Divine Guadians headquarters, Ares Office.
A middle-aged man with a scar on his face, Neptune sat in front of Ares as the former guardian handed a memory disk to Ares who turned to ask with a doubt.
"Richard, Did you receive any news on him? It has been over two years..." Ares observed the letter. This was the last message Roderick left in his room on the last day he was seen.
Hearing the name he hasn't used for ages, even before his entrance in the gardens, Nepture froze. Moments later, he showed many reports of the team sent to find Roderick.
"I see, so there is no news. He's truly talented to have vanished like this for so long, he even too a small team with him. However, my only concern right now is that girl."
Ares agreed, "I know, she hasn't been able to perform well since he vanished. She says she wants to find her brother... Roderick may have left, but we can't say he's gone rogue yet, this is something only time will tell.
....
On a desolate area. A large red ship amid the ruins of past civilizations could be seen. The engines burned like the sun as the gigantic mass of red metal was preparing to take off. Within its bridge, droids sat on every console while a single female stood in front of the main monitor. Those droids, were found in the storage of the ship, where Roderick found it and had the engineers and experts in the area to repair them for future use.
"Sharon, are you sure you can pilot it?" A voice sounded from the speakers. It has been three weeks since they arrived in this area as their ship suffered a malfunction and they never managed to get this massive starship off the ground since then.
Sharon checked the status of the ship, the engines, batteries and anything else that could be a problem before she pressed the switch. "Of course I can. You should have more trust in me, Mystic. It's just that this ship is a bit too old for me to get used, but with the fuel our captain brought us it will be fine."
A blaring alarm soon broke the stillness inside the starship.
"Captain, we are finally getting off this island. Brace yourselves!" Sharon's voice was a bit tense when it sounded in the ship's corridors.
Roderick had just changed his suit before sending a set of coordinates back at her as well as a text. "Fine, after we leave this island. I want you to follow the coordinates I just gave you, there should be something interesting there."
"Is this why you brought us away with you?" Sharon tried to ask, but Roderick didn't reply. With the engines up and running, the massive crimson ark takes off the island in the blink of an eye. Following the exact same coordinates given to her, the massive ship quickly arrived at an icy peak. The ruins of what looked like an old building appeared on the screen.
"Sir, we've arrived. What are the orders?" Cassius and the rest reunited at the bridge. They all felt Roderick was acting really strange since the incident two years ago. Like something no one knew happened that made him look more distant and colder than they remembered.
Roderick was in his set of deep blue suit. His silver eye patch covered the emptiness in his left eye as he stared at the screen.
"Anyone alive?"
"Unknown," she replied, staring at a monitor on the bridge. "Sensors are only telling me two things, sir: it's material is unlike any kind seen in our world, and its detecting what could seem to be signatures of heat coming from hundreds and hundreds of kilometers below that mountain, but it's more likely to be something like volcanic residues!"
"Understood, you should all stay here. I will go alone, if it is what I think it is, then I return to show it to you." Roderick said to the few people in besides the droids, then he was gone in a flash of light. From afar the mountain, Roderick landed next to the surrounding snowy pines.
Following the trail, he noticed no presence or vestige of any beast activity in the area. For a place within any of the old continents to stand untouched after so long, there was certainly something special or horrifying about this place. At the foot of the mountain, he watched the tall walls of white stone and the beautiful nano-fibber floor. He searched the entire place until he found a few bones and skulls.
"This looks old."Roderick explored the entire place before he found an elevator. It has been broken for hundreds of years, and all there was left was the bottomless shaft.
Reinforce! Feeling the energetic lightning running through his body, he descended the well by himself. He didn't know how many levels he passed by, but soon he landed on the bottom of the shaft. From the outside, this place base appeared to be an abandoned storage barn, but only when he reached this bottom he realized the pictures he saw on the computer were right.
"Oh gods, it's true..." He felt his heart sink when facing the scene in front of him.
It was a huge chamber, the walls were of a milky-white stone, half polished steel, lined with computer equipment, electronic meters, machines that blinked and flickered with a life of their own, and human-sized capsules filled with a dark green fluid.
With forty or maybe fifty metal containers, all with the same mark of different colors: red, yellow, blue, and green. Roderick walked to the closest container and open it. Bottles filled with red fluid appeared before his eyes, each container had approximately ten of those bottles.
"I found it." Stopping right next to one of the capsules, he slowly raises his hand before breaking through the glass.
*Crack*
In the glass shattered in countless pieces, all the fluids poured down the capsule as a half-formed fetus was all that rested in the capsule. Hitting the device on his wrist, he contacted Sharon and the others on the ship.
"Sharon, land the ship. I want you and the others to come down here, I have an announcement to make."
"Are you sure? You really sound strange right now." Sharon felt a shiver down her spine when she heard a Roderick's voice. Since he started working for him, she never heard him sound like that, he seems to be furious about something.
"Mystic,"Sharon turned to the brown-haired middle-aged female by her side, "Go call Lisa and Cassius. We are going down there."
"Understood."
Bringing everyone in the underground chamber, they all stared at the scene in front of them wide-eyed. Cassius stared at the countless capsules, then at the half-formed fetus before he threw up.
"God! Why are you showing this to us?" Lisa helped Cassius, who could even stand on his feet.
"I brought you here because it is your right to know about the lies were told from the beginning. Here Cassius, do you know what is this?" Roderick picked a bottle filled with a green fluid, the same in those capsules and showed it to Cassius.
Cassius recovered, and his eyes stopped on the bottle in Roderick's hand. He couldn't explain why, but the moment saw it, he felt the blood in his veins burn as deep green light appeared in his eyes. Cassius was sure that the fluid in the bottle was greatly beneficial to him.
"This is what the human scientists and alchemists of that time extracted from the bodies of the beasts. A thousand years ago, humanity was on the verge of extinction when they realized that the sudden awakening of power owned by the beasts had something to do with their blood and DNA. A strange phenomenon changed and bestowed upon every animal and insect the ability to resonate and control the primal elements."
He pressed a button on his obelisk, and a holographic screen showing the data he found in the old computer appeared before them. They watched human in white coats capturing beasts and injecting their blood on humans. At first they tried it on adult males, but every single one of them burst into bloody pieces. Next was the females, the teens and soon the babies and artificial children.
Humanity invested all the time they had left in this crazy and desperate solution. Then when only a dozen humans were left on the whole planet, they found the right answer. They succeed in tracking the gene capable of controlling the elements, and they realized they were doing it all wrong. Instead of picking the best of the best beasts and trying to inject its great power into a human was nothing but suicide.
The trick was to find an infant beast with its elemental force at the weakest level, and to extract its source into a refined serum before being injected into a specially devised fetus. Picture of several failed experiments was shown on the screen and even so it was only years later when they finally finished.
Huge capsules, incubators filled with the elemental serum and where the artificially made babies would grow with nearly perfect chances of awakening the elemental power in the future. Soon, most of the capsules remained in the bottom of this research institute while the few that awakened. But to the surprise of the humans, were that those "human children" were much above the realm of any "human", so they were named as the primal children by the researchers.
Some could create entire mountains with the snap of a finger, while others could create hurricanes and cyclones just by sneezing. Those kids were how Eden came to be and how some of the children separated years later to form what was known as the church of the beast gods. However, at that time the real human race was dead for a long time with its survivors being those in the far away colonies.