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A blaring alarm shattered the oppressive silence, casting the once sterile halls into a pulsating crimson hue. Elijah's eyes remained fixed on the security screens, absorbing the destruction unfolding before him.

With a flicker of satisfaction, he observed as every door within the facility slid open, and the detaining collars, instruments of control and suppression, disengaged one by one, setting the children free from their ethereal chains. In that pivotal moment of realization, the children ceased their internal strife, their unified purpose clear—they were no longer victims but warriors, poised to reclaim their stolen freedom.

Elijah wasted no time in action, his resolve firm and unwavering. His priority was clear: locate Doctor Shaw and aid the escape of as many children as possible.

With Zoe and Jake in tow, he navigated the labyrinthine corridors with practised ease, his familiarity with the layout of these facilities proving invaluable. As they approached the imposing double doors that guarded the chamber of captivity, a scene of primal chaos greeted them—a battleground where demons and lycans clashed against their captors, each blow struck a resounding echo of liberation.

Zoe frowned nervously as they got closer to the battle. "O-okay, I don't think I'm ready to fight these—"

"Just stay close," Elijah snapped, cutting her off.

With a furious snarl, the demon surged into the hall, seizing the throat of the nearest guard with a swift, calculated motion. He savagely crushed the man's windpipe, discarding the lifeless body with contempt.

Leading the charge down the corridor, mayhem unfolded in his wake. Crimson streams painted the pristine walls and floors as the detainers futilely brandished their electric prods, but the shackles of weakness that once bound the children were gone, unleashing a primal fury that rendered the guards as mere obstacles in their path. Among them, innocence stripped away by circumstance, some as tender as five years old, became avatars of vengeance, tearing through their oppressors with ferocity.

"Head for the exit," Elijah said to one of the kids as he grabbed the man she was trying to fight. The demon tore the guy apart and pointed back the way he'd come. "Go!"

She nodded and raced in the direction he showed her, and once they'd killed the guards that they were each battling, the rest of the kids followed.

"Where are we gonna find this guy?" Jake called before shifting into his leopard form and pouncing at a detainer; he pinned the man down, and Elijah mercilessly stomped his foot on his head, crushing it.

The explosion of blood and brain matter made Zoe gag, and Elijah rolled his eyes at her.

"This way," the demon said as he made his way past the last of the fleeing kids and towards a wide door at the end of the corridor. He knew that there were more subjects trapped deeper within the facility, and he'd do his best to assist them.

Once the trio passed the wide door, they emerged into a mess hall. Gunfire, snarls, and roars echoed from each of the three exits; Elijah stopped in the middle of the room, trying to decide which way to go. Left would take him to another corridor lined with rooms where the subjects slept. Straight ahead would take him to the labs and operating rooms. And right would take him to the training arenas.

"Which way?" Zoe asked worriedly.

Doctor Shaw would likely be scurrying around in one of the labs like a rat, gathering what data he could before he headed for the emergency escape stairwells.

"This way," he growled, running towards the corridor ahead.

Elijah guided his companions through the flashing corridor; the alarms continued blaring, and the sounds of battle grew louder. The pharmaceutical-plagued air swiftly weakened against the scent of blood and ash and knowing that the subjects were fighting their way out made Elijah feel some relief. But he couldn't relax yet.

As bloodied lycans and demons, bearing the scars of their struggle, fled past them, the trio instinctively stepped aside, granting them passage without hesitation. Their journey led them past an abandoned computer lab and several chambers now silent, the fallen forms of both guards and subjects bearing silent testament to the violence that had unfolded.

Each glimpse of a fallen lycan or demon stirred a tumult of guilt and despair within Elijah, a heavy burden of responsibility for those who had perished under their oppressors' tyranny. Yet, amidst the shadow of remorse, a flicker of solace emerged—the fallen had met their end not as mere subjects of experimentation but as warriors in the pursuit of their freedom, their defiance immortalized in the blood-stained halls of their captivity.

When they reached the end of the passage, they stood before a door that hadn't opened when Jake accessed the computers. However, Elijah wasn't surprised that the labs and operating rooms weren't connected to the mainframe. Those rooms had their own power source in case of shutdown or emergency.

Elijah kicked the door in with ease, but when he walked into the hallway, he came to a halt after a few steps. His heart raced, and a conflicting concoction of confusion, dismay, anger, and torment raged inside him.

The windows to his left and right allowed him to see into the halls on the other side...and they were both filled with the same rows upon rows of liquid-filled, seven-foot-tall cylinders that he'd seen in his dream.

However, these cylinders weren't empty.

