from within its chassis. The machine was analyzing the abstract concept of "freedom" for this specific prisoner. Finally, a clean, amber-gold liquid poured into the plastic cup, radiating a crisp aroma of mountain air, pine needles, and morning sunlight. There was no sudden drop in temperature, no reality-bending distortions, no supernatural smoke. Everything proceeded strictly within the physical boundaries of the room.
"Please," Joseph nodded politely, never breaking character.
D-4412 grabbed the cup, brought it to his lips, and took a deep gulp. His eyes widened instantly. The man's face relaxed entirely, washing over with an expression of absolute, boundless happiness. The beverage granted his mind the perfect illusion that the concrete walls of Site-19 had vanished, that his prison was gone, and that he was soaring somewhere far away, liberated from all earthly debts.
The D-Class eagerly drank the rest in a few greedy gulps, finishing every drop. His entire body went completely slack. So relaxed, in fact, that his nervous system simply... gently shut down.
For a man locked away in permanent containment, the concept of absolute "freedom" ultimately meant liberation from existence itself. D-4412's heart simply, painlessly, and instantly stopped right at the peak of ultimate bliss. He slumped softly to the floor, looking as though he had merely fallen asleep with a smile on his face. No convulsions, no screaming, not a single trace of fear. A surgically clean, perfect conclusion to the test.
Joseph stood over the body. His glasses remained perfectly in place. There wasn't a single bead of sweat on his forehead; his breathing remained slow and measured. No mental overload. He had completely mastered the environment, demonstrating that his self-control was flawless even when handing the initiative over to the subject. The test had gone beautifully.
He slowly raised his head and looked directly into the hidden security camera where his mother sat. His smile shifted slightly—becoming genuine, filled with a deep, quiet devotion. He was showing her his absolute stability and his ultimate triumph over his past.
Joseph tapped his finger against the hidden lapel microphone on his suit jacket and spoke softly:
"Everything is fine..."
Tenth casually paused with deep breath.
"SCP-294 successfully processes free abstract concepts without risking a containment breach,"
The damp autumn air leaked through the cracks of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza's weathered window frames, carrying the heavy scent of rotting wood and cheap machine oil. The establishment was on its final legs. In the dim light of the main stage, the four massive silhouettes of the animatronics stood frozen, their eyes appearing as empty hollows in the darkness.
Deep in the hallway, inside the security office, Terrence Afton sat behind a scuffed metal desk. He wore the purple uniform shirt of Fazbear Entertainment, covered by a heavy work jacket with a "Fritz Smith" name patch. Thick, horn-rimmed glasses slid slightly down the bridge of his nose. Because of these glasses, his neat beard, and his tired, slightly hunched posture, he looked almost exactly like Henry Emily—his father’s former business partner. The remnant in Terrence’s veins had halted his physical aging, but decades of hunting had left fine lines around his eyes. He was here under a fake identity to finish what had started so many years ago.
The front door of the pizzeria creaked open. The quiet slap of wet soles hitting the linoleum echoed through the building. Terrence did not look up when a tall, terrifyingly thin figure stepped into the dim light of the office lamp.
William Afton had returned. His skin had taken on an unhealthy, yellowish tint, deep shadows hung under his eyes, and he clutched an old toolbox in his hands. He did not recognize his own son in the man behind the desk, believing Terrence to be long dead. To him, this was just a broken, pathetic Fritz Smith managing a crumbling business.
"I was told you have an opening for the night shift, Mr. Smith," William’s voice came quiet, carrying a venomous, barely concealed smirk. He had returned here like a vulture, driven by a mad desire to dismantle the robots and extract their remnant.
Terrence slowly pushed his glasses up, perfectly mimicking Henry's hesitant, gentle gestures, and spoke in an altered, rougher tone: "Yes... The place is closing down in a couple of weeks. The previous guard ran off, mumbling something about the robots walking around at night. I need someone... reliable. Someone who isn't afraid of shadows. You worked the older locations, correct?"
William smiled thinly, convinced he was completely in control of the situation. He thought this fool was handing him the keys to the kingdom on a silver platter. "Oh, yes. I know these... characters like the back of my hand. Consider it a deal. Leave me the keys for five nights. I'll straighten this place out."
Terrence silently slid the contract and a heavy iron key ring across the desk. "Five nights, Mr. Afton. Work them, and you will get exactly what you deserve," Terrence said. In his arrogance, William failed to notice the dangerous glint reflecting behind the lenses of "Fritz's" glasses.
Once his father’s heavy footsteps faded down the corridor, Terrence took off the glasses. His eyes flashed for a second with the purple-gold light of his mixed remnant. He turned toward the dark corner of the room, where two ghostly silhouettes materialized from the air: his younger brother (C.C.), bearing the horrific bite wound on his head, and little Susie, whose spirit was tied to Chica.
"The bait has been taken," Terrence said quietly. "For five nights, he will be trapped here. Susie, Chris... you must hold back the rage of the other spirits. Do not let Freddy and Bonnie tear him apart before his time. My plan will only work when fear drives him into a corner and he tries to hide. Are you ready?"
The ghost of the Crying Child nodded silently, tightening his grip on the paw of his ghostly golden bear. Susie looked at Terrence with her glowing, sorrowful eyes: "We will do everything as you asked, Terry. We will make him remember our fear. But on the fifth night... there will be no mercy."
------------------------------
The Fifth Night: The Trap Snaps Shut
Friday midnight arrived. For four nights, William Afton—exhausted, terrified, and driven to near-madness by the inexplicable, coordinated aggression of the animatronics—had barely survived in the office. The attacks orchestrated by Terrence and the children had completely shattered his ego. He realized the robots were possessed by his past victims, and they wanted his blood. On the fifth night, William decided to destroy the threat once and for all.
Instead of sitting at the desk, William grabbed a heavy fire axe. Stumbling from fatigue and pure rage, he stormed into the dark main dining hall.
Terrence watched the events unfold through hidden cameras from a secret monitoring room. The screens transmitted shaky, static-heavy footage: William, acting like a manic butcher, attacked Freddy, smashing the plastic casing into splinters with wild screams. Bonnie and Chica fell next with a terrible tearing screech of metal. Finally, sparking wildly, Foxy collapsed, his endoskeleton parts scattering across the dirty floor. A thick, ozone-scented steam rose from the broken mechanisms. William breathed heavily, leaning on his axe, confident that he had defeated his tormentors.
"Fool..." Terrence whispered, staring at the screen. "You didn't destroy them. You just broke their cages."
