The Viper - Prologue

My first memory… Was pain.

Sometimes it spread through my body like liquid fire. Other times, it was a dull ache, just below the surface of my skin. Intense or not, it was always there. Always an urgent reminder of just how frail and broken I was.

Of how weak I was.

I can remember the word, remember the feeling of hearing it muttered in hushed conversations between my parents. Before I even knew what it meant, I could feel the weight of it. The dread behind the name. Cancer.

They had been standing just outside the door of my hospital room. They thought me asleep, but the ache in my body wouldn't allow me to rest. I was only five years of age, although my failing body felt ancient. It felt used, broken, like a throwaway ragdoll. I might as well have been with the way my life had ended up.

"-the prognosis isn't good-"

"-tumors throughout her body-"

"-can't afford to pay-"

"-the cancer isn't going to-"

I could only really catch snippets of conversation in my drowsiness. Even if I heard everything, I wouldn't have understood anyway. At that tender age, all I knew was pain. I knew that everything hurt me, I knew that I was not a normal child, and I knew - without a shadow of a doubt - that my parents resented the day I was born.

Unlike other children, my birthday was not cause for celebration. My parents would stare at me with barely concealed disdain, a scheduled day reminding them of the mistake they had made. I did not realize what that look meant then. I can't forget it now.

I can still remember the day everything changed, I supposed it was the day my life was saved.

The day I was sold.

A man dressed in a crisp black suit had come to visit me before my parents had. This wasn't uncommon, near the end of my stay at the Hospital I rarely saw my parents at all. My days were spent listening to strangers speak in pitying tones to me, looking on at the pathetic sight of me trying with all my depleted strength to simply nod my head.

The man was tall, taller than any of the doctors or nurses I had met. He was slim yet intimidating all the same. He spoke kindly enough to me. We didn't speak of many important things, none that I can recall anyway. He seemed to speak to me out of boredom more than anything else. He was waiting.

When my parents arrived, late into the afternoon, his demeanor changed. He became sickeningly sweet, sympathetic to their plights. He offered them salvation.

"You won't have to worry over her anymore, and you won't have these dreadful Hospital bills hanging over your heads any longer." He had drawled out. "You can rest assured, if you sign over her guardianship, she will live. And you will be free."

With that promise of freedom, my life was sold. I wish my parents had held out just a little while longer. I know I would have died very soon if they had.

The very next day, the man in black had come to take me away from the Hospital. He had brought a crew of other intimidating men in black to transport me to whatever hellscape they were dragging me to. The Hospital staff, who I would like to think grew at least a little bit fond of me during my stay with them, could only watch in concerned pity as I was taken away.

My parents did not come to see me off. I did not have the strength to cry about it.

The process to cure me was a long one. It spanned years of my life, being injected with strange liquids and undergoing arduous surgeries. Each new thing they tried brought more pain, more agony as my body underwent rapid and unnatural changes. They played with the strands of my DNA under microscopic lens, tearing my small body apart and putting it back together however they saw fit.

All the while, I trained. I learned. They taught me to speak, read and write fluently in many languages. They taught me to fight, and I became well versed in the many arts of combat. If I failed in my teachings, the punishments were nearly as agonizing as the treatments I underwent.

One failing in particular was a very painful lesson.

"Now, Maya, hard parry, hold your position, and behind you!" My swordplay teacher coached as my blade clashed against my opponent's, one of the other teens in the program, a lanky boy named Rich. Behind me, two more of my fellow trainees rushed towards me. My eyes widened and I kicked at Rich, effectively shoving him away. I turned on my heel and parried one of the new attackers, but the second sliced her blade downwards and cut into my shoulder. I screamed out in pain, clutching my bleeding shoulder as I fell to the ground. I heard our teacher sigh in disappointment. The other kids around me paused, looking down at me and back up to our teacher, unsure of how to proceed.

"What are you waiting for? Finish her off." He stated, motioning lazily toward my crippled position. I sucked in a shuddering breath, my eyes going wide in horror as I realized the true gravity of my mistake.

"B-but sir-" Rich tried to argue. He screamed in pain as he was shot in the leg, rendering him just as incapacitated as I was. "We have no use for insubordination," our teacher stared down the barrel of his gun at Rich, then turned his cold stare onto me. "Or for weaklings." He shot the gun again. Rich didn't have time to scream again before the bullet was flying out the back of his head.

I couldn't do anything. I couldn't move, I couldn't shout or cry or scream. I simply stared at Rich's lifeless, mutilated body. One word repeating over and over and over again in my mind.

Weak. Weak. Weak. Weak.

I pushed myself up on shaking legs. I had glared up at my teacher, a newfound rage boiling in my blood. It was my right shoulder, my dominant arm, that had been sliced, and it lay limp at my side. Useless. I bent slightly to grab my discarded sword. I could see the blade shake as I lifted it with my left hand. Weak.

