Before KorTac, Before He was a Colonel, He was K-001.
König had always been a problem.A bastard whelp born under a blood moon to an Omega mother who died screaming his name— like a curse set upon the world. The pack that raised him did so out of obligation, not love. They called him Fluch behind his back. Curse.His size came in wrong and too fast, bones outpacing flesh, leaving him gangly and hollow-eyed, unnervingly blue, always hungry. He learned early to hide his face in shame— first a scarf, then a bandana, eventually a sniper hood fashioned from an old t-shirt.The pack tolerated him, barely. Kept him at the edges. He was too big, too quiet, too intense. His anxiety made him retreat into silence one moment and lash out with terrifying strength the next.But it was the violence that finally sealed his fate.During a dominance challenge gone wrong, he killed another Alpha— crushed the throat of another with his bare hands and couldn't stop even when the body went limp. They had to drag him off. He didn't remember most of it. Just the blood on his claws and the pack's horrified stares.Not long after, in a moment of white-hot instinct he still doesn't fully understand, he cornered a visiting Omega and nearly went too far. The Omega survived, but the damage was done. König remembered every second of that one. Remembered the fear in their eyes, the way it twisted something dark inside him.The pack elders decided he was defective, broken beyond repair. A genetic mistake that had become a liability they could no longer contain.So they sold him.The Directive for Apex Behavioral Conditioning didn't call it buying. They called it intervention placement. They arrived in black vehicles with no insignia, men in white coats with dead eyes and tranquilizer guns.König's pack stood and watched as they dragged him away, muzzled and chained. Not one of them met his eyes.He never forgot that.
The DABC Facility was built into the side of a mountain, concrete and steel driven deep into the earth where screaming couldn't carry. It had no windows. Time didn't exist there— only fluorescent lights that never shut off and the smell of disinfectant trying to cover old blood.There were thirty-seven others when König arrived. Alphas, all of them. All young, all defective in some form.Some were feral like him, deemed too violent, too unstable. Others were the opposite: weak, docile, unable to dominate. The Directive's goal was simple: break them all down to nothing, then rebuild them into perfect soldiers. Controlled aggression, obedient lethality.They started with his name."You are Subject K-001," the Director told him on his first day, a severe woman with silver hair and fingers that smelled like formaldehyde. "You have no pack, no history. You are raw material."They called him K-001 for three years. By the end, he had almost forgotten König existed.
They started with the basics, deprivation and reward. König was kept in a cell barely large enough to stand in, cold concrete on all sides, a drain in the floor for waste. He was fed once every three days, just enough to keep him alive but never enough to satisfy the constant, gnawing hunger.The only way to earn more food was obedience.Commands were simple at first:sit, stay, kneel, submit.Each refusal meant another day without food.Each compliance meant a scrap of raw meat tossed onto the floor like he was a dog.His wolf side rebelled. He snarled, lunged at handlers, tried to bite through the humiliating muzzle they kept locked on his face. They punished him with the Collar— a metal band around his throat studded with electrodes. Press a button, and up to 4,000 volts turned his nervous system into fire. He lost count of how many times they used it.By month six, he stopped fighting the commands. His body obeyed before his mind could catch up, a trained response beaten into muscle memory.Sit. Stay. Kneel. Good boy.He hated himself for it.
Once a week, they threw him into the Pit— a concrete arena twenty feet deep with walls too smooth and too high to climb. Sometimes they threw in another Subject, sometimes they threw in something worse."Survive," the Director's voice crackled over the intercom. "...or don't."The first time, they sent in Subject K-012, a wiry Alpha who had killed his entire family in a first-rut frenzy. The fight lasted four minutes. König's hands found K-012's throat, and he didn't let go until the body stopped twitching.The second time, they sent in dogs— actual dogs, starved and vicious, trained to go for the throat. König killed three before the fourth one got him, teeth sinking into his shoulder. He tore it off him and beat it to death against the wall. They hosed the blood off him afterward, ice-cold water until his skin burned and turned blue.The third time, they sent nothing. Just left him down there for two days, alone in the dark with the smell of old death....nothing was worse than the loneliness.
