Chapter 54: Fervent Blues
"I have a plus circle, I have a minus circle..."
Rekka hummed a tuneless little melody as he slotted the smaller golden ring perfectly into the inner circumference of the larger one. With a satisfying click, the ancient mechanisms locked into place.
"Now, let's see what happens next." Rekka tilted his head, genuine curiosity gleaming in his eyes.
[Calculating...]
As the old saying went, science was just crossing a river by feeling the stones in the dark. If you were lucky, you could stumble upon a breakthrough in a single afternoon that would take others centuries of grueling trial and error to achieve. Of course, being an unmatched genius certainly helped. But in the grand cosmic casino of scientific research, blind luck was still the ultimate wildcard.
Rekka waited in silence for exactly two seconds.
Absolutely nothing happened.
"Looks like a whole lot of noth—" March 7th started to say, crossing her arms.
Hum—
A violent vibration cut her off. Both rings ignited simultaneously. Gone was the gentle, warm golden glow from earlier. In its place erupted a blinding, volatile blue-white radiance. Jagged electric arcs danced wildly across the metallic surface, snapping and hissing like a short-circuiting power grid before the portal violently expanded, stretching to the height of a full-grown person.
"Didn't you say this thing was for teleportation?!" March 7th shrieked, taking a massive step back. "Why does it look like a time bomb that's about to blow up the Express?!"
"Relax, relax. This is just the state of stable output," Rekka replied smoothly, not sounding relaxed at all.
He raised a hand, signaling for March 7th and Stelle to stay back. Without a second thought, he plunged his arm straight into the volatile, crackling energy field of the enlarged ring.
He rummaged around blindly, his arm disappearing into the blue-white void. Groping. Searching.
His brow suddenly twitched.
"What did you feel?" Stelle asked, leaning forward with morbid curiosity.
"A hand."
The fine hairs on the back of March 7th's neck stood straight up.
"Hey, hey, a hand? Are... are you absolutely sure?" she stammered, inching closer to Stelle for cover.
"Yeah." Rekka's voice dropped a fraction of an octave. "Though I have no idea who it belongs to."
He ran his fingers over the unseen appendage. It was slender, the skin smooth and delicate, yet it was completely devoid of warmth. It felt like touching polished marble in the dead of winter.
"Judging by the bone structure and skin texture, it's a woman's hand," Rekka analyzed aloud. "But she feels dead. Possibly for a very long time."
"Are you sure she's been dead a long time?" March 7th's voice trembled, her imagination clearly running wild with ghost stories. "Could she just be... alive and sleeping? Or in cryo-stasis?"
"Extremely low probability."
Stelle, possessing zero sense of self-preservation, leaned right up to the crackling portal, trying to peek into the blinding light. Rekka immediately threw his free arm out to block her face.
"Don't get too close. The spatial coordinates on the other side are completely unknown."
"If her status is unknown, and she feels like a corpse, then she's dead," Stelle stated with deadpan logic. "You've felt it. You've confirmed she's dead. Just let go of the ghost hand already."
"I'm trying," Rekka replied, his tone suddenly turning incredibly dry. "But... right now, it's grabbing onto me. And it won't let go."
Silence descended on the parlor car.
March 7th's face drained of all color, turning a sickly shade of white. "You... don't joke around like that, Rekka."
"I'm not joking." Rekka planted his boots into the floorboards and yanked his arm backward. The muscles in his shoulder bunched, but his arm didn't budge an inch. "She's actually incredibly strong..."
Deciding playtime was over, Rekka tapped a hidden compartment on his belt with his left hand. A sleek, heavy-duty auxiliary mechanical arm instantly unfolded, locking over his right arm with a series of sharp metallic clacks. Gears whined as hydraulic pressure built up.
"Come—out!"
Heavy, ragged breaths echoed through the sterile white room.
Huff... huff...
Slowly, the agonizing rhythm of the girl's breathing began to steady, leveling out into a fragile calm.
"Rekka, is she really going to be okay?" March 7th whispered, hovering nervously near the edge of the medical bay.
"She's fine. The Hyperion's medical technology is more than capable of handling this level of trauma," Rekka replied, his eyes scanning the holographic vitals floating above the containment pod.
Huff...
Even submerged in the soothing embrace of a deep, medically induced coma, the girl looked like she was fighting a war. Her brow was locked in a tight, pained furrow. Her jaw was clenched so hard the muscles jumped, and her small hands were unconsciously balled into white-knuckled fists at her sides.
"Who is she?" March 7th leaned in closer, her cyan eyes studying the petite, battered figure resting inside the pod. The girl had long, messy pink hair streaked with striking cyan highlights. Her lips were pressed into a thin, stubborn line. And protruding from the sides of her head... were those a pair of mechanical-looking horns?
"An... acquaintance of mine, of sorts," Rekka murmured, his gaze softening slightly. "Mr. Welt knows her too."
"I swear, you and Uncle Yang know literally everyone in the universe," March 7th muttered, crossing her arms.
Stelle, completely unfazed by the dramatic rescue, squatted by the side of the medical pod. She rested her chin in her hands, staring intently at the sleeping girl's face for a long, silent minute.
"She's pretty cute."
