(From IGOR VANIT's Point of View)
In the dark cellar beneath the collapsing VANIT manor—where sunlight never reaches and the screams of the dead go unheard—I stood before the shattered glass tubes. The scent of blood and corrupted mana has been my only perfume for years.
Everyone looked at me as the wreckage of a man from a fallen house; they mocked the collapse of "VANIT" and its lost glory. They didn't know that I was converting all that hatred into raw material. Ordinary magic was no longer enough for me; magic is what failed my family and turned it into ash. I needed something that could break magic itself.
I looked through the glass at the place where I kept Subject 01 and Subject 03 (ADRIAN and NIKO). They were merely raw flesh, subject to the experiments I conducted—though to be precise, the bulk of them were inflicted upon 01.
I used to break his bones daily only to rebuild them with a density that made steel look like straw. I forcibly drained the mana from his veins, filtering it until it vanished completely, leaving behind a "void" where I planted only darkness.
"Are you in pain?" I asked him once while he was bound in energy-absorbing chains.
He didn't scream. He didn't beg. He just looked at me with those eyes I crafted myself out of pure blackness. In that moment, I knew I hadn't raised a son, nor even a weapon... I had birthed a Monster.
I must admit, among all the subjects I managed to produce from the corpses of dead women, ADRIAN was my masterpiece. In the beginning, they were just tools made to explode and be used as bombs, but 01 and 03 changed my view of reality. I took them and adopted them to become my ultimate weapons one day.
However...
"I didn't expect 03 (NIKO) to survive the experiments; I thought he would expire sooner or later."
In my eyes, NIKO was just a reserve "battery," a weak soul placed there—truthfully, I only needed him as a scapegoat for 01. But it seems his proximity to the masterpiece granted him a resilience I hadn't accounted for, or perhaps it is fear that makes him cling so desperately to 01's shadow.
I took a deep breath of the stagnant air, contemplating the empty chains that once bound ADRIAN's wrists. I remember the day I injected him with the "Serum of Nothingness"—that black substance I extracted from the remains of the women who failed to carry my enhanced genes, fused with synthetic materials harvested from the carcasses of monsters.
At that moment, I saw his veins turn black. I saw his heart stop for three full minutes... and then, he returned. He returned not as a human, but as a machine devoid of all emotion.
I pulled out an old scroll and began writing my final secret report after learning that 01 and 03 had passed the Academy's entrance exam with excellence:
"Subject 01 and Supporting Model 03 have been successfully released into the Academy environment."
I sealed the scroll.
"They will think they are evaluating a student," I said, moving to blow out the solitary candle in the cellar, "while in reality, they are opening their fortress gates to a mass funeral. A 'unique experiment'? A 'Send 01 and 03 to the Light Academy? .These were all excuses to convince the High Nobles that I should keep 01 and 03 as my sons just to get them into that Academy. All of it... just excuses."
I spoke with a laugh that could be heard echoing from afar:
"I took dead remains, shattered bones, and forgotten souls, and I forged the name 'VANIT' once again."
.....