# Chapter 1 — Inventory
The onboarding process at my new job didn’t involve an HR representative, a welcome packet, or a mandatory presentation on company values.
It involved a heavy metallic jolt that nearly threw me headfirst off a cold bench, followed by the deafening roar of a military-grade engine rattling through my teeth.
My eyes snapped open.
The world was a violent, blurred smear of olive canvas flaps, reinforced steel walls, and the suffocating scent of raw panic. I was sitting in the enclosed cargo bed of a heavy transport truck.
A dozen strangers surrounded me. Some were openly weeping into their shirts. One guy near the front was violently trembling, muttering a frantic prayer on a loop.
*Okay,* I thought, clamping a white-knuckled grip onto the edge of the bench as my vision finally focused. *Assess the immediate variables.*
My arms were attached. My legs functioned. No visible wounds, no physical restraints, and no mysterious occult symbols carved into my skin. Everything was deeply sore, but structurally intact.
The main problem was my memory. It was entirely blank.
The last cohesive thing I could recall was a glowing monitor, a cascading spreadsheet, and an impossible quarterly deadline—the holy trinity of modern corporate suffering. I had been an overworked, underpaid data analyst. Now, I was a passenger in a high-speed kidnapping.
Given the standard operating procedures of my previous employer, both situations felt equally stressful.
The truck violently violently lurched to the left, slamming us together. I shifted my gaze toward the rear exit, but any passing thought of escape died instantly.
Four guards stood stationed by the flaps. They weren't wearing standard military gear. They were clad in sleek, matte-black armor that looked almost liquid under the dim interior lights, their faces completely obscured behind sealed visors.
Even worse were their weapons. No external ammunition magazines, no mechanical slides—just thin, glowing blue lines pulsing faintly along the frames.
I had zero clue if they fired plasma, railgun slugs, or high-intensity lasers. What I did know was that I had absolutely no desire to find out what they did to human anatomy.
Through the gaps in the rear canvas, an alien geography blurred past. The forest outside wasn't just dense; it was gargantuan. Colossal tree trunks wider than city buses flew by, their massive branches spanning distances that defied biology, stretching so high their canopies simply dissolved into the upper darkness.
A bizarre, bioluminescent blue glow flickered deep within the thickets, vanishing before I could track it. A split second later, a guttural, resonant cry echoed from the depths of the woods—a sound far too deep, heavy, and fundamentally *wrong*.
The crying passengers in the truck immediately panicked twice as hard.
I took a slow, controlled breath. Years of corporate hell had gifted me with one highly transferable survival skill: panic about the disaster later, analyze the metrics first.
My eyes drifted across the narrow aisle, settling on a girl sitting directly opposite me.
She looked around twenty-two or twenty-three, with long black hair framing an incredibly pale face. Unlike the sobbing wrecks around us, she wasn't frozen. Her eyes were moving constantly—tracking the guards' hand placements, analyzing the energy weapons, and measuring the speed of the trees passing by. It was a methodical, calculating gaze.
She was trying to solve a puzzle before a hidden timer ran out.
Our eyes locked for a fraction of a second. She violently snapped her gaze away immediately, pretending I didn't exist.
*Smart,* I thought. *Probably the best executive decision anyone has made all day.*
The transport eventually ground to a synchronized, heavy halt.
Before anyone could move, the rear canvas flap was ripped open. Blinding, high-intensity floodlights poured into the cabin, instantly searing my retinas.
A heavily armored guard filled the broad opening, his pulsing rifle held at a low ready.
"Move! Out of the vehicle! Single file!"
The terrified group practically stampeded for the exit, tripping over their own feet in a desperate bid to comply. I waited a beat for the initial crush to clear, then climbed down the metal steps.
The soles of my boots hit solid earth, and the sheer scale of the facility waiting for us made my stomach drop.
It was a monolithic, concrete fortress crouched right in the dead center of the primeval forest. Massive walls rose dozens of meters into the night sky, topped with automated watchtowers. High-res cameras swiveled smoothly across the perimeter, automated defense turrets tracked our movement from elevated steel platforms, and swarms of armed drones hovered silently overhead like mechanical vultures.
