"The corruption has grown," said Remy as he looked down at Will's blackened shin. Twisted dark veins webbed from where the etherite had burrowed in, and the branching capillaries had almost climbed up to his knee.

Will grimaced as he gazed down at his corrupted leg with distaste. He had his pant leg pulled up, and the top guard of his prosthetic was removed to expose his right knee. The rolled-down stump sock clung tightly to his amputated leg, clamping down on the dark veins running down his shin. The veins throbbed violently, and Will shuddered.

"Steady," muttered Dr. Leibowitz. He had dragged his armchair by the couch, and in his hand was a grey psionometer. Frowning, he ran the pen-shaped device over the corrupted region and occasionally shook his head.

"Strange," he muttered. "I'm getting three separate signature readings here."

"Three?" asked Becca.

The doctor nodded gravely. "One is from his natural signature, of course. The second is from the calcified region from his APS. The last one is from the etherite crystal."

Will panted as sweat drenched his forehead. "So, what do you think, doc? Am I fixable?"

"One step at a time, son," the doctor tried to smile reassuringly, but the uncertainty in his eyes didn't assure confidence. "Your personal signature is misaligned. It is to be expected, of course, with all those heterogeneous energies battling for control within your channels. The constant exposure to these signatures has shifted yours out of balance."

"So, what is our first step?" asked Becca.

"First, we are going to scan his leg," said the doctor. He pointed to the corner of the living room where a sleek obsidian VR pod lay tucked in beside the wall.

Will sat up with a grunt. "I didn't bring my CAD with me."

"It's fine," said the doctor as he got to his feet. "We are just scanning for now."

The doctor strode towards the pod. Will attempted to stand up, but his legs were shaky. Remy helped him to his feet, and the trio approached the pod where they found the doctor muttering under his breath. "Now what's wrong with the machine."

Remy gave a quick glance around before speaking. "Doc, the pod is not connected to the power." He pointed at the thick power cord that was coiled on the floor.

"Ah, yes," said the doctor absentmindedly. "It was such a tripping hazard that I had disconnected it."

Remy took the thick power cord and began unspooling it. He quickly connected it to the power, and the VR sprang to life. Its fans hummed as it booted up, and a minute later its top cover slid open, and a mist of cold air billowed out of it.

Will didn't waste any time and slid right into the pod without being prompted. He adjusted his legs on the horizontally reclined chair and shifted around until he was comfortable.

The doctor nodded once he was in place. "Alright then, sit tight." He pressed a few buttons on the control panel, and the VR slid closed.

Will watched as the outside world get reduced to a thin line as the cover finally clicked shut.

"Welcome, user."

A helmet slid down to cover his head, followed by the respirator. The helmet's HUD flickered on, and a video streamed in. Will spotted the doctor, Remy, and Becca huddled over the controls.

"Are you receiving the signal?" asked the doctor.

"Yes. The signal is clear," said Will. "This is a bit different from the VRs at the academies."

Dr. Leibowitz nodded as he tapped away at the controls. "It's not a standard commercial model. This one is focused a lot more on analysis than simulations."

Will breathed in deeply, and cold air entered his lungs from the respirator. The VR station started to hum, and Will felt heat wash over his amputated leg. He grimaced as the pressure steadily ratcheted up around his stump.

'Signature scanning in progress.'

Through hazy eyes, he spotted the green text scrawled across the HUD. The pressure continued to increase and Will felt lightheaded. As the minutes ticked by, he felt his eyelids drooping.

"Will," came a voice through the haze. Will blinked and spotted the doctor staring down at him. Remy was beside him, leaning over the controls, while Becca had her arms wrapped around herself, looking concerned.

"Focus now," said the doctor.

"Head's a little fuzzy," Will muttered.

"You need to stay awake for this," said the doctor. "How about this. We'll talk about the next part of the procedure."

"That sounds good, doctor." Will shook himself awake and focused on his HUD.

"Well, we are going to try and realign your signature back to normalcy," said the doctor. "All those heterogeneous signatures in your system have to be suppressed. So, we are going to be fighting fire with fire."

"What do you mean?" asked Will, puzzled.