"You are focusing on the entirely wrong thing!" March 7th threw her hands up in exasperation. "Is now really the time to be discussing whether the mysterious, super-strong coma girl is cute or not?!"
"Then what should we discuss?" Stelle asked, blinking slowly.
"Discuss... I don't know, maybe why she was inside that ring?!" March 7th gestured wildly toward the door. "Isn't that thing supposed to be for teleportation? How exactly does a spatial ring hide a whole person?!"
Rekka's gaze drifted toward the workbench in the corner, where the golden Directional Space-Displacement Rings now sat completely inert, their chaotic energy spent.
"Theoretically, the rings are designed to connect two fixed spatial coordinates. If I place one ring on the Astral Express and the other... somewhere else, a stable spatial channel forms between them. However, activating them blindly without a paired anchor leads to unpredictable consequences. It forces a connection to unknown spatial coordinates—most likely tearing a temporary rift straight into other World Bubbles."
He turned back to the medical readouts, his expression turning serious. "Her physical condition is an absolute wreck. Severe cellular rejection reactions, chronic long-term sleep deprivation, and... a mental state heavily indicative of severe post-traumatic stress disorder. Her current muscle tension isn't conscious. It's her body's instinctive, desperate defense mechanism."
Stelle leaned closer to the holographic light screen, her golden eyes scanning the dense, scrolling medical charts that she absolutely did not understand.
"Rejection reaction?" She pointed a finger at a violently blinking red icon. "Does that mean there's something inside her body that doesn't belong to her?"
"Her body has been surgically fused with the biological tissue of another person," Rekka explained, his voice grim. "Judging by the genetic markers, it was a direct blood relative. A sister, likely. The fusion procedure was incredibly crude. While it technically saved her life, it fundamentally altered her physiology and brought her endless, agonizing pain."
The very second the words left Rekka's mouth, the nutrient-rich repair fluid inside the medical pod began to churn violently, bubbling like a boiling cauldron.
[Beep—Beep—Beep—]
The heart rate monitor spiked into the red zone.
The girl snapped her eyes open.
They were the eyes of a cornered, wounded beast—feral, bloodshot, and burning with absolute mania. Completely ignoring the thick IV tubes and biometric monitoring patches adhered to her skin, she twisted her torso, drew back her right arm, and slammed her fist brutally against the reinforced glass cover of the medical pod.
BANG!
The deafening impact echoed through the infirmary. Although the high-strength, military-grade glass didn't shatter, it buckled outward, emitting a horrific, tooth-aching groan of stressed polycarbonate.
"She's awake!" March 7th yelped, startled out of her skin. She immediately backpedaled, dropping into a defensive archer's stance out of pure reflex. "And her temper is way too explosive!"
Inside the pod, the girl ruthlessly ripped the feeding tubes from her arms. She didn't even flinch as crimson blood began to seep into the clear repair fluid. Pressing both palms flat against the inner seam of the glass cover, she let out a guttural snarl. With a sickening screech of tearing metal, she actually forced a gap into the hermetically sealed locking mechanism of the pod door.
This... is not ■■'s hospital... it's not.
The frantic, fragmented thought flashed through her panicked mind.
Her wild, anxious gaze darted around the unfamiliar room before finally locking dead onto Rekka.
"Who... are you?" she rasped, her voice raw and grating.
"I am the Captain," Rekka answered smoothly, stepping into her line of sight. "Hello—Captain Rozaliya."
"Captain?" The girl bared her teeth, the word dripping with obvious, venomous hostility. "I don't know any Captain. Where is the Marshal? What place is this?!"
"The Marshal is not here, Captain." Rekka took a slow, deliberate step forward, keeping his hands visible. "This is not the world you are familiar with. You are currently aboard a battleship named the Hyperion. Specifically, you are in its infirmary."
"Battleship?" Delta's paranoid gaze swept over the glowing precision instruments, the pristine white walls, and the holographic displays before snapping violently back to Rekka's face. Her long pink hair, plastered to her cheeks by a mixture of cold sweat and viscous culture fluid, made her look incredibly disheveled and dangerous.
"—What kind of absolute nonsense are you talking?"
She gripped the edge of the forced-open gap, trying to haul herself out of the medical pod. But her arms trembled violently. That single, explosive strike against the reinforced glass had drained almost every ounce of her remaining strength.
"Don't move." Rekka closed the distance in a blink, pressing his hand firmly against the outer edge of the medical pod door. He didn't touch her, but his presence formed an immovable wall, blocking her only exit. "In your current state, your legs will give out before you can even take three steps."
"Move." Her voice was a low, lethal growl.
"No." Rekka didn't flinch.
A terrifying flash of pure, unadulterated mania crossed the girl's eyes. She drew her right fist back again, the muscles in her arm coiling tight as she prepared to smash the remaining glass to dust.
"Go ahead. Smash it," Rekka said, his voice dropping into an eerie, absolute calm. "Once you break this glass, the sterile repair fluid keeping your cells stable will drain out. The open wounds across your body will immediately risk infection. You'll spike a massive fever, start hallucinating nonsense, and finally slip right back into a coma. If that is truly what you want to do, I won't stop you."
CLANG!
The girl completely ignored the warning.
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