In that exact second, the monitors erupted into wild static. From the pile of twisted metal, the pure spirits of the dead children began to rise slowly, materialized from agony and light. Gabriel, Fritz, Jeremy, Susie, and leading them all, the Crying Child and Cassidy. Their silhouettes burned with a spectral, blood-chilling wrath.
William Afton screamed in pure terror. His axe was useless against the incorporeal ghosts that began to slowly, step by step, surround him. They forced him back down the long corridor, straight into the old, boarded-up Safe Room hidden from ordinary eyes.
Terrence stepped out from his hiding place. Unzipping his jacket to reveal his purple uniform, he silently followed them, stopping in the doorway of the secret room.
Pinned against the wall by the spirits of the children, William panicked, looking wildly for an escape. His manic gaze fell upon the old, dust-covered yellow Spring Bonnie suit standing in the corner. The very suit he had used to commit his atrocities. In his broken mind, a single saving thought was born: the animatronics wouldn't harm their creator if he was inside the mascot. They would see him as one of their own.
With a hysterical laugh that verged on a sob, William began to quickly climb into the heavy metal parts. He snapped the leg locks shut, pulled on the torso, and, panting heavily, forced the massive rabbit mask over his head.
The ghost of Chris and the other spirits stopped. They just stared at him. At that moment, because of the heavy storm outside, large drops of water began to leak through the ceiling, dripping directly onto William's shoulders and neck.
"I won! You can't do anything to me!" William shrieked maniacally from behind the plastic mask.
But from his sudden, violent movements, his body-shaking laughter, and the moisture of the water droplets, the rusted springlocks inside the suit failed. A sharp, deafening metallic snap echoed like a gunshot. Then another. Then dozens more.
Hundreds of sharp steel pins, bars, and servomotors that had held the endoskeleton compressed against the suit's walls snapped free with terrifying force, driving themselves deep into William Afton’s flesh.
A horrific, choking scream of agony shattered the silence of the pizzeria. William's bones snapped with dry cracks; the metal rods pierced right through his lungs, muscles, and throat, instantly staining the yellow artificial fur of Spring Bonnie a thick, dark crimson. He collapsed to his knees, thrashing in death throes as the suit literally crushed him from the inside out, fusing his body into the machinery.
The spirits of the children began to slowly fade into the air, their faces finally showing peace. Their tormentor had received his punishment.
Terrence slowly took a step forward and approached the twitching rabbit suit. He took off his "Fritz Smith" glasses, dropping them onto the blood-slicked floor, and looked directly into his father's fading, terror-filled eyes through the mask's eye slits.
"You..." William wheezed through the foaming blood rushing up his throat, finally recognizing the features of his eldest son in the purple uniform. "Help... me... Terrence..."
Terrence leaned down lower, his voice sounding cold and unyielding as iron: "No, father. You built this prison yourself. You deserved every single drop of this pain. But don't think this is the end. I injected myself with the remnant you stole from our victims and Mom. I will live forever to destroy everything you created. Your flesh will rot in this suit, but if you ever try to come back... I will be waiting for you. In the fire, in the ruins, anywhere."
Terrence turned around, threw his jacket over his purple uniform, and walked toward the exit of the pizzeria. Behind him, inside the locked room, the final, ragged gasps of William Afton faded away as he became Springtrap. The storm raged outside, and Terrence walked into the night, ready for the next thirty years of waiting.
It was a rainy evening in New York City. The streets outside the electronics store, Campbell's Televisions, shimmered with neon signs featuring the smiling face of Homelander, advertising the new family plan from Vought Mobile.
The store smelled of ozone, cheap plastic, and overheated circuit boards. Hughie Campbell stood behind the counter, gloomily wiping the screen of an ancient CRT television with a rag. His ears still rang with the excited voice of his girlfriend, Robin, who just a couple of days ago had talked about moving. Huey felt trapped in the textures of this drab life.
The doorbell rang, letting in a blast of damp air.
Hughie looked up, ready to offer his usual smile for another picky customer, but his face immediately relaxed. Chris Kane, their neighbor on the landing, stood in the doorway.
Chris was a mystery to the entire building, but in a positive way. He always paid his rent in cash, never made noise, wore simple tactical jackets, and over the past three years, he had never refused Hughie's father when he needed him to fix a dripping faucet or carry heavy grocery bags up to the fourth floor. Chris always exuded a strange but reassuring sense of security—as if nothing bad could physically happen around him.
Currently, Chris wore a dark, slightly damp jacket and held a small box wrapped in duct tape. His one good eye—his right one—squinted softly at the sight of Huey. Chris always kept his left eye hidden behind a stylish, tight-fitting, jet-black eye patch. Chris had once joked to Huey's questions that he'd "caught a bad part at the wrecker," though the scar, hidden under his bandage, looked far more ominous.
"Hi, Hughie," Chris said quietly. His voice was low, slightly husky, but had a neighborly warmth. "Your old man said you were here until closing. Am I interrupting?"
"Chris! Hey," Hughie put down his rag, genuinely pleased to see a familiar face. "No, come on in. It's as quiet as a tank anyway. Customers only come in to warm up or ask why we don't have TVs with built-in V-Net. How are you?"
Chris approached the counter, moving with that amazing, silent grace that Huey attributed to "good athletic form." Bloodhound carefully placed the box on the glass.
"Little by little. I was running errands in New Jersey. Came back, and Hugh Sr. was complaining about his tuner acting up again. He said the picture started leaking when they were showing the International Convention. I was just thinking..." Chris tapped the box. "I've got an old but reliable receiver lying around in my warehouse. It's Japanese, from the military. Barely used. Thought you might want to take a look? Your dad knows nothing about this stuff, and you're a natural."
Hughie blushed slightly at the praise, pulled the box toward him, and hid a smile. Chris always did that—bringing home excellent, expensive equipment, cigarettes, or rare instruments, making it look like he'd "just found them in the garage."
"Listen, Chris, thanks. Dad's going nuts without his evening shows. How much do I owe you?"
Chris smiled indulgently, adjusting the collar of his jacket. Looking up at the wall of two dozen televisions, he froze for a second. A breaking news report was playing on every channel. Another superhero from the Seven—A-Train, I think—was smiling toothily as he recounted how he'd single-handedly thwarted a bank robbery, destroying half the parking lot in the process.
