Wretched Star

THE MAKING OF MONSTERS

CHAPTER FOUR: THE MAKING OF MONSTERS

They dragged me across the fire bridges with a chain around my neck.

The links cut into my skin. I didn’t care.

I’d stopped caring the day my mother died.

Kida watched me disappear through the steel doors.

She didn’t call out.

Just stared.

The same way you stare at a storm that’s about to take your roof off.

The upper tiers were different.

Wider corridors. Cleaner steel. White lights instead of red.

And silence.

Not peace.

Tension.

The kind that coils before a scream.

Commander Yeshik Drahl walked like he didn’t touch the floor.

Not a step wasted.

His hands clasped behind his back. His armor polished until it looked like frozen night.

He didn’t look at me.

Didn’t speak.

Just led me through three chambers. Past security gates and steaming reactors. Past guards who didn’t laugh or spit. They stood at attention when he passed.

Eventually, we reached a large circular room.

Glass walls. Sand-covered floor. Rings of lights humming above. A single chair bolted into the center.

It wasn’t a training room.

It was a testing chamber.

Two guards shoved me toward the center.

I didn’t resist.

Yeshik finally turned.

His voice was silk over razors.

“Do you know why you’re here?”

I said nothing.

He nodded, amused.

“You don’t need to. You just need to bleed.”

He gestured.

A side door hissed open.

A massive, horned brute limped in—part flesh, part metal. His eyes were milky, and his chest was covered in burn scars.

“Subject 21,” Drahl said. “Failed hybrid from Sector Belar.”

“Kill it.”

I didn’t move.

He snapped his fingers.

The guards shocked my collar. I dropped to my knees.

“Kill it, or die beneath it.”

Subject 21 roared and charged.

My body moved before my thoughts did.

I dodged left, rolled under his first swing, grabbed a chunk of rebar off the ground and jammed it into his thigh.

It screeched.

I struck again—once, twice—shattering bone with blind fury.

The collar shocked me again, mid-swing.

I screamed.

But I didn’t stop.

Blood sprayed my face. Black and bubbling.

I shoved the bar through its eye and twisted until the thing stopped shaking.

Then I stood there.

Panting.

Covered in someone else’s nightmare.

Yeshik didn’t clap. Didn’t smile.

He just said:

“Again.”

The next one was smaller—fast, insectoid, armored.

I lost two fingers that time.

They regrew, eventually. After three weeks of pain serum and forced nutrient injection.

By the fifth test, I wasn’t just surviving.

I was enjoying it.

I started memorizing how they moved.

How their knees bent. How their skulls fractured.

There was a guard who mocked me after one fight.

Said I moved like a rat with broken legs.

I waited until he let his rifle drop while drinking.

Then I crushed his windpipe with a tray.

They didn’t kill me.

They promoted me.

They began calling it conditioning.

They fitted me with a new collar. One that could release pain at levels I’d never felt before.

They used it during fights.

During sleep.

During moments of silence—just to remind me I was still theirs.

I spent months in the glass room.

Every fight chipped something away.

Every win buried something else.

But one night, I dreamed of my father again.

He was holding my hand.

Saying nothing.

Just holding it.

Then I woke up in blood, with a blade in my palm and a corpse at my feet.

And the first thought that came to me wasn’t guilt.

It was:

Why did that one take longer to die?

After my 20th fight, Yeshik summoned me without warning.

I entered his chamber—cold, sterile, filled with floating data arrays and maps of sectors I’d never heard of.

He was alone. Watching footage.

It was me.

Slaughtering. Surviving.

Evolving.

He turned and studied me like a sculptor inspecting his latest failure.

“You’re different,” he said.

I didn’t answer.

“You don’t fight like the others. You react… like memory is your muscle.”

Still, I said nothing.

He approached.

Closer than ever before.

“You’re not a slave. Not anymore. You’re something else.”

Then he leaned close, just enough for me to smell the venom in his breath.

“We’re going to burn away the rest… and see what’s underneath.”

He left me alone after that.

No more tests. No more fights.

Just the glass room.

And the silence.

For two weeks.

Then the door opened.

And a voice said:

“You’re going back to the crawlspace.”

I blinked.

The voice repeated:

“Back to where you came from.”

Why?

I didn’t ask. I didn’t speak.

I just walked back.

Through the fire bridges. Past the corpses. Into the red haze.

And when I got there—

Korril was waiting.

His one eye locked with mine.

He didn’t speak.

But I saw it.

For the first time since I arrived in The Throat…

He was afraid of me.