The first thing Felix Brixton felt was cold. Not the kind of cold that comes from winter air or a broken heater, but something deeper.
It was the cold of death, of emptiness, of time that had passed without him. His lungs burned as they dragged in their first breath in what felt like forever, and the pain was so sharp it made him wonder if he was even supposed to be alive.
His eyes snapped open to darkness. There were faint red lights blinking somewhere above him, casting long shadows across what looked like a metallic ceiling.
The air smelled wrong, stale and metallic with an undercurrent of something he couldn't quite place. Something chemical and ancient at the same time.
Felix tried to move and immediately regretted it. Every muscle in his body screamed in protest, locked up from disuse. His fingers twitched first, then his toes, and slowly, agonizingly, he forced his arms to respond.
They felt heavy, different somehow, like they belonged to someone else. When he finally managed to lift his right hand in front of his face, he understood why.
His arm was no longer entirely flesh. Sleek black metal plating covered his forearm, seamlessly integrated with his skin at the elbow. Faint blue lines pulsed beneath the surface of the metal, like veins carrying light instead of blood. He flexed his fingers and watched the mechanisms underneath the plating shift and adjust with perfect precision.
"What the fuck did they do to me?" His voice came out as a rasp, barely recognizable.
A soft hiss answered him. The glass pod he was lying in began to lift, its hydraulics groaning from centuries of neglect.
Cold air rushed in, and Felix forced himself to sit up despite every fiber of his being telling him to lie back down. His head spun, and for a moment, he thought he might pass out again.
That's when he heard it. A voice, feminine and calm, speaking directly into his mind.
"Felix. You need to move. Now."
He froze, his enhanced hand gripping the edge of the pod so hard the metal creaked. "Who the bloody hell is that? Show yourself!"
"It's me. Cyber. I know you're disoriented, but we don't have time for questions."
"There are hostiles approaching your location. Three machines, corrupted by Mana Syndrome. They'll be here in ninety seconds."
The name sparked something in his fractured memories. Cyber. His AI assistant from before everything went wrong. But she sounded different now, more real, more present. And what the hell was Mana Syndrome?
Felix swung his legs over the side of the pod and nearly collapsed when his feet hit the ground. His legs weren't fully mechanical like his arms, but he could feel the difference there too. Stronger, more responsive, like his muscles had been rebuilt from the ground up. He grabbed onto the pod for support and looked around the room for the first time.
It was a lab, or at least it used to be. Computer terminals were smashed and overgrown with something that looked like crystallized energy, glowing faintly in shades of purple and green.
The walls were scorched black in places, and the floor was littered with debris. In the corner, he spotted what looked like a weapons locker, its door hanging open.
"Sixty seconds, Felix. Please move."
He stumbled toward the locker, his body slowly remembering how to coordinate itself. Inside, he found a rifle that looked both familiar and alien.
It had the basic shape of the weapons he remembered, but it was covered in the same kind of glowing lines that marked his new arms. Next to it was a pistol and something that looked like a combat knife made of pure energy.
Felix grabbed the rifle and checked the magazine by instinct. Empty. Of course it was empty. Nothing was ever easy.
A sound echoed through the facility, something between a mechanical screech and an animal's roar. It was close, too close, and it was answered by two more from different directions.
"They're here," Cyber said, and this time her voice came from somewhere in the room instead of his head. "Felix, look at me."
He turned and nearly dropped the rifle. Standing in the doorway was a woman, or something that looked like a woman.
She was tall and sleek, built from the same black metal as his arms but formed into a perfect humanoid shape. Her face was expressive despite being clearly synthetic, with eyes that glowed the same blue as the lines on his body. She wore what looked like tactical armor integrated directly into her frame, and she was holding a rifle that hummed with barely contained power.
"Cyber?" Felix's voice cracked.
She smiled, and it was so human it was unsettling. "Surprise. A lot has changed while you were sleeping."
"We can catch up later. Right now, we need to survive."
The first creature burst through the wall before he could respond. It had probably been a security drone once, but now it was a nightmare of twisted metal and corrupted circuitry.
Purple energy leaked from its joints like blood, and its optical sensors had been replaced with something organic and hateful. It locked onto Felix immediately and lunged.
Cyber was faster. Her rifle barked once, and a bolt of concentrated energy punched through the machine's core. It crashed to the ground, sparking and twitching, but two more were already crawling through the hole it had made.
"Felix, your integration system is active," Cyber said, her voice steady even as she fired again. "You can channel Mana through any weapon you touch. Do it now."
Felix didn't understand what she meant, but his body seemed to know. When he gripped the rifle, he felt something surge through the metal plating in his arms.
The weapon came alive in his hands, the empty magazine suddenly glowing with the same blue light as his enhancements. He raised it on pure instinct and pulled the trigger.
The shot that erupted from the barrel was nothing like a normal bullet. It was a lance of pure energy that tore through the first corrupted machine and kept going, punching a hole clean through the wall behind it. The recoil nearly knocked him off his feet, but he stayed upright, adrenaline overriding his weakened state.
"Good," Cyber said, dropping the third machine with two precise shots. "Now let's get out of here before more arrive."
"We have a lot to discuss, and you're going to want to sit down for most of it."
Felix looked at his glowing weapon, then at his mechanical arms, then at the synthetic woman who claimed to be his AI. Whatever world he had woken up to, it definitely wasn't the one he remembered.
"Yeah," he muttered, following Cyber toward the exit. "I'm getting that feeling."