1 A Project's Failure

"One final attempt."

A dark-haired teenager lay strapped to a long metal table as a sickly young man in a lab coat loomed over him. Despite the countless failures before him, the experimenter's eyes still burned with the same determination during his first trial many months ago.

"Professor Kane?"

The teen's voice echoed across the stone basement's dark halls. Despite the bloodstains left on the floor from the numerous tests that came before, there was not a hint of fear in the voice of the one lying on the operating table. Standing by his side, the young man, who looked nothing like the image of a prestigious academic, turned to face his apprentice and final test subject before sighing.

"I already told you, please call me Luthor."

Luthor Kane spoke as he picked up his latest version of the Shard Body Serum and put it in a syringe. 

"What will you do after the experiment's finished?"

Luthor paused upon hearing the question his apprentice posed. He turned and faced the child with a hint of guilt in his eyes. But when he saw Edison's pale face, the guilt vanished as quickly as it appeared. The only reason Edison was able to hold a calm look was because he was currently pumped full of anesthetics. 

Around 30 years ago, people started to develop mutations. More often than not, those mutations would prove to be dangerous to the people around them. As a result, society would hunt and kill those mutants. Autopsy results revealed the bodies held a colored gem shard. After learning this knowledge, the mutants became known as Shard Carriers. All Shard Carriers knew: being one meant suffering. This wasn't because of hunting and discrimination due to being a Shard Carrier. It was because the powers gained from their mutations caused adverse effects on their bodies. The Gem's Flaw, Shard Sickness, and the Mutant's Curse were all names for this phenomenon.

Edison was one such Shard Carrier. It was a well-known fact that mutations started to manifest around puberty. Within the last month, he had lost control of his limbs due to immense pain, leaving him unable to care for himself. This year, he was no more than 15 years old. 

"There isn't much left for me to do," he answered honestly. "I'm a wanted man who has long run out of resources and allies. My capture is inevitable... Even so, I want to finish what I started to prove I was right this whole time."

Luthor turned and raised his syringe.

"Are you ready?"

Edison finally showed a hint of unease, but nonetheless, he still nodded. Luthor sighed as he looked at the child, a child who was ready to die for Luthor's cause. There was a good chance he might just do that. Edison, like all others before him, trusted Luthor for one reason: Luthor was a Shard Carrier who had overcome his curse. Yet so far, he has been unable to reproduce the conditions of his miracle.

Luthor calmly injected the gray-colored serum into Edison before stepping back to watch. There was nothing left that he could do. He had completed all the preparations and tests beforehand, and this marked the final step. He waited for a few minutes before he noticed a faint gray light start to glow from beneath Edison's skull. 'Just like I suspected, the shard is in his brain, just like mine. The color is nearly the same too.' As the light began to intensify, Edison's face contorted in pain despite the anesthetics. Luthor involuntarily took a step forward as his worry increased. 'A brain shard is much more dangerous than most others. Even so, this situation resembles mine the most closely of all of my experiments so far.' With that thought, a little bit more anticipation bloomed in the young professor's heart. 

As Edison's screams started to echo throughout the stone room, the gray light began pulsing. Luthor watched with a somber look on his face as the minutes passed and more cries echoed throughout the room. He always stayed and watched their suffering; that was his penance. There were an untold number of believers who scummed to his experiments. 'Another failure?' he thought with a darkened expression. He watched with an ever-darkening expression, slowly preparing for the worst outcome. 

"Huh?"

Suddenly, he noticed a change: the gray light that was pulsing in Edison's brain was slowly running down his spine and spreading throughout his nervous system. Hope reignited in Luthor's heart once more. 'This is exactly what happened to me! The serum is helping the Shard and the human body to resonate together,' Luthor thought back to his own transformation as he watched the gray light spread through Edison's body. The gray light was reconstructing Edison's body so it could adapt to the use of the shard. Through Luthor's research, he discovered that many of the problems that Shard Carriers caused were because their bodies were incompatible with the Shard, and like a form of pollution, it was damaging their bodies.

As Luthor looked on with pride, a boom echoed throughout the building, and his face darkened once again.

"They're here," he whispered.

Luthor rushed over to his apprentice, whose nervous system was still aglow with a gray light. He hurriedly began unstrapping Edison from the table. Luthor's pursuers triggered the traps on the upper floors of the house, resulting in explosions. He calculated that he had at most 10 minutes for the City Guard to make it to the bottom floor. After unstrapping Edison, Luthor ran to the back wall of the chamber and opened a box. Inside were various gems and rocks. He grabbed them and began inserting them into specific groves on the back wall. An arch of gems embedded in the back wall and an empty box remained, with only a block of chalk at the bottom.

While the Shard Body Serum was his primary project, he had many other projects he'd been working on. Luthor was also trying to develop a gate capable of teleporting to any destination. The possibilities of such an invention are endless, including an incredibly useful means of escape for a wanted criminal. With a trembling hand, he grabbed the chalk, his last resort, without having had time to properly test the gate. Despite this, he began drawing chalk symbols around the gate's arch.

The sounds of explosions drew closer as the pale professor drew symbols on the walls, according to his memory. As he drew the last of the symbols on the wall, he heard the explosions reach the basement floor. 'Time's up.' he thought as he moved onto the final step.

Luthor backed away from the wall, then grabbed a torch from another wall and a bottle of oil from a nearby cabinet. One after the other, he threw the bottle of oil and the torch in the center of the arch of gems. The oil rapidly ignited and spread along the wall's surface, stopping abruptly at the inner edges of the arch. For one more moment, the flames burned along the wall before the center of the wall of flames disappeared, leaving an archway of gems, chalk, flames, and a dark pathway in between.

Though he tried, Luthor couldn't see anything past the threshold of his stone wall. Another explosion rang closer, and this time he heard a scream. 'Now isn't the time for hesitation,' he thought as he rushed back to the operating table, only to find Edison sitting up on it. By now, the gray glow had mostly faded from his body, but there was still an even pulse running under his skin.

"Can you stand?"

Edison didn't answer, but he stretched out his arm for assistance. Luthor helped Edison off the table, and to his relief, Edison didn't need much help standing. The pair hobbled across the stone floor as screams and footsteps echoed closer through the basement halls. Upon reaching the edge of the teleportation gate, the pair paused. 

"What is this?"

Edison peered into the darkness with a mixture of nervousness and curiosity. One final explosion occurred, shaking the room they were in as they heard a large group of footsteps approach the door to their room.

"Our escape."

Luthor replied grimly. The pair then stepped through the flaming arch and into the darkness.