Once Luke recovered a semblance of self-composure, the trio started explaining to him what changed in the time of his coma, and how his body changed and developed. How twisted it became.
The prosthetic, as it turned out, was made mostly of his own bones. The annoyingly long breaks in Butcher's speech became too unbearable to them all so the Hedgehog Man, Sir Jerzy, stepped in, interrupting the Bloody Surgeon and explaining to him.
“All right, let's make it short and sweet,” said the short man.
“ This madman here cut out all of, what he deemed to be, corroded or useless bone mass… He went a little overboard. If it wasn’t for that raging engine of a heart you have there you would probably be just a glop of flesh right now. Whatever that thing is, it forces growth, not always the correct kind mind you. Learn to control it. The amount of cancer we took out of you, or twisted mutations could fill this room twofold. Back to the topic, he cut out what he could, and seeing as the Void in your body rejects most of foreign bio-replacements, he decided to scramble together this. Your bones, for whatever reason, gained partial properties of a crystal, a highly conductive one, so with my help, we managed to recreate a semblance of a Battle Arm…ament… ha?”
A dead silence echoed in the room.
Luke stared at him with hollow eyes, unmoving, still processing that the glistening construct dangling from the hands of a madman next to him was carved out of his own bones.
“You guys suck.” Complained about the spiky ball on the legs.
“We will keep you here, for rehabilitation. My underlings will teach you some basics so you won’t blunder again into a fight beyond you so easily. How could you not feel the power difference between you and the monsters you fought? Monsoon found the epicenter of the explosion from the adult snail, it and the rat are monsters from the third level of the sewers, the untamed and uncontrolled level. You really have shit luck.”
The hedgehog rambled on for quite a while, and Luke just listened in silence. After the Avian Lord told the hedgehog to shut up and finish his explanation, Butcher left without a word, a wound opening in the space around him and swallowing him in.
As the aura of murder left with him, a group of weary Sparrowlings came in to escort Luke to his chambers. They pecked at their feathers nervously, still afraid of the murder to come.
As the Avian commanded, they rushed to Luke, helping him move over to his new resting chambers closer to the surface.
As the commotion settled, the Sparowlings left, leaving him dazed, alone in the somewhat spacious room with rocky walls.
Alone.
He sat down heavily on the wooden framed bed, and it squeaked under his weight. Even disarmed as he was now, his body and mass grew. He was over 2.4 meters tall now, his broad shoulders stretched out the fabric of the shirt he was given, the black veins poking out of the skin and pulsing rhythmically. He looked at his one arm, hunched with his elbows resting on his knees.
His skin was pale, deathly pale. It was crisscrossed by black pathways of different proportions. He could feel he was bursting with barely tamed power, his innards were a step away from being on fire.
Yet…
He felt no joy, not at his survival, nor his newly strengthened body and skills.
He could feel him.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
He could feel his fella.
His torment.
The agony.
Lukas clenched his fist, and the noise it made sounded like crashing rock.
His empty eyes stared into nothingness. Trying to figure out anything that would stop this helplessness.
“I’m still fucking powerless.” He whispered.
With his anger rising at his impotence his body started glowing, light emanating from his chest. His skin started giving off steam, sizzling. With the Void tamed for now, his new powers roared to life.
He only noticed them as the things in the room started combusting randomly from the heat his body was giving off.
He unclenched his fist.
He exhaled, and with it, a heat blast scorched the flooring in front of him.
“Oh wow.”
He could still feel his friend was alive in his mind. He couldn’t reach him, but he could still feel him.
His pain.
“As long as he is alive, he may be rescued. I refuse to believe otherwise.”
He knew what he had to do. As he dropped backward and sprawled on the bed, his mind started forming rapid plans. His clarity of thought was unlike anything before. His memory. His intuition.
He had to gain more knowledge, more skills, more magic.
He had to thank Monsoon for all that help. He still didn’t understand what warranted so much support. They barely knew each other.
