With a sharp crack of displaced air, Aleksander vanished from the smoldering clearing in the Appalachian woods.
An instant later, he materialized atop the gravel roof of a sleek high-rise across the street from the corporate headquarters of Kingmaker Land Development Inc.
The night wind whipped against his coat, carrying the sterile scent of asphalt and private security exhaust from the compound below.
The Kingmaker facility across the boulevard looked less like a commercial real estate office and more like a fortified research bastion.
Heavily tinted blast-proof glass, high perimeter fences laced with modern surveillance, and private security guards patrolling the subterranean parking entrances made its true purpose obvious to anyone who knew what to look for.
Aleksander pulled the leather folder from his coat and flipped it open, his dark eyes scanning the clinical notes and laboratory requisitions.
Live specimen extraction.
Venom cross-synthesis.
Vampiric cellular degradation assays.
They weren’t just harvesting werewolves for defensive countermeasures.
Lucien was systematically rounding up both species, dissecting vampires and wolves alike in sterile, subterranean labs to reverse-engineer the biological curse of immortality and venom.
He was paving the road toward creating the ultimate predator—an abomination engineered to sit atop the supernatural food chain.
Aleksander closed the manifest with a sharp snap, his gaze settling cold and hard on the glowing corporate logo across the street.
A flicker of blue fire danced momentarily across his knuckles before fading into the night air.
”It seems Lucien Castle needs to be reminded of his place,” Aleksander muttered softly, stepping toward the edge of the roof.
Aleksander stepped over the ledge of the high-rise, dropping into freefall against the rushing night air before vanishing with a sharp, concussive crack mid-descent.
He reappeared instantly in the secluded outskirts of the city, emerging near the perimeter of a sprawling, low-profile facility surrounded by double-layered razor wire and infrared surveillance towers.
Standing in the tall grass, Aleksander closed his eyes and summoned the ancient cloaking weave of the Gemini coven, supercharging the spell with his own vast reservoir of nature magic.
The air around him shimmered like heat rising off asphalt, bending light, sound, thermal signatures, and scent completely around his body.
To mortal eyes, security cameras, and supernatural senses alike, he simply ceased to exist.
He walked straight through the fortified gates.
When a guard stepped across his path, Aleksander slipped past close enough that the displacement of air barely rustled the man’s tactical collar.
Electronic keycard doors unlatched and swung open on a whisper of wind before clicking shut behind him, leaving the facility’s motion sensors dead quiet.
Descending into the subterranean levels, the sterile hum of commercial air filtration gave way to the sharp, chemical reek of antiseptic, wolfsbane aerosol, and concentrated vervain.
Aleksander glided through the automated security doors of the central laboratory.
The room was vast, lit by harsh fluorescent strips that reflected off stainless-steel countertops, centrifuge banks, and digital monitors displaying genetic sequencing models.
In the center of the hall, enclosed within thick, pressurized glass containment cells, were the subjects.
In one chamber, a young werewolf was strapped to a surgical chair, heavy steel restraints clamping down his limbs while automated needles tapped directly into his neck and spine, rhythmically siphoning spinal fluid and venom. Enjoying the story? Read on at NovelPing.
In the adjacent bay, a captured vampire hung suspended by chains soaked in liquid vervain, skin gray and desiccated as scientists in biohazard suits extracted tissue samples and injected refined venom straight into the vampire’s bloodstream to measure the cellular decay.
Aleksander dropped the cloaking spell.
The room’s ambient temperature plummeted in an instant.
A layer of pale frost crept across the polished floor tiles, while the fluorescent tubes overhead began to flicker and hum with erratic voltage.
Aleksander’s dark eyes turned arctic cold as he looked at the caged immortals and the mortals playing God with scalpels and IV drips.
Niklaus Mikaelson being born a hybrid through blood, heritage, and the tragic whims of Esther’s magic was one thing.
A freak occurrence bound to ancient curses and maternal grief, woven into the natural tapestry of history.
But stripping living creatures down to spare parts, engineering biological abominations through corporate cruelty, and forcing an evolutionary abomination into existence through needles and cages—this crossed a line Nature would never tolerate.