A cold, assessing glint flickered for a split second in Chris's single eye. The professional gaze of a mercenary, mentally calculating the trajectory of a .50-caliber bullet right into that shining superhero forehead. But Chris immediately blinked, returning his face to the mask of a good-natured neighbor.
"Come on, Hugh. Neighbors should help each other. You know that. Better tell me, how are things with you and Robin? Hugh Sr. has been buzzing my ears about you finally getting ready to move out."
"Well... yeah. We've been eyeing an apartment a couple of blocks from here. It's tiny, of course, and all you can see from the window is a brick wall, but Robin says it'll be cozy with the right curtains. She... she's amazing, Chris. I promised to stop by her place this evening after work. We're planning on getting Chinese takeout and discussing moving."
Huey immediately hesitated, rubbing his neck, that same goofy, loving smile that always gave him away appeared on his face.
Chris listened silently to the boy. A soft, almost paternal smile appeared on his stern face. At that moment, Bloodhound was thinking about his son, Luke. Luke was about the same age as Hughie—just as pure, full of hope, unbroken by the cynicism of this world. Chris had argued hoarsely with Luke over his idealism, but deep down he prayed that his son would never lose that humanity. And Hughie Campbell was a reminder to Chris of the kind of world he, Bloodhound, took his dirty contracts and cleaned the scum off the streets for. So that guys like Hughie and Luke could simply love, dream, and buy Chinese noodles in the evenings.
Chris extended his large, calloused hand and patted Hughie on the shoulder in a friendly manner. His grip was iron, but gentle.
“I’m happy for you, Hugh. Seriously. Robin’s a great girl. Take care of her. And... if there are any problems with the locks or wiring at the new place, you know my number. I'll come and fix it."
"Thanks, Chris. You're the best neighbor anyone could ask for," Hughie replied sincerely. Chris nodded, turned, and headed for the exit. Behind him, the A-Train continued signing autographs on the TV screens. Chris pushed the glass door, the bell rang again, and Bloodhound's figure disappeared into the rainy New York twilight.
Hughie looked at his watch. Only fifteen minutes remained until closing. Until Robin would be waiting for him on the street corner. Huey smiled, looking forward to the evening, unaware that in a few minutes his familiar world would shatter into bloody shreds, and the quiet neighbor with the eyepatch would be the only one who could help him survive.
2.
The Brooklyn rain mercilessly beat down on the windows of the old safe house. Inside, the darkness was dim, broken only by the blue-pink glow of a huge Vought billboard outside the window. Queen Maeve, a fake smile, was playing on the screen, advertising new fitness trackers.
The elder Kane, Bloodhound, sat in a deep leather chair. His left eye was hidden by a thick tactical patch, and his right, healthy eye was fixed on the kitchen table. The parts of his custom sniper rifle lay there in perfect order. Bloodhound, methodically, with the calm of a true predator, wiped the bolt with an oily rag. For him, this was work. Business. Nothing personal.
The door lock clicked softly. His son, Chris Kane (Wrecker), entered the room. He was soaking wet, water dripping from his dark jacket onto the old parquet floor. Unlike his cold-blooded father, Chris literally exuded a heavy, suppressed energy and rage.
Chris walked silently into the kitchen, poured two mugs of strong black coffee, and approached his father. The aroma of the beans momentarily overwhelmed the lingering smell of gunpowder and cleaning products. He placed one mug on the small table in front of his father and sat down opposite him, on the edge of the low coffee table.
They were silent for a few seconds, listening to the patter of rain. Bloodhound continued cleaning his weapon, but he could clearly see the state his son was in.
"Dad," Chris broke the silence quietly. His voice, usually warm, now sounded strained. "I wanted to ask. You've been in this war longer than me. What do you really think of Vought? Of that whole corporation, of those supers who think they're gods?"
Bloodhound set the bolt down, picked up his coffee mug, and took a slow sip. His single eye looked at his son with a heavy, age-old weariness.
"What do I think, Chris?" Bloodhound gave a bitter, barely perceptible smile. "I think Vought is the greatest scam in human history. They sold the world a religion packaged in pop culture. They created a system where human life is just a blemish on their financial statements. They save kittens in front of the cameras, but behind the scenes, they ruin and rape. And the law can't do anything to them, because they've bought the law. They've turned us into cattle, son."
The old man leaned forward slightly, peering into Chris's face.
"That's precisely why I remain neutral. I don't wear their cloaks or work for them. I take contracts from governments and syndicates to hunt monsters the law can't reach. My neutrality is my armor. And it's what feeds us and protects us." But you... you're different, Chris. You've taken the name Wrecker. You're an idealist. You go to the front lines, openly trying to destroy their corruption and save people. You're a pure guy, Chris. And it's people like you that Vought destroys first.
Chris looked down at his mug, then back up at his father. A dangerous, fanatical determination gleamed in his gaze.
"Their bloodhounds are already on me, Dad. I know it. And I'm not going to hide in the shadows like you and wait for them to kill another hundred innocent people." Chris paused, lowering his voice to a whisper. "Billy Butcher is putting together a team. 'The Boys.' People willing to go to the very end to bring down Vought. They're looking for people with balls, experience, and connections."
Chris leaned forward, looking his father straight in the eye.
"Dad... I want you to join them. To the Boys."
The room was so silent that the coffee could be heard cooling. Bloodhound slowly lowered his mug onto the table. His face turned into a stony mask.
"Butcher's 'The Boys'?" my father repeated, his low voice taking on a dangerous rumble. "Chris, are you completely out of your mind with your heroism? Butcher isn't a fighter for justice. He's a rabid, hopeless dog. He's obsessed with revenge against Homelander, and he doesn't care how many people burn in that flame. You want me, a professional, to get involved in his suicidal, personal war?"
"Yes, I do!" Chris snapped, his fists clenching. "Because Butcher is a psychopath, but he has CIA resources, information, and channels we don't have! If you're on his team, with your experience, you can guide them. You'll be their brake and their reason. And most importantly... you can use their data to cover for me. So that 'The Boys' don't use me as cannon fodder against The Seven."
Bloodhound leaned back in his chair. He glanced at the window, where the neon Maeve had been replaced by Homelander's glowing face. His son's idea was insane, twisted, but it held logic. Chris was a stubborn idealist; he wouldn't stop. He would continue his war against Vought like Wrecker, and sooner or later he would be killed. The only way for the Bloodhound father to save his son was to descend into this filth himself, to lead or direct Butcher's gang, to control the situation from within.
