Chapter 46: Awakened Soldier!

"There is no star without a scar, and the scar of every star is sacrifice." — David Oyedepo.

– – –

The cycle lasted six hours.

The pain never stopped. It moved from one part of his body to another, but it never stopped.

There was always a new section being broken, a new muscle being torn, a new wave of green healing energy rushing in to repair the damage.

His body was a battlefield, and the war lasted all night.

He bit through two leather straps during the process. The first one split after about two hours, right around the time the pill reached his spine and he felt every single vertebra in his back dissolve and reform simultaneously.

The second one lasted until hour four, when the pill hit his femurs and both thigh bones expanded inside his legs with enough force to tear every quadriceps and hamstring muscle he had.

After that, he stopped using straps and just screamed into the floor tiles.

The black sweat never stopped either. It poured from his pores in streams, pooling beneath him on the cold floor and spreading outward in a growing stain.

The impurities being expelled from his bones were darker and thicker than anything the Stone-Ape power crystal had produced, and by the time the process was nearing its end, he was lying in a puddle of his own filth that was wide enough to reach the edges of the bed.

Around hour five, his vision went black and stayed black for what felt like an eternity. He was conscious, aware of the pain, but his eyes refused to work.

The biological stress was so extreme that his brain had started shutting down non-essential functions to conserve energy for the reconstruction process.

He lay there in the dark, feeling his body being reforged one bone at a time.

At hour six, the boiling heat finally began to subside.

The last section the pill touched was his skull.

He felt the bones in his skull vibrate for about thirty seconds, a deep humming sensation that made his teeth ache and his eyes water. Then, just as suddenly, it stopped.

The heat faded. The green energy from the Regenerative Tissue talent pulsed through his body one final time, repairing the last of the torn muscle fibers and sealing the last of the micro-fractures.

Then it settled into a low, steady hum within him, quiet but ready.

The silence that followed was so complete that he could hear his own heartbeat.

Micah opened his eyes.

The room was dark. Dawn was still an hour away, and the only light came from the faint glow of the three beast cores sitting in the open briefcase on his desk and the dim illumination of the academy’s security lights filtering through his window.

He pushed himself up from the floor.

The first thing he noticed was the lightness.

Not physical lightness, because his body was definitely heavier now, but a lightness in his movements.

His arms rose from the floor with an effortlessness that bordered on weightlessness, and his legs straightened without the shake or wobble that should have followed six hours of agonizing reconstruction.

He looked down at his hands. His fingers looked the same, but when he flexed them, the muscles beneath the skin moved with a density that was visibly different.

He threw a punch at his bunk frame. Not channeled with Flux or enhanced with Kinetic Disruption. Just a casual, right cross aimed at the steel frame of his bed.

BOOM!

The entire bunk shuddered, and the mattress slid sideways and nearly fell off the frame.

The impact was so loud that he feared he might have alerted the guards and woken the officials or other recruits nearby.

Micah pulled his fist back and looked at his knuckles. Not a scratch. Not a bruise. Not even a mark.

The skin was completely unharmed, and the bones beneath felt like they weren’t even bone anymore.

He stared at the dent in his bunk frame for a long moment.

Then he sat down on the edge of the bed, crossed his legs, closed his eyes, and activated his Advanced Flux Breathing Talent.

The breathing pattern changed immediately. Each inhale pulled ambient Flux from the air with a force and efficiency that was dramatically stronger than the last time he’d used the talent.

He pulled up his system stats and watched.

[Flux Unlock: 40%]

The number sat there for a moment, then began to climb.

The Advanced Flux Breathing Talent was pulling energy from the ambient atmosphere and the residual energy bleeding from the three beast cores on his desk, cycling it through his newly fortified meridians and packing it into cells that were now exponentially more receptive than before.

The numbers climbed fast.

Forty-two. Forty-five. Fifty. Sixty. Seventy.

The biological bottlenecks that had been limiting his Flux capacity were gone. The Marrow-Forging Pill had rebuilt his skeletal structure to a density that removed those limits entirely, and the Advanced Flux Breathing Talent was flooding the newly opened space with energy as fast as his cells could absorb it.

Seventy-five. Eighty. Eighty-three.

His skin was glowing, a faint blue light emanating from his arms and chest as excess Flux bled through his pores.

The beast cores on his desk were dimming, their energy being siphoned away by the breathing cycles.

Then the climb slowed.

Eighty-four. Eighty-five.

The cells were filling up. The remaining fifteen percent was locked behind a wall that the pill alone couldn’t break. He needed more pressure than his body could generate on its own.

He needed the Flux Pressure Chamber.

– – –

0600 came fast.

Micah had spent the remaining hours cleaning himself up and scrubbing the black residue from his skin.

He dressed in a clean uniform, strapped the Widow’s Wail to his back, and headed into the early morning darkness.

The Flux Pressure Chamber was buried inside a reinforced underground facility in the eastern wing of the academy.

The entrance was a steel door set into the side of a windowless bunker. Two armed guards stood on either side with their rifles across their chests.

Micah presented his champion credentials. The guards checked them, verified the authorization code, and stepped aside without a word.

The door opened unto him and he descended a narrow stairwell into the earth.

The atmosphere changed as he went further. The concrete walls gradually gave way to reinforced steel, then to solid bedrock.