"Since it was the three signatures clashing against each other that knocked your signature out of alignment, we are going to do some controlled clashes of our own to knock it back in place," the doctor explained. "All your combat exercises, in fact, were doing just that."

"Wait!" Will exclaimed. "Are you telling me that I'm in this state just because I finally got some rest?"

"In a manner of speaking," the doctor chuckled. "It's odd though..."

"Yes?"

"Normally, I wouldn’t have expected your condition to accelerate so quickly," the doctor mused. "Then again, who has ever tried to embed this... monster."

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"Doctor," Remy interrupted. "You have yet to mention what kind of rift beast the crystal is from."

The doctor froze when the question presented itself.

"And also," Becca continued. "Isn’t rift beast crystals supposed to be embedded immediately after harvesting?"

"That is correct," said the doctor. "The crystals degrade as soon as they are out of the beast’s body."

"So how?"

"What makes you think the beast is dead?"

"Wait," Will interrupted. "That makes no sense. How do you get the crystals out without killing the rift beast?"

The doctor sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. "You three really have no idea what you have in your hands."

"This," he tapped the VR pod, "is a Titan-class crystal. It forms the core for the Titan's engines."

Becca gasped, and Remy looked dumbfounded. "You've got to be kidding me."

The doctor snorted. "That is what you have been carrying all this while. A shard on the level of a nuke."

Will got a flash of eight colossal spindly legs tearing up skyscrapers as they rose up from between the streets of old Belgrave. He remembered the eight glowing red eyes he saw through the smoke, and Will's breathing became ragged. Heart beating in his chest, Will glanced at the doctor who was continuing his explanation.

"The beast is still in the old capital. Most of the nukes were concentrated on the rift tyrant, but it still survived," the doctor sighed. "While it may have been injured, it is recovering. No one dares to provoke it in the exclusionary zone."

Remy and Becca exchanged a glance, and Will knew exactly what they were thinking. They had been closer to the beast than anyone else in living memory. Thirty more miles to the city center, and they might have actually seen it. If they had gotten any closer...

"But, Dr. Leibowitz," began Becca, "it still doesn't answer the question as to how the crystal remained functional after being outside the body for so long."

The doctor smiled. "It is precisely why the crystal initially came to our attention. Just think about it, perfect signature preservation. Even after fifty years of exposure. Well, not exactly, there is the time dilation that we have to consider, but still... Think of the implications. If we managed to duplicate the beast's skill..."

"This is all so confusing," Remy shook his head. "I thought the beast's skill was future prediction."

The doctor scratched his chin. "Another curious mystery."

He glanced at the VR pod as its fans started to slow down. A ding came from the machine, and Will turned his attention back to the message displayed on his HUD.

'Scan complete.'

A window popped up with a 3D representation of his vascular system. Veins, arteries, and channels appeared in a mesh, but there was one region in particular that stood out.

The oblong etherite crystal lodged in his leg cast a hollow shadow in the mesh network, and several blackened veins webbed out from it. The corruption ran a lot deeper than what was seen on the surface. They throbbed with the beat of his heart, and where they met with Will's personal signature, the fields clashed to form tiny localized field distortions.

The doctor got to work and zoomed in on the region. Several graphs popped up beside the window, showing the sinusoidal waves of different signatures. All of them had different pitches and frequencies that changed over time, but that wasn't what caught Will's eye. It was the fourth hidden signature that appeared on the list.

"Doctor, you seemed to have missed one," said Remy. Without a word, the doctor selected the new signature, and a small section of the etherite crystal got highlighted in yellow. Dr. Leibowitz rotated the 3D image and zoomed into the muddy yellow section.

Remy and Becca leaned in closer to the image. Will squinted at the highlighted section with interest and saw thousands of tiny flecks of etherite breaking away from the main crystal in a stream.

"What the hell," Remy muttered.

They followed the mini shards as they made their way down his channels. They seemed to grow bigger as they traveled, and finally, they settled themselves near the junction points of adjacent nerve cells.

The doctor zoomed out, and Will saw more mini shards settle in between the nerves. It was with growing horror that he realized that the light coating of yellow that he saw on screen were all mini shards. There were millions... no, billions of such shards, each occupying every connection point between every nerve.