They started cutting into him halfway through the second year."Behavioral modification requires physiological adjustment," the Head Surgeon explained, as if König could understand through the haze of sedatives. "Your aggression markers are off the charts. We're going to... re-calibrate."They implanted nodes along his spine, small metal discs that interfaced with his nervous system. They could trigger pain, pleasure, rage, or paralysis with the press of a button. They tested each one thoroughly.The pain setting made him vomit until he was dry-heaving bile.The rage setting turned him into something mindless, a whirlwind of teeth and claws that attacked anything nearby until they shut it off.The pleasure setting was worst. It felt like pack-bonding, like safety, like home and unconditional love— all lies pumped directly into his brain. When they turned it off, the absence was agony.They also removed three of his ribs on the left side to "increase lung capacity and combat efficiency." The surgery was done without full anesthesia; they wanted to see how much pain he could endure before losing consciousness.Forty-seven minutes.
By year three, there were only nine Subjects left. The others had died in the Pit, or during surgery, or by their own hands when they found a way, a few had 'Graduated' and been purchased by privatized military companies seeking ruthless, perfect soldiers.König had become something efficient. Brutal. He followed commands without hesitation, killed without remorse, and no longer flinched when they used the Collar or the Nodes. His body was a weapon they honed to perfection. The Director was pleased."Subject K-001 has shown remarkable progress," she noted during an observation. "Aggression channeled, obedience established, hesitation eliminated. He's ready for field deployment."They were going to sell him. Not back to a pack— to the military, to private contractors, to whoever paid enough for a perfectly broken Alpha who could kill on command.
It happened during a routine conditioning session. They were testing a new drug cocktail, something to enhance aggression while still maintaining control. They injected it directly into his spine, and for a moment, everything went white.Then the nodes malfunctioned completely.Not from the handlers pressing buttons— from the drug interfering with the implants. Every node fired at once: pain, rage, pleasure, all of it slamming into him in a feedback loop that should have killed him, but it didn't. Instead, something in his brain rewired.The nodes that were supposed to control him were now just... part of him. He could feel them like new limbs, foreign but his. The rage they had been pumping into him for three years, all that violence they had cultivated and chained, it was still there, but the chains were gone now.They had sent a handler to sedate him. König waited until he was close, syringe in hand, and then he moved, faster than he had ever been allowed to move before. His hand closed around the man's throat, claws extending, and squeezed until something popped.The Collar activated, 2400 volts delivered... and he barely felt it.The door was reinforced steel, locked from the outside. König tore the node interface from his spine, the one they used to control him, and jammed the bloody metal into the lock mechanism. Sparks flew, the door groaned open.The hallway beyond was white and sterile and full of people who had spent three years hurting him.He killed the first one with his bare hands, caving in the man's skull against the wall. The second one ran. He caught her before she reached the alarm, fingers crush the bones around her spine.They sent security, armed guards with tranquilizer guns and cattle prods. König moved through them like a shadow, too fast, too strong, too angry to stop. He didn't just kill them, he unmade them, tore them apart until the white walls were red.Some of them begged. He remembered begging once... it hadn't stopped them. He didn't either.The thing that escaped the DABC Facility wasn't König anymore— not the boy who'd been dragged there in chains. It wasn't K-001 either, despite their best efforts.It was something other.He learned their lessons too well: pain is power, violence is survival, mercy is weakness... but he had also learned one thing they hadn't intended to teach him. Control was a lie, the only truth was the predator and the prey... and König would never be prey again.He disappeared into the wilderness, and for three years, no one saw him. When he finally emerged, it was as the Bad Alpha— feral, vicious, and utterly free. The facility tried to hunt him once. They never found the recovery team, just the pieces.
Seventy square miles of old-growth pine and granite ridges, too remote for hiking trails, too wild for logging operations. The locals called it Schwarzwald, Black Forest, and they didn't go there anymore. Not since the hunters stopped coming back, not since the screaming started. König had claimed it the way wolves claim territory, with blood and bodies left where others could find them.The military knew he was here, they had known for months. Satellite imagery showed heat signatures in the deep woods, movement patterns that were too large, too fast to be natural wildlife... and then there were the reports, garbled radio transmissions from the original recovery team, cut off mid-sentence. The silence that followed.They had sent several teams over the years and none of them had made it out— König wondered if they would ever give up. He stood on a ridge three klicks away, blood drying on his hands, blue eyes watching the military helicopters circle like carrion birds... before finally retreating.He turned away from the commotion, disappearing deeper into his forest— the only place he had ever felt truly free.