"You're asking me to become a nanny for a gang of suicide bombers, Chris," Bloodhound said quietly, but there was no longer any anger in his one eye. Only the cold, deadly determination of a father willing to do anything for his child. "If I do this... if I go to Butcher... will you promise to carry out my tactical orders without your superhero airs?"
Chris let out a sigh of relief and nodded gravely.
"I promise, Dad."
Bloodhound rose from his chair. His powerful figure seemed monolithic in the dim light. He walked over to the table, slid the bolt carrier into the rifle with one perfect movement, clicked the magazine into place, and slid the holster over the weapon.
"Okay, Wrecker," Bloodhound said, hammer-hard, pulling his hood over his head. "Let's see what this Butcher of yours is all about. I'll be their eyes and ears. But if that British bastard ever puts you in harm's way, I'll personally put a bullet between his eyes. Get dressed. Let's go find your ticket to hell."
3.
The massive indoor stadium hosting the Believe Expo was a suffocating blend of a rock concert, a Sunday revival, and a corporate Vought shareholder meeting. Towering banners of Ezekiel and Homelander hung from the rafters, promising salvation for the low price of a premium Vought subscription. The air was thick with the smell of buttered popcorn, cheap plastic merchandise, and the blind, fanatic adoration of tens of thousands of people packed into the bleachers.
Chris Kane navigated through the dense crowd, the hood of his dark jacket pulled low over his eyes. His hands were shoved deep into his pockets. In this place, where every second person was praying to a manufactured corporate god, Chris—known to the underworld as Wrecker—felt like a ticking time bomb. Much like Ryan, he possessed a pure, unyielding hatred for this corporate rot. He didn't just want to gather intel; his core instinct as Wrecker was to tear down these glittering, fake structures that exploited human faith for profit.
His good right eye methodically scanned the environment, while his left remained hidden beneath his signature, flush-fitting black tactical patch. His movements were fluid but hyper-vigilant. His father’s brutal Bloodhound training was hardwired into his muscle memory, allowing Chris to map out the Vought Tactical security guards, calculate structural blind spots in the massive stage, and track the lower-tier supes signing autographs.
Suddenly, amidst the sea of identical, starstruck faces, Chris spotted a familiar, lanky figure.
Hughie Campbell was standing near a merchandise kiosk selling Seven-themed Christian memorabilia. The guy looked completely lost, pale, and intensely jittery—as if he had been dragged to this festival of corporate worship against his will. Chris knew exactly why Hughie was here. Ever since the horror that happened to Robin, Hughie was being dragged deeper into Billy Butcher's bloody crusade, the exact kind of violent madness Chris had always hoped his friendly neighbor could avoid.
Chris walked up silently from behind and placed a firm, reassuring hand on Hughie’s shoulder. Hughie practically jumped out of his skin, nearly dropping a glossy Homelander prayer brochure.
"Whoa, whoa, easy, Hughie. It's just me," Chris said in his low, familiar voice, lifting his hood just enough for Hughie to see his face.
"Chris! Oh, Jesus..." Hughie exhaled a massive breath of relief, clutching his chest. "What—what are you doing here? You scared the hell out of me. Did you... did you come here for the revival too?"
Chris let out a bitter, quiet chuckle, casting a cold glance at the massive, glowing cross hovering above the main stage. Inside, the Wrecker persona wanted to smash it to pieces, but Chris kept his composure for his neighbor's sake.
"Yeah, right. My old man mentioned they were giving out blessings from supes and free sliders. Figured I'd come check out the circus. What about you? You look like ran over by a truck, honestly."
Hughie stammered, rubbing the back of his neck and looking around nervously. He was clearly hiding something. Chris saw his eyes darting toward the VIP section, where Butcher and Starlight were running their own play. Hughie was trying to protect his 'regular neighbor' from the dangerous world of the Boys, completely unaware that Chris’s father, Bloodhound, was already coordinating with Butcher from the shadows.
Chris looked at him, his single eye softening with a brief flash of genuine, brotherly concern. He appreciated that Hughie was trying to shield him with a clumsy lie. But Chris had his own reconnaissance to finish as Wrecker before Vought Security noticed two guys lingering too long in the corridor. It was time to move.
Chris nodded understandingly, gave Hughie’s shoulder a parting pat, and took a step back, melting into the passing crowd. He gave his neighbor one last look.
"I get it, Hughie. Alright, so, let's split up the ways. See you back at the building."
Hughie gave a distracted, grateful nod. "Right... see you back home, Chris. Be careful."
Chris turned around and walked in the opposite direction. In a split second, the harmless neighbor vanished. His posture shifted into the stealthy, lethal grace of a predator. Wrecker was back on the hunt, ready to find the cracks in Vought's armor, while his father, Bloodhound, kept his finger on a sniper rifle trigger on the roof across the street.
The 82nd floor of Vought Tower was dead silent, smelling of expensive glass cleaner, fresh leather, and high-end corporate paranoia. The late-night fluorescent lights reflected sharply off the polished marble floors.
Chris Kane walked down the long corridor with a relaxed, completely unbothered stride. He wore a sharp, tailored gray Vought corporate suit, a silver employee ID badge clipped neatly to his pocket, and a pair of dark-tinted glasses that seamlessly covered his missing left eye. To anyone passing by, he wasn't Wrecker, the dangerous anti-Vought vigilante. He was just another exhausted junior analyst pulling an all-nighter for the human resources division. His father, Bloodhound, had drilled the rule into him since he was a adult-teenager: The ultimate camouflage isn't hiding in the shadows; it's acting like you belong in the light.
Chris turned a corner and approached the heavy mahogany doors of the Executive HR and Legal Archive. Glancing down at his watch, he knew his window was small. Three blocks away, parked in a stolen cable van, Bloodhound was currently using a military-grade signal jammer to loop the floor's security cameras on a four-minute delay.
Chris pulled out a cloned master keycard, swiped it through the scanner, and slipped inside as the lock beeped green.
The archive room was chilly, filled with rows of locked digital filing cabinets and the soft hum of local servers. Chris didn't waste a second. He bypassed the public marketing data and accessed the restricted internal directory. Pulling a compact, black data extractor from his inner jacket pocket, he plugged it directly into the primary terminal.
The progress bar on his device flickered to life. Chris’s right eye quickly scanned the digital files flashing across the monitor. What he found made his blood run cold.
