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# Chapter 3 — The Chosen Fifty
A sharp alarm shattered the silence.
Again.
My eyes snapped open. For a few agonizing seconds, I just stared at the blank white ceiling. Then I let out a long, pathetic groan.
"Seriously?"
The alarm kept blaring—loud, aggressive, and personally offended by the concept of human sleep. Did these people not possess a gentler wakeup option? A pleasant chime. A cheerful voice. Hell, even a bucket of ice water felt more civilized than whatever military-grade psychological warfare they were currently deploying.
Eventually, the screeching stopped, replaced by the familiar crackle of the ceiling speakers.
*"All subjects report to Processing Hall A. Failure to comply will result in disciplinary action."*
I sighed. Nothing says good morning quite like a professionally delivered corporate threat.
The heavy door slid open with a metallic hiss, revealing three guards standing outside. Same black armor. Same featureless helmets. Same chilling aura of people who could end your life without losing a single second of sleep. I was honestly starting to suspect they were manufactured. Some factory line somewhere: insert armor, remove personality, hand them a rifle, ship them out. Production complete.
I sat up and stretched, then paused mid-motion.
That was strange.
The agonizing soreness from yesterday was mostly gone. More than mostly, actually. I clenched my fist, watching the skin tighten over my knuckles. The movement felt incredibly smooth. Effortless. My muscles felt dense and stronger, my body noticeably lighter, and my senses... sharper.
I could hear faint footsteps echoing somewhere deep in the neighboring corridors. I could isolate the low, rhythmic hum of machinery buried behind the reinforced walls, and the soft, microscopic buzz of the security cameras tracking my precise movements.
Apparently, surviving Stage One came with permanent benefits. Too bad freedom wasn't one of them.
I clipped the plastic ID card back onto my chest and stepped out into the hallway.
The detention block emptied gradually as subjects emerged from their cells one after another.
The atmosphere felt fundamentally different today. Yesterday, everyone had been confused, terrified, and utterly overwhelmed. Today, the initial shock had worn off. Everyone knew *exactly* how bad things were. The uncertainty was gone, but the fear definitely wasn't.
I noticed a handful of empty cells down the row. Not many. Just enough to be noticeable. Nobody commented on them. Nobody needed to.
Across the corridor, Anita stepped out of her room. She looked absolutely exhausted. The dark, hollow circles under her eyes had somehow gotten worse overnight, which was genuinely impressive given how terrible they'd looked yesterday.
She caught me staring, hesitated for a second, and then drifted over toward my line. Neither of us said anything at first, just letting the heavy silence hang between us.
"You think they're actually going to give us powers?" she finally asked, her voice barely a whisper.
I considered it for a moment. "Probably."
She blinked. "That's it? Just 'probably'?"
"Well, either that or this is the most terrifyingly expensive practical joke in human history."
A tiny, fragile smile ghosted across her face. Then reality caught up, freezing her expression and wiping it away completely. We joined the shuffling line, moving deeper into the bowels of the facility.
At first, I assumed Processing Hall A would be somewhere nearby.
Five minutes into the march, I was less sure.
Ten minutes in, I started getting concerned.
Twenty minutes in, I seriously began wondering if this facility had secretly constructed underground highways.
The corridor stretched endlessly ahead into the gloom. Massive, industrial support pillars disappeared into the overhead darkness. Restricted side passages branched off into pitch-black sectors, and cargo platforms the size of small warehouses rolled silently across distant intersections.
The deeper we went, the more absurd the scale became. This wasn't a hidden laboratory hidden under a warehouse. This was an entire subterranean city. Whoever ran this place wasn't some rogue mad scientist operating out of a basement; they possessed money, technology, and political influence—the kind of terrifying power that leaves absolutely no paper trails.
That realization was significantly less comforting than it should have been.
With absolutely nothing else to do but march, I started paying attention to the other subjects around me. Yesterday had been pure, unadulterated chaos. Today, I actually had the mental bandwidth to observe.
The first thing I noticed was the sheer diversity. Different heights, builds, features, and accents from all over. Unremarkable enough.
Then I noticed the green-skinned boy.
I stared.
He stared right back.
He was still green. Not pale, not a bad dye job, and not theatrical makeup. His skin was actually, genuinely, unmistakably green.
A few rows ahead, a girl with bright, crimson skin moved smoothly through the crowd. Not a massive birthmark. Not war paint. Her base, biological color was just... red.
I rubbed my eyes hard, but the colors stayed exactly where they were. Noted. The outside world was a whole lot stranger than I had previously assumed.
Then my eyes spotted another figure—a thin boy moving quietly through the center of the crowd. He had ordinary brown hair, an average height, and absolutely nothing remarkable about him at first glance. Except for one bizarre detail: people kept looking directly at him and then immediately looking away. Not intentionally, either. It was completely instinctive. Like their brains simply refused to register his existence.
One guy nearly walked straight into him, bumping shoulders. Another glanced over in his direction, only for his eyes to glaze over as he forgot the boy existed mid-look.
