Azotreh watched the last system windows fizzle into non-existence, though the voice of a parent she'd never known still echoed in her head. She dreaded the idea of that voice being a constant presence.
She turned to the eye on the bedside, which was still sitting passively. Despite the trembling of her hands, she lifted one finger and poked it. The eye flickered to life a moment later, spinning to observe its surroundings. It stopped once it looked at where the prism once sat.
"Where did the item go?" The administrator's voice once more emerged from the bedside table. The eye turned back to Azotreh, now taking in the fresh blood and spots of tar-like liquid now dissolving into rainbow mist on the sheets.
Azotreh shrugged. "Something happened, and it offered me direct absorption." She replied.
The eye spun a bit before making an irritating clicking noise on the bedside. Soon enough, one of the facility's nurses appeared. Her eyes barely widened at the bloodstained sheets, instead turning them on the little machine.
"Move AZ-087 to suite C. I have a private interview to conduct." The metallic voice told the nurse.
She nodded slightly before moving the bedsheets from Azotreh's legs, sliding her hand beneath Azotreh's knees and the small of her back, and picking her up. The nurse carried Azotreh to a much larger, glitteringly warded room. The only light was the bright blue light fixtures, lines of energy that seemed to pulse within the walls themselves.
The nurse gently placed Azotreh into a soft bed in the corner of the room, rearranging the pillows to make Azotreh sit upright.
A small drop of blood fell from Azotreh's face onto the sheets, only for it to immediately dissolve into crimson mist.
The nurse nodded sagely before departing, leaving Azotreh alone in the room again. She only remained alone for a moment as the administrator created a more humanoid form from the floor to stand beside Azotreh's bed.
"You are by far the most interesting experiment I currently have in this facility." The administrator said as if remarking on the weather. "Your heroic blood and innate powers will lead you to be truly powerful if you manage to live past the end of this war. I have already learned much from you, and I wish to learn more. As such, I will be keeping you in this room most of the time. You will also be sent with one of the trainers to hunt monsters in the plains. Until then, I will have the training teams coordinate a schedule."
"Why?" She asked, her voice carrying more confidence than ever. "You said I was the most interesting experiment, but why would that mean that you're sending me beyond the facility?"
"I have been told you are to be a private operative. A powerful hidden weapon. I hope that you'll survive your missions and allow me to continue to study you and your progress. You might even assist me in gathering insights about my own further growth."
Azotreh tilted her head slightly. "How could I help you in your advancement?"
"Wait until you reach higher rank to worry about such things."
The administrator then pulled a small pile of books from the empty air and placed them on the floor beside Azotreh's bed.
"Absorb these when you've partially recovered. I'll also be porting other books to this room soon. I have many things that need copying."
With those words, the administrator's form sank into the floor, melding once again with the matte black metal of the entire facility.
Azotreh spent the rest of the day and first night resting her body, but her mind worked almost constantly. With Nicholas and the dragon now communicating through her aura, she was able to start gleaning some information on the new inhabitant of her soul.
While the dragon had fragmentary memories at best, he still attempted to guide not just Azotreh, but also Nicholas through some basic training they could do while sitting still. Azotreh's desire for escape was something both were more than happy to help her with.
While the dragon was teaching her some of the basics of mental advancement, he taught Nicholas to better use Azotreh's aura. Both were weak compared to the memories the dragon held, and he could only provide bits and pieces of either process, but it was still a supremely helpful use of time while Azotreh was in recovery.
Most importantly, the trio had been further investigating what they could already do. With what Azotreh called the 'basic system abilities' forcefully activated in the hospital, Nicholas could better gain a grasp of their abilities and the other facets of their status. Nailing the 90 potens, or stats as he called them, was important, but there were other things he was far more interested in.
The dragon spent the more proper rest periods, when Azotreh's mind was too strained to keep working and her aura forcefully retracted due to overuse, recalling his own fragmentary memories. He was hoping to find a name in them at the very least.
Azotreh was awoken from a dream she couldn't remember before the sun had even risen. A rather large woman was shaking them with an unexpected gentleness. When Azotreh's heterochromatic eyes focused on the woman, she stepped away.
"Azotreh, the administrator has instructed me to begin training you personally. I'm Diana Crimbrew, though until you're at least aluminum-rank, you will refer to me only as Lady Crimbrew or Instructor Crimbrew. Am I understood?"
Azotreh felt her aura flare in slight surprise. Nicholas was curious about the name, but Azotreh didn't have time for that. She just nodded silently.
"Good. You've got a weird collection of powers and limits, according to Doc. Something about the collar on your neck shutting down some pretty standard perceptual stuff."
She visibly relaxed once Azotreh nodded. She rolled her shoulders before looking at the stack of skill books.
"The doc doesn't really get the limits of a tin-ranker. Let me guess, he told you to absorb all of those?"
Azotreh nodded again.
"The mind can't handle all that new information, even with what he told me about your weird attunement to knowledge itself. Since we're starting from the very basics, you should put off using those books. You're too weak to even vaguely understand how to use 'em right."
Azotreh's expression became confused, and Diana let out a heavy sigh.
"This won't work if you're quiet the whole time. What's wrong?"
"I used one just fine. A blood status ritual skill book."
Diana chuckled. "That's not what I meant. You could probably use them perfectly fine, but the problem is using what they grant properly. Your body isn't ready to actually utilize the information."
"So how do I prepare my body?" Azotreh asked.
Diana grinned a truly wicked grin and said, "That's what I'm here to help with."
