Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0134

Chapter 134

Star Labs, 7 p.m. Right in the center of the complex, protected by layers of security that rivaled military installations, the scientist with graying hair at the temples typed incessantly in front of three curved monitors. Silas Stone smiled contentedly, his fingers dancing across the keyboard with the familiarity of someone who had spent decades there.

On the central screen, the silhouette of a human body rotated slowly. Red markings pulsed at specific points, indicating the altered regions. Nothing detailed yet, just outlines, but enough to make the doctor’s heart race with excitement.

“That’s impressive,” he murmured, leaning back in his chair. “That’s a really great discovery.”

Footsteps echoed behind him, coming from the darkest part of the office. From the shadows emerged a tall figure, hood pulled down over his face, dark gray sweatshirt and gloves covering his hands. Where there should have been an ordinary eye, only a constant red glow, faint as embers, strong enough to be unsettling.

“Discovery?” The voice came out young, laden with an anguish that seemed older than the body that produced it. “This is a monstrosity.”

Silas turned around, rising from his chair with a smile that belied the tension in the air.

“Calm down, Vic.”

The nickname caught the boy by surprise. Behind the hood, he tried to remember the last time his father had called him that. He couldn’t. His recent memories were all of closed doors, needles, and exams that stretched into the early hours of the morning.

Silas stepped forward. “Don’t you realize that what you’re becoming is something beautiful? Something incredible?”

Victor stepped back, the distance between them growing like an abyss that neither of them seemed willing to cross the right way.

“I don’t even recognize myself in the mirror anymore. How can you say something like that?”

“Son, be patient. We’re only at the beginning of the research.”

It was the word “research ” that broke something inside him. Not pure fury, but a bitter mixture of everything that had been accumulating for weeks. His body reacted before his mind could process it: his arms reconfigured themselves with a metallic sound, plates sliding over each other until they formed two cannons pointed directly at his own father’s chest.

Silas didn’t move.

The cannon cores began to glow, a deep hum filling the room. It was Victor’s other hand that interrupted the process, gripping his own arm tightly enough to crush the metal, forcing it down. He fell to his knees, trembling, the weapon still active between his clenched fingers.

“I almost killed you.”

Silas approached without hesitation, placing his hands on his son’s shoulders as if nothing had happened. “Very good. Another function we didn’t know about.” There was fascination in his voice, not fear, which somehow hurt more than any scream would have.

“If this is a blessing ,” Victor thought, his eyes closed, ” I would have preferred not to have survived the accident.”

The father, oblivious to what was happening behind that silence, patted him on the shoulder. “Go rest. Tomorrow we start another round of tests.”

And he walked away, returning to his computer as if the conversation had never happened.

Victor stood in the center of the laboratory for an unmeasurable amount of time. The hum of the equipment filled the silence his father had left behind. He looked at his own hands, still partially transformed, his metallic fingers reflecting the bluish light of the monitors.

When he finally moved, he headed toward the door, not the room Silas had mentioned. The corridors of Star Labs were practically empty at that hour, just the constant hum of the server cooling system and the distant echo of footsteps from some night shift employee. Victor kept his hood pulled up, avoiding the few cameras he knew were there, a habit he had developed in the last few weeks without even realizing when it had started.

He arrived at a smaller room, an old storage room he had claimed for himself in the first few days after waking from his coma. There was nothing sophisticated there, just an old chair, some stacked boxes, and a broken mirror he refused to replace. He sat down, the hood still covering his face, and stared at his own fragmented reflection.

Each piece of glass showed a different part of him. In one fragment, what remained of a human face, pale, with deep dark circles under his eyes. In another, dark metal, red sensors, a mouth that no longer seemed to belong to him.

“Who are you? ” he wondered, without expecting an answer, because he already knew there wasn’t one ready.

He remembered the accident. Not the technical details, those his father preferred to keep to himself, but the feeling. The laboratory collapsing. The explosion of energy that no one had been able to properly explain. The pain, so much pain that his mind simply shut down to protect itself. And then, the emptiness. Weeks in a coma, and when he finally opened his eyes, it was no longer just him looking back in the mirror.

Before that day, his father barely had time for him. Victor remembered the afternoons spent waiting at the front door, his backpack with his team shirt slung over his shoulder, hoping Silas would show up in time to at least watch the second half of some game. It almost never happened. There was always an unfinished experiment, a last-minute meeting, a new excuse to replace the old one.

Now it was different. Now his father watched him all day, took notes, measured each new task as if it were a gift. Victor couldn’t tell if this was worse or just another form of the same old absence, only this time disguised as attention.

The sound of light footsteps interrupted his thoughts. He recognized the rhythm even before turning his head.

“Vic?”

It was Sarah, one of the few lab assistants who still treated him like a person and not like a project in progress. She stopped hesitantly at the entrance, holding a tray with something that looked like food, although he no longer felt hungry the way he used to.

“Your father asked me to bring this.” She placed the tray on one of the boxes, her eyes avoiding direct contact with the exposed metal parts. “He said you would be here.”

“Of course he knew.” His voice came out drier than Victor intended. “He knows everything about me now. Every function, every reaction, every… new piece.”

Sarah was silent for a moment, her fingers interlaced in front of her body. “He cares about you. In his own way.”

“In his own way.” Victor repeated the words as if they were foreign to his own mouth. “You know what the problem is with that? His way of looking at me has always been as if I were a result. Before, it was disappointment because I wasn’t what he expected. Now it’s fascination because I’ve become something he never imagined he could create.” He clenched his fists, the metal creaking softly. “In neither case was he looking at his son. Only at what I represented.”

