Azotreh once again woke up in the sterile medical ward. Her head was covered in bandages, leaving only space around their eyes.
She raised one hand, holding it straight up towards the ceiling. On instinct, she activated the new power they felt in the very core of her being.
Most of the room didn't change, but her arm lit up with a bright red light to her vision alone. The red light seemed to emanate directly from the pale skin of her arm, drifting slightly into the air around her. It gave her body a second aura of what she assumed was heat.
She sat up, her back still pressing into the back of her bed. This one was much more comfortable than any of the cots she'd spent previous nights in. It was warmed from underneath, making the sheets also illuminated by a faint orange hue in her vision. Most interesting was the bedside plant, glowing an extremely dim yellow.
But only after a moment of watching the room with her new power, her vibrancy completely drained, a headache building rapidly before she shut off the ability. A steel hand emerged from a wall, offering a bright blue potion.
She stared at it warily, twin pupils now spinning around her new mismatched draconic irises. One pupil was the same bright emerald, though now carrying almost imperceptible golden sparkles. The other was a shifting mix of red and black.
A crimson eye constructed itself from the wall, crawling up the arm to more closely observe Azotreh's changed face. She looked a little older again, with new shadows under her bandaged eyes. Her physique had gained some new mass as well, becoming just a little more muscular than before.
A voice echoed from the bedside dresser, the same voice she used to hear under her bed. The voice she'd heard for a moment before re-entering her soul realm as Nicholas took control of her body.
"It's a basic vibrancy potion of your rank. Should get rid of that headache." The voice carried an unusual tone of almost kindness. "I also have a gift for you, and you need to be at full strength to use it. So take the potion. If I poisoned you, that would make all the effort I put into keeping you alive worthless."
She thought that over. It was true, she guessed. That, and if he wanted to poison her, he was the one providing her all of her food and drinks. And the headache wasn't getting much better with each passing moment. So she took the potion and chugged it.
The potion tasted very faintly of something sweet. She couldn't place the flavor exactly, though she thought she might have tasted something similar in the meal hall once. It wasn't unpleasant, at least.
"Now hand back the bottle. No matter how clever the trick you did to use your aura was, I won't have you cutting yourself again. Not with how weak you are after the implantation. I don't even want to use your sanguine status ritual until you've regenerated more of your blood."
The administrator's unusual concern put Azotreh on even higher alert; she slowly backed away from the legged eye socket, its crimson mechanical eye held in the semi-spherical piece of black iron. There wasn't much room to move in the bed, but she still tried to put distance between herself and the eye.
The projected voice let out a soft sigh before continuing, "You're the only AZ experiment to survive. Which means the resources I was supposed to invest in your entire squad have been moved solely to you. Including my gift."
Another arm pulled itself free of the wall, leaving an indent in its exact shape in the smooth black iron. In the hand sat a golden polyhedron. She couldn't tell how many sides the object had, no matter how she looked at it. It invaded her senses strangely, like something she'd experienced only from the LW experiments' auras and the one time she'd snuck into the basement and seen whatever the thing was down there. She hadn't been able to feel her own aura in either scenario, but still felt the unimaginable rigidity of that thing's aura, collar or no.
This thing felt like it. Something she couldn't even begin to understand. But she knew its purpose. She'd seen an object almost identical to this one but blue in her own soul.
"This is one of the rarest items I've ever seen. My analysis power provided no results, and no experiments I've used curios on have provided an identification. The provider of this item told me to give it to the most promising survivor of the AZ experiments, and told me that you could absorb it like an affinity. Have your basic system abilities activated?"
Azotreh shook her head. She knew about the basic powers granted by simply holding the system, but hadn't seen them on the sanguine ritual she'd undergone before the AZ-02 experiment. So she shook her head. The administrator's voice let out another weary sigh before pulling the hands back into the wall, leaving the prism and unblinking eye machine on the bedside table.
"Looks like I'll have to introduce you to basic rituals then. You're lucky I have records of some maniac who ignored the system's basic power to force this nonsense."
Hands emerged from the ceiling above Azotreh, weaving together tight strands of black iron into a relatively simple magic circle. Around the same level of complexity as the ritual she'd used to observe her status.
They made the circle in midair, holding it aloft with ever more hands shaped directly from the metal of the ceiling. It looked extremely time-consuming to anyone who wasn't as powerful as the administrator.
Finally, the hands began lowering the wireframe circle towards Azotreh.
"Reach up and touch it, then grab the prism and hold it against your wrist."
Azotreh did as instructed. She and Nicholas had talked briefly about a comment made by the administrator during the implantation process. The administrator had said that they would appreciate the pain for the sake of advancement.
He had also implied that she would suffer. Nicholas hadn't liked the idea of her suffering, and her feelings were much more complicated. But the conversation had cemented in her mind that the administrator was, at the very least, not going to kill her.
She held the shifting prism to her wrist. Despite visibly changing shape before her eyes, it didn't change at all to her touch. Its smooth side remained as such, even as it appeared to visibly clip into her hand and wrist. She curled her left hand around the prism to hold it steady against the inside of her wrist while moving her right hand to grasp the array.
"Now use your mana to fill the iron," the mechanical voice said.
She looked at the bedside table questioningly, meeting the mechanical eye standing there. The eye spun in its false socket, keeping a steady focus on Azotreh.