“An ambitious setup,” Aleksander’s voice sliced through the laboratory with quiet, terrifying clarity.
“Shame it all ends tonight.”
The lead researcher spun around from his terminal, eyes wide in absolute shock as he fumbled for the panic button.
The lead researcher’s trembling finger was mere millimeters from slamming down on the glowing red panic button when Aleksander made a subtle, dismissive flick of his wrist.
A sharp, collective CRACK reverberated through the sterile hall like a string of dry branches snapping underfoot.
Every single scientist, lab technician, and armed orderly in the room froze mid-motion.
Their heads twisted sideways at sickening, unnatural angles in the exact same fraction of a second.
Before the sound had even faded from the concrete walls, their lifeless bodies collapsed simultaneously to the tile floor, needles, clipboards, and medical trays clattering uselessly beside them.
Not a single alarm blared.
Not a word had been uttered.
Just immediate, cold silence.
Aleksander stepped over the lead doctor’s body without sparing it a downward glance.
The fluorescent lights overhead ceased their erratic buzzing, settling into a low, sterile hum over the graveyard he had just created.
Turning toward the glass observation cells, his gaze landed on the restrained werewolf and the desiccated vampire hanging from the chains.
The wolf’s chest heaved with shallow, frightened breaths, his golden eyes wide with shock as he stared at the carnage through the transparent barrier.
The mechanical clamps and vervain-laced restraints snapped like brittle plastic, dropping the two prisoners gently down from their suspended torment.
Aleksander walked over to the main terminal console, although he didn’t plan to kill Lucien yet, he did want to torture the bastard to extreme after all this.
Aleksander stepped up to the central terminal console, resting his hand flat against the glossy glass interface.
With Scientiapotence, Aleksander possessed boundless, absolute dominion over science, mathematics, technology, and the underlying laws governing information theory.
He didn’t need code, brute-force algorithms, or decryption bypasses.
The very concept of data, digital architecture, logic gates, and quantum states answered directly to his will.
The moment his fingers made contact with the glass, the terminal’s screen flashed white.
His consciousness effortlessly penetrated the machine, transcending the local server racks and plunging straight into Kingmaker’s entire digital infrastructure.
Firewalls, military-grade air-gaps, and encrypted protocols didn’t just fail—the fundamental mathematical principles that allowed them to function dissolved.
Through the network, Aleksander reached into every satellite link, cloud cluster, and off-site backup vault associated with Lucien Castle’s empire.
With an effortless command over the logical universe, he inverted the binary state of every drive, storage block, and hardcoded circuit.
Research dossiers on werewolf venom synthesis.
Cellular degradation logs.
Specimen gene maps.
Automated delivery routing and shell account ledgers.
He didn’t just delete them; he unmade them from the digital fabric entirely, zeroing out every trace of the data across all physical and virtual media simultaneously.
The servers beneath the lab emitted a faint, high-pitched whine as their silicon memory cores were wiped completely blank, leaving nothing but dead silicon and empty registers.
Then, weaving his Arcanepotence seamlessly with his absolute scientific authority, he sealed the purge.
Because Arcanepotence gave him total, boundless omnipotence over the magical, esoteric, and anomalous—commanding the supernatural through raw emotion and pure instinct—he laid an absolute conceptual curse across the memory of the research itself.
Any mortal scientist, corporate executive, or rogue vampire who had ever laid eyes on the equations, venom extracts, or genetic models suddenly felt the knowledge evaporate from their minds like mist under the sun.
The neurological pathways in their brains holding those specific thoughts were smoothly wiped clean, leaving behind an insurmountable mental void.
Not a scrap of paper, not a single hard drive, and not a single human or vampire memory of the experiments remained on the planet.
Aleksander lifted his hand from the terminal.
The screens died instantly, plunging into permanent blackness.
He turned back toward the surviving werewolf and the desiccated vampire huddled together on the shattered laboratory floor.
With a gentle push of his boundless magical instinct, he purged the lingering wolfsbane and vervain toxins from their bloodstreams in a single breath, restoring their vitality and setting them free.
He also wiped away memories regarding there stay here, just something he didn’t want them to remember.