Vanes opened her eyes, finding nothing that would send back light up or around her. Except a downed body a few steps behind her. Despite his physical changes in size and stature, that form was still quite reconisable to her even if she couldn't feel it's presence. Quickly bounding for it, their still new leg muscles pulled themselves towards the body, a speed that'd normally dislocate gusts of wind behind the tall elf.
He was dead. Several holes in his stomach, his chest didn't rise and fall, his left eye had become a bloody mess and several more small perforations found themselves in....
'Nes, is that you? Don't do anything to my body! I'm just pretending, everything will be fine!'
The voice echoed all around, several somethings appearing in the sides of her vision before rapidly dissapearing.
"Thank fuck." The breath she didn't know she'd been holding was released as she fell to her knees. "You own me one." She murmured in a low voice while studying the body again. This was likely what gun wounds looked like.
'I already own you a lot. Can i make up for this one with the best date ever?' He scoffed, the impression of great white halls and the ringing of metal ringing on her mind.
"If you want to treat me like a girlfriend then you might also want to start taking up some rites in my place. I'm sure morale would go up if the 'God of Pride' was the one actually presiding our first rites. Your chalengers are also quite the pain to deal with, you know?" She pouted as she sat down and hugged her knees, watching the 'corpse' regenerate into a naked Aki. His height wasn't the only thing that'd grown, she noted.
'Yes mom! I'd always planned to, but it's not like i can come any sooner. You know that i would spend however many years are needed to finish our contrat the fastest were i given the chance.' He sighed, a whole world of sights and smiles showed themselves clearly to her at that moment.
"Good thing you're contract bound then." She roled her eyes, a small blush painting her face and ears as she thought of her part in the contract. "I also started to receive prayers in some language i can't understand recently though, so would his majesty explain that to me please?" She deflected.
'Well, you see, i kind of had to conquer a weaker human kingdom on a fallen realm so i could get rid of a curse and... now that i think about it, you should probably not be here, it's very dangerous. I did some unsavory things and am currently going through my punishment.' His voice was suddenly very cold. Vanes furrowed her browns.
"Are you feeling ok?"
'Honestly? Not really. I accidentaly killed someone. Me. Accidentaly.' All hell broke loose as he said so, and it stayed there, a giant claw made of lava lifting what sounded like a screaming woman, suddenly turning into chains spreading her limbs akimbo in the air. 'You, make the survailance of the rooms we're at in show some kind of loop feed of you searching my mind, i will know if you do something else, so prepare for a lot of pain, this doesn't get better. Where was i? Right, i needed to be captured without people thinking me too big a threat, so i went on a rampage near a police station, i told you about those, right? Anyways, it was going great, civilians with minimal damage, though maybe i scared them too much. But THEN these little things people put on my body screwed with me, tried to take control of my body and i accidentaly hit this guy on the head while i fought it back, almost died myself when someone ambushed me in a mad dash, sans looking like an actual corpse while i pretended to be one.' He explained, completely ignoring the screams coming from up high, showing that the person that'd entered his head was trying one thing after the other to get out of his control.
"You know, had i not spent so long talking about random stuff with you i might have thought you cared only about the fact something else forced you to kill." She sighed, letting herself go and bending her back down to kiss his forehead. Turning into motes of light, the high elf found herself back in front of a command table, guards on her sides and all waiting for her conciousness to be back.
'Sorry dove, too tired to do three things at the same time. Need to be a better god to have a perfect half like you.'
He sent his daily message, spoken in an english accent she did not know, though it was kind of funny, both their moods seeming to have improved as the message came together with a mental image of him happily holding his sister in pride towards her.
*****
When Aki opened his eyes, he ignored the two man cutting and proding his insides, waiting for them to close him up properly before sitting up and getting off the dissection table.
Stepping on the bloodied floor, he didn't even look at the doctors he'd made kill themselves with whatever they had, walking outside of the room he asked the woman still connected to him for directions. The guards outside had been knocked out by receiving shocks through the door anyway, so he only had to quicly kneel down to stab one of his hands into their necks each, walking forward after taking a silenced pistol for himself.
"Now, where's the research or data storage facility? I need proper control of these nanobots if i want to live you know?" He coldly said with none of the humor his words would suggest. It'd been rather fortunate someone had tried to enter his mind with a diving equipment, otherwise his helper would be way less useful.
'I... I don't know.' Replied the strained voice holding some anger behind all of that.
"Then figure it out. I'm buck naked and covered in blood, so my mood isn't good. Try to escape again and i will be leeking your adress in the first social net i find instead of bothering to punish you. Good luck on going full immersion by the way, it'd make you even more vulnerable. Sorry if i'm talking too much, i just literally have nothing else to do while i boil in my mind." He said, knocking out all the guards nearby as he talked, the cameras and other sensors debilitated already.
His voice was a constant, complaining and comenting on anything he could think of. The situation was entirely under his control, sure, but he'd never believed for a second that the robots eating him alive were the main focus of the dungeon if there were no enemies that could not even reach S rank stats in the dungeon, which would be the general level of power needed to get rid of the current him.
