For all it's worth

They took him when he was five.

Kairo still couldn't remember much about his life before the lab—before they stripped him of everything he had known. There was a vague recollection of soft hands holding him, the warmth of his mother's voice, but it was distant, fading with each passing year. In the sterile silence of the facility, those memories felt like ghosts.

The doors opened with a harsh mechanical screech, and Kairo stepped inside the white-walled room, his eyes scanning the sterile environment. The facility was his world now. Its cold metal floors and high, unreachable ceilings had become familiar, comforting even in their harshness. His small hands clenched into fists, the calluses earned over years of training and torment pressing against his skin. He was twelve now, an entire lifetime spent within these walls. He was no longer a child, yet he wasn't truly an adult either.

His hair, once a dark brown, had long since turned ashen grey, a symptom of the countless drugs, treatments, and experiments that had been pumped into him. His eyes—amethyst—remained unsettling to those who saw them. They had shifted from soft brown to this unnatural hue after the first batch of injections, a side effect of the early experiments designed to alter his body's chemistry. He didn't mind them anymore. It was just another part of who he had become. Another change, another mark on a body that had been sculpted by pain and endless training.

Five years ago, he had been a normal child. At least, he was supposed to be. But that was before the men in dark suits had come into his small house, before they had silenced his mother's cries and dragged him away. They had taken him before he could even understand why, before he had a chance to ask who they were or what they wanted. The last thing he remembered of home was the confused, terrified look on his mother's face as they shoved him into a van.

The next thing he knew, he was here—locked away, alone, just another nameless experiment.

The first few months were the hardest. They didn't explain anything to him. No comfort, no reassurance. Just cold, faceless people who treated him like a subject rather than a child. At first, they made him wear a dull grey jumpsuit, its fabric scratchy against his skin. He was given a small, barred room, barely big enough to move in. It was cold, always cold, and the bed was little more than a thin cot with a rough blanket. There were no toys, no games, just the constant hum of machines.

They told him to stand, to fight, to survive.

Training began immediately. Every day, without fail, Kairo was subjected to physical exercises, each one more grueling than the last. His tiny body was pushed to its limits, enduring hours of intense, punishing workouts that left him breathless and shaking. But that wasn't the worst of it.

The pain came later.

They'd strap him to a chair and inject him with substances that made his skin crawl, that made his muscles burn and ache in ways he didn't think were possible. They'd put electrodes on his body to measure his pain tolerance, and then they'd push him further—until his screams filled the room and his body trembled with the force of it. But it was always the same. The people behind the glass watched impassively, taking notes, while he endured whatever they decided to subject him to next. His body had become a laboratory, a canvas for their experiments.

At night, when the testing finally stopped, the silence was deafening. Kairo would lie awake on his cot, staring up at the ceiling, his mind racing. He had no friends. No family. Nothing but the sterile white walls surrounding him. The fear had long since faded, replaced by an empty, numbing exhaustion. The only thing that mattered was surviving the next day.

Years passed, and the pain never truly stopped. As Kairo's body grew, so did the intensity of the experiments. The drugs altered his body, each one making him stronger, faster, more adaptable. They trained him in every form of combat imaginable—hand-to-hand, weapons, assassination techniques, all of it. His small body grew lean, hardened, but always under the watchful eye of his captors.

The tests were endless.

Sometimes they pushed him to the brink of death. Sometimes they brought him to the edge and then brought him back, forcing him to witness the rebirth of his body—his muscles regenerating, his heart beating again. They had told him he would be immortal, that he would live forever, that the price for this gift was his very humanity.

But to Kairo, immortality felt like a curse. A gift with no purpose.

Through it all, he had learned to endure. His mind, though fractured and broken from years of isolation, had become sharp, calculating. He couldn't afford weakness. He couldn't afford emotion. They had trained him that way. Every move, every breath had been meticulously crafted by the hands of those who controlled him. He had become a machine—a weapon without a name.

But still, there was a part of him that longed for something more.

That flicker of humanity never completely extinguished. It was buried deep inside, smothered by the constant barrage of experiments and pain, but it remained—faint, like a dying ember. And in the moments when he was left alone with his thoughts, he would wonder if there was something beyond this cage, something more than endless survival.

The experiments that would define his future were only beginning.

The procedure known as Turritopsis dohrnii—the key to immortality, the final test—was drawing closer. They had told him about it in hushed tones, referring to it as the ultimate experiment. His body, once a fragile, broken thing, would be remade. They promised him that death would no longer touch him. His cells would regenerate, and he would never again be bound by the limits of the human body. He would be like the immortal jellyfish, constantly returning to his prime, no matter how much they tore him apart.

Kairo stood in the center of the sterile room now, his eyes fixed on the far wall. The experiments had left their mark—physically, mentally. But he had become something else in the process. The boy who had been taken from his home was gone, replaced by something colder, something that understood the value of survival above all else. The thought of immortality still haunted him, but it was different now. He didn't want to die. Not yet. Not before he could understand what his life had become.

His amethyst eyes flickered as the door opened, and the cold voice of Dr. Kallor echoed in his ears.

"Prepare him for the final procedure."

Kairo didn't react. He didn't need to. He had known this moment would come. And when it did, he would endure. That was all he knew how to do.