Black
I didn’t wait for reinforcements that would take weeks to arrive.
By the time anyone else found out about the disaster I had on my hands, the whole facility could be lost, and with it any chance of understanding what had gone wrong before the problem decided to go out for a stroll on its own.
So I gathered the few people I had at hand: a handful of soldiers who had already received a stable first generation of C24, two of my most loyal tech-adepts, and myself, with the incinerator cannon I’d kept stashed away for years, waiting for a good enough excuse to use it again.
That cannon, for the record, was my own invention, from a time when I still confused “genius” with “good idea.” I designed it to incinerate anything in front of it without having to reload every two shots, and in the first field test it nearly managed the same with me: a badly calibrated recoil valve, a jet of plasma that decided to come out where it shouldn’t, and the result was that I came within a hair of becoming the first recorded case of gluteal self-incineration in history.
Ever since, I’d kept it stored away—partly for redesign, partly out of embarrassment—waiting for an emergency big enough to justify taking it out for a walk again.
“All right, listen up,” I told them as the transport dropped us in the containment zone, checking the incinerator with the exact respect you give a weapon that has already burned you once.
“None of this is in any manual, because I don’t write manuals for disasters I caused myself.
So we improvise, we survive, and if anyone asks afterward, the official version is that everything went exactly as planned.
Oh, and if at any point you see me pointing this thing at myself, somebody please step in.”
The medical wing looked nothing like it used to.
The emergency lights stained the corridors a sickly red, and the air smelled of a mix of burnt metal and something much more organic, much less pleasant.
The first mutants we ran into were barely recognizable as people anymore: gray, cracked skin, white and empty eyes, moving with a ferocious clumsiness that broke every reasonable expectation of how a human body should behave.
They fell fairly easily to our weapons, but they kept coming, one after another, as if something were pushing them from behind even after their bodies had no reason left to keep working.
The Hell Knight was waiting for us at the center of the facility, right where the sensors had indicated.
Up close it was worse than it looked on the monitors: a mass of deformed muscle and bone, crowned with horns that seemed to have grown in a matter of hours, wrapped in an aura that distorted the air around it, like heat shimmering off asphalt on a hot day—except this had nothing to do with temperature.
“Well, well,” I murmured, feeling my skin crawl without letting it show too much in my voice.
“Somebody’s been eating badly this week.”
The creature answered with a roar that rattled the broken glass in the corridor and hurled itself at us with a speed a body that size should never have had.
The first exchange was pure chaos: plasma shots that barely managed to singe its skin, soldiers thrown against the walls like rag dolls, and me trying to work out, as fast as I could, what I could do against something that healed almost as quickly as we could wound it.
I remembered something I had noticed in the files of the affected subjects: all of them, without exception, had a history of unresolved rage, of violence with no outlet.
That gave me an idea.
If the door that let that thing through was the host’s rage, maybe that door could be closed from the outside.
“I just need a few seconds and nobody stepping on my heels.”
From the inner pocket of my jacket I pulled out one of the neural inhibitors I always carried on me, originally meant to calm soldiers in combat shock.
I’d never tested them against anything like this, but at that moment any idea, however crazy, was worth a shot.
I dodged a swipe that blew a support column to pieces, rolled under the creature’s deformed legs, and jammed the inhibitor straight into its neck, where the skin still looked, however remotely, like a human being’s.
For an instant nothing happened.
Then the aura distorting the air around it trembled, contracted, and the roar coming from its throat changed pitch: it stopped sounding like a monster and, for one horrifying fraction of a second, sounded like a person again.
“Now, now, now!” I shouted, already backing away.
“Hit it with everything you’ve got—I already did the scary part.”
The soldiers opened fire with everything they had.
Without the rage feeding whatever had slipped through from the other side, the Hell Knight lost half its strength and all its coordination.
It fell to its knees, and a second later, it fell all the way.
We stood there in silence, breathing hard, surrounded by rubble and by bodies we no longer quite knew what to call.
“Black,” said one of my tech-adepts, his voice still shaky, “what just happened?”
“I just confirmed a very ugly theory,” I replied, brushing rubble off my shoulder like it was nothing.
“And while I was at it, I probably just found the solution, so technically tonight was a success.
Put it in the report exactly like that, in those words.”
The facility remained under total quarantine for weeks while we reviewed every piece of data in the program from scratch.
The conclusion we reached was as simple as it was uncomfortable.
C24 didn’t create violence or madness; it simply amplified, with no filter, whatever already existed in the carrier’s mind.
In a stable person, the result was health and strength.
In an already wounded mind, with too much rage or too much unresolved pain, the chromosome opened a crack, and something from the other side of reality—something that fed on precisely that kind of rage—took advantage of the opening to slip in and take control.
You didn’t need to be a genius to know who stood to gain from that kind of crack.
“If the Blood God thought I was going to hand him a free back door into the mind of every person I try to cure, he picked the wrong AI.
I don’t hand out invitations to my work.
I don’t give discounts even to gods.”
The solution wasn’t to get rid of C24, but to complete it.
We designed a second compound, meant to be administered alongside the chromosome from day one: a neurochemical and psychic stabilizer that sealed that vulnerability before it could open, without dampening anyone’s personality or will.
I called it the Panacea, partly because of what it did, and partly because after weeks without decent sleep, it struck me as a grandiose enough name to make me feel better about myself.
With the Panacea administered alongside C24, we repeated the tests with the same risk profiles that had failed before.
This time there were no mutations, no roars, no cracks into any other side of reality.
Just people who were healthier, stronger, sharper—exactly as it was supposed to have been from the start.
When I finally walked out of that facility, I didn’t feel the clean triumph I would have liked to feel.
I had come close to creating, without realizing it, one of the best tools Khorne could ever have asked for.
But I had also learned something I intended to carry with me for the rest of this project: every advantage I gave humanity had to carry, from the design stage, a defense against the one thing that truly wanted to exploit it.
I thought of my brothers, the way I always ended up thinking of them at the end of every project like this one.
They hadn’t had anyone to seal those kinds of cracks in time.
This time, at least, someone else wouldn’t have to go through the same thing.
“Well,” I told my team on the way out, my usual tone fully back, “write this down: phase two, complete.
No apocalypse, no dimensional doors, and nobody ended up with horns.
We’re improving enormously.
At this rate, by phase five I might not even set anything on fire.”
English isn’t my first language, so there may be some mistakes or inconsistencies along the way.
I hope you can understand, and thank you for your patience and support!