The target’s eyes started to glow, once again filling the room with shades of red light. All of the soldiers felt a shiver run down their spines and the lab workers started to push their bodies more closely to the wall, so dominated by fear that not even a soft gasp escaped their claustrophobic throats.

Gulping down hard, Ikusaki tightened his grip to his handguns. He quickly blinked his eyes and, when he opened them once again, the targets had advanced several meters in the lab worker’s direction.

“Okay, okay, guys,” started saying M3, cracking his neck with the help of his hands. He stopped in front of one of the soldiers that were keeping guard to the lab workers and mischievously grinned at him. He didn’t even seem to notice the soldier’s rifle pointed in his direction. “Do you want to fly or to slide down the floor?”

“W-Wha—“ Before the soldier could finish speaking, two hands grabbed the front of his military uniform and threw him up in the air, his body crashing against a group of soldiers in the opposite end of the main hall.

“You were too slow to answer so I made the choice for you,” taunted M3, advancing to the next soldier and doing the same with him. M5 did the exact same to the other two soldiers next to that one, all of them flying to the other side of the big room and crashing against the soldiers there.

“GAHHHHHHH!!!” suddenly screamed one of the lab workers. All of the soldiers readily looked over in the screech’s direction, still trying to recover their formation after having been thrown with four of their members. What they saw made their blood freeze.

“Ah! You’re so unfair, M0!” complained M5 with a pouting expression. “You can’t just start without us!”

“You were being too slow,” answered M0, his face smeared with blood. One of his hands was wrapped around the throat of a lab worker, while his other arm was stabbing the man’s chest. He quickly withdrew his arm and dropped the corpse to the ground, red staining the floor and his body.

“Let him do whatever he wants, M5,” commanded M1, grabbing a woman by the neck and then motioning his other hand forward. He grabbed her by the face and twisted her head, a sick crack echoing through the main hall when the spine was broken. He released the woman’s corpse and looked over to M5, an evil smirk on his features. “Actually, do whatever you want too. Today is a special occasion, after all. I read that during special occasions, you get to do fun things so go all out.”

“Don’t mind if I do, then~” acknowledged M5 with a singsong voice while he got closer to the group of lab workers, all of them teetering with fear and trying to create more distance between them and him. He crouched down in front of a man and cheerfully grinned at him. “Hello there~”

“Ah…” gasped the man, his body trembling in a noteworthy way.

“And goodbye,” added M5, the grin disappearing completely from his face as he strongly slammed the man’s face on the floor, blood splattering on his clothes out of the completely crushed cranium.

“You have such savage methods, M5,” sighed M4 as he squeezed the throat of a woman, her hands scratching at his arms to try to free herself from the terrifying grip. All of a sudden, blood gushed from the piece of flesh he was grabbing at and her head fell backwards, linked to the torso by a thin thread of muscle only. Her corpse was readily dropped to the floor.

“You just crushed that woman’s neck and you’re talking about M5?” pointed out M2, grabbing a man by the back of his lab coat as he tried to crawl away from the group in the midst of the confusion. He picked him up above his head and then lowered his body on top of his raised upper leg, the scientist’s back immediately bending like a one-slice sandwich.

“M1 has said it himself. This is a celebration!” said M3, giving a push to the back of a man and sending his body strongly against the floor. He put his feet on top of the back of the head and stepped on it repeatedly, only stopping when all that was left of the skull was a gooey mess of bone fragments and cerebral matter. “Let’s have fun and not sweat the small details.”

“Fire!” ordered Murayama, taking the second handgun on his holster and pointing both of his weapons on the target’s direction. All of the other soldiers readily put themselves in position to shoot in their direction, the four men thrown at them still on the floor as they tried to regain their bearings at having been subjected to that kind of treatment. “Try to only hit the targets and kill them off if necessary, but stop them right now!!”

All of the guns in the main hall readily started to fire at the command of one of the squad leaders, even the soldiers who weren’t related to him in any way within the military universe. They were all terrified at the gory show happening in front of their eyes and it was clear how much they wanted it to end as soon as possible.

