Chapter 544 – Arc 4 Prologue – The Gamer’s Body

Chapter 544 – Arc 4 Prologue – The Gamer’s Body

“Hmmmmmm,” the Apothecary hummed as he stared at the screen. For his profession, he was a remarkably unremarkable fellow. Short, greying hair of a dark colour, the face a doctor would have, only the odd tube, reminding of a miniature chimney with a lightbulb on top, attached to his left temple and steadily dripping some sort of alchemical fluid directly into his brain and the laboratory coat made him look like he belonged here.

Through Aclysia’s eyes, John was watching as he lay in a tubular machine himself. It was rattling around him with deep vibrations. Hovering metal pieces, bent into unclosed rings, were going up and down his length. Blue mana lines were moving over his body in accordance, the arcane particles were caught again and the gathered information uploaded to the screen the Apothecary was looking at.

“Oooh!” A sound of revelation echoed, closely followed by another, “Hmmm, yes, noooooo.” It had been going like this for at least ten minutes. This was basically the last straw John had grasped onto to see if there was a way to heal his eyes. Regardless, he was running out of patience.

“Doctor, I really appreciate your verbal engagement in the peculiarities of my body, but could you PLEASE tell me what is actually going on?” the Gamer asked, staying otherwise put.

“Hm? Oh, yes, yes, I am just looking at something highly peculiar is all.” The Apothecary knew that Aclysia was watching for both of them, so he showed the screen to her. There were two human skeletons.

The left one looked like a normal MRI scan, for the most part. Joining the bones and intestines was an array of blue lines that ran through the body like a second network of veins, concentrated around lungs, heart, brain, crotch, lower spine and the joint areas. In contrast, the right one was basically entirely made up of those lines, as if a child had seen something beautiful and decided to repeat drawing it ad nauseam.

“This is a normal Abyssal,” the doctor explained, taking a touch pen to gesture around on his screen. “As you can see, the pathways mana takes through the body are evenly spread and work completely normally for whatever purpose they will be trained in. Now, comparing this to your body, Mr. Newman.” His hand travelled over to John’s image. “Basically, your entire body seems to be made out of pathways. You have something along the lines of one thousand times the normal density. Normally that would classify you as some sort of elemental, but...” using the touch pen, the Apothecary disabled that particular layer and revealed a perfectly normal, if above average in fitness, male body. “...you are also still human. The network seems to be capable of updating, leaving behind a new true body which it will actively restore in the case of damage. Very fascinating.”

“Aside from the scientific background, none of that is news to me,” John had to hold back to not start screaming about the man’s incompetence. “Get back on topic.”

“Topic?” the man asked and was subsequently grabbed by his collar and shoved against a nearby shelf. Delicate looking glass instruments fell out as Eliza growled like a wild animal at the Apothecary. Between the strands of hair, having grown long enough to reach her hips from her earlier outburst, stared widely opened eyes filled with insane rage.

“His fucking eyes, you creepy shitstain,” she cursed to the echoes of shattering glass. A second wave of that followed when the blood mage shook the much taller man. “Get your smartass brain together and help him before I rip out every last dysfunctional braincell you have and feed it to some creepy Cthulhu like monstrosity while nailing your mangled ass corpse to the bedroom door of your moron of a wife!”

Eliza threw him back towards the computer, the dots and lines in her eyes spinning rapidly, where the Apothecary, gasping for air and with the speed of the fearful, got to work, looking over the scans again. Normally, John would have intervened. Today was not normal.

“S-seems m-m-m-my colleagues did all they could alrea-already.” With the reality check that he was currently analysing one of the strongest people on the continent, not to mention the lover of a girl that could react incredibly volatile, the Apothecary was stammering. “B-because of the way your body works, now that this is the new updated state, no amount of healing will restore your eyesight. I am sorry!” he backed away along the corner of his table, the crunch of shards getting ground to dust under his boots. “There really is nothing we can do!”

“What about biomechanical replacements?” Aclysia asked for John. “Surely, that is possible.”

“Now comes the difficult part,” he thought, Aclysia kneeling down next to him to let him see what he was doing in more detail. This, too, the Gamer rebuked, asking her to stand normally. The first contact lens fell to the floor, he failed to get it on his finger and so it simply rolled away. Leaving him to repeat the game of unwrapping another one. This repeated for the second, then the third. Finally, at the fourth, he gave up on getting this done just with the foreign perspective and grabbed the glass.

