L*st and Death

But the shock of reunion was inevitably interrupted by the intervention of another figure.

“Isaac, lower the weapon.”

It was the doctor Siron had encountered in the research facility every single day since arriving on the island. He now stood in the hallway with several armed men. Isaac, too, had a gun in hand, but with his back turned to them—and seated in a wheelchair—he didn’t appear capable of retaliation.

Only then did Siron realize Isaac was in a wheelchair. He’d been staring right at him, yet overwhelmed by the situation, he hadn’t registered that fact until now.

“Isaac. Do you want to end up bedridden instead?”

At the doctor’s sharp rebuke, Isaac let out a small sigh, then raised the rifle above his head. He held the weapon firmly in one hand, ejected the magazine with the other, and tossed it toward the hallway. Lastly, he pulled the slide to eject the remaining round into the air, then slowly set the rifle down.

At last, he raised both hands in the air in surrender. Only once Isaac had made it clear he was disarmed did the doctor speak.

“Bring Ted out. I need to check his condition.”

“What should we do with Isaac Bazelli?”

“Bring Ted out first.”

The red-faced young man acknowledged the order with a reluctant nod, his eyes still full of discontent. Together with the others, he lifted the bearded man’s body.

Beardface was sobbing like a child, a pathetic sound ill-matched to his size. His genitals were still exposed, though the club-like erection had shriveled into something limp and wormlike, like a dead sea cucumber.

“What about Isaac Bazelli?” the red-faced man asked again.

“Punishment can wait. We’re busy. The analyzer needs fixing right away.”

Siron watched as the red-faced man passed Isaac with a glare full of animosity. It wasn’t just him—the other alphas in the storage room were all looking at Isaac with the same simmering hostility.

“Then Singh, let me assist Bazelli as his little helper,” the red-faced man said to the doctor, his voice filled with challenge. His eyes gleamed with a hunger to crush Isaac slowly and thoroughly. The doctor sighed and turned toward Siron.

“You there. You help him.”

Siron hesitated, frowning in confusion.

“...Me?”

The doctor stared at Siron as if he were pathetic, then ushered the other men out of the storage room. But a few seconds later, his footsteps returned. Poking his head back in, the doctor said with a smugly bureaucratic tone:

“Don’t forget to scrub the bloodstains off the floor and shelves.”

And just like that, the doctor vanished again, leaving only Siron and Isaac in the room.

Siron glared silently at the gaunt man in the wheelchair. The man who had once seemed like a giant in Siron’s memory now looked shrunken, vertically and horizontally, like someone who’d been folded down to size—smaller and more pitiful.

After a long silence, Siron averted his eyes with an arrogant expression. He drew in a deep breath. The air stank of blood. Time to clean up the fucking pervert’s spilled blood—even down to his torn-off ear.

The storage room was stocked with sanitizing wipes. Siron ripped out an entire canister, clenched them tightly, and dropped to his knees. When he began wiping up the bits of flesh that had come off Beardface’s ear, he had to turn his head to fight the wave of nausea. After a few rough, sharp breaths, he forced himself to finish the sickening task quickly. When the stains were finally all scrubbed clean, Siron dumped the used wipes into a hallway bin and returned to stand in front of Isaac. He looked down indifferently at the man now confined to a wheelchair.

“Your face is a mess,” Isaac said.

Siron let out a scoffing laugh before he could stop himself.

“Is that so?”

He folded his arms and leaned in toward Isaac.

“Still seems like I’m doing better than someone.”

Isaac’s eyes looked up at him—blue like marbles filled with fluorescent liquid. Maybe it was the way his cheekbones and brow bones jutted from the weight loss, but those eyes seemed even more intense than before. Siron studied him with a strange expression before asking coldly:

“You’re Hybris too, aren’t you?”

A new kind of surprise flickered over Isaac’s face. At the same time, Siron felt a strange discomfort hearing the words come out of his own mouth—as if a country bumpkin had suddenly spoken a foreign language fluently.

“You know what Hybris is?”

“To some extent.”

“You’ve been tracking them?”

“To some extent. Someone I knew got caught up with them—shittiest luck.”

Isaac stared at him as if he genuinely couldn’t figure him out, then asked:

“So you ended up here chasing Hybris?”

Siron scratched his nose, scowling at him.

“I was just trying to find some missing homeless guys. Got dragged into this mess.”

“Missing homeless?”

“...From Baggers City. One guy just vanished. We figured he got taken by Hybris.”

“Homeless people disappearing—that’s hardly rare. Why link it to Hybris?”

Siron stared silently at him. Somehow, without realizing it, he was having a normal conversation with Isaac.

“Just answer my question. Are you with Hybris or not?”

Isaac didn’t respond directly. Instead, he offered a plausible explanation—one meant to lower Siron’s guard.