I narrowed my eyes, fighting through a strange mental fog, and focused entirely on him. Even doing that felt remarkably difficult, requiring a weird amount of willpower. Before the serum, I probably would have missed him entirely. Now, I could barely hold him in my attention, but he still drifted through the crowd like smoke.
*If that guy doesn't awaken an invisibility power, I'll eat my own shoes.*
It felt like a pretty safe prediction.
Small groups had slowly started forming throughout the moving line. Humans are inherently social creatures—drop them into a living nightmare and they immediately start looking for allies to lean on. Whispers spread down the rows. Wild theories circulated. Fragments of stolen information passed between terrified strangers.
I needed information too, preferably from someone who wasn't carrying an automatic weapon.
My gaze landed back on Anita. She was walking entirely alone, glancing around occasionally, clearly hoping someone would break the heavy silence first.
I shifted my pace, moving alongside her. "Hi, Anita."
She nearly jumped out of her skin. Which was pretty impressive, given that she'd already survived experimental gene modification less than twenty-four hours ago.
"Oh." A faint, sudden blush crept up her neck. "You remembered my name?"
I stared at her, deadpan. "We spent yesterday getting tortured together in glass pods."
"...Right."
"That tends to be a pretty memorable bonding experience."
The blush deepened slightly before her expression shifted, the embarrassment vanishing entirely. Something much darker replaced it—the hollow look of someone touching a memory they'd rather leave buried.
"I grew up in an orphanage," she said softly, her eyes tracking the floor.
I stayed quiet, letting her speak.
"It wasn't a bad place," she continued, a flicker of surprise crossing my face. That wasn't a common way to start that kind of story. "We had good food. Real teachers. The caretakers were genuinely kind to us. For a long time, I actually thought I'd been incredibly lucky."
Then her expression went somewhere cold and mechanical.
"Every year, specialized doctors would come to perform routine medical examinations on us. Everyone went through them. Nobody thought it was strange."
*That sounds incredibly suspicious.* But only in hindsight. The best traps always do.
"Then one day, they selected six children. They told us we'd been chosen for a prestigious, special educational program."
I instantly translated that internally. *Kidnapping. Corporate edition.*
"Better education. Better opportunities for our futures." Her laugh came out brittle, lacking any real humor. "And then I woke up in a white cell here."
Right. Definitely kidnapping.
There was one specific part of the story her mind kept returning to, a single name that made her voice change every time she uttered it.
"Khan," she murmured.
Twelve years old. There were actual children trapped in this meat grinder. Somehow, that realization made the entire facility feel infinitely worse.
"He always followed me around like a shadow. Got himself into trouble constantly." A brief, genuine smile touched her lips before vanishing. "I promised him I'd always look after him. But after they dragged us here, they separated us..."
She stopped. She didn't need to finish the sentence. The way her hands clenched into tight, trembling fists said everything. She wasn't terrified for herself anymore; she was terrified for him.
I found that strangely admirable. Most people lead with absolute self-preservation in a crisis. Anita had apparently skipped that chapter entirely.
Somewhere during the remainder of the walk, I also managed to overhear the name of the low-presence boy from a few whispering subjects.
Ira.
Interesting name. Future invisibility user. I remained entirely confident in my prediction.
The quiet didn't last forever.
Ahead of us, raised, angry voices cut through the rhythmic thud of marching footsteps. An argument had broken out between two subjects. One looked like he'd been surviving on sheer determination and not much else—patched clothes, worn edges, and calloused hands. The other was cleaner, better fed, clearly the kind of person who’d had plenty of comfortable options in life before this.
They weren't arguing about the facility, or the guards, or the experiments. They were arguing about where they came from.
"You people have absolutely no idea how lucky you are!" the first one snapped, his voice sharp with envy.
The wealthier subject let out a hollow, humorless laugh. "Lucky? You think I'm lucky?"
A heavy pause hung in the air.
"My own family sold me to these people."
The entire corridor went completely silent. Not just quiet—*silent*. Everyone heard it. Everyone stopped moving for a split second.
*Sold.* Not kidnapped from an orphanage. Not tricked by a fake job offer. *Sold by his own blood.*
For several seconds, nobody knew what to say. The guards completely ignored the exchange, marching forward like it wasn't unusual in the slightest. Like they'd heard it a thousand times before.
I glanced at Anita. She looked just as deeply unsettled as I felt.
*What kind of horrific world existed outside these reinforced walls?*
Eventually, the crowd slowed to a halt. We had reached Processing Hall A.
I stepped inside—and something immediately pulled my attention straight to the center of the massive chamber.
There was a machine. It was enormous, towering over the room, and looking distinctly *wrong* in a way I couldn't immediately put my finger on. Then I saw the people.
They weren't operating it. They were *connected* to it.
Thick, black cables disappeared directly into the bases of their skulls. Complex metal tubing entered their bodies through surgical ports. Their skin was pale, motionless, and waxy—looking as though they had actively become components of the machinery rather than the other way around.
A deep chill moved through my spine.
Then, one of them shifted.