Using Possession on them, he placed them on his face and immediately felt infinitely relieved. The sight of Possession was, generally speaking, better than his own sight had been. Although John’s sight had always been pretty good, sparing him at least the need for glasses that would have given his bullies even more ammunition, this magical vision missed the biological drawbacks. No outline of his own nose, no near or farsighted problems. Focusing worked the same, vision concentrating on a particular object or spot, but that the cone of his vision was bound to the surface of the glasses instead of the rolling of his eyes was as odd as it could come.

At least he now could look at what his hands were doing in a more accurate perspective. With that, he managed to scoop up one of the contact lenses on his index finger. He sat there still for a few seconds, guiding his mana through his body to the tip of that finger. Once Possession had also taken hold of that object, he began raising it to his eyes. That was another experience that he could only describe as weird. From the view of the lens, he only saw his own finger on one side and, when he looked the other way, his slowly approaching face, then right eye.

Pushing something onto his own eye was uncomfortable, to say the least. Having to adjust it afterwards, to sit accurately above his iris, was even worse. Then he had to repeat the entire thing. Eventually he did manage to fiddle both in, however, his girls watching him tensely as if he was brooding over his death sentence. Everyone was pretty drained today, only Eliza was still showing steady rage.

“Alright, I think I got it,” John announced and blinked a couple of times, with both contact lenses in place. He could barely feel them as he looked around. He smiled, feeling that, perhaps, this whole thing wasn’t too bad after all. He cancelled Possession on the glasses and put them aside; still wearing the hospital gown, he didn’t have the pockets to put them elsewhere. Then he stood up.

They were in some remote corner of the hospital. Nothing was going on here, patient rooms were lined up, but the lack of doctors around indicated that most of them lay empty. Standing worked, that was good. John took one step, then another one, at the third he allowed himself to look around more.

When he moved his eyes and neck like he normally would have when looking around, everything turned into a swirl. When moving one’s head while staring at something, the eyes would naturally stay focused on that thing. Just like that, the possessed lenses stayed focused as John moved his eyes. That each of the contacts served at its own complete field of view, rather than the puzzled together overlap of two normal to the human gaze didn’t help. The emulation was close enough that his brain was tricked into expecting normal sight input. Neck and eyes, that was what that was designed for and used to. The extra layer of contact lenses, themselves not synchronized with each other, simply didn’t fit into the paradigm.

John fell to the floor, catching himself on all fours by pure luck. He barely heard the worried cries behind him against the grinding of his teeth. Joy that he had felt a moment ago, having broken away the dullness in his spirit, now gave way to a storming see of emotions. ‘Do I have to learn to see from the start like a toddler?!’ he thought and quickly presented himself with the answer: it would go quicker. In essence he already knew how to see, how to control Possession, all of the individual parts he already knew how to use. Putting it altogether... would take time.

He tried to calm down, but was beset with the reality of his situation. He had lost, no, he had been utterly defeated. The only people he could save were those Sigmund simply didn’t feel like killing. Gnome, Beatrice, Undine, Rave, he could have lost all of them and more. Rampant death all around him, everlasting darkness in his eyes and he was powerless to stop any of it.

“GODAMMIT!” he suddenly shouted, tears of anger and ripped pride flowing down his face. “GODAMMIT IT ALL TO HELL!” Raising his fists, he brought them down on the floor with angry might, the tiled floor immediately shattering under his supernatural power. Even on the floor below, they must have felt the reverberations.

He tried to get on his feet, but the water on the contact lenses made the view even worse, his confused brain made all movements feel like he was drunkenly balancing on a tightrope. His shoulder ground upwards on the wall; Rave and Aclysia hurried over to help him; he refused the support, keeping them at distance with wild movements.

He stumbled three steps forwards before landing on the floor again. His head hit the ground, the pain and confusion only fuelling his anger further. Raising his clenched fist and about to cause more damage to the property, potentially ripping a hole in the concrete, John suddenly felt a sharp pain on the side of his palm. Tiny teeth were piercing his skin.

Breathing heavily, John looked at his raised hand, saw a golden thing dangling from it. Even through the blur of tears, he recognized Stirwin. A dark thing passed through his mind, to choke the pesky little lizard until his scales broke and this pain was done away with. John reached out to the golden crocodile hatchling. His hand closed around him.

Gently, now only sobbing, John removed the watcher of his pride from his hand, sitting down on his legs. The small infinity elemental sat in his summoner’s joined palms and looked up as salty tears fell down onto him.“I lost... goddammit it all,” the Gamer whispered, his body quivering with broken acceptance, and let his girls approach him.