The lab was burning. Not just with fire, but with possibility.
Karl Mitsubishi stood at the center of it all—his white lab coat drenched in coolant and blood, the soft blue glow of nanites crawling across the shattered remains of his magnum opus. A car that could become a mech. A machine bound to a mind. A dream five years in the making.
A dream that was now eating him alive.
"RIDA, status?" Karl coughed, staggering toward the trembling generator chamber.
[RIDA]: Core instability at 113%. Fusion threshold breached. You must evacuate.
"No... Not yet... I'm close..." He fell to one knee, clutching a crystalline drive in one hand and a soldering cable in the other. "Just need... one more minute... just one more circuit—"
Then came the tremor.
And the scream.
The nanite chamber exploded—not outward, but inward—folding into itself and dragging everything into a pocket of collapsing mass. Karl's body was the first to go.
It was not fire that consumed him. It was molecular unraveling.
His fingers were the first to disintegrate—stripped to bone, then atomized. His skin peeled in waves, evaporating in sheets of light. Muscles burst like overripe fruit, revealing wet sinew and the fragile lattice of human wiring underneath.
His screams were silent.
His eyes dissolved, yet he saw. His ears ruptured, yet he heard the nanites howling like digital banshees.
"Am I dying…? No. This is worse. This is unmaking."
"My body... it's being broken down into particles... data... stripped clean like rusted code…"
"This isn't destruction. It's conversion."
Then there was nothing.
And then light.
He was kneeling. On metal. Under stars.
A vast anvil floated in space above him, glowing with lava runes and thunder-bound chains. The sky was black iron, the stars flickering sparks. There stood a bearded man cloaked in molten robes, hammer slung over one shoulder, with eyes like burning forges.
"Karl Mitsubishi," the being boomed. "You were chosen. Not for your genius. Not for your ambition. But for your ability to build through pain."
"I am Hephaestus. Primordial of Creation. The flames that forge. The strike that tempers. You were burned... but you will be reforged."
Karl couldn't speak. Couldn't even raise his head.
"You have one task, mortal: to create again. In this second life, your soul shall be fused with the nanites you once tamed. You are no longer flesh alone."
"You are living tech."
With that, the hammer fell.
When Karl awoke, he was sprawled in the ruins of a scrapyard on the edge of Purgatory's Earth.
Naked. Alive. Wired.
His veins pulsed with blue nanite light. His left arm was no longer flesh—it was a mesh of programmable alloy, shifting and breathing like a serpent beneath synthetic skin. Drones hovered behind him like loyal hounds.
He panted. Groaned. Then laughed, just a little. "So… this is how it feels to be rebooted."
RIDA's voice crackled in his head, a whisper woven into his skull.
[RIDA]: Welcome back, Doctor. Re-initializing core directives. Project 'Chariot'... incomplete.
He sat up quickly. "What?! Incomplete? Where's the blueprint—wait, wait, wait—don't tell me—"
His vision flickered.
[RIDA]: Primary blueprint files were lost in the detonation. Recovery impossible.
Karl slumped back, eyes wide with disbelief. "You've gotta be kidding me… It took me four years to design that core... That was my baby…"
He clenched his mechanical hand, fingers twitching like claws. "No matter. I'll build it again. Even better. Stronger. More adaptable. We're starting from scratch, but I've got a literal machine brain now. Screw it."
Karl stood.
He looked out at the broken skyline, the rusted husks of tanks, the crumbling towers, and thought:
"If this world is going to burn… then I'm building the firebreak myself."
Weeks passed.
He scavenged, fought rogue tech beasts, stripped demon war machines for armor. His body adapted. He constructed new nanite-based weapons. He grew his drone network.
But one thing eluded him: Chariot Mode.
The core engine—his mobile transformation system—was impossible to recreate from memory alone. It needed the original schematic. Which was... still inside his old lab, deep in Japan. Deep in enemy territory, overrun by a brute-class demon guarding it like a lair.
But Karl knew one thing: if he wanted to survive this new world, he needed that blueprint.
So he prepared. He rebuilt his nanite gauntlets. He refitted his internal generators. And when the time was right—
That's when he found Shojiro Momo.
A half-dead teen drenched in demon gore, surrounded by a mountain of corpses.
Karl watched from a rooftop, impressed and baffled.
"Yo... is that guy punching demons to death? With his bare hands? What kind of monster is this…?"
But then he saw Shojiro fall.
Karl didn't hesitate. He launched himself in, plasma gauntlets flaring, drones exploding across the enemy horde. He didn't need to introduce himself. Not yet.
He just needed to build time for the kid to live.