"... And so i noticed that yes, i am in fact, very lucky. This begs the question, what would have even happened were i not? Of course, the karmic tie infers that without all my good karma i'd be more likely to not face all the bad things either, however Occan and Murphy would both point that i'd also be quite dead."
Elizabeth honestly fealt like this was torture. Not only was the blodied subject treating her like a sack of potatoes as he leizuraly carried her outside the facility with killing guards with high energy discharges coming from his FUCKING FINGERS, but he also would not. Stop. Talking.
She'd honestly hoped the on site detonation would begin any second now, but his off hand comment about having made it inefective seemed to hold more and more credit the closer they got to an exit. Even her kill switch had been shown to her after some time of walking, broken under his heel.
There hadn't even been any pain from her spine being cut open and the removal of the whole circuitry implanted to it, which not only took the thing keeping her hostage away, but also most of her mods'.
"I do have to ask though, is it so hard to neutralize mods that you'd leave yourself so exposed? Like, i get the need for keeping yourself biological and all that which would end up making the person a ship of theseus, medical problems aside, but couldn't you have some kind of back up for your eyes and legs? Or just make yourselves harder to kill by adding some redundancies that would allow for momentary retention of life support despite high levels of damage? Seem kind of useless when there should be so much money involved in this whole thing. Anyways, could you maybe do a whole surgery on someone else were you to be in perfect condition?" He asked, only the last part actually backed by any seriousness despite the fact that he'd killed over a dozen people in the mean time if her blurry eyes could tell her anything.
"Me? Yeah, sure, if you slap yourself to a table i could even upgrade you too." She scoffed.
"Good to know. We will be working on my nanobots later, i finally decided what to do with them. The modifications can only take off a week at a time at most though, so buckle up because you're going to be working overtime for a while. On the bright side, i'm likely the best subject you could ask for in this project." He coldly informed her, the sun hitting her skin as he finally destroyed an actual exit. Then nothing.
She was preparing to complain about being manhandled and such, but when her voice left her throat, no sound was produced, the sudden blackness clearly not just a visual effect.
'He's likely using a device to create true invisibility and lowering a layer or another to utilise a ping so he knows where he's going. This is going to take a while.'
'Ha, someone finaly guessed that! It has nothing to do with some stupid mojo. It will be great to have you on the team, i am sure we will come up with quite the nice circuitry and codes for spellwork and enchanting, which before you ask, work pretty much as coding on air and pure energy.'
'WHAT?! How are you speaking in my mind without my implants being active?!'
'Translating to something you can understand? Direct energy manipulation causing neuro sintatic messages to your receptors or something along those lines, this isn't my original language, sorry.'
That made no sense. Nothing known to men could ever do that, not an A.I nor a super computer could create temporary access ports and simply function like a ninja at the same time! No, to begin with, they'd be unable to do the first because it's simply outside of their area of interfearance, while the second would need an agent with minimum requirements to be overwriten.
'Well, yeah, it's because i'm forcing a technique that should probably not work on this world. You can't see it, but the whole block around that base went totally black out because i converted electricity into mana. There's simply not enough around being produced around here because of balance and the amount of potential energy being turned towards technology i guess. By the way, no, i'm not from this planet or solar system at all. Still human though.'
*****
Basically sending his captive for a long ride, Aki stopped paying much attention to her mind. The woman was clearly not adapting too well to finally finding things that she was unable to understand.
After seeing the on site subjects for the nanobot technology, he had been very disgusted, and the thought of killing the one besides him crossed his mind.
He could not let his feelings for the children stop his survival however, he needed the crazy cientist in his arms to fix him a new foci for reinforcing his body. The best he could offer those not yet brain dead was a quick death before he burned their corpses so as to ensure the project would not easily be continued by their captors.
It would not matter however, they'd likely be too dead to even try acting on such projects soon enough.
Ferris was waiting for him in a nice enough villa in the middle of nowhere, far from the city, so he had to store energy for the road, sans taking some time around before blowing any pursuer off by leaping around. Since he was only jumping into platforms he'd telekinectically created, there was simply nothing left for the aircrafts, police cars, snipers and reapers to follow after he turned his comunicator off.
He knew the government of this place was likely related to the researchs in some way or the other, so he wasn't terribly surprised to see military jets and floating tanks going around searching for him while he crosed he power plants either, but after he raeched the plains, there was simply very little use in any such search.
Maybe if he was afraid of an information tipe existence showing out of nowhere or some hunting tipe A.I came, then he'd not go directly towards his hidding place, but such things simply had no place where he currently was, the former unlikely to even give a shit about his existence were it to even track him for it's recording of events.
