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Alex woke up to sparks and the sound of Bev loosing strings of heavily censored profanities.
She saw his eyes flick open and immediately addressed him. “Stop that!”
He tried to frown, almost asking ‘what’ she wanted him to stop, but then he noticed the pain, and the fact that he was actively growling against it. Moreover, he was growling despite being utterly bodily paralyzed, as he’d expected to be for the whole operation.
Such should have come with unconsciousness, but life had a way of throwing curveballs.
The growl—that he shouldn’t have been able to make—was sending out waves of dissonance that weren’t necessarily the source of the sparks and disruption, but they weren’t helping.
He also found that his basic resistance to magic ‘muscle’ was bunched up so tight it was actively cramping.
He didn’t know how a muscle he didn’t have could be cramping, but it was, and it was awful.
Firstly, he pulled power from around his throat, and the waves of wrongness faded from the room, allowing him to get a better picture of what was going on.
The magical machinery was working on his actual muscles, hence the paralysis.
He could sense the waves of mana coming in from emitters around the room, and he could see his Life rising up to try to ward off the magic.
Interestingly, that ‘contraction’ of his Life was what seemed to be forcing power and enough impetus through his throat to have created the dissonant growl with every exhale.
My Life is defending me from a perceived threat? Why hadn’t it interfered in the skeletal transformation? …That’s a stupid question. I was the source of that change. This is coming in externally.
More importantly, the change was being wrought on his Life, making its resistance even more impactful.
Sure, the magics could change his muscles—from the sense he got they already had—but if his Life wasn’t shifted to match, he’d ‘heal’ away the upgrades in a matter of minutes.
Bev was much calmer now, likely having been rather disturbed by the dissonance surrounding him. “I don’t know what’s happening, but I need you to stop it. Concentrate on the knowledge that you want this change. I can force it through, but this is supposed to be a boon to you. These magics aren’t meant to force themselves upon you. If you’re fighting, it won’t properly settle in, and the process will be all but wasted.”
Alex didn’t grunt, but he gave a long blink that he hoped she’d interpret as ‘I’ll try.’
And try he did.
This is good for me. I asked for this. This will make me stronger, better able to help and protect others. There was some loosening, but not as much as he wanted.
“Good! Keep that up, we’re making progress again. If you can do more of whatever you’re doing, that’d be helpful.”
Alex closed his eyes and concentrated. This will let me live up to her, and honor her with my life.
There was the briefest of hesitations, then the stubborn defenses released entirely, the external magic flooding into his Life. It was still choppy and obviously pushing through the base resistance, but it was getting through.
Alex sighed internally, unable to smile but feeling relief all the same.
It hurt like the dickens, but he literally couldn’t do anything about it, especially since it actually hurt less now that his Life wasn’t resisting. That very truth helped keep his Life in check, his subconscious from fighting his conscious desires.
The whole thing probably only took a few minutes, but it felt like a lot longer.
Bev spoke to him throughout, giving him benchmarks and talking him through what was happening and what was to come. He let her words wash over him, not really hearing them but taking comfort in the sound of the voice, the knowledge that every word was the passage of a moment and one step closer to this being over.
His new sense felt… overwhelmed.
Each wave of power crashing over him carried more information than he could take in a week.
It reminded him of the time he’d tried turning his video player to 2x speed to get through various things faster… Except, at the moment, he had seven videos going at the same time, and they were progressing at 8x speed, not 2x. Also, this was all happening while he was trying to focus on a critical call from his lawyer, and someone’s wayward child was poking him in the forehead, trying to get him to listen to a poorly thought out knock-knock joke.
Yeah… That was about how this felt.
As a means of coping, he did his best to snatch fragments of comprehension from within the storm.
Sarcomere.
Actin.
Myofibril.
Eccentric.
Isotonic.
Troponin.
He grimaced internally. They were mostly terms and things that he’d heard before in some biology class in the distant past, even if he still doubted they should be classified as English. Unfortunately, even knowing what the terms meant perfectly wouldn’t have let him figure out exactly what the magic was doing. He simply wasn’t ‘glimpsing’ enough of the incoming power to put it together.
Still, it was good training. So, he persisted. In fact, he felt like he was approaching some sort of threshold with his Speed Reading skill as he pushed it to garner more and more from the incoming streams.
It felt like he was missing a piece somewhere, something that would let him advance the skill and garner a greater ability to—
Bev grunted, clearly sighing in relief. “And, we’re done.”
Alex jerked, suddenly able to move, and that meant his muscles could contract. At that, it felt as if a wave began moving from the top of his head downward, each muscle fiber bunching and releasing, as if trying to get the full measure of its new nature.
Thankfully, it didn’t happen fiber by fiber, or that would have taken ages. Regardless, it would still take a moment or two.
Trying to ignore the slow-moving oddity, he tried to sit up, the action happening much more smoothly, powerfully, and quickly than expected. He almost smacked his forehead into his own knees, but he managed to react fast enough to stop the motion short of such an ignominious end.
“Take your time, Alex.” She stepped forward, helping him sit.
He had a few notifications, so he decided to glance at those as he sat there, his muscles getting used to themselves.
Attribute Level-Up:Basic Cognition - MagicalLevel 7 → Level 8
Attribute Level-Up:Basic Resistance - MagicLevel 7 → Level 8
Attribute Level-Up:Basic Dissonance of TonalityLevel 1 → Level 2
He grunted, careful to keep power from his throat.
Bev flinched even so, clearly having disliked his earlier sounds.