“You won’t believe me, but Hybris... that name sounds unfamiliar to me too.”

Siron’s face twisted like he’d just heard a bad joke.

“Unfamiliar?”

“When I was tailing them—back then—they weren’t called Hybris.”

“So they changed names or something?”

Isaac nodded.

“It was a composite group, made up of different factions, so it went by many names. If they’ve consolidated under the Hybris name now, that would’ve required at least one major reorganization.”

“Why?”

“Because a few years ago, their backbone—an outfit in Beljoras—was completely wiped out.”

Beljoras? Siron remembered Isaac saying he’d done a stint of military service there. His gut twisted.

“You were the one who did that?”

Isaac shook his head.

“I had a partner. A woman named Marta Montaux.”

“...So you were involved.”

“Believe it or not, that’s what happened.”

Isaac rolled past Siron toward the back of the storage room—the same spot where Siron had almost been raped by Beardface just minutes ago. Siron’s expression hardened.

“Who’s Marta Montaux?”

“She used to work in intelligence for Beljoras. A security specialist. She came to me for help while tracking down the human trafficking ring that took her son.”

“And the ones who took him were tied to Hybris?”

“Prostitutes, drifters, orphaned teens looking for work, political dissidents—so many people got sold off cheap. Her son was one of the dissidents.”

Isaac reached for a black box on the shelf, but it was just out of reach. He braked his wheelchair, gripped one armrest, and lifted his upper body with effort.

Siron could have helped him. But he didn’t move. Isaac didn’t use his legs at all, as if the lower half of his body were completely non-functional. Siron remembered the shootout near Isaac’s hideout by the swamps of Secreta.

Maybe he’d been injured beyond recovery back then—left paralyzed from the waist down. The same man who once tried to turn Siron into a rut-triggered omega was now an alpha who couldn’t move his own legs. It should have been satisfying. But Siron felt no relief. Not even a sarcastic quip came to mind. Just how much weight had he lost? It looked like at least twenty kilos in under two months.

Isaac finally grabbed the black box, shifted his weight to one armrest, and carefully lowered himself back into the chair. An action that would’ve taken seconds standing up had required his full effort now.

He sighed lightly and wheeled himself back toward Siron.

“There are a lot of CCTVs in the lab. They don’t record audio, but there are plenty of eyes watching. Be careful.”

Then he added, “Let’s go. To the lab.”

The lab was across from the blood-drawing room. It housed two stainless steel medical refrigerators and some kind of complex machinery that Siron couldn’t identify. Isaac rolled toward the largest device, the one covered in sensors ✧ NоvеIight ✧ (Original source) and displays. He pulled the power cord to shut it down, then carefully pried open the service panel using a tool.

Siron pretended to scratch his nose as he lowered his voice with his palm:

“Tell me why you came to Helsottaz.”

But Isaac didn’t answer right away. For the delicate task ahead, he asked Siron to hold the panel open and shine a flashlight into the machine’s interior. Siron stood close by, holding the tangled panel with one hand and illuminating the guts of the device with the other. As he reached into the blood analyzer, Isaac finally spoke.

“There were several reasons. First, my partner got caught up in Beljoras’s politics and was assassinated.”

Siron gasped softly in surprise.

“Second, I determined the trafficking ring’s central node had relocated to Helsottaz. But the most important reason... I doubt you’ll like it.”

“Say it. Stopping halfway is worse.”

Isaac merely tilted one corner of his mouth. He didn’t speak. Instead, he detached a cable from a component no larger than a thumb, then skillfully unscrewed it with a small driver.

“Let’s just say, as I told you before—I’ve always been fascinated by catastrophe. Helsottaz is a hellhole where you can experience every kind of natural disaster.”

From the black box, he pulled out a new part: the photodirector. The one he’d been looking for. Carefully, he adjusted its position and connected it to the machine’s core, linking the wires with meticulous precision.

Meanwhile, Siron’s face had turned a deep shade of red. He had heard those exact words before—from Isaac Bazelli, back when he knew him as “Johnson Roubre.” Back when they’d shared a bubbly dinner at the restaurant, and Siron, foolishly, thought it might’ve been a date. In truth, it had been nothing more than bait for a kidnapping.

“Mr. Siron... if you could live in a world where your senses were expanded, what do you think it would be like?”

“Well... I guess life would be more interesting.”

“You don’t think it would just make life harder?”

“What can you do? I’d probably just adapt and keep living.”

Recalling that conversation made Siron tremble with fury. That was the moment he found Isaac’s final reason.

“You came here to create an omega, didn’t you?”

Isaac’s hands froze mid-motion as he tightened the screws on the new component.

“You didn’t want to die, so you crossed the ocean to find lab rats who’d come willingly for a few bucks.”

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