There was so much gold that the morning sun reflecting off the metal actually forced Nakime to squint, burying her face deeper into my chest to avoid the glare.
I didn't hesitate and activated Greedy Healing.
The gold bars closest to me instantly dissolved into a swirling vortex of golden motes, sinking directly into my skin.
My broken ribs snapped back into place, my dislocated shoulder rolled perfectly into its socket, and the raw, jagged scar running across my waist knitted together, replacing dead tissue with fresh, unblemished skin.
I watched the piles diminish. Nearly 250 million dollars' worth of gold vanished just to patch me up.
'Weird.'
It didn't used to take nearly this much to heal me. The continuous Zenkai boosts must have scaled up my biological baseline. Healing a peak superhuman was vastly more expensive than healing a regular teenager.
With my body finally functional, I brought my wrist down to Nakime's mouth. She didn't resist this time and drank deeply, her charred skin slowly knitting back together as the Demon biology processed my overpowered blood.
'Good job, boy. You're the best, Ship,' I pushed through our mental link, feeding a massive chunk of healing directly into the Mechamorph's energy reserves, helping it grow back.
The matte-black suit hummed happily against Nakime's skin.
Debbie scrambled back a foot, her hands flying up to cover her mouth. She stared in pale, shivering horror as the young girl fed on my veins, as the monstrous reality of the world she was trapped in hit her all over again, while Cecil simply watched with cold, calculating eyes, filing the interaction away into whatever contingency folder he had labelled with my name on it.
When Nakime pulled back, the charred tissue had completely knitted into pale, flawless skin. She wiped her mouth and materialized her biwa, her posture snapping from broken guilt to full of purpose.
"Master, I will manage the tens of thousands of civilians inside the castle," she said, locking eyes directly with Cecil. "You know the procedure, Director. Ready your men."
TWANG
A single strike of the strings tore the air open. She stepped through the sliding wooden doors, taking the remaining crates of gold with her for safekeeping before the portal snapped shut.
"Please! My son…" Debbie scrambled over the rubble, clutching my hand with terrifying grip strength. "Mark, he… that monster hurt his own son! My Mark!"
I looked at Cecil. He understood my intention and threw his cigarette into the dirt and pressed the remote again.
The blue light swallowed me whole. The harsh, howling wind of the ruined city vanished, instantly replaced by the biting, sterile chill of GDA air conditioning and the suffocating smell of antiseptic, and the frantic beeping of a dozen heart monitors.
I stumbled, my dirty feet hitting polished white linoleum. I was standing in the dead centre of the GDA's primary intensive care ward. Doctors and nurses sprinted between high-tech medical pods, screaming out blood pressures and desperately administering coagulants.
I looked around the room. The New Guardians, old Guardians, even Bulletproof. They were all here, and they were all torn to shreds.
I was hurried over to the largest medical pod. Mark lay inside as a cluster of IV lines pumped dark, synthetic blood directly into his neck just to keep his pulse from flatlining.
Nolan had tried to cave his skull in.
Mark's face was ruined. The left orbital bone was completely crushed flat, burying his eye under black, swollen tissue. His jaw hung unhinged, jutting at a wrong angle to expose splintered molars through a ragged tear in his cheek.
'And I thought my father was an asshole,' I thought, hovering my hands over the glass.
I turned around to assure Debbie that he was going to be fine, but she wasn't behind me. I looked at Cecil, who was already barking evacuation protocols to Leon over a comms headset.
"Where's Debbie?" I asked.
"Controlled or not controlled, Nolan is too dangerous to be anywhere near these patients," Cecil replied, not looking up from his datapad. "Whether or not the curse is real is irrelevant.. We did the sensible thing and escorted Debbie to a subterranean black site. Nolan followed her like a dog on a leash."
I nodded, turning my attention back to the boy who had taken the brunt of his father's madness.
My palms flared with golden light. It cost me another hundred million in resources to bypass Mark's Viltrumite biology and force the shattered bones in his skull to fuse back together. His breathing steadied, the swelling rapidly receding.
After I fully healed the boy, I left Mark to breathe on his own and turned to the rest of the ward.
I didn't hold back and opened the floodgates.
Heaps of solid gold instantly vaporized into blinding light. The flash forced the scrambling GDA doctors to shield their eyes as I swept my hands forward, driving the gold mist directly into the Old Guardians.
The energy sank hungrily into their ruined bodies. The ward filled with a sickening, wet chorus of snapping bone and fusing meat. Shattered ribs cracked like gunfire, violently realigning. Fatal lacerations zipped shut, and Golden light wove severed muscle fibres together, jump-starting crushed hearts and inflating collapsed lungs.
Gritting my teeth against the massive cost, I pushed the golden wave down the line to the New Guardians.
I burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in seconds. The heavy stench of blood was completely incinerated. One by one, the frantic shrieking of the life-support monitors died, replaced by the deep, synchronized rhythm of steady heartbeats.
I finished with Bulletproof, driving the golden mist straight into his stitched, mangled hands. He gasped. His endless string of curses died in his throat as the pain evaporated. He shot up from the mattress, seizing my forearm with a crushing grip as tears cut clean tracks through the thick soot on his face.
"You're a real one, brother," Bulletproof choked out. "I knew those GDA suits were full of shit for framing you."
I offered a tired nod, but as I scanned the room and noticed the gaps.
"Hey, where's Rex and Dupli-Kate?" I asked. "And I don't see the tin can around."
The atmosphere in the room completely plummeted. The doctors stopped moving, even Bulletproof looked away, staring at the floor.
"If you'll follow me, Mr. Kaisen," Donald said softly, stepping out from behind Cecil.
He led me out of the main ward and down a sterile, harshly lit corridor to a secondary surgical theatre.
I stopped in the doorway, and my stomach turned violently.
A dozen surgeons, including Dr. Maya, crowded the operating table.
Rex's own blast had blown him apart from the inside out. His left arm ended at the elbow in a splintered, blackened stump. The explosion had cooked his torso and legs, incinerating so much muscle that bare ribs and joints showed directly through the ash-grey tissue.
The surgeons were trying to anchor cybernetic implants to his severed nerve endings. It wasn't taking. The flesh was now necrotic. Every time they set a metal graft, the dead tissue sloughed right off the bone, dropping the sparking hardware into puddles of his own congealing blood.
"John!"
Kate sprinted away from the viewing window. She was wearing her Zero-suit. That meant every single one of her active clones had been slaughtered on the battlefield, leaving only her true, original self as the absolute last resort. Her face was streaked with tears. She grabbed my arms, her knees buckling as she physically dragged me toward the glass.
"Please… please… save him. The foolish boy… he sacrificed himself…"
I caught her shoulders, keeping her upright. I didn't offer empty promises. "I'll try my best, Kate."
I pushed through the swinging doors into the surgical theatre. Some doctors shouted at me to scrub in, only to be stopped by Dr. Maya, but I ignored them, marching straight to the head of the table.
I activated Greedy Healing, but I didn't just dump the energy this time. I remembered my Ace of All Skill and engaged the Expert Medical Skillset.
The chaotic biological data of Rex's body flooded my brain.
I saw the pathways of his necrotic tissue, the severed peripheral nerves, and the catastrophic failure of his vascular system. Healing this automatically would force his brain to process the simultaneous regeneration of millions of nerve endings. The pain would completely shatter his mind before he even woke up.
I held my glowing hands over his ruined chest.
"Everyone back! I'm inhibiting the spinothalamic tract and temporarily suppressing the somatosensory cortex," I ordered, my voice cutting through the panic of the surgeons. "If he wakes up with full nerve regeneration hitting his brain at this speed, the neurogenic shock will cause immediate cardiac arrest. I'm regenerating the dermis and rerouting the sympathetic nervous system."
Dr. Maya dropped her scalpel onto a metal tray. "That's impossible," she breathed, staring wide-eyed at the biometric monitors. "He's going to manually override cellular death."
The entire surgical team stepped back, completely stunned into silence as the teenager they had profiled as a pretend ruffian who lucked into powers started rattling off neurosurgical protocols.
Golden light flooded the room.
I tracked the path of the cybernetic implants buried in his forearms—the government tech that gave him his explosive powers. The metal was warped, melted into his bone marrow.
I purged it.
The ruined cybernetics liquefied, dripping harmlessly off the table, in their place, pure, unadulterated biological flesh rapidly wove itself together; I dragged his genetic blueprint backward, regrowing the missing limbs with the healthy, untainted flesh of the child he was before the experiments.
Rex Splode, the government cyborg, was gone.
Rex, the human, took a massive, shuddering breath, his chest rising perfectly under flawless new skin.
On the other side of the glass, Kate completely gave out. She collapsed to her knees, pressing her hands against the window as a ragged sob of pure relief tore from her throat.
I dropped my hands as the golden light faded.
The adrenaline completely crashed as the edges of my vision rapidly tunnelled into black. I grabbed the edge of the operating table just to stop myself from collapsing into the bloody surgical trays.
"Well, that was entertaining," Cecil said, stepping into the theatre. "The evacuation from the Castle seems to be over. You should get some rest, Kaisen. Your girlfriend must be waiting for you."
I didn't even have the energy to throw a sarcastic insult at him. Every single cell in my body was screaming for a shutdown.
"Yeah," I mumbled, letting go of the table and letting my feet drag across the floor. "I'm gonna sleep for a whole damn month."
[A/N]:
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