The underground bunker that'd previously been caled a 'villa', however, was certainly living up to it's fame though, since it somehow had such a perfect facilities for survival on an apocalipse, including state of the art medical facilities.
Ironically enough, miss heart of steel wasn't at all confused by having to operate herself through his hands and vision, aparently considering it something every good doctor/bioengeneer should be able to do. Surprise surprise, only crazy people did that. She was, however, surprised to learn that she could already not betray Aki, having become phisicaly uncapable of striking him as she tried to take control of him after her surgery was done.
"Do you remenber when i told you to get the observation windows open? You blacked out for a second after that, and that's when i took over your soul, which again, exists, you just don't have the equipment to detect the spectrum it uses to affect the material world." He told the woman polishing her eye while it was out of it's socket and looking silently at him with the other.
He'd not paid much attention to it, but Elizabeth didn't have much 'human' remaining on her body despite looking like one of the few people without circuitry on her face and limbs. Beneath her 'skin', there was another dermic layer that was completely black, something he guessed had to do with protection and effective energy usage. It'd likely need few adjustments to be converted into magitech, though maybe they'd need to perform a gradual material exchange.
"Welcome to the club!" Comented the other player from the entrace of the door. He wasn't much interested in the woman with several scars on her front and back though. Some did sugest a breast removal with intentional scarring however, so Aki wasn't even able to guess wether those were from an enemy or self inflicted wounds.
"So now i am your slave." She affirmed, putting back the eye to her socket and checking all functions in rapid sucesion. "What does that entail? What do you want me to make?"
"Honestly? Nothing. I really just want to pluck your soul out of your body and destroy it so you never get the chance of ruining so many lives again." He shrugged, getting a small twitch from the woman, who seemed to want to say something about her research yet found herself unable to. "What i need, however, is to make sure i can use the thingies on my body to become more powerful, otherwise i die, which nowadays also means the both of you die. Your soul is extinguished and then poof, you're suddenly a vegetable whose brain will forget to breath unless something prompts the bodily instincts to keep doing it. Hell if i know what'd happen to Jones there though." He shrugged, hand on the cold shoulder of the woman. "So how is a normal subject supposed to use these?"
"With a connection module that works on the whole medula. It's supposed to only be instaled on the subjects of higher compatability however, which we keep in a certain facility which also stores the bodies of the lesser experiments that are released back to society in order to study their specific evolutions before disposal. The one that housed the lead researcher of the project." She coldly told him before removing his hand from her shoulder.
"Shame i incinerated them all then. Still don't regret it though. Do you know how those worked and can you adapt one to a constantly changing body if i teach you biomancy and enchanting? Yes, those are exactly what the names suggests, changing a body and a material's properties depending on your expertise. With your hands it should be easy to get engraving right, so when we're out of here you can upgrade yourself to an inhuman level all you want, but first we need to focus on making me strong enough to survive whatever it is that is going to happen here." He explained with much the same coldness.
"What are you so scared off? You got in and out of a heavily fortified military grade base on your own with ease. There's little in this world you should fear." Scoffed the scientiest as she started to prepare some equipment on a table, several monitors being brought to light pointing towards her wanting to analize Aki's body.
"We've basically been sent here to die by something that knows exactly what we can do, and even to a genius like me, there's no chance of improvement available around unless i want to risk getting shot with orbital artilery." The young man sighed, taking off the shirt he'd put on and laying on the surgery table he'd just ripped any smear from. "The nanites or whatever are my best shot at improving exactly because i don't know left from right on how to get ussed to these things, so i can't just be sure i will survive the likely ominicide that will happen in this planet." His calm voice still got a shiver from Ferris, but their new recruit simply looked at him with several questions in her eyes. "I can only get my mission description when i'm not in any sort of danger, and he wasn't supposed to be here, so we only know that we will be here for six months max. Thing is, even if there's a war of mutual assured destruction that begins exactly where we are and climax in this exact period, i'd still have unsealed both our powers by then no matter what, so that means there's still an unkown factor that makes the system assured that there's only a small chance of survival despite my seemingly godly result to this day. This world is weak compared to some i've seen, so there's a good chance it will die."
"Couldn't you have targeted me any other way?" Grumbled the older man by the door, massaging his forehead as he thought of how right his new boss was.
"Only if your curse hadn't made me see such visions of my family. You've got no clue what my worst nightmares are all about Jones, but none of them are about my danmation. If it was so, i'd have just slowly grinded my way into killing your whole guild!" Laughed Aki.