Sarah didn’t have a ready answer, and he hadn’t expected her to. She simply nodded, a small gesture from someone who understood more than she could express, and withdrew, leaving him alone again with the broken mirror and his own thoughts.

Victor reached for the tray, lightly touching the rim with his metallic fingers. The contrast between the cold metal and the ordinary porcelain was almost comical, a constant reminder that he now lived divided between two worlds that would never fully align.

“There are more tests tomorrow ,” she thought, feeling the weight of the phrase like a sentence. ” And the day after tomorrow, more. And after that, even more, until there’s something left of me that’s still… me.”

He stood up, walking back down the hallway, his footsteps echoing in a way they never had before, the extra weight of the metal altering even the way his own body moved through the world. He passed a glass room where some equipment was still switched on, lights flashing in automatic sequence. He stopped there for a moment, observing his own reflection in the dark surface of the glass, this time whole, without the fractures of the broken mirror.

The image returned was strange and familiar at the same time. A face that still bore the features of the boy who played football on weekends, pressed against a body that looked as if it had emerged from some secret military experiment. He raised his hand, touching the face carefully, feeling the exact line where the skin ended and the metal began.

Perhaps he’s right , she thought, almost hating herself for the doubt. Perhaps this really is a gift. But the idea didn’t last. No. A gift I would choose. This was imposed on me, and he treats it as if I should be grateful.

Back in Silas’s office, the doctor himself remained in front of the monitors, oblivious to the passing time. The red markings on the digital silhouette had multiplied since the last time he had checked, new points appearing as the sensors implanted in his son’s body sent data in real time, even from a distance.

He opened a separate file, quickly typing a report that only he would have access to for the time being. The words he chose reflected an enthusiasm bordering on obsession: higher-than-expected rate of cell regeneration, progressively stabilizing integration between organic tissue and synthetic components, neural response to new motor functions exceeding the initial hypothesis.

He stopped typing for a second, glancing at the door his son had left through. A shadow of something resembling guilt crossed his face, too quickly to settle.

“He’ll understand ,” Silas thought, almost convincing himself. ” When this saves lives, when the world realizes what we’ve managed to create here, he’ll understand that it was worth it.”

The door to the room opened without warning, and a man entered, his suit impeccable despite the late hour, a leather briefcase under his arm. Silas recognized the posture even before he fully raised his eyes.

“Dr. Stone.” The voice was calm, controlled, the kind that sounded rehearsed even when saying something simple. “The results of the latest biocompatibility analysis are in.”

“Already?” Silas stood up, curiosity overriding all other thoughts. “Let me see.”

The man handed over the folder, watching intently as Silas flipped through the pages, his eyes darting quickly across the lines of data. With each page turned, the doctor’s smile widened a little more.

“This is even better than I expected.” He closed the folder, looking at the man with an almost feverish glint in his eyes. “Do you know what this means? It’s not just about Victor. It’s about what we can do after him. About replicating, improving, expanding.”

“The board will want a formal introduction.” The man adjusted his tie, an almost mechanical gesture. “Especially considering the origins of the incident that caused the initial transformation.”

Silas hesitated for a fraction of a second, something that would have gone unnoticed by anyone who didn’t know him well. “Origins don’t matter now. What matters is the result.”

“Some will disagree with that, doctor.”

“Some people always disagree.” Silas sat back down, placing the folder on the table with almost reverent care. “Let them disagree. As long as the data remains like this, no one will be able to argue against what we’re building here.”

The man nodded, withdrawing without another word, leaving Silas alone once more with the monitors, the data, and the absence of his son, whom he preferred not to examine too closely.

Somewhere in the corridors of Star Labs, Victor had reached a restricted access area, one of the few he could still enter without raising alarms, thanks to a card he had managed to fold in the first few weeks after waking up. He hadn’t planned to come there; his feet simply led him there, as if his body knew something his mind hadn’t yet admitted.

The room held old equipment, abandoned prototypes, projects that never made it past the drawing board. Among them, an old soccer ball, forgotten in a corner, covered by a thin layer of dust. Victor stopped before it, recognizing the object instantly. It had been a birthday present, years ago, one of the few times his father had seemed truly present.

He bent down, his metallic fingers touching the worn surface of the ball with a care that contrasted sharply with the brute force those same fingers had displayed hours before.

I remember that day , he thought, a pang of something old and distant piercing his chest. He said he was going to teach me how to curl a shot. He never got around to doing it.

He held the ball for a moment, feeling its familiar weight, before placing it back exactly where he had found it. There was no point in carrying it with him. It belonged to another life, another body, a boy who perhaps no longer existed anywhere but in memory.

As he left the room, he encountered his own reflection once more, this time on the polished surface of a closed metal door. He paused, staring at the image for a long moment, the red eyes gleaming back at him with an intensity he had not yet become accustomed to recognizing as his own.

“He’ll call me again for the tests tomorrow ,” she thought, the decision slowly forming, like something growing inside her chest without asking permission.

Determination brought with it a strange kind of calm, the first since he had woken up in that body he barely recognized as his own. He stepped away from the door, his steps now firmer, the weight of the metal no longer seeming as strange as before.

In his office, alone, Silas Stone continued his work, his eyes gleaming with the same obsessive passion as always, blind to the growing distance between him and the son he claimed to love more than any scientific discovery.