When this seventy-year-old man lay down on the metal bed, he still looked old and frail. But when he rose from it, he had become someone else.
No, something else.
His hair was still white, but it was no longer soft. It had become like white metal wires, each strand thick and stiff, gleaming coldly beneath the lights. It spilled over his shoulders like a silver crown.
His skin had turned pale gray, like frozen earth in winter.
A thin layer of frost covered its surface, grown from beneath his skin. The frost formed dense hexagonal patterns over his entire body, like natural armor.
His eyes had turned silvery white, with blue points of light flickering deep within his pupils like stars in a blizzard. When he blinked, tiny ice crystals formed on his lashes before falling and dissipating in the air.
Most terrifying of all was his mouth.
When he opened it, what showed inside were not human teeth, but wolf teeth. Four canines were especially long, jutting from his upper and lower jaws and interlocking like two rows of daggers.
Those teeth were silver-white as well, their surfaces covered in frost.
"Marcus, Berserker class. Codename: Frost Wolf."
Elena was the fourth.
When she sat up from the bed, the temperature around her abruptly plummeted.
Her skin became a translucent pallor, as though ice had permeated it. Beneath it, faint golden blood vessels could be seen. No, they were not blood vessels, but some sort of flowing liquid slowly circulating through her body.
That liquid emitted a faint cold glow, like an aurora.
Her hair was still white, but it was no longer ordinary white hair. Every strand had turned into a long, slender, transparent ice crystal, refracting rainbow-colored light beneath the lamps.
The crystalline hair cascaded down and