The journey back to the lab was a crawl of shame. Every scrape on my bare feet, every throb from the claw marks on my ribs, was a punctuation mark in a long, painful sentence that just kept repeating in my head: You failed. You failed. You failed. The freight yard’s labyrinth of rust and shadows seemed to mock me, its oppressive silence amplifying the echo of my stupidity.

  I stumbled through the crooked steel door of The Kennel, collapsing against the frame. The cool, dusty air of the lab was a balm on my overheated skin. For a long moment, I just stayed there, my cheek pressed against the cold metal, my body a single, unified scream of pain.

  “Well, that went sub-optimal,” Handy’s voice was calm, a stark contrast to the frantic chaos in my head.

  “You think?” I choked out, my voice thick with a mixture of blood and humiliation. I peeled myself off the door and staggered toward the center of the lab, leaving a small, pathetic trail of bloody footprints on the dusty concrete.

  I found a half-full bottle of distilled water and a roll of what looked like ancient medical gauze on one of the lab benches. It would have to do. I sank onto a stool, the world spinning slightly. The sharp, claw-inflicted gash on my face stung with a vengeance, the one on my ribs a deep, fiery ache that made every breath a fresh ordeal.

  I poured some of the water onto a corner of a lab coat and dabbed at the cut on my cheek. The reflection in a dark, dead computer monitor showed a stranger. A bloody, beaten stranger with my face. The arrogant smirk from the freight yard was gone, replaced by the hollow-eyed look of someone who’d just been taught a very brutal lesson.

  It wasn't just that I lost. It was how I lost. My voice echoed in my head. 'Hey, Fido!' I actually said that. Out loud. I sounded like some cheap knock-off of an action hero. The cringe was so bad it almost hurt more than my ribs. My wild, uncontrolled punches. The idiotic grin on my face right before he turned the tables.

  And the civilian. The dockworker. He’d gotten away, but only after I’d made things a hundred times worse. I hadn’t saved him. I’d just burst in like an amateur, turning his terrifying ordeal into a three-ring circus of my failure. Ravage was still out there.

  Still hunting. And I had let him go. The guilt was a physical weight, pressing down on my already bruised ribs, making it even harder to breathe.

  My hands were shaking. I wasn’t just a monster. I was an incompetent one. A dangerous, arrogant fool with powers I did not know how to control.

  “You know, for future reference,” Handy said, his voice pulling me from my spiral of self-loathing, “announcing your presence with a jaunty one-liner is a poor tactical choice. Unless the goal is to get yourself turned into a chew toy, in which case, congratulations on a mission accomplished.”

  “Shut up,” I muttered, my voice raw.

  “I’m just saying, there’s room for improvement. A significant, Grand Canyon-sized room for improvement.” A hologram flickered to life in the air above my wrist, projecting a shaky, three-dimensional recording of the fight. A nauseating first-person perspective view of my beat down. “Let’s review the game tape, shall we?”

  I wanted to look away, to smash the wristband against the wall, but I froze, forced to watch my humiliation in glorious, high-definition replay.

  The hologram showed me charging in.

  “Okay, stop,” Handy said. A red circle appeared around my fists. “See that? All arm strength. No core. Your center of gravity is a mess.”

  My cheeks burned. He was right. It was sloppy. Basic.

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  “He didn’t have to block you,” Handy continued. “He just had to wait for you to trip over your own feet.”

  The footage jumped forward. Ravage was staggering back, his leg supposedly injured.

  My triumphant, breathless grin filled the screen.

  “And this,” Handy’s voice was dripping with digital sarcasm, “is the exact moment your tactical assessment devolved into pure wishful thinking. He presented a false data point—the injury—and you accepted it without verification.”

  The hologram shifted, showing my mad dash into the narrow gap between the containers.

  “He didn’t run from you,” Handy explained, his tone becoming serious. “He funneled you. He controlled the terrain, eliminated your primary advantage—your agility—and forced you into a kill box of his own choosing. It was a classic ambush maneuver. Textbook, really.”

  The final, brutal moments of the fight played out. The trap. The sudden shift in Ravage’s fighting style from ‘berserker’ to ‘surgeon.’ The precise, methodical way he dismantled me. The hologram froze on the image of his massive form looming over me, his claws extended.

  “That’s not a beast, Nikki,” Handy said quietly. “That’s a weapon executing its programming.”

  The combat footage dissolved, replaced by a complex series of scrolling schematics and data files. Pandora Corp logos burned in the top corner of each one.

  “I’ve been digging through your uncle’s encrypted files on Subject-17,” Handy explained. “This isn’t just a collection of lab notes. It’s an instruction manual. Look.”

  A new image appeared: a wireframe model of Ravage, overlaid with hundreds of moving lines and tactical diagrams. “He has dozens of combat protocols downloaded directly into his cerebral cortex. ‘Ambush Predator.’ ‘Guerilla Warfare.’ ‘Close Quarters Termination.’ He wasn’t just fighting you. He was running a program. He assessed your skill level—or lack thereof—and selected the most efficient protocol to neutralize you.”

  I stared at the schematics. He's a computer. A bio-computer running a program. My strength, my speed... it was like trying to win a chess match by throwing a punch. The game was rigged from the start.

  The deep-seated fear I’d been trying to outrun finally caught up to me. It wasn’t just the fear of Ravage. It was the fear of my powerlessness. The fear that I was nothing more than a cheap, defective knock-off of the monster he was. He was a weapon. I was just a girl who broke things by accident.

  “I can’t beat him,” I whispered, the words tasting like defeat. “I can’t do this.”

  “No, you can’t,” Handy agreed, his voice gentle. “Not like this. Not by being a stronger, faster version of the girl who used to lead pep rallies. That girl is gone. Trying to be her is just going to get you killed.”

  The hologram vanished, leaving me in the dusty silence of the lab. My reflection in the dark monitor stared back at me, bloody and broken. I wasn’t a hero. I wasn’t even a proper monster. I was just a victim who had got herself a participation trophy in a fight she would lose.

  I stared at my bloody reflection. The fear was still there, an icy knot in my stomach. But something else was sparking to life underneath it. Anger. Not at Ravage. At myself. For being so stupid. For thinking this was a game. For treating a curse like a superpower.

  I got this power, this curse, and I had treated it like a toy. I had been arrogant. I had been reckless. And I had paid the price.

  The fear wasn't paralyzing anymore. It was… focusing. I had been so afraid of what I was becoming. But what if the real problem was that I wasn’t becoming it fast enough?

  I couldn’t just be a monster. I had to learn to be a fighter.

  I looked down at the wristband, at the steady blue light of the AI that was now my only link to the truth, my only connection to my uncle’s legacy. He wasn’t just a snarky voice on my wrist anymore. He was a library. A coach. An ally. The only one I had left.

  “Okay,” I said, my voice quiet but steady. The girl who had cried in the freight yard was gone. Someone else was sitting here now. Someone harder. Colder. “Show me again.”

  “Show you what?” Handy asked. “The part where you get your face redecorated? I can put it on a loop if you’d like.”

  “Show me his protocols,” I said, my eyes locking onto my own determined, blood-streaked reflection. “Show me how he fights. Show me everything.”

  A moment of silence from the AI. Then, a new file flickered to life in the air. A training simulation.

  “Alright, rookie,” Handy’s voice was all business, but I could hear a flicker of something new in its synthesized tone. Respect. “Lesson one begins now. Let’s go to war.”