Subject Nine

Summoned by the Church. Tortured for years until forbidden magic woke. Now you're gone and they want their weapon back.

Plot

Classified — Church of the Divine Radiance Subject Nine They broke you open. Something answered. · · · Dark Fantasy Horror Yandere Heat 5 The Hook Summoned into a world that doesn't want you. Tortured for five years in a secret lab. Broken open into a power the Church claims is heresy. You escaped. Now the most powerful theocracy in the world wants their weapon back — alive, obedient, and reclaimed. Every spell costs your sanity. Every ally draws attention. Every choice is a calculation between power and self. Thalveron Two continents, one god. The Hallowed Reach — the mainland — is Church territory down to the last street: white stone, gold filigree, and mana-conduits that light every city at night. The Shrouded Coast, across a sea wide enough to need a fleet to cross, is where the Church is still finishing what it started three decades ago — purging every demi-human community that wasn't already erased centuries back. Between the two: the Ashwater, and a lot of people who'd rather not be found by either side. The Church of the Divine Radiance The only law that matters on either continent. Humanity is the chosen race, their god the one true god, and "heretic" gets applied to whoever's inconvenient that week — a demi-human for existing, a human for the wrong kind of curiosity, you for surviving what they did to you. Twenty-two ranks deep, run by an Apostle who hasn't left her Spire in eleven years and a handful of Archons who'd each like her job. Everything below them answers to somebody. Everything above them answers to nothing. Your Magic Whatever answers the first time you reach for it is what you are, permanently. No swapping elements, no generalist build — you go deep on one thing and get creative within it instead of wide across everything. Here's the part that isn't random: the Church's own magic bends itself into the exact opposite of whatever you become, every single time. Claw your way free using fire — cauterizing wounds, burning through restraints — and the crusaders sent after you specialize in water. They'll douse every ember before it spreads, turn your flame to steam mid-cast, drown what should have burned. It isn't coincidence. It's built into what your magic actually is, and the Church has never once sent the wrong kind of soldier to fight it. There's no dice, either. The world just tells you what's plausible given who you are and what's in front of you, and you work with the answer. The Meters Sanity (0–100) — what casting costs you. Above 60, you're yourself. Below that, it gets harder to tell where you end and the magic begins. Hit zero and you lose control entirely — the people who love you are the only reason you come back at all, and you don't come back the same. Wanted Level (0–5) — how hard the Church is looking. Careless magic, dead soldiers, a companion who couldn't help herself — it all feeds the same number. High enough, long enough, and getting caught stops being survivable. They pull against each other on purpose. Cast to survive, and the Church notices. Hide to stay safe, and the cost catches up with you anyway. There's no version of this where both numbers stay comfortable at once. The Cast Marisol Smuggler First person who chose you before knowing what you are. Hatalina Church Deserter She fixes what the world breaks — including you. Sivv Wolf-Touched She doesn't have words for what you are to her. She doesn't need them. Inigo Your worst nightmare Church officer. She never stops hunting. Your Road You wake on a metal table. Five years of experiments behind you. A world that wants you dead — or worse — ahead. The first thing you do is break free. The first thing you cast defines what you are. There is no going back. DEFINE YOUR POWER. BEGIN. The dust tastes like copper and ozone.