Maybe if he went against a whole squadron ussing rail guns or had to evade orbital artilery he'd be in real danger, but otherwise, his magic could keep him alive by the sheer weight of the fact that his powers were not understood.
Survival in a dungeon world was not as simple as evading all dangers however. Normally there'd be a main quest forcing you to go with the flow the system dictated, but with none of that around, there'd likely be something making sure he was going through the expected route one way or another, nevermind that this was too lenient a punishment for his crimes.
In other words, that ment he needed to use every card he had at hand, including his 'curse'. For that, he needed access to codes for modifying the creations of the things inside of him.
They were too slow, too inneficient, and more importantly, didn't listen to him.
Killing his way foward, Aki tried several things to fix any of those problems himself. He'd previously slowed down the bots with a mockery of a true anathema, something he could literaly not even imagine thanks to being born without one as far as he'd seen, but he still had other tricks to play. Filling his body with the concept of control and creation for example.
Simple in concept, but very likely to back fire by explosion or megalomania depending on the kind of failure his mind commited. That ment he needed to raise his INT and SPR stat. Preferably some twenty five points. Though he barely knew how to get some nineteen added points, it'd have to be a start.
Stopping his advance, Aki leaned against a wall, sighing at what he was about to do. It'd hurt like a bitch, and maybe feel similar to a succesful suicide for all he knew. He'd not perish here simply because he was being picky though.
*Crack*
His eyes became cold and dead like a corpse, his concentration entirely on his soul as he bashed it against his bondaries.
*Cracrack*
There was no pain. It was so very freeing that it felt wrong, like he could just stop and everything would be fine.
*Thunk Thunk Cra...*
He kept at it, the lack of meaning irrelevant for his crazed and cracked soul as it laughed, the metaphysical occurences representing his understandings of the things happening beyond his perception range perhaps just as crazy as what was actually happening.
*CRACK*
'Well, ok, that lie crumbled quickly.' He commented, humor barely registering to his trembling mind.
There was a series of system notification in front of him, the rows of words in a white box floating in his perception now looking like the bait light of an anglerfish attached to his face. The comparison most likely came from yet another reference to an author/artist that called his fans like so, but the system anchor was definetly an ugly parasite snaking through his body and soul, though he'd just riped appart a good chunk of the thing by releasing his perception from it's filters.
The sixteen points in perception certainly helped too, though he was definetly being constantly damaged from looking at the dimentional fabric, feeling complete air and magic flows and so on. He needed to get his inteligence to solid Z rank.
Grunting, Aki pushed himself from the wall he'd spent two minutes laying against and took a step forward, feeling everything around him, including his trembling brain, several parts of which seemed to have just realised they should be functioning slightly diferent they they currently were. For whatever reason, that got him a whole point in the stat currently in question despite the fact he was clearly crying cerebral fluid and blood.
Healing himself was fortunetaly easy after part of his concentration was released from dealing with the pain. You were aparently NOT ment to care for it so much. The concept had always been there for him ever since he'd first heard about it, but truly understanding it was only possible after breaking through even more restrictions.
Luckily he didn't need a stop command to deal with what came after.
With his captive dead thanks to his need for an upgrade though, he needed further directions. Leaping forward with slight empowerment from his energy, which was being supercharged by the surrounding electricity he absorbed at a slow and constant pace, Aki easily bore through several steel doors that were suddenly closing down as the survailance system noticed his path of destruction.
While he may have only heard a bit of the directions about reaching the rooms he needed to reach, he could still remenber them despite his recent mental ginastics. That's not where he was going though.
Breaching a certain door sized metal alloy set of barricades, the young man didn't go in imediatly, instead hitting the one person he felt inside with a small mental blast. They were simply too important, or so a soul with so much brain power would suggest, to have some weak weapon with them after all.
Quickly taking the woman in question away from what seemed like a rifle getting ready to shoot plasma at him, Aki noted this seemed to be an observatory room with several reinforced glasses currently shut in a way he could in no way perceive through them. That was worrying. Looking at her name tag, it seemed that she was the head researcher around.
"Did you work with the nanobots?" He asked while focusing on making sure she'd answer truthfully after he released her throat slightly. It was kind of strange to hold a human after he started to perceive more, but she was most certainly not 'bearing the plague'.
"Yes" She said, seemingly fighting a sudden headache as he used his powers. She'd likely been the target with the highest spirit and inteligence who he'd ever used hypnosis on after all, so he'd never really seen such an effect.
He lowered her to the ground, holding her left shoulder with enough strenght to pressure her down and hurt the limb bellow it.
"Good, that means you live. Now, open the viewing window. I am curious how the others fared." He sighed, walking calmly and still influencing the woman who kept resisting his domination. Her slow tapping of a code on a terminal ended with him having to crush the bone in his grasp a bit. "Open it. I'm not just influencing your body. Surface thoughts, specially those strong enough as yours, are quite obvious even without magic." He again sighed, not minding the wait as she opened the viewing window with one hand. There was even blood on her pretty lips as she bit her cheek to try and resist/ in anger. "Wow. And you really don't feel shit about this." Fixatedly looking at the rooms below with every way he could think of, Aki saw the other experiments. "It's decided, you're coming with me." He nodded.