The entire layout communicated one singular message with flawless clarity: *you are never leaving this place.*
Near the front of our line, a young man finally broke under the pressure. "Where the hell are we?!" he shrieked, his voice cracking. "What do you want from us?!"
Absolutely nobody answered him. A single black-visored guard simply turned his helmet to stare at him, and the kid immediately shrank back into the crowd, completely silenced. Questions were clearly not part of the onboarding process.
With a deep, hydraulic roar, a set of massive steel gates rumbled open. We marched through the threshold, and they violently slammed shut behind us.
We were systematically marched through an endless gauntlet of biometric checkpoints, security scanners, and reinforced blast doors.
Then came the elevators. Three separate industrial lifts descended deeper and deeper into the earth, forcing the atmospheric pressure in my ears to pop repeatedly. By the time the final set of reinforced doors hissed open, I was fairly certain we had traveled deep enough to legally qualify as a tectonic mining operation.
Sterile, white metallic corridors stretched out into the distance, illuminated by soft blue LED strips. Energy barriers hummed with a low static charge behind thick partitions. It looked less like a medical laboratory and more like a sci-fi villain's staging ground.
"Keep moving, cargo," a guard barked from the rear, shoving the trailing edge of the line.
*Cargo.* Not patients, not detainees. Cargo. Never a spectacular sign for long-term health metrics.
The line shuffled forward over the polished composite floors. Suddenly, the analytical girl from the jeep stumbled. Her foot slipped on the slick surface, her balance breaking as she pitched forward.
Before my brain could actively debate the survival metrics of drawing attention to myself, my arm shot out. I firmly caught her by the forearm, stabilizing her weight before she hit the ground.
She froze, standing completely still for a second as she stared at me, a flash of recognition crossing her pale features. "You... you were in the jeep."
"Unfortunately," I murmured, letting go of her arm.
A tiny ghost of a smile appeared on her lips and vanished just as quickly. "Thanks."
"No problem."
"Move it!" the guard's harsh bark instantly terminated the interaction, and we were forced to keep walking.
The holding sector featured rows upon rows of reinforced cells stretching into the subterranean distance, each heavy door emblazoned with a glowing, digital red number.
The armored guards began systematically separating us one by one. A heavy, armored glove clamped down onto my shoulder, shoving me toward a threshold.
"Cell Seven."
The heavy door hissed open with a pressurized sigh, I was shoved inside, and a high-energy barrier snapped back into place behind my back with a static hum.
I turned and looked back at the digital number glowing crimson on the frame. Seven. If I were relying on Western superstitions, that denoted luck. And since I was Indian—seven meant MS Dhoni. Thala. A top-tier omen. I chose to willfully ignore every single variable suggesting otherwise.
Then, I turned around to inspect my new accommodations, and I blinked twice in sheer disbelief.
The room looked absolutely *amazing*. It featured a massive king-sized bed, a sleek ergonomic desk, custom ambient lighting, and minimalist furniture that looked incredibly expensive. The sheer square footage was larger than my entire apartment back on Earth.
Then, my eyes caught the high-res dome camera mounted in the exact center of the ceiling, its dark lens rotating smoothly to lock directly onto my position.
*Ah. There it is.*
A luxury prison. The high-end room wasn't designed for our comfort—it was optimized for continuous, unobstructed observation. They wanted us healthy, well-rested, and perfectly cooperative. Like prime, expensive livestock.
I checked the parameters: the walls were entirely seamless, zero visible cracks, no ventilation shafts large enough to matter, and everything was bolted directly into the bedrock. Whoever built this place possessed a terrifying level of dedication to security. I highly approved of their engineering. I heavily disapproved of being the subject of it.
A soft movement pulled my attention toward the reinforced observation window facing the central corridor.
The analytical girl from the jeep was standing in the cell directly opposite mine.
