Chapter 191: Artificial arm [1]

Somewhere in Korvath the sky never fully brightened.

It stayed at that particular shade of dark gray that sat between night and proper morning without ever choosing either. Black towers pierced through the low cloud cover. Winged stone creatures stood guard at the palace entrance with their eyes cut from the same cold stone as everything else.

Crimson lanterns lined the corridors and cast long warped shadows across the walls. The palace was quiet in the way places are quiet when the people inside have learned what happens to those who make unnecessary noise.

Deep in the palace behind two towering doors Zeus sat on a couch examining his right arm.

White bandages ran from his shoulder down to his wrist. Beneath them an artificial arm had been attached where the original had been. The pale flesh was close enough to convincing at a distance. Close enough. Not quite.

He flexed his fingers.

The hand responded a fraction of a second late.

His crimson eyes narrowed. "Tch."

He rotated the wrist. Closed the fingers into a fist. Opened them again. "The weight is wrong, the movement is wrong, and the feeling is completely wrong." He held the arm up and examined it from several angles with the expression of someone who has been handed something deeply offensive in the shape of a normal object. "It’s like someone replaced my arm with a stranger’s and then told me it was the same thing."

Across the room a figure sat behind a large table covered in glass containers and metallic instruments and transparent vessels of bubbling liquid. He wore a dark coat and a hood that cast his face in shadow deep enough that the lantern light couldn’t reach it. He didn’t look up.

"How long are you going to complain about it, Zeus."

Zeus glanced at him. "Until it stops feeling like furniture someone attached to my body."

"Then develop some patience. Furniture generally doesn’t need its cells to establish a connection with your nervous system."

"You make no sense... And how can you sit there so calmly when I came back without the Core?"

"It’s fine. My initial plan was simply to infiltrate them and intimidate the humans. Sure, I mentioned bringing back the Helion Core, but I never actually expected you to pull it off. So really, everything went exactly as I anticipated."

Zeus stared at the hooded figure for a moment. Then he sighed. "Sir Planner. I’m beginning to understand why people find you irritating."

"How perceptive of you."

The response arrived so casually that Zeus almost laughed. Almost. He looked back at the arm instead.

"I suppose I should thank you. Without your help I’d be walking around with one arm for the foreseeable future."

"Not necessarily."

Zeus raised an eyebrow. "Not necessarily?"

"I could have made you a wooden one."

Silence.

Zeus turned his head slowly toward the hooded figure.

"You’re joking."

"Am I?"

Planner finally glanced up.

Even through the shadow hiding his face the amusement in his voice was audible.

Zeus leaned back against the couch. "One day, Planner, I’m going to find out whether you actually have a sense of humor or whether irritating people is simply something your body does without asking you first."

"Please let me know when you figure it out. I’d hate to lose such an important scientific discovery."

Zeus let a quiet breath out through his nose.

Dealing with Planner was exhausting. Not because the man was disrespectful. Zeus had encountered countless people who confused arrogance with courage and most of them had learned the difference rather painfully. Planner was different. He could dismiss a genuine threat while measuring the contents of a vial and was the one who decides and plans for everything despite Zeus’s father being the ruler of Korvath. Planner speaks about things capable of reshaping the world.

The irritating part was that Zeus couldn’t determine whether the man genuinely didn’t register danger or simply understood it better than everyone else. Possibly both. Either way Zeus knew better than to underestimate him.

He lifted the artificial arm again. "How long until I stop using this thing?"

Planner turned back to his table. "Your original arm was severed by an attack that interfered with your blood regeneration. Whatever was in that lightning attack was clearly superior to what you relied upon to restore yourself. Under normal circumstances you could regenerate a lost limb. This wasn’t a normal injury. Your blood generation failed to restore it and forcing the process would only waste your energy."

Zeus’s eyes narrowed slightly.

He remembered the exact sensation. Leon’s lightning going through the arm. The Thunder God Spirit’s output at the moment of contact.

He flexed his remaining original hand slowly.

That boy had become considerably more troublesome than anticipated.

"More precisely I cultivated artificial flesh, reconstructed the necessary structure, and adapted it to your body. The arm is functional. Your cells still need to accept it properly." Planner picked up a small instrument and held a glass tube to the light. "Give it approximately a week."

"A week."

"That’s correct."

"You’re telling me I have to sit here for an entire week while the war continues."

"I’m telling you to follow a recovery timeline that exists whether or not it inconveniences you."

Zeus stared at him. Planner continued working. "You can either give your body a week to adapt, or you can return to the battlefield prematurely, aggravate the damage, and give me a considerably more interesting problem to solve. I’d prefer the first option. I have enough experiments without having to reconstruct your entire body because you couldn’t sit still."

Zeus rubbed his forehead with his left hand. "You’re enjoying this."

"Immensely."

"At least you’re honest."

"I find dishonesty terribly inefficient."

Zeus leaned back again. He had no intention of sitting still for a full week. The battle had not ended in the vampires’ favor as decisively as he had intended. The Helion Core was still out of reach. He had retreated with one arm and three outcomes he didn’t like.

None of them irreversible.

He slowly closed the artificial hand.

The battlefield would wait. But not indefinitely.

"What about my brother and sister," he said.