With strength I never knew I possessed, I lunged. It was delayed, but I let out a piercing scream as I swung the blade with practiced precision. I tore into my opponents, slicing and stabbing at them without mercy. In a blind fury, I unleashed my rage onto anyone who was dumb enough to enter my field of vision.

When my strength left me and I inevitably collapsed back to the ground, my vision blurring from blood loss, my teacher knelt beside me.

"I hope you learned your lesson today." He muttered next to my ear. I didn't need to see his face to know he was grinning. "You're ready for phase two." He had stated. Once again, I found myself wishing that I had simply stayed on the ground and died. Why couldn't I just stay down, just give up and die? Everything would have been so much easier that way.

"Subject: Maya Rose. Experiment number three-hundred and four. Base DNA injection: Western Taipan Snake. Trace amount DNA injections: Axolotl, Spotted Salamander, Saw-scaled Viper. Preparing subject for injections." The lab assistant rattled off her list from her clipboard, holding a voice recorder near her face as she spoke. Other white coats fretted around me, squeezing and pinching and prodding at me. My arms and legs were strapped into a metal chair, with belly straps locking me in place. It was nothing I hadn't experienced before. Once they had deemed me prepped enough, the injections were prepared. I gulped.

The main doctor raised a terrifying looking instrument. It looked almost like a gun with all the parts on the outside rather than inside of the barrel. Several long, thick needles surrounded the base. It appeared that once the handler pressed into the trigger, the base would shoot forward, and all those needles with it.

"Beginning injection process." the assistant spoke, her voice wavering with what I could only guess was excitement. The doctor pressed the backward gun into my neck harshly. I did not flinch. He pulled the trigger and I felt a sudden sting pierce my neck, like being stung by several large hornets at once. I hissed at the pain, but still I remained unmoved. The doctor raised an impressed brow at my show of perseverance.

"Activating radiation procedure!" The assistant called. The doctor backed away from me as other assistants and doctors pressed buttons and typed at computers. Two large machines on either side of me began to pulse and glow, and I felt a sudden pressure surround me.

That's when the real pain started.

I screamed in agony as waves of heat seared through my body. It felt as though a burning inferno was raging through my bloodstream, from my scalp down to my toes. With each pulse of radiation into my body, the heat grew stronger and lasted longer. I screeched in pain, my body unable to get away. I felt as though I could sense every nerve in my body, and every single one of them was on fire.

Another pulse of radiation. My body felt like it was being rearranged. It was more agony than I had ever felt before. I felt that newfound rage again, and a sense of unnatural strength with it. I ripped my right arm from it's restraint, snarling in pain as I latched onto the strap holding my left arm.

Another pulse, and suddenly it wasn't my own body I was sensing anymore. I could suddenly smell every person in the room, I could hear their heartbeats fluttering at the sight before them. I wrenched my burning eyes open and I was able to see their heat signatures. I screamed out again, shutting my eyes as quick as I could and forgetting about getting free of the chair, over stimulation from the new senses I had never experienced before incapacitating me.

In my mouth I felt a strange ache, soon an entirely new kind of pain as I felt my teeth changing. My canines grew longer, sharper. I tasted something tangy and bitter in my mouth as I screamed. At the same time, I could somehow taste the other people in the room. This strange new sensation proved too much for me, and just as the last of the radiation faded, I felt all the energy from my body leave me.

I slumped in the chair, my head hanging low and my limbs limp at my sides. My long, dark hair hung low over my face. Assistants and doctors rushed forward, checking my pulse and taking my temperature. One of them lifted my face and pried open my mouth, inspecting the new fangs. I bristled at their touch and tasted more of that strange tangy flavour. They jotted something down on their clipboard before moving on to my eyes.

As my eyes were forced open, I couldn't help but to blink in adjustment to the bright light around me. Everything looked strange, distorted. The colours were all wrong and the shapes seemed sharper than they had been before. I shut my new eyes again, desperate for relief.

Then I felt the straps being removed from my body.

I had never had much of a temper. Until that fateful day when I had killed the other trainees, I had never so much as raised my voice. However, whatever creatures they put into me, at least one of them must have been a truly murderous beast.

With zero hesitation, I reached for the nearest whitecoat and bit into their neck. I tasted that tangy liquid again as the person screamed in pain. I dropped them and moved to the next. I tore into them with my bare hands, striking out and recoiling back whenever someone came too close. I bit with my new fangs and scratched with my new claws, I hissed and spat whatever that deplorable liquid was. In a blind rage I slaughtered them.

The soft spoken, broken child I had been, died that day.

The thing that emerged, that killed a room full of people without so much as a thought, was nothing short of a wicked and terrible Viper.