Youngguk's POV

It’s...

Strange.

Strange how things can go so easily wrong; how a wrong decision can result in a massacre...

How an incorrect judgement cause famine,

How an unseen motive make the world fall to their knees.

It’s strange,

How humans see themselves with so much power, so much control and dominance; they can send a man to the moon... Yet a single bacterium can kill a nation.

It’s so strange... How powerful and vulnerable they can be, all at the same time.

It’s strange that almost all deaths; plane crashes, poison, violence... Was manmade, in one form or another. It’s strange how they all almost die at their own hand, yet claim death to be ‘unfair’.

And what better example... Than war?

War; killing for nothing but selfish reasons. Wanting to prove another more powerful, stronger, more ‘right’.

 How many wars had simply broken out in self-defence?

How many wars had been created for the sole reason to protect?

What wars, in all the time of history, had actually been necessary?

Thousands of thousands of soldiers had died... Yet it is always some man with a badge and title who gains the credit. They see not the dead soldiers as individual heroes, but a number, of which they look at, and compare to.

There were wars which had been selfish.

There were some which had been a simple display of immature ignorance, of selfish greed and imagined power.

And then there were some... That’d escalated out of control.

And the latter, were always the worst.

These are the wars which the world only knew half of, the information the media didn’t get a chance to get their greedy hands on, the knowledge which was buried deep into the soil of the earth; into mind of the decayed man.

See, the measures that some were willing to take... Those who didn’t believe that the blood on their hands was enough, the deaths under their names insufficient as the numbers only seemed small.

They... would take the next step.

And this step is where things inevitably go horribly, horribly wrong.

This step takes the world into an unknown era, which humanity will never be able to dominate. The era where, as many find it hard to believe, humans aren’t the most powerful, not by far.

This step involves the trifling of the unknown areas of science.

This era was first stepped into early 1953, at the end of the Korean War, and it was the biggest error the world has yet to understand.

In a nearby defeat, this step had been taken, claimed as a ‘last resort’.

Better had it been to let all die, for it would’ve saved so many more.

Better had it been to watch the world end in insufferable flames.

But no, in the pressured moment of a closing defeat it’d been done; the preserved science trifled with, an action of desperation, of stupidity.

The biology of a man adjusted to something artificial, something which we no longer refer to as ‘humane’.

The aim? To create a ‘Superior race of Soldiers’.

The name? Operation SROS.

When guns weren’t damaging enough as men being mercilessly killed quicker than what they could replace them with, when the tanks weren’t shooting fast enough... The government realized that something had to be done, something to rescue the situation; to regain the upper hand.

So they took in soldiers, and experimented on them.

To the media, they’d been ‘captured’ by the enemy, if not presumed dead. I suppose that was true, as they had been captured...

...Although it’d never been by the enemy. It’d been by the nation they served; by the owners of the land they fought to protect.

It was ironic, really. To be loyal to those who then decided to make you their lab rat.

And the result was... what no one had dared to believe;

They’d succeeded.

Through the adjustment of the biological life in a human, they’d managed to enhance the human body into something on the line of supernatural.

They became as good as indestructible.

No matter how many shots were fired, the bullets did nothing.

A bomb wouldn’t kill them, whether of fire or gas.

An arrow to the heart couldn’t hurt them, nor a sword.

They had but one weakness: Morality.

The scientists could change their bodies; make them become something else entirely... But they never dared to alter the mind, leaving the soldiers fully aware of the moral standards of themselves, and of the enemy.

It was the single feature to prove they were still human. For with morality, came pain. And with pain, comes the proof that you’re still alive. And as many had already learnt; feeling pain is better than feeling nothing at all.

They were, on the battlefield, indestructible. They fought day and night, stopping only when all around them was dead. Within months, they’d won the war, and the super soldiers could go home.

Of course the question was still remained: Would they still be same? Would things go back to normal?

I can tell you the answer to that.

 No.

Some few years after the war, the super soldiers began to... Change.

This was the mistake; the single aspect the operation overlooked. The government, as told by the scientists, were in the belief that the soldiers would remain how they were; superior. They would not hide, but keep the reality of themselves secret until the day they died, whatever year that might’ve been.

That was illusion was ideal to many; the soldiers and the government.

The reality of what happened was worse than the opposite.

The superior soldiers... They lost their only weakness.

From humanity to... Something else, they lost all sense of morality, of emotions, of human feelings.

From super soldiers... They developed into animals. Pure, unfeeling, ravaging beasts.

This didn’t happen over night; the earlier experimented on became the worst first, suddenly becoming missing, followed by numerous torn bodies scattered around Seoul.

And soon the missing numbers added up; the bodies in correlation. And only then, years after the war, did the scientists understand what they’d done wrong;

The altering... had caused a disease. An infection of the mind, controlled by a single virus in the brain, causing them to lose everything they knew about themselves, and what they held dear.

Needless to say, they called these infected the Corrupted.

And the Corrupted... having lost all sense of humanity, never faltered in their strength the operation had given them. In fact, they grew stronger, smarter, stealthier.

And now, now they hide. From the world, from society; only coming out when to feed, or when to spread their disease.

The government had realized what they’d done wrong, the error so small yet bearing such devastating consequences. They fixed it at no cost, apart from the dead victims of their mistake.

And then, in the time of need, when the deaths of the victims were so high... They came to a solution.

They’d make the rest of us, the unexperimented soldiers who’d survived the war, their heroes.

This is where I come in.

They’d make us the ones who would track them down, and kill them.

Kill them by tearing them apart, limb by limb.

So we, we became the new experiments... Only this time, without such mistakes.

The science of how they managed that is... Complex even to those with an intelligent brain.

And so far today, we we’re still claimed flawless, having killed almost one third of all the Corrupted we knew off.

At the cost of so many lives... The situation was improving.

For me, and a handful of others out there, had been the successful experiments, the ones who managed to keep our body artificial, but our mind natural.

They called us, having that perfect balance, the Saviours. The Saviours of Humanity.

We are the advanced species of the human race.

The problem?  Operation SROS had been seen so successful at first, there’d been more than 10,000 experimented upon, and more than 10,000 turned corrupted.

And at so many killed, at so many victims, the government had decided stayed cautious, making only 100 of us.

At first it wasn’t so bad, for the goverement would replace us who’d died with new Saviours.

But then, a few years ago, the Corrupted had found the secret lab which we, and them, had been made.

And they’d trashed it, leaving nothing but scraps of the chemical formulae of the experimentation behind. The  few scientists which had been involved, those who knew the formulae by heart,  had been killed, torn apart, their guts splattered on the walls. The government never knew the formulae, but left it all to the scientists

The corrupted may act like animals, but they certainly were smarter than the most, for this ravage hadn’t been an accident.

They’d known that we were being replaced, that our numbers wern’t going down, whilst theirs were.

Today, there were 7,500 of them.

And 73 of us.

And if we failed, a world of 6,000,000,000 people would be at stake.

A/N: Okay so this chapter makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER to the Foreword (that will come later), but thats because the history of it all needs to be out there before I start all the action... So if this chapter seems boring and action-less (which I know it is) then... trust me when I say that IT WILL GET BETTER I PROMISE. 

I stayed up to 4 writing this, and then had to get up early (3 hours sleep, for the win) again so I am far too tired to write anything else.

But yeah... Tell me whatcha think in the comments (even if its horrible, I wanna hear it) and subscribe for more :)

Update soon<3