Terrible, mangled creatures floated within the ooze inside. Some looked like horrific, hand-crafted hybrids—chimaeras. Monsters with the bodies of wolves and the heads of true demons, grossly attached with ethos-infused metal. Others possessed the likeness of humans but with the features of certain demons or lycans, some with wings, others without.

But they all had one thing in common.

Every single creature looked like it was suffering, suspended in time, trapped in an endless cycle of torment.

The sight made Elijah's throat tighten. His limbs went stiff, and his heart raced with anguish.

"What...the fuck?" Jake breathed, approaching one of the windows.

"Elijah...w-what the...the hell is this?" Zoe asked shakily, moving towards the other window.

He didn't know.

He didn't want to know.

But the revelation forced him to contemplate. It made him hypothesize. Some of the kids he was trapped in that facility with wondered what happened to the ones who were taken and never came back. One boy suggested that they were set free. A girl said that they'd finally proved their worth and were taken to be trained for a military program that Lyca Corp. was running. He and Haru, however, always felt as if something much more sinister was taking place. And he wondered...were they right? Were these...things parts of the kids who disappeared?

"Elijah?" Zoe asked worriedly.

He snapped out of his thoughts and glanced down at her.

"Are you okay?" she questioned.

Elijah huffed and glared ahead, trying his best to ignore the horrors in the corners of his eyes. "Come on," he muttered.

The cylinder-filled rooms seemed to go on forever, though. Every window that they passed peered into the same place, but Elijah focused on the door at the end of the corridor. When they got to it, he lunged at it, forcing it open with the weight of his body.

He emerged into an atrium, and through all the windows and glass doors, he saw labs and operating rooms. Inside some of them, doctors and nurses were gathering what papers and hard drives they could, and in another, a kid, sedated and tied down, had been abandoned mid-procedure.

His first instinct was the help the kid. If he was left intubated for too long, he could struggle to recover and breathe on his own, and the silver shackles binding him to the table would leave permanent scars. No demon deserved to be left with a permanent reminder of the awful things these people did. Elijah knew too well what that did to a person.

"How do we find the guy you're after?" Jake asked.

Elijah glanced at Zoe and the Pardus. He was sure that neither of them knew how to take a patient off a ventilator, and he didn't trust either of them to find and detain Shaw for him, either.

He had to make a choice, and as guilty as it made him feel, he had to go after Shaw first. He'd not risk him getting away.

With a breathy huff, the demon charged forward and stopped in the middle of the atrium. He looked around, his eyes frantically darting from each plaque above the doors until he found the one with Shaw's name—it was on the second floor.

He hastily located a staircase and raced up, ignoring Zoe and Jake's pleas for him to slow down. All the detainers and guards were busy trying to contain the subjects, so he didn't need to be cautious. He raced ahead, reached the landing, and sprinted to Shaw's office.

The moment he arrived at the door, Elijah kicked it in. He set his eyes on Shaw, the stubby, bald little man, who had been scrambling all his notes together; the man winced in startle, and when he turned to face Elijah, a look of utter horror smothered his ugly little face. He knew what was about to happen, and he evidently understood that there was nothing he could do about it.

"N-no, p-ple—"

Elijah lunged at him and viciously snatched his throat, pinning him against the wall before he could attempt to beg. "Remember me?" he snarled, glaring into his eyes.

The man choked and nodded stiffly. "0...333."

"Where's Haru?" he growled.

"W-who?"

"0547," he snarled impatiently.

Shaw whimpered. "I-I don't know who that—"

"Tell me where he is!" he yelled.

The man cried like a child and closed his eyes, trembling in the demon's grip. "I don't know!" he insisted as tears trickled down his face. "I'm just a doctor!"

Elijah tightened his grip, ensuring that his claws pierced the pathetic man's skin.

Zoe and Jake finally showed up, panting behind him. To his relief, though, neither of them questioned him.

"P-please," Shaw begged.

"What were those things in the cylinders?" Zoe suddenly asked, appearing beside Elijah.

Shaw opened his eyes to look at her. "W-what?"

"Those monsters in the cylinders," she repeated.

Although Elijah didn't want to know, he also didn't want to ignore an answer if Shaw had one.

"I don't know what—"

"Answer her," Elijah snarled, leaning his face a little closer to Shaw's as he bared his fangs.

With a terrified whimper, Shaw gulped loudly. "Th-the chimaeras," he answered shakily. "They...they're what we've been working on."

Elijah scowled. Now, he wanted to know more. "Why?"

