Breaking Free of the Cage

"Besides blood draws and tissue samples, they also conducted high-temperature tolerance tests.

They put me in a completely sealed metal chamber and pumped high-temperature steam through pipes in the walls, measuring the expression threshold of my Fireproof Sequence at different temperatures.

At the highest setting, the thermometer on the chamber wall showed that the temperature inside had already surpassed the melting point of ordinary steel.

I stayed in that chamber for nearly two hours. They wanted to keep testing at even higher temperatures, but the chamber itself could no longer withstand it. That test ruined the experimental chamber."

...They also made me fight a Giant prisoner.

That Giant had been captured from the waters near Elbaf. One punch from him could blast through an armored plate.

They injected him with a drug that temporarily disabled his pain receptors, so he would not have to worry about recoil injuring him when he punched.

I fought that Giant for several hours, and they recorded the data from the entire battle."

"Where is that Giant now?"

"Dead. Because of the drug's side effects. The pain blocker they used on him was still in the testing stage. Long-term use caused irreversible dissolution of the myocardial fibers.

After he died, they moved his body to an autopsy room on one of the upper levels. I don't know what happened after that."

Kaido fell silent for a moment.

He had seen victims of human experimentation on both Hachinosu and at Marine Headquarters. Back then, Rocks had intercepted several half-destroyed experimental files from the Marine Science Unit, and what those files recorded was almost identical to what Abel was describing now.

After reading through those files, he had thrown them into the fire. Not out of sympathy, but because he thought those experiments were "too damn low."