🇺🇸 CHAPTER 21: THE FIRST STEP OF REST
Subject 198 locked his sensory grid onto the distant horizon, watching the sunset bleed out as three faint, phantom moons materialized across the dark sky, casting fluid silver paths across the petrified glass earth. Looking into the empty expanse, a rare wave of physical relief expanded through his core, systematically soothing the high-tension neural fibers that had been stretched like drawn bows inside his processor. Following the cataclysmic stimulation of the deathmatch, a rhythmic, dull numbness began to erupt, traveling up from his peripheral appendages—specifically from all seven of his newly replicated limb configurations. The paralysis advanced with mechanical precision, expanding across every remaining coordinate of his four-armed frame.
He registered the creeping numbness transition into a sharp, deep-seated burning agony. Subject 198’s anatomy convulsed violently under the internal bone trauma, triggering a severe wave of systemic failure accompanied by absolute metabolic exhaustion—the visceral collapse of a physical engine forced far beyond its biological parameters. His eight operational eyes grew heavy, the sừng lids closing against his grid. He directed his fading line of sight toward the darkening canopy with a vacant, wiped processor, his cognitive nodes entirely spent after burning through their remaining chemical reserves.
He locked his optics. Slid into the absolute darkness of stasis, he began to dream.
The data streaming through his subconscious mapped a distant epoch, long before his frame was cast down into the meat-grinder of the Outcast world. Inside the simulation, he occupied a maintenance berth deep within a warship belonging to the Blood Empire. The overhead blocks fired a cold, blinding white illumination that cascaded downward across the matte alloy plates of massive server arrays. At this baseline coordinate, his physical shell was undergoing automated diagnostics conducted by a mechanical maintenance drone, while his central ego existed strictly as a raw biological brain anchored to a solitary spinal column, floating suspended inside a transparent glass cylinder filled with pressurized nutrient fluid. Lined across the synthetic bulkheads of the vessel were infinite rows of identical incubation tubes, a continuous matrix of disembodied brains stretching into the dark vacuum.
Concluding the calcified structural repairs, the maintenance drone retracted its manipulators and departed the bay. Sensing his neural pathways and central nervous assembly re-engage their connections with the mechanical chassis, Subject 198 initialized his systems. Instantly, a fresh directive block was pushed directly from the warship's information database, and he propelled his chassis toward the bio-processing hub.
He navigated a network of elongated corridors forged from a specialized Mythril alloy matrix. The structural plates had been treated with gravitational acceleration tech, engineered through a non-linear process that injected virtual electrons into the molecular bonds to permanently negate the mass vectors. Running along the structural columns were sprawling arterial conduits transporting a dense, viscous fluid that blended neon-green and pink matrices, continuously pulsing as it pumped biological resources to the lower sectors of the vessel.
Halting before the primary chamber, an automated optical array extended from the ceiling bulkhead, tracking a violent red scan line across his frame.
Processing environmental metrics... Verifying systemic identity codes...
Match confirmed.
The heavy alloy vault hissed under pressure and slid aside, allowing Subject 198 to cross into the core hub. Nestled at the center of the chamber was a gargantuan mechanical basin packed with vertical iron rods submerged under a boiling chemical solution that vented thick sheets of toxic vapor, which were instantly reclaimed by a lower filtration matrix to be dội-ed back down into the reservoir.
He moved without data feedback, occupying his designated operational coordinate. Packed across the perimeter were hundreds of identical terminal nodes, where endless clones of his species executed matching processing tasks, shifting like vacant automatons beneath the dead light of the hub. The mechanical systems embedded within Subject 198’s humanoid frame shifted, mutating a third of his sừng-arm array into a heavy hydraulic claw. He manipulated the asset, driving the clamp forward to wrench a rectangular iron bar out of the boiling solution, shifting the payload onto an adjacent transport belt to be processed down the line.