Shaw gulped again. "If...if I tell you, you'll let me go, right? I-I'm just a doctor; I do what they tell me to do."

"Sure," the demon lied.

"What are they?" Zoe repeated.

"And why do some of them look like lycan hybrids?" Jake called.

For a moment, Shaw seemed to ponder. "Th-they're...supposed to be weapons. All of Lyca Corp.'s experiments and programs have been for this—to create perfect hybrids."

Something hit Elijah. A connection?

Before he could ask, Zoe did instead. "Was Ridge working for you?"

"Ridge?" he questioned.

"Darius Ridgeforth," the girl said irritably.

Shaw frowned but eventually nodded. "Y-yeah. He...was a private contractor. He obtained hybrid blood for us—a one-time job. He had nothing to do with our work."

Elijah could tell that he wasn't lying, and it disappointed him that there wasn't a connection between Ridge, Ascela, and Haru—or Ridge, at least. There was still a chance that Haru had been sent to Ascela, right? He still wouldn't get his hopes up until he had solid evidence. This guy couldn't help, but Ronan was still out there somewhere, and Elijah's desperation to get to Flinnwick to follow Ronan's trail returned.

The demon looked at Zoe. He thought he'd offer her a chance to get what she could out of Shaw before he ended him. "Do you have anything else to ask him?"

Zoe frowned, pondering.

"Yo, this could save time, get us out of here, like...now," Jake called.

They both turned their heads and looked at him. In his human form, he was holding Shaw's laptop.

"Password's on the back," the pardus said as he flipped it over and pointed to a piece of paper taped to it.

Elijah set his eyes back on Shaw. Everything the doctor ever did to him flashed before his eyes, fuelling his rage, his hatred, and as his anger grew, he gradually tightened his grip on the man's throat.

"W-wait!" Shaw choked.

If Elijah could make him feel all the pain and suffering this man had inflicted on him and countless others, then he would, but they were running out of time. He didn't want to risk spending too much longer there, so he slowly suffocated the man. His face turned blue, his eyes bulged from his head, and once his struggled, muffled chokes came to an end, Elijah squeezed with a lot more force, crushing the doctor's throat in his hand.

With a disgusted snarl, he dropped the corpse and turned to face Zoe and Jake. The girl took the laptop from the pardus, and then they looked to Elijah for instructions.

"Let's go," the demon said.

He left the office and made his way back downstairs, but instead of heading for the door that led towards the exit, he hurried into the room where the unconscious kid had been left on an operating table.

"What are you doing?" Jake protested.

Ignoring him, Elijah recalled the things he'd seen, heard, and learned from his years in a practically identical lab. He carefully disabled the machines and took the breathing tube out of the kid's throat, and then he took the key to the silver shackles from the wall. Once he released the restraints, he picked the small boy up and threw him over his shoulder. He wouldn't leave him to fend for himself.

He headed for the exit. As Zoe and Jake followed, he navigated the path he'd taken, stepping over corpse after corpse, keeping his eyes focused ahead. He knew that the guilt would only return tenfold if he stopped to see whether he was walking past dead guards or subjects.

When they got to the stairs, what seemed to be the last of the kids were heading up. Elijah couldn't hear or sense any other Caeleste behind him, so he ushered the last subjects up and followed with his two companions.

"Where are they all gonna go?" Zoe asked, panting as they climbed the mountain of stairs.

"I don't know," Elijah answered with a huff.

"Shouldn't we help them?" she questioned.

"I don't have the time or resources," the demon muttered.

"But we can't just leave th—"

"I've done everything I can, all right?" he snapped irritably.

"What about your dads?" Jake suggested. "You could tell them that there's a bunch of kids out here that need help. They can do something, right?"

"Yeah, but...I can't contact them. I'd need to get to a phone."

Elijah wasn't against getting these kids some help if it were possible. And it wasn't like he'd be sticking around waiting with them. "There's likely a phone you can use once we get back up to the radio station," he told her.

Zoe nodded and said, "Yeah...yeah, that could work. They could get some people to come out here to find and help them."

The fact that she was saying that her dads, who worked for the Venaticus, could get people out here to help these kids made Elijah a little more skeptical. He wanted to know who exactly Zoe's dads were and why she knew so much—there had to be more to it than her having a cousin who brought his work home—and he was determined to get the answers, but there were more important things to focus on at the moment.

It was likely that someone had managed to send out a distress call, and Lyca Corp. would send reinforcements. He wanted to be well away from the radio station before that happened, so Zoe was going to have to be quick contacting her dads, and he was going to have to be just as fast getting back to the car.

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✧ Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed the chapter! ✧

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