The woman stood in a plain brown dress to her knees and black combat boots, holding her side where blood was blossoming from. She slowly put down the gun.

“…baby?” Her familiar eyes squinted and her jaw dropped. “…my baby?”

“Mama, what the ?”

“He was going to hurt the hybrid,” she snapped.

At that moment Soonyoung burst forth from his cage, draping himself over Seokmin in an attempt to pull him up, still screaming.

Jihoon simply sat there, staring at his mother in disbelief.

Then suddenly Soonyoung was racing at her – before Jihoon could move to stop him the small tiger hybrid had ripped a chunk out of the woman’s bloody stomach before she managed to hit him with a syringe, making him hit the ground instantly.

“Mama?! What the are you doing to my friends?!” Jihoon held up the gun again out of instinct.

“Don’t worry. It’s a hybrid serum. He’ll sleep for hours.” She looked up, tears in her eyes as she struggled to walk forward. “…my baby? My Jihoonie?”

“Mama…” Thousands of questions swirled through Jihoon’s head – two blaring in grand alarm (number one, where was Seungcheol, number two, am I dying?) and others in vague distress (why did you kill my friend and where the have you been the past twenty-odd years?). The boy gripped his head against the headache.

His mother froze, eyes widening. “…you’re… not well.”

“I’m changing,” the boy managed to grunt out between gnashed teeth. “What the is happening to me?!” he burst out into tears, stinging and aching riddling him through. “What is happening to me, mama?!”

She began to struggle forward again, obviously trying to reach the chair next to her long-lost son, gripping the bloody gash in her side. “I never… thought… I’d see you… again. Never thought… you’d reach… adulthood.”

“Mama?!”

“Stay still.” She made her way to a cabinet and pulled out a vial, loading it into her syringe.

Jihoon backed away naturally, letting the wheels of his computer chair take him away. “What the ?!” he managed to spit.

“…this will give you time,” she panted, eyebrows rocking up in desperation. “I need to give you time.”

“Time for what?”

“Before you expire.”

“Expire?!”

“…you’re a hybrid, Jihoon.”

As many mothers, Mrs. Lee was not a woman to be trifled with: nor was she the kind of person easily swayed by the impending death of her son and only child or a bloody gash that had ripped her body open. These matters she took simple care of with a syringe and a first aid kit.

Jihoon was on something closely resembling an operating table as the aching soothed inside his head, his blood began to cool slightly and all the bleeding ceased.

“I don’t know how long this will stave off the maturity,” she admitted, using a baby wipe to casually clean blood off her hands. “…thirty hours, if you’re lucky.”

“Mama… you have some explaining to do.”

Her face has been matured by fate; her hair was going grey and her skin was dull and wrinkled. The world had not been kind to her, obviously. When she sighed and wheeled her chair to sit beside her son, it was as if the weight of the planet lay upon her shoulders.

Her eyes reflected a remorse that was chained deeper in her soul than any emotion Jihoon had witnessed in another person. “…there’s so much to tell you. Jihoon… things that happened long before you were born… things that happened too long ago…”

“Try.” The sarcasm and cutting edge of the boy’s unimpressed demand brought a smile to his mother’s worn-out face.

“…your father was not a bad man, Lee Jihoon,” she whispered. “He’d worked for the police force all his life. He’d seen too many dark things, baby, too many dark things.” She picked up her son's hand, staring at it as she told her story.

“I was Jang Doyoon’s assistant when he was young. I helped him create the first hybrids – beautiful creatures. We thought we were enhancing the human race. Giving men and women cuter appearances and heightened senses. We thought we were going to save the planet… We should have known that a world which ousts its own people based on their skin colour could never be a world where hybrids were accepted. But we learned too late. We learned far too late…

“The government took control of the labs, the project, everything. We were forced under contract with them. It was the highest dictation. Doyoon… it was breaking him apart. He was ordered to do all kinds of experiments, try all sorts of… monstrosities… it was eating away at him. He didn’t want it. Didn’t want any of it.

“…your father and I didn’t agree on the hybrid situation. He’d seen too many bad hybrids. When a hybrid failed, became feral, it usually escaped and the police were left to deal with the creature. Of course he couldn’t see them as we saw them… he didn’t understand…

“…when I became pregnant, Doyoon and I saw an out. We realized what my baby could be. Who he could be. The hybrid issue was escalating, not declining as we’d hoped. It was spiralling out of control with documents leaked and DNA samples patented… the world was at war, briefly, over the creatures. We just wanted a better earth and we ed up.”

Her brow furrowed in pain, as if the destruction she had witnessed was playing in front of her eyes over and over again.

“…I realized too late. That I was pregnant. So late. Too late. It was… the DNA was supposed to be implanted before the 8th week, and I was already at nine. We had to hurry… we didn’t think it would work… We used the lop-eared rabbit. Rabbit DNA seemed to take far easier, with less complications than others. If we were to have any chances, that was it.

“In a few days we had our answer. The DNA had taken. And even without a synthetic environment… inside me you were still growing normally. So… we began our work to create the greatest soldier the world had seen. The one to halt wars. The one to end the tyranny of the government, of the president himself. He was going to succeed where we were to fail. He was going to save the world.

“We gave him… DNA of the chimpanzee for agility, and the salmon for strength. Chameleon, for camouflage. Dolphin for intelligence. We gave him the DNA of the jaguar for spee