Extra: Yandere Milfs Obsessed with me!

The years passed with a disconcerting rapidity, as if time itself had been sucked in by the invisible gears of human ambition. Babylon now stood in its austere splendor, its three monumental towers dominating the narrow valley. Yet Konstantine had not contented himself with building a city of stone and knowledge; he had undertaken the work of his life, the one that would finally give meaning to his rebellion against the Constellations.

In the basement levels of the Tower of the Alchemists, where daylight never reached and where the air was laden with metallic odors mixed with iridescent fumes, the heterochromatic sorcerer conducted his most audacious experiments. Crystal cradles were aligned against the walls of damp stone, and these translucent structures were connected to each other by pipes of liquid mana that pulsed like still-warm veins. These cradles housed the first subjects of his genetic manipulations, beings whose very existence was an affront to the laws of nature.

Konstantine had started modestly, gathering orphans from the rubble of the wars that bloodied the Kingdom of Yggdrasil. He presented himself to them as a savior, a benefactor who offered a second chance to lost souls. However, this benevolence was only a carefully maintained facade, for the sorcerer saw in them far more than children to protect: he considered them as raw material that he could shape according to his darkest designs.

The first tests were brutal. Konstantine had set up his laboratory in the lower levels of the Tower of the Forge, where the screams could not rise to the upper floors. He injected his protégés with serums elaborated from samples of flesh taken from creatures captured in the dimensional rifts: wyvern blood for cellular regeneration, troll marrow for physical resistance, fluids extracted from fairy glands for magical affinity.

Rejections were frequent and often spectacular. The bodies of the children convulsed on the observation tables, their veins burst under the pressure of the foreign substances, and their flesh necrotized within a few hours. Konstantine observed each agony with clinical attention, meticulously noting every detail on parchments covered with protective runes. Then, when the subject succumbed, he disposed of the failures in the blazing furnaces of the Tower of the Forge, without ever showing the slightest emotion. Yet, in the course of his experiments, three of them managed to survive.

The first survivor was a girl whom he named Walpurga. Konstantine remembered with precision the day he had found her. She lay in a mass grave, half-buried under the decomposed bodies of her family, all massacred by a bandit raid that had occurred three days earlier. Crows circled above the charnel house, and the smell of death permeated the morning air.

The child had survived alone for those three days in that charnel house. She had fed on bitter roots and rainwater accumulated in a split skull. Her small fingers were bloodied, for she had clawed at the hardened earth to free herself from the weight of the corpses that enclosed her. When Konstantine had freed her, she had not cried. She had stared at him fixedly with eyes that shone with a fierce determination far beyond her age.

The mage had seen in her a spark that no other child possessed. A will of iron forged in horror, a capacity to survive where all hope seemed lost.

Konstantine had taken her to his laboratory and administered a particularly complex serum to her. It was a cocktail of DNA taken from creatures of the Plane of Darkness, succubi that he had captured during one of his expeditions into the most dangerous rifts. This serum was designed to grant its subject advanced regeneration abilities, resistance to death spells, and above all a natural affinity with dark energies.

The process had lasted entire weeks. Konstantine remained constantly at her bedside. He tirelessly adjusted the dosages of the substances, modified the stabilization incantations, and rebalanced the flows of mana that circulated in the frail body of the child.

When she finally awoke, her eyes had changed radically. They were no longer the same color. An insidious glow danced in them permanently.

Then came the turn of Éléanor. When she came into the world, she did not cry. Her eyes opened immediately, two prisms of liquid amber that seemed to recognize Konstantine even before distinguishing the outlines of the room. He held her against his chest, feeling the tiny weight of what he had created, and for the first time in several decades, his hands trembled.

She was different from the others. This difference did not lie only in the pearly sheen of her skin or the unusual fineness of her ears, the heritage of the woman he had loved. No, what made her unique was that glow that danced at the back of her gaze, that spark that he recognized because he had seen it every morning in the mirror of his tower. Konstantine had conceived her from his own blood and that of his wife, the elf he had loved and lost.

He had kept samples of her DNA for more than two centuries, protecting them in vials of tempered crystal, preserving them from time and decay. These fragments of her, taken from her body before it was reduced to ritual ashes, were all that remained to him. For years, he had tried to recreate what he had lost, to fuse what he was with what she had been. Each failure had brought him closer to madness, each failed experiment had dug a little deeper the gulf that separated him from humanity.

The process that gave birth to Éléanor was longer than for the other children, more meticulous and infinitely more painful. Konstantine worked entire days without sleeping. When the embryo had finally taken shape in the crystal matrix, he did not extract it prematurely as he had done for the others. He let it develop for nine full months, like a natural child, before extracting it.

Over the years, the children grew up in the bowels of the Tower of the Forge. The walls oozed with humidity and residual magic, the corridors echoed with the noise of mechanisms and the distant howls of creatures locked in the lower levels. Konstantine trained them in combat with merciless rigor, transforming their bodies into weapons even before they had learned to read.

In the underground arenas, vast amphitheaters of black stone lit by globes of cold light, he pitted them against stone golems whose fists were large enough to crush an adult man. He confronted them with laboratory chimeras, creatures half-man half-beast that he had himself designed to test their reflexes and their endurance. Sometimes, when he judged that they were becoming too confident, he forced them to fight each other. Blows rained down, blood flowed on the granite floor, bones broke with a dry crack that made even the youngest grit their teeth. The regenerative serums, injected into their veins at the end of each fight, closed the wounds and re-fused the fractures within a few hours, preparing their bodies for the next trial.

"The world will not give you any gifts," Konstantine shouted at them from the observation platform, his arms crossed over his chest, his heterochromatic gaze fixing each of them in turn. "The weak are crushed. The naive are betrayed. Those who mourn their dead soon join their dead. You must learn to endure, to take the hits, to get back up."

He told them the story of the world as it had been before the third world war, that apocalyptic conflagration that had ravaged the lands, poisoned the oceans and broken civilizations. His eyes then shone with a bitter nostalgia, with a regret that he never fully expressed. Then his voice became grave, almost a whisper, when he evoked the bombs, the radiations, the millions of dead and the slow agony of a world that had chosen to self-destruct.

"The angels and the demons are only pawns," he said when he told them the story of the world. "Puppets in a game that surpasses them. They believe they serve justice or chaos, but they only dance to the rhythm imposed by their celestial masters. The Constellations are parasites. Sons of bitches, every last one of them."

He pronounced these words with a hatred so pure, so concentrated, that the children began to share his ideals. They listened to these lessons while holding their breath, their young minds absorbing every syllable like a sponge absorbs water.

Walpurga, the oldest of the first generation, listened to these lessons with particular attention. Her eyes, usually empty, came alive with a new glow each time Konstantine evoked the perfidy of the Constellations. Over the years, listening to his speeches and observing the contained fury that inhabited her creator, she had come to hate the Constellations with an almost religious fervor. It was an inverted devotion, a cult dedicated not to adoration but to destruction, a faith that found its reason for being in the negation of any other faith. Konstantine had made her a living weapon.

The other children, born in violence and having grown up in pain, shared this faith with varying intensity. They were the disciples of the sorcerer, his children of the heart, even if none equaled Éléanor in his affection.

Despite the harshness of his training, he saw them as his own children, but the world he knew would never leave him in peace. For that, he would have to ensure that his children could protect themselves.