Immediately following the transfer, the shift-cycle sequence executed with absolute precision. The residual mass of his mechanical framework began to contract, collapsing its physical volume. To shield the centralized biological brain nesting at his core, his primary joints executed a rapid sequence of structural transformations, compacting his frame into a rigid, rectangular metal brick. The ship’s automated handling matrix grabbed his compressed block with crushing force, dropping his mass down a vertical guide chute until it slammed into an empty socket along the mainframe hub, filling the void to initialize his subsequent data shift.
Subject 198 could distinctly feel the high-density fiber lines from the ship's information database driving billions of raw information streams directly into his cranial tissue. The massive data payload flooded his processor, analyzed in real-time according to pre-calculated sub-routines, before being exported back into the grid as foundation data to sustain the collective calculations of the vessel's unified AI consciousness.
A sudden, violent jolt shattered his stasis loop, and Subject 198 jolted awake to find the sun dead-center in the sky. It was midday. The exact second his conscious mind re-engaged, a wave of apocalyptic pain càn quét across his nerves. Subject 198 chật vật to assume a vertical stance, but his physical motor controls operated with severe, dragging latency—mirroring an uncalibrated machine where a full two-second delay occurred between his cranial command and the muscle contraction. Registering the hazardous degradation of his frame, he forced his limbs to move, manipulating his body like an operator guiding a high-tier avatar across a terminal with absolute baseline hardware—it required an extensive duration simply for the physical feedback to register within his awareness.
He dragged his spine upward, staring down at the gargantuan crustacean abomination pinned beneath his weight. Subject 198 sat up, commanding Silas, his belly appendage, to begin harvesting the meat, only to realize the auxiliary mouth had absorbed too much kinetic trauma from the mallets; the muscle filaments were entirely pulverized, stripped of all motor capacity. He was forced to deploy his upper sừng-hands, chật vật driving his nails deep into the monster's carapace to peel away a series of thin armor plates. Wrenching those thin sừng sheets away from the raw muscle tissue triggered an agonizing, grinding friction that mirrored the physical sensation of a human forcefully tearing his own living toenail out of the nail bed with his fingers.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Thwack!
Exerting the absolute threshold of his hand strength, he managed to shear the armor plate free from the meat. Examining the exposed tissue block beneath the shell, Subject 198 recorded that the muscle strands possessed a vibrant, high-density red pigmentation, significantly deeper than the flesh profile of the previous variants he had harvested. He bypassed the biological variance for now, using the jagged sừng plate as a makeshift blade to slice into the flesh. Through some bizarre biological matrix, the living muscle yielded with zero resistance, slicing as effortlessly as a blade cutting through a congealed cream cake; he had anticipated an incredibly fibrous, rubbery texture and had over-compensated his downward torque, the extreme force tearing a long, jagged strip out of the limb.
As he was monitoring the irregular density of the meat, Subject 198 readied his blade to harvest a secondary block when a low, systemic vibration rippled through the core of the carcass, as if the entire five-meter framework was contracting in response to the localized cutting trauma.
The entity was active.
Subject 198 automatically reached for his broken mallet-axe to bludgeon the remains, but his arm froze mid-motion as his analytical nodes stalled. He questioned his own parameters: How am I supposed to permanently terminate this organism? This calcified thing possesses zero centralized organ systems and lacks a localized brain assembly; how does one execute a biological shutdown? Furthermore, through what formula did I terminate the baseline hand-cluster variants? They lacked vital organs as well; mapping my historical logs, every single kill was finalized strictly by bludgeoning their limbs until their appendages lost all motor capacity, or their systems suffered absolute failure after absorbing too much macro-trauma.
Then how was this crustacean abomination sustaining its vitals at this coordinate? He had personally deployed his mallets to systematically atomize every individual tentacle it possessed.
The exact millisecond that logical paradox cleared his rãnh não, a sudden, blinding flash of agony detonated within his skull. The localized trauma drove deep into his central nervous assembly, mimicking the horrific physical feedback of an ancient, primitive pre-frontal lobotomy driven straight into the cranium. (This was an absolute, surgical procedure deployed in ancient history to neutralize madness; the mechanical reality verified that if the operation succeeded, the subject permanently lost all emotional capacity, rendered a vacant shell to erase the hysteria. The practice has been completely banned, and any modern execution of the method occurs in absolute secrecy to avoid immediate imprisonment).
