*
Blood to blood, and bone to bone. Break the child, remake our own. Name and soul to darkness cast. None shall mourn what does not last.
Let demon's gift and night's embrace. Carve perfection into flesh. From pain shall rise our finest art. A loyal blade, a fearless heart.
Praise the night that veils our sin. Praise the blood that dwells within. What we forge with willing hands. Shall bring this world beneath our command.
*
The first thing that returned was pain.
It spread through my limbs in slow, aching waves, like every bone in my body had been ground to dust and poorly reassembled. I tried to move and immediately regretted it. My chest heaved, breath coming in short, panicked pulls as my eyes opened to nothing—just a thick, suffocating dark with a single crack of light.
“Where am I?”
My voice came out wrong. Too small. Too high.
I lay still, trying to think past the fear. The last thing I remembered was the crosswalk. The red light. The headlights filling my vision as the truck closed the distance between us—and then nothing. No hospital had ever felt like this. No hospital smelled like damp stone and rust.
I moved my arms and stopped.
They were small. Really small. I held them up in the dim light that crept under what I could now make out was a door, and stared at hands that did not belong to me. Small fingers. Thin wrists. The hands of a child.
I had no time to process it.
The door swung open.
Light flooded the room, and three figures stepped inside. They wore masks—dark, carved things that made them look inhuman—and they moved with the unhurried certainty of people who had done this many times before. The iron bars of what I now understood was a cage groaned as one of them pulled it open.
I tried to push myself back. My legs barely responded.
One of them crouched beside me, gripped my arm with a hand that felt like it could snap the bone without effort, and looked me over with the flat, assessing gaze of someone evaluating livestock.
“Still alive,” he muttered, sounding almost put out by it. “Tough little bastard.”
The woman beside him laughed—a bright, horrible sound completely at odds with where we were. “He’ll wish he wasn’t, soon enough.”
I wanted to fight. Every instinct I had screamed at me to thrash, to bite, to do something—but my body was not mine yet, and it refused to obey. They dragged me out of the cage and down a series of damp, winding corridors, and all I could do was keep my feet moving and try not to fall.
The room they brought me to was worse than the cage.
Rows of tables lined the walls, each fitted with metal restraints. Machines hummed along the counters, their purposes unclear and deeply unwelcome. Tubes and needles scattered across and In the far corner stood an altar dark with old staining that looked like blood, it was so horrifying that I chose not to look at too closely.
They didn’t explain anything. They simply shoved my hand against a pale, floating crystal that hovered at the room’s center, and a screen materialized in the air before me.
Ding.
< [ STATUS ] >
Name : ——————
Class : None
Race : Human
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
HP : 10 / 10
MP : 0 / 0
Stamina : 5 / 10
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Strength : 5
Defense : 2
Speed : 2
Magic : 0
Charisma : 10
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Resistance : 100
Luck : -100
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Skills : None
Titles : None
I stared at it. Luck at negative one hundred. Resistance at one hundred. I didn’t know what half of these numbers meant, but the gap between those two felt like a joke being told at my expense.
The man studied the display and exhaled through his nose. “Terrible stats. Barely worth the effort.” He paused, eyes lingering on one line. “That resistance though. Maybe you’ll last.”
I opened my mouth to protest but before I could say anything, they strapped me to one of the tables. The restraints bit into my wrists and ankles, cold metal against skin that was already too sensitive, too unfamiliar. I pressed my teeth together and stared at the ceiling.
“This will hurt,” the man said pleasantly. “Quite a lot. I find it’s better not to pretend otherwise.”
The needle went in.
The burning began almost immediately.
The pain felt wrong—foreign, as though something had forced its way into my veins and was rewriting everything it touched. I screamed until my throat turned raw, until my voice finally gave out, leaving me with nothing but ragged gasps. It spread through every inch of me, tearing me apart from the inside out.
I bit down hard enough to taste blood and clung to the table beneath me, my fingers digging into the wood until my nails left pale bloody marks across my palms.
Survive. The word repeated like a heartbeat. Survive. You just woke up. You don’t get to stop now.
The days after that blurred.
The pain became my constant companion, numbing me to everything else.
Each day they came with more of the same black substance, and each time the burning lasted a little longer than the day before. Other children had been brought in during the first few days—I heard them, and then I didn’t. Their absence was louder than anything they’d said while alive. I stopped counting how many. It didn’t help.
What I couldn’t stop thinking about was why I was still breathing when none of them were.
The resistance stat. It had to be. Whatever my body was doing, it was holding on through something the others hadn’t had. I didn’t feel grateful. I felt like a subject in an experiment that hadn’t concluded yet.
I was right.
…
I was pretending to sleep when I heard them.
“Today’s dose was injected.”
“Good.” A pause—unhurried. “And the transformation?”
“Progressing slowly, Master. But the succubus blood is taking hold. Within a few years, the child will fully transform. The body will be female.”
The words landed somewhere below my stomach.
Succubus blood. That was what had been burning through me, day after day. Demon blood. I kept my breathing even and my eyes closed, and I listened.
“How much remains?”
“None. The last dose was today.”
“Hmm.” Another pause. “What else do we have?”
“Vampire blood, Master.”
The silence that followed was the worst part.
“Start the injections. All of it, if the body can take it.”
“Yes, Master.”
Their footsteps faded down the corridor.
I lay in the dark for a long time after that, staring at the ceiling I couldn’t see. They were remaking me—not just my body, apparently, but what I was. Piece by piece, turning me into something they could use.
The fear was still there. I wasn’t going to pretend it wasn’t.
But underneath it, something else had begun to harden. They had chosen me because they thought I would survive their process. They had no idea what they’d made possible by keeping me alive. Whatever they were building, I would take it and walk out of here with it.
They thought they were creating a weapon.
They were just handing me one.