He went to sleep while trying to meditate. Remembering all the techniques, pathways, and knowledge he learned so far and forming questions to ask.
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“ YOU MOTHERFUCKER!!!! AAAAAAAAAGHHHHH” Screams so intense they shook the whole island to the core resounded from one of the healing chambers.
“HOLD…STILL…” Said the hooded monster that was currently wrestling with the man strapped to the chair by leather straps and iron, glyph-covered chains.
‘’FUCK YOU!!! AAAAH FUCK! UAAAAGHHH!” he could only scream and trash his body during this operation. Through clenched teeth, his gums bled. Veins throbbed on his forehead as the back of his head repeatedly smashed into the headrest of the torture chair.
“AAAH YOU FUCKER!!” He cursed the Butcher as he worked on connecting his contraption to Luke’s stump. The monster said that the connection process needed to be done without any anesthesia which Luke started to truly doubt the moment his fresh layer of scarred skin on the stump was peeled off and the monster started caressing his bleeding, revealed flesh.
The monster in question smirked at the insults and poked the bone needles even deeper into the muscles, first gliding it off the bone, then piercing it inside.
“TY JEBANY SADYSTO!” Luke could only roar in pain as the bone construct started connecting to his nervous system, firing off signals and causing torment even worse than the arm being ripped off.
The whole operation was the stuff of nightmares. As it turned out, the bone construct could move by his will and even be a good conductor of his powers.
But It needed to be reconnected to his magical and physical body.
And that meant melding.
His body was forced to accept an aberration in its design.
The prosthetic extended tens of small needles, barbed ones at that, that were slid one by one, painfully slowly into the stump of his arm that was peeled off any skin and with some muscle groups shaved off the bone and held in the air by hooks on wires.
The needles need to be connected to nerves and directly into the bones. The act of piercing into a fresh bundle of nerves was comparable to being submerged in boiling water. The act of those nerves connecting to still unsynchronized construct made by a madman that enjoyed torture?
That pain was incomparable to anything else, the arm was simulating and experiencing pathways being burned into it by Luke's magic as it filled out the insides.
Blazing hot suffering.
Finally, after hours of this torture, the operation ended successfully. Luke dropped his head down with bloody froth coming out of his mouth. Delirious.
The feeling of those barbed protrusions slipping between his muscle fibers and ripping them still echoed as phantom pain in his mind.
His body shook.
He felt the latches release, and his bindings fall down.
Before he could throw himself at his torturer and rip the bastard to shreds, the cloaked monster left without a word through a gash in reality.
He was left alone.
After a moment of coming to terms with the stupidity of agreeing to awake surgery by a psychopath, he lifted his new glistening arm in front of his face.
It was light. It reacted to his thoughts without any delay.
The fingers bent easily with the sound of bone rubbing against bone.
He channeled the Primordial Blaze into it, and the empty paths on the claws ignited with blinding fire and coalesced into torch blades.
Next, he slowly let the Void flow through, and the whole arm started blending with darkness, slowly, it became harder to notice, harder to focus on.
The claws became depthless. With a flick of his wrist, he cut deep gashes in the walls around him.
He smiled.
Deactivating the powers he stood up and prepared for his last lesson here.
“ 3 months flew by, I wonder what the last lesson will be about” Luke wondered aloud as he made his way to the Great Birdery Hall up the stairs.
The hedgehog, Jeż Jerzy, will also be there. Both he and the Avian lord planned this day as his last on the island and under their tutelage.
With both his arms resting on the wooden doors, he pushed them open and entered the great hall with an open ceiling that allowed the sun to shine in through.
As his eyes adjusted he saw a table set with tons of food and two of his teachers chatting while sitting down with wine in their hands.
The hall was lined with tens of Sparrowlings dressed as butlers. Ready to serve mindlessly.
He moved closer and sat down at the end of the table.
“So, what more will I learn today?” he asked.