2. Project IZ*ONE II

Chapter 19- Last Stand

"Your guards are all preoccupied, and I know you can't fight me one on one. It's time to surrender and turn yourself in." Eunbi says with a sneer.

"You're right. I can't fight you one on one...unless I use this." Ahn then brings out the syringe from his briefcase and injects himself in the shoulder. At first, nothing happens, but after a few seconds, the man groans and doubles over in pain.

"What have you done...?" Eunbi asks cautiously as she approaches. Suddenly, Ahn screams, his eyes turning pure red and his muscles beginning to enlarge.

"If you can't beat them...join them." He says, swiftly grabbing a hold of Eunbi's arm and yanking her up and tossing her towards a pile of crates.

"Unnie!" Nako shouts and charges towards Ahn, but is smacked away easily.

"What was in that serum!" The leader continues to ask, despite her ribs being in pain.

"The key to our next evolution!" He replies with an evil laugh.

"Dr. Park said this experiment would be unstable, and that our focus should be on the cloning project, but I saw differently. The only way to control mutants is through power and dominance."

"You're crazy! You talk about how much you hate us, and yet, here you are trying to replicate us?" Chaeyeon says before speeding towards him.

"Replicate? No. That was the clone project. I aimed to surpass even your abilities." He says as he easily dodges Chaeyeon's lightning quick strike, and hitting her with a counter punch before she could even react. The others try and jump in as well, but they are also swatted aside like flies.

"Kkura, you seeing what we're seeing?" Eunbi mumbles as she tries to get up.

"Yes, unnie. I'm already looking into it. Just don't let him get away." Sakura replies.

"At this point, I don't think he's even trying to get away anymore. The problem right now is probably staying alive." Eunbi says as she dodges a flying forklift.

"Yah, what the hell did he do to himself?" Yuri asks worriedly from Sakura's side.

"Like I said, I'm looking into it. I don't know how I missed that file in Park's laptop."

"Well, you're gonna have to find it soon!" The younger girl says, seeing Ahn break out of Hyewon's ice and ripping through Hitomi's roots. Sakura scans through every file again until she comes across one labeled "Project Darwin" that was hidden behind triple the security all the other files had.

"This has to be it." She thinks to herself as she skims through. From what was put in the report, it was a top-secret formula that awakened any recessive mutant genes a person might have. It was kept under wraps, even below the cloning project, because it was more unstable, with test subjects reportedly even passing away from the injections. Sakura then recalls some of Chaewon's stories from the lab in Daegu. The two-headed pig...the fire-breathing parrot. It all makes sense now. There were even more implications that this experiment brought up, but Sakura decided those questions would be better answered some other time. Right now, she needed a way to beat this guy.

"Subjects were reported to have extreme aggression swings and a lack of empathy..." Sakura shakes her head as she continued reading the report that wasn't yielding any useful information until she got to the last paragraph.

"Guys! Stop fighting!" Sakura comms to her friends who reply in confused tones.

"What do you mean? We almost have him. I can feel it!" Nako responds.

"Just trust me! The report said subjects fell into a more containable and docile state when less aggression was shown towards them."

"Alright, Kkura-chan. If you say so." Chaeyeon says, doing something she didn't normally do- stand still. The others, though hesitant, begin to follow her example.