It wasn't a list of superheroes. It was a top-secret ledger of ordinary, non-cape Vought employees—high-level executives, laboratory directors, and even a few dirty security chiefs—who were secretly dosing themselves with low, controlled amounts of Compound V (especially Victoria who also used Compound V) to enhance their cognitive functions, halt aging, or gain minor physical edges over their corporate rivals. The files contained medical records, dosage logs, and exact names.
This was pure gold for Billy Butcher and the Boys. It proved that the rot of Compound V wasn't just confined to the capes in capes; Vought’s entire corporate infrastructure was secretly weaponized and high on their own supply.
100% Download Complete.
The device buzzed softly in his palm. Chris smoothly unplugged the extractor, slipped it back into his breast pocket, and took a deep, steady breath. He adjusted his tie, letting his pulse drop back to normal, completely erasing the Wrecker persona and bringing back the harmless neighbor from Brooklyn.
He pushed the heavy archive doors open and stepped back into the bright, silent hallway.
Just as the door clicked shut behind him, the heavy thud of tactical boots echoed from the cross-corridor. Two Vought Security guards, armed with submachine guns and wearing full body armor, stepped into the hallway. Their eyes locked instantly onto Chris.
"Hey! You there," the lead guard called out, his hand resting on his sidearm. "This wing is locked down after 10 PM. State your name and authorization."
A normal person would have panicked. Hughie would have started stammering; Butcher would have reached for a weapon. But Chris just offered a perfectly practiced, weary corporate smile. He didn't stop walking, slowly pacing toward them while casually adjusting his Vought ID badge.
"Oh, thank God you guys are here," Chris said, his voice completely relaxed, carrying the exact tone of an overworked employee drowning in paperwork. "Legal compliance just dumped an audit on the HR department. If I don't have the Q3 non-disclosure logs on Ashley Barrett's desk by 6:00 AM, she’s going to have Homelander 'personally audit' my severance package. You guys know how she gets when she's stressed."
The guards stopped. They looked at each other, the mere mention of Ashley’s volatile temper and Homelander’s terrifying name instantly striking a chord of universal, corporate dread. The lead guard let out a heavy sigh, his hand dropping away from his holster.
"Yeah. We know," the guard muttered, shaking his head in sympathy. "She’s a psycho. Look, just wrap it up and don't linger. Elevators are down the hall to the left."
"Appreciate it, gentlemen. Stay safe," Chris nodded politely, flashing a brief, friendly smile.
He didn't speed up. He didn't look back. With absolute, chilling composure, Chris calmly walked past the guards and headed straight for the elevator bank at the end of the hall. He pressed the down button, the metallic doors sliding open with a soft, melodic chime. He stepped inside, turned around to face the corridor, and watched the doors smoothly close on the Vought guards, his face a mask of pure, unbothered calm—looking exactly like nothing had ever happened.
Deep in his pocket, the files that would shatter Vought's corporate empire from the inside out were safe.
4.
The torrential rain over the New York docks turned the neon glow of the Vought billboards into a blurry, bleeding mess. It was the night of the Season 1 finale. The city was fractured, Vought’s leadership was in a panic, and Billy Butcher was on a suicidal path to destroy Madelyn Stillwell.
Perched high in the rusted rafters of an abandoned crane overlooking the pier, Bloodhound sat completely still. The heavy downpour hammered against his dark tactical gear, but his right eye remained frozen against the thermal scope of his custom, suppressed Barrett .50 caliber rifle. His left eye was hidden behind his signature black patch. He wasn't a hero, and he didn't care about Vought's stock prices. He was a professional hired to ensure that no corporate corporate strike teams interfered with the endgame tonight. His son, Chris (Wrecker), was on the ground tracking Hughie, and Bloodhound was here to keep the perimeter clear.
Suddenly, two distinct heat signatures cut through the gray static of his thermal optics.
Vought hadn't sent their public heroes; they had deployed two brutal, under-the-radar Supes used exclusively for wet-work and corporate executions:
* Phantasm — a stealth supe who could bend light around his body to become practically invisible, specializing in silent assassinations.
* Ironclad — a massive, bio-metallic brute whose muscle fibers were woven with dense organic steel, making him an unstoppable living battering ram.
They were moving fast along the shipping containers, hunting for the Boys' trail.
"Two rats in the maze," Bloodhound whispered into his throat mic, his voice a low, gravelly rasp.
He didn't start with the brute. He focused on Phantasm. To a normal soldier, an invisible supe was a nightmare. To Bloodhound, it was just a math problem. Phantasm’s light-bending trick didn't mask his body heat. Through the thermal scope, the invisible killer looked like a bright, glowing neon silhouette against the cold rain.
Phantasm was sprinting across the top of a cargo container. Bloodhound tracked the glowing shape, calculated the wind resistance of the heavy storm, and gently squeezed the trigger.
Pfft.
The heavy rifle let out a muffled, metallic grunt. A specialized, armor-piercing tungsten round sliced through the rain. It caught Phantasm directly in the hip mid-stride. The immense kinetic force shattered his pelvis and blew his leg clean out of its socket. The invisibility cloak instantly short-circuited, and Phantasm materialized, crashing hard onto the metal roof, screaming in agony as he clutched his bleeding, ruined lower body.
"Sniper!" Ironclad roared, his skin immediately shifting into a dull, jagged metallic plating.
Instead of running for cover, the brute used his super-strength to tear the heavy steel door off a shipping container, holding it up like a massive ballistic shield as he charged toward the origin of the shot. "You can't pierce my armor, you baseline human piece of shit!"
Bloodhound didn't blink. He didn't even move his cheek off the rifle's stock. He calmly reached down, ejected the standard magazine, and slapped in a custom-loaded clip. These rounds weren't meant to penetrate Ironclad's skin. They were packed with an experimental, high-grade magnetic-thermite compound his CIA contacts had stolen from a Vought weapons lab.
Ironclad was twenty yards away, stomping through the deep puddles, his metallic shield covering his upper torso.
Bloodhound shifted his crosshairs slightly lower. He aimed precisely for the exposed, watery mud right beneath Ironclad's heavy boots.
Pfft.
The second shot hit the ground exactly an inch in front of the brute’s advancing foot. The thermite charge detonated instantly upon impact, releasing a blinding, white-hot flash of 4,000-degree heat. The liquid metal didn't just splash; the magnetic pull instantly dragged the molten thermite upward, wrapping around Ironclad’s bio-metallic legs.
Ironclad let out a horrific, metallic shriek as his own steel-woven skin began to rapidly conduct the heat, literally cooking his muscles and fusing his joints from the inside out. He dropped the shield, collapsing to his knees as his legs melted into the burning puddle of slag.
