Chapter 22 #2
"I will peel the fused brass and the necrotic tissue away," Evander continued. "I will expose the bone. And then, using a localized resonance extractor, I will siphon the corrupted aether directly from your marrow. It will be an excruciating, prolonged process. The systemic shock will be absolute."
Drystan turned his cheek against the freezing obsidian. He looked up at the perfect, sociopathic face hovering above him.
He forced his throat to work. He swallowed the pooling, dark blood, fighting the agonizing protest of his torn tissue.
"You're... a parasite," Drystan wheezed. His voice was a horrific, bubbling rasp, barely louder than the hum of the scalpel.
Evander paused. A microscopic flicker of genuine amusement danced in his bright blue eyes.
"I am an optimizer," Evander corrected smoothly.
"I identify inefficiencies in the Script, and I correct them.
You are holding raw, unrefined potential that you lack the biological capacity to fully wield.
Your actions in the Caldera proved that the glitch is powerful, but your body broke under the strain.
I am simply transferring the data to a superior, flawless vessel. "
"You... dropped a mountain... on your own men," Drystan choked out, spitting a speck of crimson onto the pristine white marble floor beneath the slab. "You engineered... a slaughter... just to farm me."
Evander’s smile vanished. The clinical mask hardened into a wall of absolute, untouchable arrogance.
"The Vanguard are assets. They fulfilled their designated localized purpose," Evander stated coldly. "Their deaths provided the necessary friction to elevate your code. I traded twenty-eight expendable lines of data for the key to absolute godhood. It is a perfectly balanced equation."
Evander raised the hard-light scalpel.
He brought the humming blade down toward the charred shoulder joint, preparing to make the first, devastating incision.
Drystan braced for the absolute agony. He locked his jaw, his muscles tensing against the heavy iron restraints. He stared up at Nymeria’s golden cage, anchoring his mind on her amber eyes. He refused to give Evander the satisfaction of a scream.
The scalpel hovered a fraction of an inch above his skin.
Evander stopped.
The golden hero tilted his head, his summer-sky eyes narrowing in sudden, intense irritation. He wasn't looking at the arm. He was listening to the wet, erratic, failing rhythm of Drystan’s breathing.
The punctured right lung was failing. The extreme physical trauma of being dragged from the Caldera, combined with the heavy pressure of the iron band across his back, had exacerbated the injury. Drystan’s cardiovascular system was violently crashing.
"Your heart rate is bottoming out," Evander noted, his melodic voice tight with sudden frustration.
He pulled the scalpel away, deactivating the blade with a sharp, angry flick of his wrist. He tossed the silver handle onto the obsidian slab with a loud clatter.
"The extraction process requires a stable circulatory system," Evander muttered, pacing away from the table. "If your heart stops before I isolate the glitched marrow, the corrupted aether will instantly crystalize. The code will degrade into useless, dead mana-resin."
Drystan let out a pathetic, bubbling laugh.
The irony was exquisite. The Doomed Mid-Boss was dying too fast for the system administrator to harvest him. His broken, pathetic human anatomy was actively sabotaging the grand, flawless spreadsheet.
"You're going to lose the file," Drystan rasped, a bloody smile touching his lips.
Evander stopped pacing. He turned back to the slab. The pristine, surgical calm was completely gone, replaced by the furious, petulant rage of a god who had just been inconvenienced by a rounding error.
"I am not losing anything."
Evander stepped to the right side of the obsidian table. He looked down at the heavy leather duster, ignoring the massive, dark stain of blood covering Drystan’s chest and back.
He didn't use a tool. Evander Cross placed his bare, flawless right hand directly against Drystan’s right ribcage.
"Luminous Mending is designed for the Vanguard," Evander stated, his voice vibrating with absolute, holy authority.
"It is meant to instantly repair localized combat trauma to keep the assets in the fight.
It forces the biological architecture to conform to the divine blueprint.
On a corrupted anomaly, the rejection rate will be spectacularly painful. "
Drystan’s icy gray eyes widened.
Evander didn't give him a second to brace. The golden hero unleashed the spell.
A blinding, localized supernova of pure, weaponized light erupted from Evander’s palm. The holy magic drove straight through the heavy leather duster and directly into Drystan’s chest cavity.