The magic resistance level wasn’t unexpected, but the magical cognition increase? That made less sense until he realized that he’d been deeply mentally involved in figuring out what was happening—magically speaking—and striving not only to understand it, but to improve how it interacted with him mid-working, even if only by resisting less.
I suppose that makes a sort of sense, yeah.
And he’d finally gotten a level in dissonance… despite all his attempts at suppressing it.
I do wonder what I’ll do with this one… Get it to level ten and see how I can shape it? If I even can?
He actually had quite a bit of interest in getting his Attributes up—even more than before—because the potential changes after level 10, and how they might impact his race, were both fascinating prospects.
Alex took a deep breath as the last of rippling contractions and releases moved through him, his toes curling then straightening once more.
He sighed. “All done, I think.”
Bev smiled. “Bio-clean-up?”
He shuddered. “Will… will it be like that?”
She shook her head. “It uses something akin to holy magic. In this case, it lets your body return to a state that it should be if you’d had magic for your whole life, where holy magic returns to how it was without outside interference, if that makes sense. This won’t heal injuries, but it will remove scars. What it does do, like the augmentations, is reset your ‘baseline’ for both holy and healing magics of all kinds going forward.”
Alex took in a deep breath and nodded. “Let’s do it.”
“Lay back down.”
He did so, and an arc of metal came from under the table. “Will… this hurt?”
She shook her head. “There is localized pain mitigation. It will be uncomfortable, and most say it feels… odd, but it shouldn’t be more than that. Near the beginning, there will be some adjustments to your thinking, but they’ll balance out as the process is completed through your whole brain. Many even say that the momentary shifts in perspective are quite insightful and enlightening.”
Alex nodded, and magics flared to life.
These were far more varied than the augmentation workings, but they were also far more surface level.
They spoke of restoring, soothing, smoothing, washing away build-up, tightening that which was loose unnaturally, and relaxing that which shouldn’t be tight.
If he had to describe it quickly, he’d describe it as the perfect spa-day customized for each type of his cells, all rolled into a relatively quick procedure.
It wouldn’t change his foundation, but it would scrape the grit that life as a non-magical human had built upon that foundation—as well as unifying his body—allowing his Life to even out through previously bottlenecked sections of his physiology.
As the arc began moving downward, the first thing he noticed was an odd tugging at his hair, explained by Bev a moment later. “Oh, as hair often contains many impurities, expect to have to regrow it after we are done, here.”
He almost objected, but the arc shadowed the crown of his head then, and he was locked down.
It was a truly surreal experience.
First, as the higher functions of his mind smoothed—almost like newly greased mechanisms—he felt as if emotions became more muted in comparison, his logical thought-processes speeding up just slightly but sufficiently enough to change the balance within his usual thoughts.
He was suddenly able to understand the information pouring in through his sense better than before, not truly because he could actually understand it more easily, but because his mind was capable of holding onto the stream that little bit more efficiently, allowing for him to more easily draw connections between otherwise disparate data points.
Before he was able to truly process that, he was hit by a realization: He protected others because he hadn’t been able to protect his wife. It was a stupidly obvious ‘realization’, but it wasn’t one that he’d allowed himself to truly acknowledge before. The mindset was entirely emotionally based, and he felt himself pull back from it at the illogic of his thinking.
Despite the weight of the realization, it was washed from his thoughts for the time being a moment later.
When the magics swept over his eyes, it was as if there had been a subtle mist in the air before him, and this scrubbed it away, everything coming into sharper focus. Huh, my eyes were getting worse.
He examined his own memories and realized that he’d been deluding himself, finding increasingly thin excuses for his slowly degrading vision before the System.
His ears popped, a chorus of tones—seeming almost triumphant at their return—chimed in his ears, and he logically understood that the auditory phantoms were the result of a return of those tonalities to his range of hearing.
Had his emotions been a bit more elevated, he might have wept at the beauty of the sound.
His nasal passages and sinuses were, at once, scraped clean and refreshed, a gout of nastiness practically fountaining from his nostrils in a wave.
He felt like he should have been disgusted by the ick, but instead, he remembered the magics in his coverall and activated them, scrubbing himself clean practically instantly.
He was once again distracted by the sudden realization that he hadn’t been exercising or training his stats as he knew he was capable. He’d left so much power on the table, even if he wasn’t quite sure just how much could be gained in that way.
His mind created and discarded several dozen training and activity routines over the next seconds, feeling growing anxiety at just how much he had to do and how ill-equipped he was to do anything about it.
He was ravenously hungry and couldn’t eat.
He was weary and couldn’t sleep.
He had so much to do and couldn’t get off this curse-spawned table.
But the arc continued, and suddenly, he felt a wave of joy, contentment, and certainty.
Yes, he’d made mistakes.
Yes, he most likely could have been able to be a bit more powerful at this juncture if he’d done differently.
But.
He was human. He was flawed, and he was doing what he could in a completely new and genuinely terrifying situation.
That created a momentary crisis as he truly felt the existential dread of the end of the world, but it pulled back a moment later, a truth settling deeply within his thoughts: I can only control myself. I can only move forward.
Almost in rising counterpoint to that realization, he felt as if a veil were being pulled back off of his memories—both real and System granted—and he saw so many flaws in the constructed ‘training’ given for the scenario. At the same time, he realized that most of the flaws that he noticed were so revealed by his magical cognition skill highlighting the ‘rough’ edges of the implanted ones.
Then, the clean-up met the portion of his mind that was still healing, still grappling with the ???? of his training with Runia.
His eyes widened, and his consciousness fled in a vain attempt at salvation.