Diana guided Azotreh out of the bed she'd been in, holding her up as she almost fell. The extreme pain of absorbing that prism had left a rather intense mark. One Azotreh hadn't realized until she was pulled to her feet.
Her bare feet felt the chill of the metal floor. The warmth of the bed had been an enchantment rather than the warmth of the room. The cold seeped into her skin, but she didn't let that stop her from continuing her shaking walk.
Diana led her to the center of the room before lowering Azotreh to the ground.
"Your training will begin slowly. While you're still injured, and when you're inevitably hurt again by the doc's later experiments, we'll just get you through some more basic stuff. Resistance training will be easy, but your skill training is much more important. We'll start with some of the basic physical ones."
Diana reached to her belt and grabbed a small sack, cursing something fierce about the array of the facility. She began to pull items from the sack, most of which were much larger than the sack itself.
"Why do you carry all that in the sack instead of your inventory?" Azotreh asked.
"The facility keeps everyone except the commander and the doc from using any external powers, including the basic system ones. I can't even access my interface in the main zones."
"So are there places I could access my interface?"
"Nope." Diana indicated the collar of brands around Azotreh's neck. "They'll get those brands severed when you're out on the front, but while you're in here, no way."
Azotreh's shoulders slumped before she straightened up and grabbed one of the smaller weights. She couldn't lift it from the ground until Diana touched it and stared into the empty air for a moment. The weight lit up blue, and Diana handed it to Azotreh.
"I thought you said you couldn't access the system?"
"I can here, just not in most areas of the facility. Even then, you should learn soon that a lot of the arcane exists beyond the system."
"Can you teach me?"
"Not my area. I'm only here to train you physically, not poorly explain things even I barely understand."
Diana looked at Azotreh assessingly before sighing at the dampened curiosity in Azotreh's eyes.
"Ask the doc about it. He seems weirdly fond of you."
Azotreh nodded and took the weight from Diana. It was still heavier than she expected, but she managed to hold it up without too much trembling in her arm.
"Since you're recovering, I won't start your training with anything truly difficult. It all comes down to perseverance, and considering you survived whatever AZ-02 was, I'd guess you have at least some perseverance."
Azotreh nodded and waited for Diana to demonstrate what she was supposed to do with the weight.
Azotreh spent half a week in recovery, amounting to four days. Even at tin-rank, with the assistance of potions, she was able to walk steadily by the second day, and stopped bleeding from the eyes on the third.
Only on the fourth did the administrator stop her training to once again undergo the status ritual. This time, as she drew out the patterns in her blood, she felt once again that this would be in one of the many languages she had learned through one of the two egos now housed within her soul. But when it was produced, it wasn't in English.
The cold voice of the administrator emerged from a far more obelisk-like body than she'd ever seen. Seemingly just one tall pillar of black iron with reaching hands and watching eyes. He didn't even bother to form a distinct head, just creating eyes from the pillar itself. Diana was also present, since she would learn how to better create a training regimen for Azotreh if she had a full picture of her abilities, something even she only had a partial grasp of.
"Interesting. I know that language, though not well." The administrator said, the obelisk vibrating to create the sound.
"What language is it?" Asked Diana.
"Duvdrearc, the common language of black dragons." The administrator turned a curious eye on Azotreh. "How did you learn Duvdrearc? I've researched the ritual some more, and the accounts I've found, along with experiments I've done on other subjects, have pretty conclusively shown that the ritual uses only languages the user already knows to the master-threshold."
Azotreh shrugged. It was true that she knew the language as well as she knew English or Scinparic, considering that she could easily read the sheet, but she didn't know how. She did have a theory, though.
"I think it's because of the implants." She said, her voice small as ever. It grew smaller as the administrator focused both of his crimson eyes on her.
"Continue." He commanded.
"W- well, when the two implants fused rather than attacking each other, they changed something." She pointed to the section of her bloodlines. "This used to have the human, heroic human, and black dragon bloodlines, right?" She asked.
The administrator made an affirming sound, reverberating through the metal of the room itself along with the obelisk.
"Now the third one reads as rainbow dragon instead."
The administrator's pupils contracted before the bright eyes dimmed. Diana looked at the administrator in confusion for a minute before the eyes relit with the crimson energy of his presence.
"I have no records of rainbow dragons. However, if that was created from the fusion of the black dragon and red dragon implants…" He trailed off, though his voice continued to reverberate through the room. He grabbed the sheet from the small bedside table it was sitting atop. Despite not being able to read most of it, he could still look for differences.
"A third… is that a name?" He asked. The characters that made up the name weren't reflected anywhere on the sheet. They seemed to be one of the runic scripts rather than a part of the same language.
"Is there a third now? Alongside you and Nicholas?"
Azotreh nodded. She felt a small pang of hope echo through her aura and watched the pair standing before her exchange a glance.
"We don't know his name yet," Azotreh explained.
"I don't recognize the language the name is written in. It's not one of the runic scripts either."
An echo of disappointment filled the room, emanating from Azotreh's aura. Diana once again looked at the administrator, but he didn't look back, more focused on the sheet.
"I know you don't want to share your entire sheet with me, but would you mind outlining some of the more basic things? Any ways I can assist in your advancement would be better to know now, while we're still in the experimental phase." The administrator let out a sound somewhere between a long sigh and the clinking of wind chimes.
Azotreh nodded quietly before ceding control to Nicholas, who was more capable of explaining what was useful while keeping secrets close to their chest. He was older and apparently had some level of experience in keeping secrets.