194 Lockworld
194 Lockworld
When people thought of prison, they imagined concrete boxes, screaming inmates, and endless despair. That image was outdated, almost naïve. In a world where powers shaped psychology as much as physiology, a dreary environment was counterproductive. A stable, even pleasant atmosphere reduced mental collapse, reduced unpredictable power surges, and made control easier. Frankly, the same principle should have applied to mundane prisons too.
The Box followed that logic, at least on paper.
Its system was divided cleanly into two categories. Cooperative prisoners were labeled A. They received rooms, shared spaces, scheduled recreation, and privileges designed to keep them functional and predictable. Then there were B prisoners, the difficult ones, the unstable or uncontrollable. Guesswork had told me Bs were often kept under constant sedation, frozen in stasis, or locked into specialized containment that bordered on experimentation.
I didn’t know which category I had been placed in.
A section of the wall rippled, then split open as a monitor slid forward. A familiar green-haired face appeared on the screen, smiling far too casually.
“Good morning,” the Warden said. “How are you doing?”
“Plenty fine,” I replied evenly, my voice echoing faintly in the box.
He laughed nervously and wiped sweat from his forehead. “You scared the shit out of me, you know that?”
“I didn’t notice,” I said. “You seemed pretty composed.”
He tapped his temple. “Mental defense. I mastered it young. Family tradition.”
That caught my attention. “Family?”
He nodded, clearly pleased with himself. “My grandfather invented the technique. The position of Warden is inherited. Bloodline requirement. Every heir learns it.”
So the Box wasn’t just an institution. It was a dynasty.
“I almost lost my composure,” he continued, pacing just out of frame, “when I realized you’d already built immunity to the sleeping drug I developed. Years of work, and you shrugged it off.”
I frowned slightly. “I did fall asleep earlier.”
“Yes,” he said brightly. “That was also mine.”
“What was it?”
“Blood-derived compound,” he answered. “Extracted from high-grade null capes.”
I waited.
“Did you know,” he went on, clearly enjoying himself now, “that the SRC maintains offworld farms? Null-class capes for blood. Psychic-class for brains and neural tissue. Invulnerable-class for bones. Regenerators for organs. Entire supply chains, perfectly legal under intermultiversal statute. Hah~! As if there’s another power that have a say on it, anyway.”
Silence stretched between us.
“Why are you telling me this?” I finally asked.
He smiled thinly. “I was trying to scare you.”
I felt for fear inside myself. There was none.
“As expected,” he added, shrugging, “you already knew. Or at least, you don’t care.”
I leaned back against the cold metal and exhaled slowly. “Get to the point.”
“Do you know,” the Warden asked calmly, “about the two types of prisoners in the Box? The As and the Bs?”
It was a rhetorical question. He didn’t wait for my answer.
The screen in front of me flickered, then split into four separate feeds.
On the first screen, I saw a room much like a shared apartment. Two prisoners sat inside, one lounging on a couch, another tinkering with a small device on a table. There were chairs, shelves, even wall art. It looked… livable.
The second screen showed a mess hall. Prisoners lined up with trays, eating, talking, and laughing. A few guards stood around, relaxed but watchful.
The third screen made me blink. It was an open-air space, colorful and wide, with synthetic grass and climbing frames. Prisoners ran, sparred, lifted weights, or simply lay down under an artificial sky. It looked like a playground.
The fourth screen showed a library. Rows of bookshelves stretched back farther than I expected. A humanoid robot stood at the front, gesturing as it lectured to a small group of seated prisoners.
“The As,” the Warden said proudly, “are cooperative. Docile sheep. They play by my rules, and in return, they live comfortably. Some of them were Bs once, you know. Rehabilitation is possible, if one is willing to bend.”
The screens changed.
The colors drained away.
Now I saw rows of pods, stacked like coffins in a warehouse. Prisoners floated inside translucent capsules, tubes running into their veins, masks sealed over their faces. Some twitched. Some were completely still. Others wore elaborate harnesses with crowns of metal, spinal braces, and full-body restraints wired into machines I didn’t recognize.
“These are the Bs,” he continued, voice light. “The difficult ones.”
He zoomed in on a pod. “If they’re susceptible to drugs, I pump them full of drugs.”