It was a slow, agonizingly mechanical movement. His head turned by a fraction of an inch, and his open, unblinking, entirely empty eyes locked directly onto mine. For one horrible, visceral second, I had the distinct sensation that it wasn't a man looking at me at all.
It was the machine itself.
My skin crawled. And given my current living conditions, that was really saying something.
Before I could dwell on the human machinery, guards aggressively directed us into tight queues.
The testing began. Harsh blue lights swept across the subjects one by one. Heavy scanners hummed, and scientists frantically recorded scrolling numbers while researchers watched from elevated glass observation chambers like they were cataloguing prize livestock.
A scientist suddenly raised his hand, cutting a scanner short. One subject was immediately grabbed by the arms and pulled aside into a separate corridor.
I managed to catch fragments of their conversation over the hum of the tech.
*"Third gravity-compatible candidate this year. Keep him separate."*
The subject looked utterly terrified and confused. The scientists looked profoundly excited. The guards straightened up, their grips tightening. None of those reactions were remotely reassuring.
A few minutes later, more subjects were systematically removed from the line. The scientists weren't even bothering to be subtle about it anymore.
*"No detectable affinity."*
*"No dimensional resonance."*
*"Incompatible."*
That last word rippled through the remaining crowd like a disease. *Incompatible* carried a very specific, lethal kind of weight to it in a place like this.
Anita stepped forward into one of the flashing scanners.
A few agonizing seconds passed. A scientist checked the rapid data feedback on his tablet, frowned, and immediately signaled security.
My stomach tightened into a knot. *Great.* I'd finally managed to learn someone's name, and now a pair of heavily armed guards were escorting her away through a side exit.
Anita looked back over her shoulder once before she disappeared into the darkness of the corridor. I couldn't explain why her departure bothered me as much as it did, but a heavy weight settled in my chest.
Eventually, it was my turn.
I stepped up onto the metal platform of the scanner. The harsh blue light swept slowly down my body from head to toe. The machines hummed a low, vibrating note. The scientists watched their displays.
One of them frowned. Another leaned in closer to the monitor, tapping the screen.
*Why the hell are they looking at me like that?*
Then I caught a flash of movement in the elevated observation chamber. The lead scientist—the wild-haired psychopath from yesterday—had gone completely still. He checked his main screen, checked it a second time, and then looked out through the glass directly at me.
It wasn't excitement in his eyes. It wasn't even scientific curiosity.
It was pity.
My stomach completely dropped. People don't look at you with genuine pity when something good is about to happen.
He checked the monitor one final time, his expression tightening into a grimace—looking as though he desperately wished the numbers were different. Like he was genuinely sorry about whatever those numbers were showing him. That was considerably more unsettling than being treated like a piece of data.
Then, the scan simply ended.
No alarms blared. No guards grabbed my arms. No special escort arrived. Nothing. I was just waved along to rejoin the general crowd of remaining subjects.
That should have been a massive relief. Instead, I felt oddly deflated.
Some small, embarrassing, deeply buried part of me had apparently expected the machine to suddenly flash red and announce: *Congratulations. Chosen overpowered protagonist detected.*
Instead, it had essentially announced: *Completely unremarkable. Please move along.*
Rude.
When the final subject had cleared the scanners, the massive hall fell dead quiet. The lead scientist emerged from the observation deck, stepping onto the central platform.
He was smiling. Of course he was.
"Excellent," he boomed, his voice echoing off the metallic walls. That word was rapidly becoming the most terrifying sound in my vocabulary. "Now that we've successfully identified exactly which dimensional energy each of you is biologically compatible with, only one final step remains."
No whispers broke out. No one shifted their feet. Nobody even dared to breathe too loudly.
"We will introduce that specific energy directly into your bodies," he explained, a strange, desperate murmur running through the crowd—people getting excited, somehow, despite the horror. "You may think of it as violently awakening your dormant genetic potential."
The murmurs grew slightly louder. Human hope is a remarkably stubborn, stupid thing.
Then, he shattered it completely.
"If your body successfully adapts to the foreign energy—congratulations. You will awaken extraordinary, supernatural abilities."
He paused, letting the silence hang.
"If your body fails to adapt..." His manic smile didn't shift a millimeter. "...you will be disposed of."
The entire hall froze solid. The air felt ten degrees colder. He casually adjusted his glasses, looking exactly like a corporate middle-manager announcing a minor schedule change.
"Oh—and one more thing." Nobody liked the sound of that. "Our data indicates that a strong will may marginally improve your survival chances. Do try to hold onto your minds."
A trembling, pale hand rose from somewhere near the front of the crowd. "W-What exactly happens to us if we fail?" a young voice cracked.
The scientist offered the exact same polite smile.
"You die."
Simple. Direct. Final.
He pressed a glowing button on his console.
A deep, bone-rattling mechanical rumble vibrated through the floorboards. The massive metal plates beneath our feet suddenly split apart, sliding away into the walls with a deafening screech.
A yawning abyss of pure darkness waited directly below us—endless, lightless, and infinitely patient.
And just like that, nobody was thinking about getting superpowers anymore.