Epilogue #2
With a sound like tearing canvas and a grotesque spray of biological matter, the skin split wide open.
From the gaping, bloody rupture spilled a heaving mass of raw, undifferentiated flesh that slithered onto the ground, writhing, splitting, and dividing on impact, rapidly shaping itself into three distinct, slime-slicked human forms.
They lay naked for a fraction of a heartbeat, coughing up fluid. But before Lance could even draw breath to scream, the reality-warping mechanics of the system took over entirely.
A violent hum of static energy rattled the air. The literal birth was instantly overwritten by something only someone familiar with the Awakened System could make sense of.
"Finally," one of them groaned, as light flared around all three. Within a millisecond, heavy composite armor plates, laced with glowing mana conduits, snapped into place over their bare skin, summoning a great axe in his hand.
A crystalline staff materialized directly into the waiting palm of the leftmost figure, who had just let out a draconic groan.
On the right, the heavy metallic clack of a high-caliber rifle echoed through the air as a massive, unmistakably powerful weapon materialized straight out of what Lance assumed was the man's personal inventory.
"You..." the killer's eyes widened in horror, recognition dawning. "How?!"
The one with the rifle ignored the question entirely, resting a finger on the trigger for barely a couple of seconds before firing. The recoil and reverberation alone stole a visible chunk of Lance's HP, leaving him to wonder in horror just how devastating that attack actually was.
"Let's not lose sight of the mission, we are to capture him, not kill him," C said to the trio, who glanced back at him, giving Lance the chance to finally register something about them.
Different builds, but the exact same face, currently shared by all four of them.
Currently, because C himself now had two faces, one identical to the other three, and a second one, on the side of his neck.
Lance quickly recognized that the face of the C they knew was a fusion of both.
After casting a giant prison, the one with the staff warned C, "Don't get ahead of yourself, C-422."
The other followed in the move.
"You don't need to remind us of anything."
"You've done your part. Let us handle ours."
The trio left, not even sparing Lance and Rhema a glance as they moved to engage the killer, whose face had twisted into utter horror. That left the two of them alone once more with C, or whoever he actually was.
"You... who are you?" Lance asked, staring at the now dual-faced man, seeing nothing left of the friend they'd traveled with for eight months. "Or maybe I should be asking, what are you?"
???
Somewhere in Tutoria, in a lush, unclaimed stretch of verdant land, stood a castle. Inside it, Hiro was handling a heart.
He held it up to the light, a proper surgical light this time, acquired by C-379 from Nazim, a massive upgrade from the makeshift version he'd cobbled together from first principles after deciding torchlight was frankly an insult to the craft.
He turned the organ slowly between his nimble fingers, inspecting it.
Size-wise, it looked perfect now. He'd been worried about a repeat of the earlier mutation, the incident where healing magic cast on the heart had caused it to swell as it tried returning to its "normal" size, only for all the modifications he'd made to fit it into a human chest to backfire, essentially causing the thing to explode.
This time, even after casting healing on it, there was no sign of that happening.
The lycanthropic chambers had grafted cleanly onto the existing structure, which had been his other major concern, alongside the explosion issue. That particular failure had already cost him four subjects.
"I want to say this looks good, but the color...
" The apex was too dark. Could be early rejection starting.
"Could be donor blood incompatibility—" he muttered, glancing over at the blood donor currently in the room, giving blood at that very moment, before quickly dismissing the thought as unlikely.
He set the heart back into the chest cavity and looked across the table. "How's the pressure?"
"Dropping," said the clone across from him, not looking up from the “monitoring array”.
He had Hiro's face, naturally, they all had Hiro's face, something he'd long since stopped finding strange.
This one also had Hiro's hands, currently busy managing three separate fluid lines running into the patient's subclavian. "We're losing the margin."
"The margin was already thin," said a second clone, the blood donor, perched on a stool near the subject's head, arm extended, a thin line of dark blood running from a puncture at the elbow into a collection vessel feeding directly into the transfusion circuit.
He looked bored, which was fair. Blood donation was boring work. "Want me to push the rate?" he offered.
"Not yet." Hiro reached for the suture kit. "Sebastian, what's the aggregate on donor three?"
"Four hundred and twelve milliliters in the last twenty minutes," the interface reported, its voice coming from everywhere and nowhere at once, in its particular way.
"Donor three is approaching the clinical threshold for mild anemia.
I'd recommend rotating to donor two within the next six minutes. "
"Rotate in four."
"Noted."
The donor clone on the stool let out something close to a sigh, earning a glare from Hiro, who briefly wondered if future clones should be built without whatever capacity gave them the urge to sigh at all.
He didn't blame the clone, exactly. He'd probably have reacted the same way in its position. Still, he considered it might be kinder to strip that particular trait out of future models, since their sole purpose was supplying blood, no reason to make that harder on them than it already was.
"Sebastian, remind me to handle that later."
"Understood, sir," the interface replied, as Hiro turned his focus back to the subject in front of him, also a clone.
"Graft suture," he said, holding out a hand.
An assistant beside him placed the instrument in his palm without being asked, one of the more practical perks of working alongside versions of himself.
Anticipating his needs was nearly perfect between them.
Same training, same decade of surgical residency crammed into fabricated memory, same instinct for what came next before it was even said aloud.
He worked in silence, or near enough, one of the assistants having put on music with a strange, resonant quality that echoed through the castle. Hiro was eleven sutures into the graft when the lines flatlined.
No escalation. No warning cascade. The monitoring clone opened its mouth, presumably to say something useful, but by the time the first word came out, the patient was already gone, the lycanthropic heart sitting motionless in the open chest cavity.
"Hm," Hiro murmured, setting down his instrument.
He stared at the chest a moment, trying to piece together what had gone wrong this time, when his Personal Interface spoke up. "I have an important report. It's from Clone-422."
Pulling off his gloves, "Close him up," he ordered.
"He's dead," the clone he'd assigned the task to pointed out.
"I know. Close him up anyway. We're not animals." He made his way to the sink, mentally noting, again, that maybe giving a little more empathy to these variants of clones wouldn't hurt.
"Sebastian, I'm listening," he said, washing his hands with automatic thoroughness, as the interface reported that the mission was complete. They'd captured the problematic bastard who'd ruined so many of his clones.
"Tell them I'm eager to meet our troublesome hero," Hiro told the interface. "I'll start preparations to receive him properly."
"At once, sir. Though there's something else I need to report. Regarding the other otherworlders."
"The other otherworl— oh, them. They saw what happened, didn't they?"
"They did."
He winced. "That's a problem. If they know about the clones, it's only a matter of time before the rest of the world, mainly my fellow otherworlders, finds out too.
I simply cannot allow that, can I?" he said to the interface, which stayed silent.
"Bring them here. I'll arrange a proper welcome for them. "