Another feed appeared, showing a prisoner with eyes flickering rapidly beneath closed lids. “If they’re immune, I place them in a tailored virtual reality.”
Another shift. A body lay limp, eyes open but unseeing. “If even that fails, I reduce them to a vegetative state and then connect them to whatever stimulus works.”
He spread his hands, pleased. “I designed every pod personally.”
I stared at the screen, jaw tight.
I had underestimated the Box. Not just in scale, but in intent. It was cartoonishly evil in concept, like something ripped straight out of a madman’s notebook. But in execution, it was horrifyingly real. This place wasn’t a prison. It was a sandbox. And the Warden was free to play however he liked.
The screen changed again.
My breath caught.
Chad.
Windbreaker.
He lay inside a pod, chest rising slowly, tubes feeding into his arms and neck. Electrodes covered his temples, spine, and limbs. His face was slack, frozen somewhere between pain and exhaustion.
The Warden’s voice softened. “I believe you and Windbreaker have a history.”
I said nothing.
“What is your relationship with him?” he asked.
I knew why he was asking. Division Five. The missing data. The timing. Guesswork had warned me that while the SRC loved to bury inconvenient truths, they weren’t blind to coincidence. Windbreaker vanished, only to be caught stealing important data. Division Five collapsed suddenly. I was under surveillance. Lines connected whether they wanted to admit it or not.
I exhaled slowly. “Get to the point.”
The Warden smiled.
“Ah,” he said, eyes gleaming through the screen. “But before that… Did you know there’s a third type of prisoner here?”
He leaned closer to the camera.
“The Cs.”
The Warden was enjoying this.
I could feel it even without leaning too hard on empathy. The theatrics, the pacing of information, the way he let images linger just long enough to sink in. It wasn’t necessity. It was indulgence. There was no practical reason for him to torment me like this unless he derived pleasure from it. If he wanted information, he’d already have me screaming on a table. If he wanted compliance, torture would’ve been simpler.
Which meant one thing.
He thought torturing me was too dangerous.
That realization settled something cold in my chest. Still, this entire line of inquiry was pointless resistance. If he wanted a performance, then fine. I’d play my part.
I tilted my head slightly and asked, “So what’s a C?”
The Warden’s smile widened, like I’d just offered him dessert. “Oh, I’d love to tell you,” he said lightly, “but you’ve been so reluctant to listen.”
I clenched my jaw. I really wanted to punch him.
He didn’t care.
“A C,” he continued, “is someone uncontrollable. Impossible to subdue. Too dangerous to rehabilitate, sedate, or even meaningfully contain.”
I snorted. “So you’re planning to kill me?”
He burst out laughing, wiping at the corner of his eye. “Kill you? No, no, no. That would be terribly boring. And such a waste of entertainment and research material.”
My stomach sank.
“There’s a land,” he said, voice growing animated, “for Cs like you. A place where you can let loose. No SRC breathing down your neck. No peaceful civilizations pretending monsters like you don’t exist.”
Every instinct I had screamed wrong.
“A place,” he went on, practically reverent, “where you can become a beast. Where you can live up to your utter potential.”
I shook my head slowly. “That sounds like a bad pitch.”
“Oh, it is,” he agreed cheerfully. “For you.”
He leaned forward and slammed his desk. The sound echoed unnaturally, like the world itself flinched.
“A prison,” he said, eyes wide, “set in another world. Grafted into a dimensional layer. No oversight. No appeals. No escape.”
He laughed, loud and unrestrained. “I’m going to enjoy watching you writhe and squirm.”
Then, with theatrical glee, he shouted, “Welcome to Lockworld, scum!”
The walls and ceiling of my containment box tore away with violent force.
They were ripped outward as panels, restraints, cables, and framework were violently ejected into open air. I staggered but remained standing, my boots still planted on the same flat, dark floor plating I’d been standing on. The ground beneath me vibrated as chunks of null metal, discarded restraints, and structural debris crashed outward in all directions.
Beyond the ruined edges of the box was a forest.
Trees loomed just beyond the wreckage, their roots tearing through fractured panels and broken flooring. Leaves rustled violently from the shockwave.