The agony was instantaneous, absolute, and entirely mind-breaking.
It was infinitely worse than the initial break.
Drystan felt the jagged, shattered edges of his rib violently snap backward.
The sound of the bone grinding against itself echoed sharply in the pristine amphitheater like snapping celery.
The holy magic did not gently encourage healing; it brutalized the tissue.
It forced the torn muscle fibers to violently weave themselves back together.
It flash-boiled the pooled blood inside his lung, turning the liquid into searing, localized steam before purging it from his system entirely.
Drystan threw his head back against the freezing obsidian slab.
A raw, inhuman scream tore its way out of his throat. The sound was so violent it tore his vocal cords, drowning out the ambient hum of the surgical lamps. His entire body convulsed against the heavy iron restraints, the metal groaning under the sheer, predatory strength of his agony.
Evander held his hand in place, his face an emotionless mask, completely ignoring the screaming anomaly writhing beneath his palm.
The mending spell lasted for ten excruciating seconds.
Evander severed the connection, pulling his hand away.
Drystan collapsed against the stone, his entire body trembling with aftershocks of localized nerve pain. Sweat poured down his face, mixing with the blood on his chin. He was gasping, his mouth opening and closing like a landed fish.
But the wet, bubbling rattle was gone.
Air—crisp, freezing, lavender-scented air—rushed into his right lung. The airway was completely clear. The organ fully inflated, expanding without a single spike of pain from the rib. The bone was perfectly, flawlessly intact. The tissue was completely fused.
The cardiovascular crash halted immediately.
Drystan lay pinned to the slab, his chest heaving as he dragged massive, greedy gulps of oxygen into his starved bloodstream.
The hypoxic fog that had been clouding his mind for hours violently evaporated.
The corporate, analytical tactician snapped back online with terrifying, high-definition clarity.
"Your vitals are stabilizing," Evander noted, picking the hard-light scalpel back up from the slab. "The host vessel is viable once more. We can begin."
Evander walked back to the left side of the table. He stood over the dead, brass-fused arm, his summer-sky eyes entirely focused on the incision point.
The system administrator had made a profound, arrogant miscalculation.
Evander viewed Drystan’s body as nothing more than a container. He believed the glitched Weave-Interface was an isolated string of code stored strictly in the arm. He failed to understand the foundational reality of the corrupted magic Drystan had harvested in the dark.
The raw, kinetic aether from the Scavenger-Hound wasn't stored in the brass gauntlet. It was integrated directly into Drystan’s circulatory system. It lived in his blood.
For the last three hours, that corrupted blood had been starved of oxygen. It had been dormant, slowly shutting down as the punctured lung failed.
But Evander had just flooded the engine with pure, unadulterated fuel.
As the massive intake of oxygen saturated Drystan’s bloodstream, the dormant glitch woke up.
It didn't just wake up; it recognized the residual Luminous holy magic lingering in his chest as a hostile, invading parasite.
The corrupted aether violently reacted. Drystan felt a sudden, localized surge of kinetic heat deep within his marrow.
The pitch-black veins that had originally mapped his arm after crushing the beast's core began to surface across his entire chest, racing beneath his pale skin like a spreading, volatile infection.
The pain of the forced healing was instantly masked by a tidal wave of raw, predatory adrenaline.
Drystan didn't scream. He didn't thrash against the iron restraints.
The Villain's Valedictorian turned his head slightly. He didn't look at the golden god raising a scalpel to skin him. He looked up at the vaulted ceiling.
He locked his icy gray eyes onto Nymeria Shade, trapped in her golden cage.
She was staring down at him, her hands pressed flat against the hard-light snare. She saw the sudden, terrifying clarity in his gaze. She saw the bruised, bloody lips curl into a microscopic, lethal smirk.
He wasn't dying anymore. The victim was completely erased.
Evander Cross pressed the humming blade of light against the charred flesh of Drystan's shoulder.
"Let's see what you're made of," Evander whispered.
Drystan Harrow tightened his newly oxygenated, predatory core, actively pooling the massive, unregulated glitch racing through his heart, and prepared to show the golden hero exactly what a broken anomaly looked like when it was fully awake.