When the first bullet was released, M1 immediately positioned himself in front of M0 and kicked his heel on the floor. A large block of the ground in front of them rose, shielding them from all of the bullets being shot at them.

“Thank you, M1,” acknowledged M0, softly smiling at M1 as he dropped a woman’s severed head on the floor.

“No need to thank me,” answered M1, looking over his shoulder with a smile on his face while he secured the block of flooring in the correct position with the help of both hands.

“Argh~ Don’t interfere in our celebration~!” yelped M5 with a sulking voice at the same time he used the body of a lab worker to shield himself from the bullets. M4 was doing the same and M2 had to use two workers to obtain the same result.

“Man… Can’t you just leave us alone for a bit? It’s not like we’re hurting you guys or anything,” groaned M3 as he walked around with a woman’s body shielding him. He reached one of the pillars on the main hall and dropped the bloodied corpse on the floor, immediately wrapping his naked and muscular arms around the round block of cement. With an easy pull, he ripped the pillar from its link to the ceiling and floor and held it in his arms. He threw a quick glance at the soldiers, who were still shooting at them and released a sigh. M3 immediately swung the pillar around and let it fly in the door’s direction, heavily falling in front of the soldiers and throwing the ones in the front line out of balance, though none of them was hit directly. “Just stay there quietly and let us finish our things.”

“Fuck…” cursed Murayama as he got up from the floor. They couldn’t afford to lose the workers of the lab – they were to be taken to the base and interrogated about the projects in progress in this clandestine organization, as well as what exactly was ‘The Union’, the terrorist cell they were working in league with, planning to accomplish by creating super soldiers… which was clearly what they got out of all six of these monsters. But by the looks of it, they wouldn’t be able to keep any of the workers alive enough time to do that.

“Are you okay, Murayama?” asked Miue, running together with Ikusaki and Mizusaki towards him. Eki soon grouped with them too, his rifle on his hand.

“I’ll answer that question later if we come out of this freak show alive,” groaned Murayama, shaking the dust out of his military uniform. He lowered his upper body to the floor and picked one of his handguns, which had slipped out of his grip when he jumped out of the way of the thrown pillar. “Though I think we won’t be able to take any witnesses or targets back with us, the way things are going.”

“Just what kind of switch has M0 turned on in all of them for them to do this kind of crap?” asked Ikusaki, looking to the sea of blood that was continuing once again now that most soldiers had stopped shooting at the targets. When he saw M3 rip an arm out of one of the workers’ torso and the high scream it caused in the woman, he readily averted his gaze from that area, his stomach turning around.

“This was most likely something they had planned on doing all along if they managed to reunite for the first time,” answered Eki, also not fully looking to the cruel massacre going around them. “You heard what M1 said, right? I can only think of it as all of this being something that they have agreed on beforehand, for some reason.”

“Revenge…” mumbled Miue, his brows furrowed as he observed the satisfaction on the targets’ expressions while they went over each worker, one by one, and turned their bodies into bloody lumps of torn flesh and broken bones. “They are getting their revenge on what they made them become.”

“I don’t know if I should call them monsters… or humans that aren’t bound by any sort of human restriction…” added Mizusaki, closing his eyes for brief seconds as he heard a man scream his lungs out while his arms were being twisted around by M4. “But the code name they received is absolutely correct. They are mass murder machines.”

The lab workers alive continued to plummet each passing second as the sea of blood, organs and crushed bones continued to increase in reverse. The previously grey floor and white walls were now splattered with deep red and the screams were slowly starting to die down as the number of victims to be sacrificed was nearing its end.

“Oh~ Aren’t you the woman who assisted me on my training to erase the sensation of pain from my body?” asked M5 with a taunting voice as he picked a scientist up by the back of the collar of her lab coat. He kept her suspense in the air, her arms and legs lunging around in hopes to free herself from M5’s grasp on her clothes. “You know, though I can barely feel any pain now, no matter what kind of thing you torturers do to my body… It hurt like hell when you started to play around with the inside of my brain using electricity! The only reason why I won’t let you experience that personally is because the power has been cut off completely!”

M5 readily grabbed the woman’s face and smashed it repeatedly against the wall, large cracks appearing on the blood-splattered surface.