"Incredible," the doctor muttered.

"What are we looking at here, doc?" Remy asked in a hushed whisper.

"An impossibility," said Dr. Leibowitz. "It will be a long and exhaustive explanation, so I won't bore you with the details."

Remy and Becca stared expectantly at the doctor, who clicked his tongue. Will, too, had his eyes locked on the doctor, and he relented. "Fine. I'll give you the cliff notes."

He took a moment to collect himself before explaining. "Normally, rift beasts only have one etherite crystal because their fields clash against each other. Whenever there is a nucleation point for a second crystal, the former one always destroys it. This is the Bregoli's exclusion principle. No two similar signatures can occupy the same field states."

Remy and Becca nodded, and the doctor continued.

"But the story changes if it is identical. If the second signatures have no deviation from the original, then there is no clash, and they start behaving as one object. This way you can have multiple etherite shards working in tandem. Or so the theory goes."

"Which is the case here," said Becca.

"Indeed," said the doctor. "The rift tyrant is the only known case to have succeeded. And I suspect it is through the future prediction ability that you mentioned."

"How so?" Will asked with a frown.

"They are predicting how the signature changes over time. Now keep in mind that your signature is dynamic. It changes throughout the day in tune with your metabolic processes. So, if the beast is able to predict..."

"How the signatures change over time..." continued Remy.

"It is able to have perfect sync," finished Becca.

Dr. Leibowitz nodded and looked at Will. "I suspect your future prediction ability is merely a side effect, an emergent skill. These... secondary shards are reading the neuron signals and then giving you the future version of your nerve impulses."

"That's insane," Will muttered.

"An impossibility," Dr. Leibowitz repeated.

Will glanced at the scattered crystals all over his body. A single shard had caused him so much worry, and now seeing the endless multitude of them speckled throughout his body was unnerving.

"This would be amazing if it wasn't killing me," Will muttered.

Dr. Leibowitz gave a bitter smile. "Have faith. You are not off the cliff yet."

Will nodded and clenched his fist. "I’m ready for the realignment, doc."

"Good," said the doctor. "The procedure is simple. All you have to do is stabilize and hold your natural signature steady while I subject your channels to some stress."

"Okay."

"Now, if you had your CAD, this would have been much easier, but no matter. We are going to have to improvise. We will program your prosthetic to send the pulses into you."

Dr. Leibowitz began tapping away at the controls, and a message popped up in Will's HUD.

'Requesting access to G-class prosthetic limb,' it read.

Will gave confirmation, and lines of the prosthetic's base code appeared on the HUD.

The doctor squinted at the control panel. "Now, how does this go? Coding was never my specialty..."

"I can handle that, doc," said Remy. He stepped forward and started editing the code.

Dr. Leibowitz frowned as Remy continued his work. He observed for a few minutes before deciding that Remy knew what he was doing. Satisfied, he began instructing him on how to implement the pulse patterns according to the signature scans.

While the two worked on the code, Becca stepped forward. She placed a hand over the VR pod and spoke to Will. "How are you holding up?"

"I'm fine," said Will, wiping the sweat from his brow. "Just want to get this damn thing over with."

Becca leaned over the controls and frowned at the display.

"What's wrong?" asked Will.

Becca shook her head. "I don't know. I just don't like all that yellow in your system. It just looks wrong."

Will glanced at the yellowed portion of his main etherite crystal. He had been unconsciously sending a tendril of his psions to touch the section. He kept brushing past it like he was wiggling a loose tooth. Becca was right; the signature felt like a decaying wound. There was something oddly familiar about the signature that he found off-putting.

"Will," Remy called out, breaking him out of his musings. Their eyes met through the display. "The code is done. Are you ready?"

Will nodded grimly. "Let's do this."

Remy raised a key fob and pointed it at the VR pod. "On the count of three."

Will gave a shaky nod as his prosthetic started charging up. The doctor had a concentrated look on his face, and Becca had her hands clasped in front of her.

Will kept a firm grip on his signature as he braced himself. It was now or never.

"Three... two... one!"

His teeth clattered as a massive pulse crashed into him.