"How do I do that?" She asked.
The eye stopped its constant motion. Despite lacking eyebrows, lids, or anything else to convey an expression, it still seemed disappointed.
"You just fill it. It should be instinctual to…"
The eye began moving again, rapidly climbing the wall and making a small leap onto Azotreh's throat. She yelped as the cold claws of the false spider dug into her skin, and she dropped the prism, though the administrator created a hand to catch it.
"The brands. Damnit." The administrator's voice once more emerged as the eye's small legs dug deeper into Azotreh's throat.
The eye began circling her throat, the voice box in the bedside muttering all the while. Its claws left no mark, and it eventually moved to her collar for stability once it stopped standing on the back of her neck.
"While the way you escaped the aura sensory suppression was clever, it seems that the internal sensory suppression is still active." The voice said, its tone fully analytical. "You will instinctively activate arrays and circles you create, but not mine. Unfortunate."
The eye climbed back around her throat and leapt back to the wall before returning to its former location on the bedside table.
"I will write you a skill book for the absorption ritual. Since you are the only surviving member of the AZ-category of experiments, you will be provided with much greater opportunities than others. Planning for procedure AZ-03 is still underway."
The last sentence sent a shiver down Azotreh's spine. The eye clearly noticed, still fixated on Azotreh's upright form.
"AZ-03 should be substantially easier on you than AZ-02. The rejection should shrink with each additional part. I will keep this drone present for your recovery."
The light in the eye darkened, and the voice crackled out. The prism was moved back to its location on Azotreh's bedside, waiting for her to absorb it. The ritual retreated into the ceiling, molding back into the perfectly smooth surface of black iron.
Azotreh couldn't sleep now; the restorative effects of the bed and being freshly awakened ceased all possibilities of her doing so. She still shifted to her side, dark hair speckled with pure white falling before her face. She tried to rest even if she couldn't sleep. But before she could close her eyes, something odd happened.
A system window, flickering and fraying at the edges, manifested before her eyes. But this time it wasn't just the system's windows, but also a voice. A voice only inside her head, but it was a voice that brought up dim memories.
[Syst- ER]
[System integration]
[Supreme Administra-]
[System Arch-]
[I has begun contributing 10 CE per second]
[I has forced system integration with Infinite System]
[Innate Skill System abilities: Absorb, Interface, Quantify forced integration.]
Even as she reached up to try to cover her ears, to block out the sound of a masculine voice she only remembered through nightmares, pain began coursing through her body. Her body once more lit up, the room dyed red, and her body emitting the cerulean blue of the vibrancy resource poten.
[Infinite System has begun integration]
[ERR: Additional System Prism Detected. Absorb? Y/N]
Her aura flared in affirmation, even as she curled into a fetal position on the bed. She felt Nicholas once more attempt to assert control, to hide her from the pains exploding through her already damaged form, but she pushed his consciousness away.
The administrator had said she'd appreciate pain, that it would help her advancement. She knew overcoming adversity was a key driving force in growing stronger. She had to face this herself, even if it was for no other reason than because she didn't want to be coddled.
[Hoard System has begun integration]
She felt the pain redouble. The first was an attack she couldn't understand, damage from something so vast and incomprehensible that her mind simply couldn't parse it. She only felt the pain of the damage after it had already been delivered. Not during.
The pain of the second integrated system was as if molten metal were being poured into her veins, a sensation accentuated by her veins glowing a deep gold. She felt pressure beginning to build behind her eyes before they once again ruptured.
She could hear screaming, a raw, horrified voice screaming into nothingness as her sight once more failed her. Thick, red-hot metal scoured her veins. Then the other pain, the unknowable vast pain, invaded her mind and core. It dug its way into her perceptions and the root of her power. Her senses were sharply cut, as if suddenly thrown into the depths she'd only heard about in old legends. She had no eyes to see, but she had ears and tongue and nose. She knew she still had the organs to sense the world, but they had stopped sending information to her mind.
Then it was over. Her senses returned all at once, only to be submerged in liquid gold again. It dripped into her ears; the metallic scent filled her nose. She could taste the molten metal as it touched her tongue. Her aura felt it too, the burning mass of molten riches.
Then that was over too. Her senses returned to her body. Her eyes were restored, and her mind was racing. She was sweating buckets, the sheets soaked around her. The sweat also contained small amounts of a glistening black material, a sheen of rainbow light trapped just beneath its surface. There was also blood, but she had seen enough of her own blood to not be truly surprised.
[System integrations complete! Congratulations!]
[Hoard System has forcefully activated basic Skill System abilities: Analysis, Looting, Inventory]
[Your rate of energy-based progression has decreased by 10%. All limitations and guardrails on systems and progression have been forcefully revoked.]
The screens quickly became fully incomprehensible, flickering out before she could even read anything more than the word 'congratulations.' But the voice continued to echo in her head.
She wanted the voice to go away, to leave her alone, just as the nightmares had left when Nicholas had been transplanted into her soul. She still had nightmares, but these were clearly based on Nicholas' life rather than her own. No burning, only bright light and the terror of seeing your own death coming.
It was scary, but she hated the nightmares she'd had about the day she didn't remember far more. At least in Nicholas' nightmare, there was nothing she could have done to stop it.