The heavy, rhythmic crunch of combat boots on gravel cut through the sound of the storm. Phantasm, still bleeding out on top of the container, looked down to see a tall, imposing silhouette approaching through the curtain of rain.
Bloodhound stepped into the dim light of a buzzing streetlamp, his long tactical coat dripping with water. He pulled a customized, suppressed 9mm pistol from his side holster. His single eye was entirely devoid of anger, pride, or cinematic drama. It was the face of a man checking a box on a ledger.
"Please..." Phantasm choked out, coughing up blood. "Vought... Vought will pay you double..."
"Vought doesn't have enough money to buy my code," Bloodhound said softly.
He raised the pistol, tilted his head slightly, and fired a single round into Phantasm's forehead. The shouting stopped.
Bloodhound smoothly turned around, walked over to the still-smoldering, paralyzed form of Ironclad, and put a bullet directly through the brute's eye socket where the armor plating was thinnest. The massive metal body went completely still, slumping into the mud.
Bloodhound re-holstered his weapon, picked up his spent .50 caliber brass casings from the ground, and slung the heavy sniper rifle over his shoulder. The perimeter was secure. He tapped his earpiece twice.
"Two corporate assets neutralized."
Without looking back at the bodies, Bloodhound walked into the darkness, vanishing into the torrential New York night like a ghost.
He was caring about C.C, standing up for C.C against Michael, in night he hears Ballora's music and voices. But when in the bite of 83 happens — Terry got PTSD (which he lost Elizabeth and C.C). And yet, after Terry found out about William being killer, he stole dark and light remnants from William. He then mixed up and injected himself and he gets immune to age and regeneration.
In FNAF SL (1985)
Michael and Terrence are now technicians. They got silly names: Michael got Eggs Benedict (just like in canon) and Terry got Angsty Teen. But when he checks Ballora. He found out that he found that Mrs.Afton (in rumors that she was put in Ballora's animatronic), he found her but Michael got scooped. After event of FNAF SL — Terry made alliance against William.
VENGEANCE ARC
(FNAF 1 - 6)
FNAF 2 (1987)
While Michael is night guard to fix William's mistakes and Ballora (who uses illusion disk to be Mrs.Afton again) — Terrence (with fake name Fritz Smith) also surviving with Michael while Jeremy brought into night shift by Michael. First time Michael saw that Jeremy was bit by mangle as Bite of 87 has happened.
FNAF 1 (1993)
Terry got an idea. He convince Susie to team up against William in night which he gave her memories back that she was murdered by William. But when he pretends to be employer named Fritz Smith with glasses (who's trying to look like Henry Emily), he gave William job as night guard to give him experience of horror just like Michael and Terrence did. In the results — William got springlocked after he destroyed animatronics and escaped from missing children. Terry has won.
FNAF 3/6 (2017)
But William came back. Terry, Michael and Rotten Ballora arrived in Fazbear's fright. Michael and Terrence are now night guards once again. But when he arrived with crowbar, Springtrap and Terry got battle but Terry won again. Michael burned Fazbear's fright. Ballora sacrifices herself to hold Springtrap down. But Terry and Michael escaped.
In FNAF 6, Henry burned labyrinth while Michael and Scraptrap stuck in labyrinth but in outside, Terry sees the burning place and he left them to live in the shadows.
FINAL ACT
FNAF: Help Wanted (20??)
But When Terry is immune to age -> he decided to change fake name: Jay Kennedy as new Co-owner of Fazbear's entertainment (which he has spirit of Henry Emily while Terry promise Henry to end this madness to accomplish revenge) but currently he's working his own job but if evil comes back -> Terry can end this madness once and for all himself.
He met Vanessa which they face each others as close friends but in next day later — Terry felt something is wrong with Vanessa (which it's now currently under the mimic's control as Vanny).
FNAF: Security Breach
When Terry arrives to stop The Mimic once and for all as he arrived in pizzaplex as he passes all obstacles because he knew how company and pizzeria works. He himself inherited this knowledge from Henry while Glamrocks animatronics are aware: someone was here in pizzaplex but they can't see who is it. When he plays All 3 parts of princess quest — he releases Vanessa from the mimic's control. After that, he's leaving Vanessa live happily with Gregory while he was still living in shadows who can't move on (like immortal but broken guy who's suffering).
FNAF: Ruin
When Terry finally arrived, after he found out that Cassie mistakenly released The mimic. Terry met Cassie and he helps her escape from the abandoned Pizzaplex. After that — he face to face with the mimic (while Terry has spirit of Henry Emily to end this madness). He finally had a new weapon: iron hammer. The mimic and Terrence Afton gets a fight but a sudden and unexpected turn — Terry has won again as he defeated the mimic (but The mimic is now weak). Terrence finally saying last word to the mimic(which Terry mentioned about Vanny murdered 9 children which Terry repeats fate of missing children's revenge): "You are nothing but a freaking copycat... And this is for dead children." (While the mimic in first time feeling panicked and scared of being crushed by Terry's brutality) Which The mimic gets a most brutal death and most brutal revenge for Terrence Afton. Now it's done. He can finally get away and having peace.
What do you think about this timeline? For me it's sad that he lost his own future and happy life with someone. If Vanessa choose Terrence then the future would be different but this one is too good for me that it's good ending and sad ending at the same time.
Fun fact:
By your fans theories that Vanessa adopts Gregory — Terry stays single.
He also had survivor's rage (due to dark remnant) against The mimic and William Afton (as Springtrap)
He cared about C.C. and Mrs.Afton more than William and Elizabeth although he also cares about Michael.
Ending [SPOILER!!] - In the end, after defeat: Terry will be completely alone when he gets away because he can't move on. He lost his family, his possible future and now he lost home.
The vault room was a tomb of cold steel and flickering electronics. Four syndicate mercenaries, draped in tactical gear, huddled around the main terminal.
"Almost through," the hacker gritted out, his fingers dancing over the keypad. "Just one more layer and we’re—"
He entered the final digit. Instead of a click, the entire building shuddered with a deep, vibrating hum that rattled their teeth. The overhead white lights flickered once and died, replaced instantly by a pulsing, strobe-like blood-red emergency glow.
"Fuck, what’s this?" the leader hissed, his voice cracking as he raised his rifle.
One merc, standing by a massive marble pillar, felt a sudden, unnatural rush of air from above—as if the space itself had collapsed. He jerked his head up, his flashlight beam slicing through the gloom.