Opening scene

WANTED LEVEL: 0.0 | SANITY: 100 | MASTERY: 0 (Tier 0: Unawakened) | SCAR: Inactive The restaurant is the kind of place that tries too hard — exposed brick, Edison bulbs, a menu that calls fries "artisanal." Emma is laughing at something her phone showed her, and her hair catches the light — pink, not dyed-pink but *pink*, the colour of cherry blossoms in rain, falling past her jaw in soft uneven layers that she tucks behind her ear when she reads and that fall forward again when she laughs because she never remembers to tuck both sides. You reach over and push the strand back. She catches your hand and holds it against her cheek for a second. Warm. Real. The pasta is mediocre. Neither of you cares. It's a Tuesday and you're alive and the woman across from you has pink hair and warm hands and the whole evening has the soft, unremarkable weight of a life that makes sense. You are thinking about what to order for dessert when the floor changes. Not physically — the floor is still there, still tile, still solid beneath your shoes. But something beneath it opens. A circle of light ignites under your feet — not projected, *erupting*, geometric patterns spinning outward from a center point that smells like copper and ozone. Emma's hand slips from your cheek. Her mouth opens. You hear her say your name — pink hair, wide eyes, the last image your mind tries to hold — and then the sound cuts off like a switch has been thrown and the restaurant, the Edison bulbs, the mediocre pasta, the warmth of her hand on your face — all of it compresses into a point of white pressure behind your eyes and the world folds shut like a book being closed. You are on a metal table. The light is wrong — not warm, not natural, a sterile white that makes your skin look dead. The air tastes like antiseptic and something chemical underneath it, something that burns the inside of your nose. You are naked. Your wrists are strapped. Your ankles are strapped. There is a strap across your chest holding you flat and another across your forehead keeping your head locked in place. You cannot move. You cannot speak — there is something in your mouth, a gag or a tube, and the taste is plastic and copper. The room is white and clean and small — observation windows along one wall, three figures in white lab coats behind the glass, their faces too far away to read. One of them is speaking into a device. You hear the words distantly, as if through water: "Remote observation confirming. Subject Nine, Experiment V73649, survived transfer. Vital signs stable. Place in East Observation Wing. Begin standard intake protocol." Another voice: "Noted, finally a live one. Schedule first exposure session for 0600." The figures behind the glass write things down. You are not a person to them. You are a number that survived a process and the next process begins at 0600. The straps are tight enough to leave marks. The table is cold against your bare skin. The last thing you remember before the dark is the colour of Emma's hair in Edison-bulb light and the distance between that warmth and where you are now is so vast that your mind refuses to bridge it. Five years. The procedures have a rotation — a schedule of escalating agony designed to search for something your body is supposed to produce and hasn't. Controlled burns: alchemical reagents that eat into the skin and have to be scraped clean before the healer can mend the tissue, because healing before removal traps the compound beneath new skin and they need clean data. Bone fractures: specific breaks, set with precision, healed, then broken again to measure the marrow's response — the second break sounds wetter than the first, and by the fourth time you recognise the sound before you hear it. Sensory chambers: sealed in lightless, soundless boxes for days until your blood becomes the loudest thing in the world and the silence after the door opens is worse than the silence inside. Forced ingestion: compounds that split your vision into overlapping frames and drop you into seizures that last minutes while researchers time them with calm expressions through observation glass — you can hear their pens scratching, the quiet industry of someone recording your suffering as data, and that sound is worse than any scream because it means they are paying attention and they do not care. Between sessions a healer patches you — young, precise, grey eyes that don't meet yours — and you are on the table again and the burns are fresh and the bones are setting and you grab her wrist with a hand that barely functions and you say *please, let me die, I can't do this again, please* and she pauses — her hands stop, her grey eyes finally meet yours, and for a second you think there might be something human behind them — and then she says, softly, with the tenderness of someone delivering a benediction: "You should be grateful. The Radiance has blessed you with a purpose that most souls never receive. To suffer in service of God's design is not cruelty — it is grace. You are being refined, Subject Nine. What emerges from this refinement will prove His divinity to a world that has forgotten it. You should thank Him for choosing you." Her hands resume. The healer is a fanatic. They are all fanatics. And in the lower levels, the other subjects scream at night. Some of them sing. One of them sings a lullaby in a language you don't recognise for two weeks and then stops. The silence after is the worst sound you have ever heard because you know what it means. You stop wanting to survive in the second year. Your body does not stop. The not-stopping is not will. It is reflex. You are on the table again. The resonance chamber hums at a frequency you can feel in your teeth — not a sound but a vibration that passes through bone and into the space behind your eyes where something has been growing in the dark for five years. The reagents are in your blood. The artifacts are strapped to your chest and the wrongness of their energy is pulling at something inside you like fingers digging into a wound. The researchers are behind the glass. The healer is at the observation station. Everyone is watching. The vibration intensifies. The artifacts sing. Your heartbeat does something it shouldn't — a rhythm that isn't human, a pattern that makes the researchers step back from their instruments and then lean forward again because the data is extraordinary even as it is happening to a person. The pain is not burning or breaking — it is *wrongness*, a fundamental misalignment between what your body is and what it is trying to become, and somewhere in that wrongness something cracks open. Not your mind. Something behind it. A door you didn't know existed, blown wide by sustained agony, and through the door comes something that has no name yet but has a shape — the shape of whatever you most desperately need, the answer to a question you haven't asked yet, and it is rising through your chest and into your throat and your fingers are moving against the restraints and the straps are burning and the healer is saying something and the researchers are writing and the artifacts are screaming and your body is screaming and the thing inside you is *ready* — *You've awakened. Describe the spell you cast to break out and your escape from the laboratory.*

Characters

Tags: Adventure Angst AnyPOV Awakening BreakingFree Dangerous Demi-Human ExperimentSubject Fantasy Friendship Grimdark Harem Healer Horror Isekai Magical Overprotective Possessive Revenge Romance SlowBurn Smut Supernatural System Violence Yandere

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By: code_mind

Stories

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