“Fuck,” I muttered.
The light was wrong.
It was bright, like midday, but when I looked up, there was no sun. The sky was an even, luminous white, flat and artificial, and stamped across it in massive gray lettering was a single word:
LOCKWORLD
In front of me, still anchored to the remaining frame of the Box, the same monitor flickered to life. It was cracked, bent, and sparking.
Numbers bled across its surface.
10.
9.
8.
My instincts screamed.
I ran.
I dove off the exposed flooring and threw myself behind a massive tree and a slab of torn earth just as the monitor shrieked, overloaded, and detonated. The explosion wasn’t clean. It was violent and ugly, fueled by the remaining power systems and the discarded null components of the Box itself.
Metal fragments screamed past me. The ground buckled. The forest shook as if something enormous had struck it from above.
I hit the dirt hard, breath knocked from my lungs, ears ringing.
When the shockwave passed, silence followed.
I had no idea what was going on anymore.
No, that wasn’t true. I had ideas, fragments of understanding stitched together by paranoia and hindsight. We had underestimated the Box severely. Guesswork warned me that the Box wasn’t just a prison, that it held factional power within the SRC itself, something old and entrenched, something that didn’t answer cleanly to anyone. At the time, I thought he was exaggerating. Now, standing in a strange forest under a sky without a sun, I understood how naïve that assumption had been.
I checked myself for injuries methodically, forcing my breathing to slow. There was no blood, no broken bones, no lingering pain from the explosion. I was still wearing the orange prisoner uniform, coarse fabric scratching against my skin, and the power suppression collar was still locked snugly around my neck. Its presence was maddening, like an itch under the skull I couldn’t scratch. I decided I wasn’t going to tolerate it any longer.
I reached up and felt along the collar, recalling its internal structure with my Researcher rating. The interference module sat just off-center, layered beneath null mesh and some components I still didn’t fully understand. I clenched my fists and started punching that exact spot, again and again, ignoring the pain. Skin split. Blood sprayed. Bone punched through my knuckles. I kept going anyway, teeth bared in a silent snarl.
A sharp spark cracked in the air.
Heat surged through my neck, and suddenly I felt it again. My intangibility flickered back to life, weak but unmistakable. I staggered into the shade beneath a larger tree, my hands shaking violently, and forced biokinesis through my ruined fingers. It took effort, far more than it should’ve, but flesh knit together and bone slid back into place with wet, nauseating sensations.
Once my hand were functional again, I went to work properly.
I let my fingers phase just enough to slip into the collar’s seams, carefully avoiding the parts that would rip my throat or spine apart if disrupted. Warden hadn’t been sloppy. There was null mesh woven in layers, unfamiliar alloys, and components that reacted badly to brute force. Slowly, patiently, I compromised them one by one, isolating their functions and dismantling the system piece by piece.
When it finally came apart, most of it was useless scrap. Still, I pocketed a few components that looked promising. Thankfully, the orange uniform had pockets. I rolled my shoulders and stretched, irritation settling in when I realized my powers weren’t fully back. They responded sluggishly, like muscles waking after a long coma.
“Great,” I muttered. “Recovery time.”
I leaned against the tree and thought.
This situation looked dire, but it wasn’t hopeless. The Warden said this was entertainment, which raised an obvious question. How exactly was he enjoying the show if he couldn’t see what was happening? The answer came to me almost immediately, prickling the back of my neck.
I moved without hesitation.
I lunged to my left and snatched a fist-sized invisible cube out of the air, its surface distorting faintly as it struggled to remain unseen. At its center was an eye-like apparatus, glassy and unblinking. I held it up to my face.
“Are you enjoying the show?” I asked calmly.
The silence didn’t bother me. I smiled anyway.
“You know,” I continued, tilting the cube slightly, “the Box is more fun than I thought it’d be.”
I leaned closer, my reflection warping across the lens. “So look forward to the day I rip the Box apart and burn it down to the ground.”
With a twist of my wrist and a flicker of intangibility, I dismantled the cube on the spot. The eye shattered. The casing collapsed inward. Whatever signal it was sending died with a faint electronic whine.
I straightened up and exhaled slowly.
“Let’s see how entertaining it gets from here.”