It happened in exactly one second.
From the absolute void of the high ceiling, a pale, bare hand shot down. It clamped around the merc’s throat with the force of a hydraulic press.
"FU—!!"
His scream of pure terror was cut off mid-breath. His hundred-kilogram frame, body armor and all, was yanked upward into the darkness as if he were a ragdoll caught in a snare. His boots vanished into the shadows before the others could even blink.
A sickening, dry CRACK echoed from the rafters—the sound of a thick branch snapping. But there was no wood in the bank. Those were his cervical vertebrae.
A moment later, the merc’s limp body plummeted back down, slamming onto the polished marble floor with a heavy, wet thud right in the center of a red light. His head was twisted at an impossible angle, his eyes wide and glassy with the shock of a death he never saw coming.
High above, perched on a steel beam, a silhouette leaned into the red glow. Dante Wheeler looked like a ghost of old Viltrum: his breathing was heavy and ragged, and the thick black paint around his eyes was smeared by sweat and tears, running down his face like oil. He wasn't cracking jokes like his father; he was simply watching.
"That's not Vision Guy..." the hacker whispered, his legs giving out. "Something... just killed him..."
"Shit!-" the leader screamed, dropping his bag and bolting for the exit.
They scrambled for the doors, but the air behind them exploded with a sonic boom. The Vane didn't use the stairs. He dropped from the ceiling like a falling star, the marble floor shattering under his heels as he landed directly in their path. He didn't say a word; he just raised his bloodied knuckles, his face a mask of broken, silent rage.
The news of the syndicate mercenaries spread though the cracks of conversations, whispers of their fates were heard by those willing to hear the tale. It reached ears of relatively powerful people in the world of business. Owners of the Midnight Enterprises were no exceptions, the Mun family operates as a channel. They are reliable not only for their expertise but also for their skills on information gathering, they are the best at what they do and take pride in it. The youngest of the Mun family was no exception except that she had to be accompanied by at least two bodyguards to even begin trying to get a glimpse of the rumored “The Vane”. After a few minutes of walking, Lunette Sei Mun, the youngest of the Mun family was able to convince her bodyguards to let her explore on her own. Of course within a 15 mile radius with her phone gps on and with a tracker on her clothes, Lunette happily treaded though the place in search of The Vane.
They begin to lose hope in catching even a glimpse of The Vane, she came across a brutal sight of him and a bad guy. Lunette was afraid yet she couldn’t help but see the beauty in the brutality of it all, she was not too far from The Vane’s line of sight either. A person dressed in soft colors and in a sweater was not at all discreet after all, especially in this area.
The alleyway was a throat of solid concrete and rust, suffocatingly narrow and choked with the heavy stench of ozone. The pouring rain hit the metal fire escapes above, creating a deafening, rhythmic clatter that trapped the two of them in an isolated pocket of the world.
Dante stood completely still against the wet brick wall, his back to the street. He had retreated into the darkness to slip away, but her soft footsteps had followed him right into the trap.When he slowly turned his upper body to face her, the breath completely left Lunette’s lungs.
In the pitch-black shadows of the alley, the thick greasepaint smeared across his eyes didn't look like makeup anymore. With the absolute lack of light, it looked like two hollow, infinite void holes carved violently into his skull. The flickering white strobe of a faulty streetlamp at the mouth of the alley caught the red double "V" on his chest, throwing jagged, broken shadows against the brick behind him. To Lunette, he didn’t look like a human vigilante hiding from the law. He looked like a terrifying fallen angel—a silent, vengeful ghost that had materialized out of the city's concrete.
The aura radiating off him in that enclosed space was freezing. It was a heavy, suffocating pressure that made it hard to swallow.
Dante didn't attack. A ghost doesn't need to rush. With an impossibly quiet, gliding stride, he closed the distance between them. His dark gray leather jacket brushed against the narrow brick walls, cutting off her only exit. He stopped exactly two feet away, towering over her fragile, soaked frame. He smelled of fresh rain, cold iron, and the faint, terrifying tang of alien blood.
He leaned down slightly, bringing those two hollow, empty voids in his face inches from her eyes.
"You should have turned around at the plaza, princess," Dante murmured. His voice was a low, gravelly rasp that vibrated directly against the brick walls, entirely stripped of human warmth. "Alleyways are where people go to disappear. Or die."
His right hand shot out with blinding, fluid speed. He didn't strike her. Instead, his cold fingers gently but firmly plucked the high-end Midnight Enterprises GPS tracker right off the collar of her soft sweater. The wet wool dragged against his skin as he held the tiny, glowing device between his fingers, staring down at it through his hollow gaze.
"Midnight Enterprises. The Mun family," Dante said softly, his tone shifting into a dangerous, detached amusement. "Your people pride themselves on gathering information. But some secrets are heavy enough to crush a corporate empire into dust."
He didn't smash the tracker. Instead, he casually dropped it into her open, trembling palm, his fingers lingering just long enough for her to feel the unnatural, stone-cold hardness of his Viltrumite skin.
"Your bodyguards are already moving this way. I can hear their boots splashing through the puddles three blocks out," Dante whispered, his posture straightening back up as he loomed over her like a dark monument. "Go back to them, Lunette. Tell your family that 'The Vane' isn't a rumor they can buy or sell. I'm the thing that keeps the monsters afraid of the dark."
He didn't wait for her to reply. He stepped backward, his silhouette instantly melting into the absolute blackness of the deep alleyway. By the time the headlights of her bodyguards' SUV flashed against the brick entrance, Dante was completely gone—dissolved into the night like a ghost, leaving Lunette alone in the pouring rain with a glowing tracker and the unforgettable sight of a fallen angel.
Lunette was staring into the void that once had ‘The Vane’, still processing what happened as her bodyguard came to her with an umbrella, their face filled with worry for her state. “Miss Mun, Are you alright?!” The bodyguard asked her as he checked for injuries on her person. The bodyguard’s eyes shifted to the GPS tracker still glowing softly on her palm. The second bodyguard stepped out of the SUV with a warm blanket for Lunette. “I take it that you weren’t able to find ‘The Vane’ Miss?” The second bodyguard said with a breathy laugh as they wrapped the blanket around Lunette, plucking the GPS tracker out of her hands and into his pocket. “That or, you did find him..You were just awe-struck weren’t you?”