Agony blinding his sensory grid as his brain convulsed, Subject 198 locked his stance to arrest the tremors, yet the neural overload compounded with every cycle. Right at the threshold of absolute blackout, the trauma peaked; he permanently terminated all analytical thought paths, forcing his brain into a completely blank, processing-free stasis until the agony ceased its expansion.
Purging all logic loops, Subject 198 simply cut a raw block of flesh from the quivering tentacle and rammed it directly into Silas, which currently hung flaccid like a loose, unstrung tube beneath his belly. He collapsed flat onto the glass earth, using his primary upper hands to forcefully point the dead cylinder of Silas straight up toward the canopy, allowing gravity to guide the raw meat down the pipeline until it slid into his flattened stomach cavity.
He registered the progress of a standard digestive loop initializing within his stomach, accompanied by an immediate influx of dense, raw vitality traveling through his capillaries to hit his brain, allowing his processor to re-engage minor cognitive calculations. He could map the nutrient current spreading across his frame, but an anomaly emerged: this raw vitality was being incinerated with terrifying, unnatural velocity. The energy bar was not being redirected to patch his widespread tissue tears; rather, the dense energy current seemed to be cannibalizing itself, burning through its own molecular bonds without yielding a repair matrix.
Operating on survival instinct, Subject 198 continuously harvested and swallowed additional flesh blocks from the carcass. After an extensive duration of this frantic feeding sequence, having incinerated nearly two kilograms of the predator's raw muscle, the internal energy wave finally ceased its self-cannibalization, pivoting to reconstruct his shattered framework. The vitality surged through his marrow, fusing his fractured bone struts back into alignment—the repair script tracking from his legs, up his arms, through his cranial vault, and across his torso; the skeletal welding loop finalized after a prolonged duration, allowing the current to flood his global muscle sheets.
A sharp ache began vibrating through his entire muscular network. However, following the sudden retreat of the energy wave, his somatic cells received zero additional mending; the vitality bars had merely established a temporary bridge to anchor his broken bones and torn muscles, ensuring his injuries would not collapse into fatal degradation before the current went completely dark.
Perceiving the absolute disappearance of the internal energy pool, a spike of severe alarm hit Subject 198; he failed to map the mechanics governing his Outcast biology. He frantically sliced and swallowed more flesh blocks, but his stomach and tongue recorded zero metabolic feedback from the biomass. A long duration drifted across the clearing before a faint, its dynamic trace of vitality lờ mờ returned to his sensors; Subject 198 monitored the current, processing the reality that his biology had slid into a restrictive, sluggish recovery filter that was vastly inferior to his previous generation metrics.
He collapsed his mass back down across the mangled tentacle of the prey, staring up at the canopy while angling his optics away from the direct glare of the sun. He analyzed the sky, which currently radiated a deep, morbid crimson coloration due to the hemorrhaged blood pooling inside his own eye tissue—a stark contrast to the standard ocean-blue sky native to this coordinate.
Subject 198 concentrated his neural paths, firing a communication signal deep into his mind to locate Pain. However, registering the absolute devastation and exhaustion paralyzing Pain’s mental framework, he permanently terminated the link, allowing the entity to remain undisturbed within the dark zones of his mind. It appeared that the core of Pain’s consciousness was entirely occupied with absorbing and processing the raw data files of the final, close-quarters combat sequence that had unfolded right before Subject 198 blacked out. This calculated data-hogging explained why Subject 198 carried zero memory logs of the combat sequence following their initial front-facing charge yesterday; the entire file had been isolated by Pain for background processing.
Sensing a secondary wave of systemic exhaustion drag at his motor nerves, Subject 198 allowed his remaining sừng lids to close. He surrendered his frame back into the expanding dark, abandoning his physical controls to slide into the quiet embrace of deep stasis to compile his resources.
(End of Chapter 21)