The hiss of shifting mechanical doors gave way to a chamber of white walls and sterile light. Within, a red-haired man sat before a control console as mechanical arms whirred to life above him—sleek, precise, each tipped with blades of uratsu crystal. The crystals shimmered with a sickly silver-blue, cutting into sterilized flesh with surgical efficiency.
Inside the capsule lay the subject, restrained and unconscious. The artificial spine embedded in his body pulsed with purple light, each segment flickering within its mechanical frame as damaged tissue was stripped away and replaced, reinforced node by node.
The operator's face came into view—bearded, golden-eyed, unreadable. With mechanical detachment, he uncapped a vial and passed it beneath the subject's nose.
The man on the table convulsed with a sharp inhale.
Purple eyes snapped open, locking onto gold. A mane of wild, tangled violet hair fell over a face worn with slackness and shadowed by dark circles—yet a knowing smirk tugged at his mouth. Artificial dermal grafts of obsidian black curled across his neck and shoulders, each node glowing faintly with violet light, mapping out the cybernetic nervous system newly woven into his flesh.
His skin was pale, his features sharp, a blend of Mediterranean softness and Middle Eastern severity. His name: Ivo Galahad.
He sat up with a sudden inhale, purple eyes narrowing as the aftertaste of sedation clung to him. The hum of his new prosthetic spine was unmistakable—smoother, sharper, every signal to his nerves transmitting without hesitation. Yet the seamless function only deepened the uncanny sense that someone else had tuned his body for their own ends.
He flexed his hand. The motion alone should have been ordinary, but he knew what came next. His arm shuddered as if something beneath the skin refused to stay buried. Veins flared faintly violet, muscle fibres tightening in unnatural rhythms. Then, with a slow, invasive inevitability, the augment took hold.
Chitin unfolded from beneath his flesh, rising clean and deliberate, forming a dark carapace that sealed over his arm like polished armour. No ragged edges, no grotesque seams—on the surface it was almost elegant. But Ivo felt the crawl of it: the way Kaizen drilled through him, reordering tissue, rewriting scar into function, reminding him of every injury it had ever studied.
The exoskeletal plating was heat-tempered, proof of battles survived. Smooth ridges ran down to a sharp claw, pristine in form but heavy with the memory of fire. The augment was progress, resilience perfected—yet every adaptation came with the same price.
Kaizen never asked. It simply took.
"Don't overdo it," Hibino said, voice level, almost bored. "Your nervous system is still in progressive decline. Any unsupervised adaptation near the grafted sites will destabilize my implants. Paralysis is the minimum outcome."
He closed the console with a click and approached, movements deliberate but devoid of care. Five metallic bands were fastened one after another at the junctions where synthetic light pulsed beneath Ivo's flesh.
The coils tightened with hydraulic precision, biting cold into skin until they locked in place. Hibino keyed a command, and the invasive chitin dissolved in an instant, retreating beneath the dermis with a shudder that left a phantom sting in its wake.
Purple eyes met gold for a moment. Hibino's gaze was unblinking, unreadable. "That will suffice," he said, not as reassurance but as fact. "Your payment covers stability, not perfection."
Already, his attention drifted back to the machinery, to the blinking vitals and graphs that meant more to him than the man they described.
"Break them again and I won't put you back together." Hibino's voice was flat, final. He peeled the backing off a nicotine patch and slapped it over his arm as if the matter was already settled.
Ivo smirked—then let the carapace rise. The organ spread like a metallic bloom, darker and denser than his usual chitin, catching the light like burnished steel as it sealed over the graft. His body moved before thought, arms sweeping open.
Tendrils of sharpened chitin shot forward, hissing through the air with enough speed to fracture sound.
The sound cut short. Hibino's hands had already darkened, his skin transmuted into something denser, black and unyielding. The tendrils crumpled between his palms like brittle wire.
Ivo froze, his augmented nerves screaming with feedback. He saw it then—in Hibino's eyes. They gleamed with a metallic sheen, unnatural and oppressive, but horrifyingly stable. Not raw Norvanite, no—the diluted echo Hibino had perfected. Olvaltite.
The Crimson Surgeon lived up to his name.
A crimson distortion bloomed open behind Ivo, space itself unraveling into a jagged maw. Hibino's gesture was almost casual as he flung him through.
From the doorway, a younger figure steadied the rift's edges with one hand. Her hair was mussed, her eyes fading from their distinct, glowing red back to calm gold.
Sakura Hibino lowered her arm, her voice soft but firm. "Father, that's enough."
Ivo staggered to his feet, every nerve along his spine hissing with phantom pain as he pushed himself off the cold concrete floor. He spat, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and let out a low, bitter laugh.
Back to work.
The dim light of his hideout hummed overhead, half the bulbs flickering, the smell of oil and ozone mixing with cheap incense burning in a cracked dish. Around him were stacked crates of contraband: augment suppressors, black-market stim patches, Ura-fusion cells, and cages sealed with biometric locks. His little empire—ugly, lucrative, and crawling with shadows.
He turned toward the battered cot that doubled as his command seat, the place he had made the call that dragged him to Hibino's table. With a grunt, he yanked open a locker, pulling free the uniform of his station: the armored blacks and muted silver insignia of the Black Order's Diamond Division. The suit was scarred and patched in places, but the crest still gleamed—a diamond split into four shards, their edges jagged like broken glass.
Strapping himself in, he caught his reflection in the warped steel of his breastplate. Purple eyes stared back, veins faintly aglow with the sickly light of his grafts. The chitin at his neck twitched, alive, eager to spread again. He grinned, teeth flashing silver under the shadows.
"Fine," he muttered to himself. "Break me, patch me, burn me, drown me. I'll keep crawling back. Diamonds don't shatter easy."
He holstered a plasma sidearm, slipped a nicotine patch beneath the sleeve of his gauntlet, and walked into the gloom of his operation's main floor. Already, runners and traffickers were moving, and somewhere, a caged augment screamed before being silenced.
Business as usual.