“Hey, M0!” called M3, looking over to M0 as he dropped a severed leg on the floor. He shook his hands lightly, blood dripping from his fingers, and happily grinned to him as M0 also looked over in his direction. “Pass me one of them.”

M0 nodded his head in acknowledgement and picked a male scientist by the back of his clothes, one of the few alive in the midst of the mass of bloodied pieces of flesh and broken corpses. He put him above his head and then sent him flying in M3’s direction. As the man was growing closer to him, M3 raised his fist and sent a powerful blow in the scientist’s face, his skull exploding in several small fragments.

“Nice pass!” complimented M3, once again shaking his hand around in the air to release the bits of brain stuck to his skin. M0 simply softly smiled at him for it and then continued working his way around on ripping the trachea of a woman barehanded.

“M0,” called M1 this time, walking over in his direction while dragging the body of a scientist on the floor. He dropped the man in front of M0 and forced the frightened man to get himself in a kneeling position. “This scientist was the one who made the bombs that kept us apart for years to no end. But he said he would apologize and make up for it if we spared his life. What do you think?”

“Why are you asking me that, M1?” asked M0 back, tilting his head as he dropped the trachea on the floor. “You said that no one would be spared from Phlegethon. But I guess you could be nice to him and kill him painlessly.”

“Yes. He will have a lot of time to suffer when he reaches Inferno,” agreed M1, motioning his hand sideways and cutting the scientist’s head off of his shoulders in a swift motion. The man’s lifeless and headless body fell down on the floor, blood flowing out of his neck and staining M0’s feet. “I believe we are almost done?”

“Yes,” acknowledged M4, stabbing a man in the heart with his hand. He removed his arm from inside of the hole in the lab worker’s chest and let the corpse fall to the ground, on top of a few other dismembered bodies.

“Yeah…” sluggishly answered M2, ripping the leg of a woman, then doing the same with her arm and, finally, her head.

“Yup~” also acknowledged M5, throwing a man up in the air with enough strength for his head to punch through the ceiling. He jumped in the air too and grabbed the man’s ankles, pulling his body back down but leaving his head stuck on the floor above the main hall.

“Done,” answered M3 while twisting the head of a scientist around and then pulling it off of his shoulders, a gush of blood squirting in the air and hitting his features with a dark red liquid.

Silence suddenly flooded the main hall, only the frightened rough breathing of some of the soldiers echoing through the dark, big and now bloodied division. They readily prepared their weapons once again, this time to protect their own lives. However…

“Come, my sweet child. The garden of shadows is no more – you’ll be free,” started singing a choir of six voices. All of the soldiers let their jaws drop at hearing the unexpected song. “Go, my sweet child. What awaits is just war, no time to flee.”

Singing, M1 motioned his hand forward in M0’s direction, who immediately clasped it with his own. M1 softly wiped some of the blood staining M0’s pale features and they bumped their foreheads together one more time.

“Run, my sweet child. Knowledge for a murder, the beauty is gone.”

M3 started walking over in their direction as he sang. Once he reached the pair, he motioned his hand up in M0’s direction, his hand spread open. M0 did the same movement as him and they high-fived for the first time ever.

“Weep, my sweet child. No one could hear her – passion won’t get a new dawn.”

M5 gave a quick jump and landed behind M0, whose shoulders he wrapped his arms around while all of them continued to sing, an extremely happy and relished smile on his features.

“Fight, my sweet child. For the fallen to slay and the shadows appease.”

Both M4 and M2 walked over to the group and stopped near them, M4 adjusting his splattered-with-blood glasses and singing with a soft smile on his lips. M2 lowered his large body down to the floor and sat down, leaning his back on M0’s legs.

“Live, my sweet child. Turn the red into grey, bring an end to the disease.”

The eyes of the six mass murder machines started growing red at the last portion of the make-shift lullaby – a second shade of bloody crimson that only stopped illuminating the main hall when all of them closed their eyes and buried the entire building in chilling silence.

None of the soldiers knew of it but, at that moment, every single one of them shared the same thought.

The Ms were a family, a pack of starving wolves. All of them were extremely deadly… but also extremely stunning.