The Shadow Leech Pt.3

The first time he felt it—really felt it—was the night he should have died.

At twelve years old, shivering in an abandoned warehouse in Chicago, his body shutting down from cold and exhaustion, something inside him woke up.

He had thought it was just instinct, some primal urge to survive. But the truth was, it had always been there—in his blood, in his DNA, waiting to be activated.

He just never knew it.

Not until he dug into his past.

Not until he learned what he was.

His mother's name was Helen Vasquez.

It was on an old file buried deep in a foster care system database, something most people wouldn't have been able to access. But he had learned things. Learned how to steal—not just food or money, but information.

Helen Vasquez. Deceased.

Cause of death: classified.

That sent a chill down his spine.

Who classified a death? Who hides something like that?

He dug deeper.

It took him months of tracking down old medical records, breaking into databases, and bribing people in backrooms. He hit dead end after dead end—until he found a name that mattered.

Revenant Initiative.

It was buried under old government projects—something experimental from the late 1990s, hidden behind layers of classified documents.

When he finally cracked through, the files made his blood run cold.

Helen Vasquez—his mother—had been part of an experiment.

A U.S. military operation. A black-budget project. Something that shouldn't have existed.

The Revenant Initiative was meant to create a new breed of soldier—not through cybernetics, not through training, but through genetics.

Through blood.

It wasn't just a research program. It was human experimentation.

In the late '90s, the government had been racing to control the growing metahuman problem. There were already enhanced individuals out in the world, people with extraordinary abilities emerging in rare cases across the country. Some were natural mutations, and some were the result of freak accidents.

But the government wanted predictability. They wanted control.

They wanted to make metahumans.

The Revenant Initiative was designed to unlock dormant potential in human DNA—the genetic blueprint of metahuman abilities that some believed existed in all people but remained inactive.

They called it the Revenant Serum.

It was supposed to be the key to awakening power in an ordinary human.

The test subjects didn't volunteer.

Some were prisoners. Some were soldiers who had been deemed expendable. And some—like Helen Vasquez—were people who had simply disappeared.

She had been pregnant when they injected her.

That was the real secret behind the Revenant Initiative.

Metahumans didn't all come from accidents or rare genetic mutations. Some were designed.

And some were born.

The serum had bonded with her DNA, permanently altering it—fusing it into her blood at a molecular level. But unlike other test subjects, she didn't gain powers. She remained normal.

The experiment was declared a failure.

What the scientists didn't realize was that the change hadn't been for her.

It had been for her child.

For him.

The Revenant Serum had altered his genetic makeup before he was even born, embedding something deep within him—something that would only activate when his body reached the brink of death.

The hunger, the ability to drain energy, the power to feed off others—it was the result of an unstable mutation.

The scientists had theorized about it in their files, calling it the Ghost Gene—a theoretical state where a person's body could phase between energy and matter, existing in a liminal state between life and entropy.

That's what he was.

A living, breathing parasite.

The Revenant Initiative was shut down before it could be perfected. The test subjects were either terminated or "disappeared."

His mother was among them.

She had tried to run. She had gotten as far as Los Angeles before they caught her. They scrubbed her from existence and erased every trace of her from government systems.

But they hadn't accounted for him.

A child born with an active Ghost Gene. A living weapon created by accident.

A monster they didn't even know had survived.

He sat in silence for a long time after learning the truth.

This was why he had no real records. Why does the system have nothing on him?

They had never expected him to exist.

The hunger inside him—this wasn't normal. It was never normal. It was the result of something unnatural, something done to him before he was even born.

He was never supposed to be a person.

He was supposed to be an experiment.

A failed one.

But he wasn't a failure.

He had survived. He had thrived.

And now?

Now he was going to make the world pay.

Not just the government. Not just for the Harbingers.

Everyone and everything.

Because if the world saw him as a monster—if they saw him as nothing more than a predator

Then that's exactly what he would become.