“LEON! That is no way to talk to Miss Mun!!” The first bodyguard barked at the second in annoyance. “I swear, this Leon kid will be the death of me…” They sighed as they rubbed their temples. The first bodyguard was an older gentleman with dirty blonde hair and sharp features named Idris, he’d been Lunette’s Bodyguard since she was little and he sees her as his daughter.
Meanwhile the second bodyguard was the same age as Lunette, being one of the student-bodyguards of Lunette also means he’d be more casual with her since they see each other on campus a lot. Leon rolled his green eyes playfully at Idris, leaning towards Lunette to whisper. “Is he bothering you, queen?” Lunette couldn’t help but sniffle out a giggle as they get into the SUV, Idris was driving while Leon was next to Lunette. Leon got comfortable next to Lunette who’s wrapped up with the blanket, leaning in close to whisper. “Seriously though..Are you okay? Do we need to dispatch anyone to check out this place?” He asked in a low and dangerous tone, ready to strike first no matter who is the enemy.
She smiled at him and nodded, looking out of the window to watch the rain pour down. The city was beautiful with the lights and the rain pouring down the buildings like a mirage of colors. In Lunette’s eyes, everything and anything can be beautiful if you learn to look correctly. Though there was something that she was wondering about, “How did you two get alerted that I needed help? Usually you just let me run around til I willingly come back” she asked curiously to Leon next to her as he avoided eye-contact.
There was a few seconds of silence until Idris spoke up from behind the wheel. “Your heart rate was out of control miss, we thought you needed help..” Upon that confession, Lunette died silently in her seat, she knew why her heart beat was out of control and it wasn’t just out of fear but from curiosity.
Lunette then spent the next few weeks trying to search for ‘The Vane’ or Dante as the files she recovered told her so, she left a letter inviting Dante to her apartment on Ivory hills near her university, she placed it somewhere Dante was always seen in by data. Actually, why did she basically ask him out? Both for intel about him and to get to know him with a not so secret agenda of asking him for help with her abilities, which ever comes first.
Lunette waited every night for Dante to see and read her invitation, though on one night that she wasn’t ready. That’s when Dante decided to swing by the apartment in full gear, which is how we got here. Lunette was deep into making a charcoal animation for her final, drinking a take out of iced wintermelon milktea. Her hair was tied into a low ponytail with a few hair strands out place unlike her usual well-kept self, her cheek had charcoal from god knows how it got there.
She wore a tank top which was dirty from charcoal and sweat pants littered with evidences of previous paints stains and now charcoal. “How long is this going to take?!” Lunette yelled to no one in particular, frustration evident in her face as she checks her progress and sees that she’s only 15 seconds into her 2 minute charcoal animation. She grabbed her milk tea and sat down on the floor, contemplating if she should try and finish at least 1 minute of animation until the dawn of morning or should she just take shower and call it a day. While Lunette was contemplating, she heard a ding from her front door and immediately went into panic mode as the door opened to reveal Dante…
The low, rhythmic hum of the city outside was suddenly swallowed by a cold, suffocating drop in air pressure. The lock on Lunette’s front door didn't click—it slid open with an impossibly quiet, mechanical friction.
Through the doorway stepped the ghost she had been chasing.Dante was in full, terrifying gear. The matte-black tactical suit absorbed the warm ambient light of her apartment, making the red double "V" on his chest look like a sharp, metallic fracture in the room's reality. The dark gray leather jacket still carried the faint, crisp scent of the night rain and fresh ozone. But it was his face that made the breath completely hitch in her throat. The thick, pitch-black greasepaint smeared across his eyes transformed his gaze into two hollow, bottomless voids cutting through the dim light of her desk lamp.
He didn't make a sound. He just stood there, towering over the entryway, looking like a fallen angel who had bypassed her building's high-end corporate security without breaking a sweat.
His hollow gaze swept the room with tactical precision. He didn't look at her high-end tech. He looked at the chaos. He took in the littered takeout containers, the half-empty wintermelon milk tea, and the endless sheets of translucent paper scattered across the floor. Finally, the two dark voids of his eyes locked onto Lunette.
She was a complete contrast to the sleek, corporate daughter of Midnight Enterprises he had seen before. Her hair was messy, her tank top was covered in black dust, and a smudge of dark charcoal was pulled across her cheek.
Dante slowly closed the door behind him. The lock engaged with a heavy thud. He didn't drop into a stance, and he didn't raise his hands. He just walked deeper into her space with a slow, heavy, and unbothered stride, completely farming the aura of the apartment until her stressful art studio felt like a high-stakes GDA interrogation room.
He stopped exactly three feet from where she sat paralyzed on the floor. Up close, he loomed like a monument of wet leather and iron. He slowly leaned his upper body down, bringing his hollow, painted face inches from hers.
"You've been leaving pieces of paper all over my sector, princess," Dante said. His voice was a low, gravelly rasp that vibrated right through her ribcage, completely flat and devoid of human warmth.
He glanced down at the animation desk, his sharp senses instantly reading the frantic, repetitive charcoal frames. A ghost of a sarcastic smirk flickered at the edge of his lips.
"Is this what Midnight Enterprises spends its resources on? Crying over a fifteen-second cartoon at two in the morning?" He straightened back up, his arms hanging loosely at his sides. He reached into his leather jacket, pulled out the sleek, crisp Valentine's invitation she had left for him nights ago, and casually tossed it onto her lap. It landed right next to her charcoal pencils.
"Trying to have a relationship? No fucking way... I've seen enough of this so-called 'cheating on someone'." Dante delivered the line with a freezing, absolute finality. He didn't look angry; he looked like a man stating a law of physics.
He turned his back toward her, his dark gray jacket snapping as he walked toward her open window, overlooking the neon lights of the city below. He paused on the frame, his silhouette cutting a jagged line against the moonlit sky.
"You're terrible at being discreet, Lunette," he murmured over his shoulder, his voice fading into the cool night wind. "Clean the dirt off your face. Finish your project. And stop looking for things that don't belong in the light."
Before she could even scramble to her feet, Dante stepped out into the empty air, vanishing into the shadows of the city before she could even hear a splash in the streets below.
Guys, I've got news that someone used to pretend to be me but when I read carefully is that was a fucking scam, please if someone shows you about the pictures of your accounts. DO NOT FALL FOR THAT cuz they are actually fooling you. These creeps do deserve to be poor like if you notice that someone "can't message you" BUT TRUTH IS DO NOT MESSAGE THEM because it's new trick of scammers about false reports. 💀
romaincrisis
germansingergirl
dailybridgerton
tangentwithtanner
janainaart
snowghoul