She noticed me looking, and for several awkward seconds, neither of us moved an inch. Then, she offered a small, hesitant wave. I stared at her, she stared at me, and I awkwardly waved back. Directly across from each other—the universe really did appreciate logistical efficiency.
The fear in her expression was entirely different now. The controlled, calculating mask she’d managed to maintain in the jeep was completely gone. This was what raw terror looked like when reality finally caught up to your brain—when there were no more moving variables, no more distractions, and no lingering hope that an authority figure was about to walk through the door and explain the mistake. Just cold walls and endless waiting.
She eventually sat down on the edge of her bed, and I mirrored her, dropping onto mine. The mattress was absurdly, mockingly comfortable, which somehow made the entire situation feel ten times more sinister.
A soft, electronic hum vibrated through the room, and a seamless section of the wall beside the desk smoothly slid open.
Inside the recessed compartment lay a neatly folded set of sterile white clothes, a sleek metallic wristband, and a high-tech electronic ID card.
I stepped over and picked up the card. No corporate photo, no legal name, and zero personal information—just an encrypted barcode, an unfamiliar minimalist logo, and one single line of bold text:
**SUBJECT: INALA**
I stared blankly at the words. "Inala?"
The word meant absolutely nothing to me. My name was Razz—not legendary, not intimidating, but it belonged to me. This digital card felt freezing cold, like an entire system had looked at my whole life and decided it no longer legally applied. No history, no future, no identity. Just a clinical label, a subject designation, a piece of corporate inventory.
I turned the card over. Completely blank.
I tossed it carelessly onto the desk. "Still significantly better than some of my old high school usernames."
Suddenly, every single high-output speaker in the detention block crackled to life in perfect unison. A cold, detached synthetic voice flooded the corridor.
*"Attention all subjects. The initial acclimation period concludes in exactly twelve hours. Prepare yourselves."* A brief, deliberate pause hung in the air, heavy enough to crush a man's ribs.
*"The previous experimental test group achieved a final survival rate of thirty-one point eight percent."*
My stomach violently dropped through the floorboards.
Across the corridor, the girl's face went completely translucent, her jaw tightening.
Thirty-one percent. They hadn't said a completion rate. They hadn't said a graduation success rate. They had explicitly said a *survival* rate. Which meant people died. A lot of them. One in three survived. Roughly.
The terrifying odds settled in my stomach like a block of dry ice. In a video game, I’d call those terrible RNG metrics. In real life, they were a death sentence.
Suddenly, a piercing, blood-curdling scream tore directly through the local ventilation system.
It was human, raw, and completely desperate—the exact kind of horrific sound a body makes when something is happening to its anatomy that shouldn't be physically possible.
It lasted for several long, agonizing seconds. Long enough for everyone in the sector to fully understand it was entirely real. Long enough to vividly imagine yourself making that exact same noise tomorrow.
Then, it stopped. Abruptly.
The sudden silence that followed was infinitely worse than the screaming. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. Across the corridor, the girl just stared blankly at the floorboards, hot tears slipping down her pale face, not even bothering to raise a hand to wipe them away.
I looked up at the ceiling, staring directly into the lens of the swiveling camera, then down at the absurdly comfortable bed in this high-end prison pretending to be a hotel.
Somewhere beyond these reinforced walls, people were actively dying in agony. Tomorrow morning, it was my turn to enter that room.
The ambient lights automatically dimmed slightly—the universal signal for sleep. I lay back onto the mattress and stared into the dark ceiling. Tomorrow I might miraculously gain a superpower, or tomorrow I might flatline into a statistic, and both options felt equally realistic right now.
Sleep eventually claimed my consciousness—not because I felt safe, but because raw psychological exhaustion simply wins the battle in the end.
The very last thing I saw before my eyes closed was the girl across the corridor—still wide awake, still paralyzed with fear, and still watching her sealed door, waiting for answers that were never going to come.
Somewhere deep within the massive facility, another distant, muffled scream echoed through the dark plumbing, and beyond our reinforced walls, unseen by any of us, the digital clock kept silently counting down toward the dawn.