The Last Howl Of New Kyoto

New Kyoto floated like a fantasy above a dying planet.

Lifted above most of its inhabitants, magnetic arrays older than most of them hold a tangle of arc-light towers and sweeping terraces aloft in the sulfur-laced stratosphere. Below, the once-blue Earth is sprawled in ruin, fractured, overrun by nature too strange to name. Riko Ayane stared down from the Skyplate sector balcony of her lab with the chilly indifference of a person taught to view a world in data points rather than dust.

She said, seeing the brown clouds whirling like bruises, blackened gusts swaying upward, turning the skies to ash. Still, from up here it felt like a long-ago memory-nature's fury at what mankind had done. She could sense the storm even if it was far away. Her bioglass flashed silent warnings, showing the system. Still, it was just another day.

She faced away from the view, the shadows thrown by the jagged horizon stretching over the cold white walls of her laboratory.

Her communication tab chimed. Her concentration was interrupted by the soft hum of the device, and she looked down at the arriving message.

SUBJECT DELIVERY: Cryo Batch #48B Cleared for gene probe testing.

She frowned. The name rang a bell. Though this one was unusual, cryo batch samples usually come out rather routinely. The genetic material was ancient, retrieved from the ruins of the pre-Collapse era, the old world.

She slid her gloves on and headed to the main table where a tiny, frost-coated case lay waiting, held by two floating drones. Riko's caught her breath in her throat. She knew that code. It was a rare specimen-a biological relic intended for the most profound research.

She saw a glass vial containing thick amber liquid inside as the case opened, and a cold wave of air followed. Suspended like a ghost in mid-flight, a strand of fragmented yet clearly intact DNA was within the fluid.

Riko zoomed in and changed her bioglass.

"Too intact," she whispered, hardly audible. "Where did they haul you up?"

The sample arrived with no origin information-only a series of numbers indicating coordinates in the Mongolian Wastes, a desolate area unaltered since the geothermal rupture of 2118.

Running a battery of diagnostic scans, Riko's fingertips raced over the terminal. The findings flashed on screen-first unstable, then stable. Her inhalation gasped in disbelief.

This ... this was not just a usual ancient gene. It was a mirror match to something she believed had disappeared long ago.

Her heart rate rose as she double-checked the DNA strand. A dormant, unlisted line buried in her genetic data-hidden, unnoticed-is Gene WZ-219. She then came to understand what it meant.

She was not considering a historical artefact. She was observing her own reflection in an old mirror.

"How...?" she murmured, her voice shaky.

As she gripped the vial, her fingers shook. Her body's reaction-and the data-did not lie. This was the gene present in her own cells.

No. This couldn't be real. But Riko came to one awful reality as the truth sank upon her. She had only found the gene guiding a lineage of superior humans long ago erased from history. The Lupomorphs.

Early Riko closed the laboratory; her heart pounding and thoughts racing. She hurriedly erased her data logs and systems, so guaranteeing no evidence of her findings stayed behind. Still, her thoughts like a toxic fog the echoes of that gene fragment, the affirmation of her fear.

The city buzzed around her, oblivuous to the catastrophe gradually creeping under its skin as she passed along the sterile Skyplate sector corridors. Holo-signs cheerfully urged "BioUnity: The Future, Unmutated," and security drones glided past, Riko little paid little attention as they went about.

She soon engaged with the system back at her high-rise pod. Accessing her personal data, she retrieved her genetic history and her head sped. She examined her genome alongside the cryo-sample received. Her findings were conclusive: an exact match.

She whispered, browsing through her birth record, "How could I have missed this?" At birth, every citizen's genome was scanned, coded, catalogued. With these markers, she should have been flagged long ago. Still, here she was- untouched.

She found a post-natal scrub as she delved more. Maera Zhou, head of Bioethics and Anti-Deviancy Control, signed a mark on her genetic code. Why would someone like her-whose only mission was to observe and eradicate genetic defects-shield her?

It just didn't make sense.

Then it . The gene in question, WZ-219, was not simply a mutation. It was the code for something significantly more harmful.

Lupomorph. Designed to improve both physical and mental capacities, a military-grade gene is The men and women who received this gene line became more than humans; they were hunters created for survival in difficult post-crisis environments. Their sensitivity above anything the normal human mind could handle, their strength tremendous, and their reflexes heightened.

There was something else about them, though. The transformation. The shift. Werewolves. Before they vanished from history during the 2091 Purity Act, that was the name the public gave them. They were considered too hazardous to stay in the public eye. She also understood now that she was one of them.

But the issue still stood: why had they preserved her? And why had her genome remained undiscovered and unsearchable for so long?

It happened without warning.

A solar flare hit at exactly 22:04 Earth Standard. The outer magnetosphere of New Kyoto. The city's artificial intelligence battled to manage the abrupt wave of radiation flooding over it. The impact was first.

Lights died and flickeringly lost their meaning. Gravity hampered a hiccup for a moments. Systems in the Skyplate field froze. Afterward, in a big blackout, everything vanished.

Riko Ayane screamed when her body started to respond.

Her skin tingled with a great surge of vitality. Her muscles spapped, twitched. Her bones could sense breaking and shifting, adapting into something totally different.

Her jaws stretched, shattering her teeth and turning her into something more animal than human beings. Her hearing, her sight, her whole senses opened with explosions beyond understanding. She could not control herself. Her mind was not in control; her body was.

Riko lay in a crumpled pile on the chilly lab floor several minutes after the power returned, her body still twitching as her mind tried to reassert itself. The tiles were stained with blood; in the cracked glass, her image revealed the face of a stranger.

Feral eyes. Dark veins. Too sharp teeth.

She gasped, saying "no," and moved towards the shattered mirror.

The AI did not register her change. Security footage malfunctioned. Medical alerts were muted. The system kept quiet even if it knew what had happened.

Riko used to be just a laboratory test subject. She posed a threat to the city, which knew it.