Chapter : 1893

  "I read your textbooks when I was in training," Ben told her. "I memorized your theories on how brains talk to machines. My first combat suit... the software was based on your designs. To us, you weren't just a scientist. You were the Mother of the Interface."

  Eun-ha looked at Ben. The soft, loving look she had given Lloyd disappeared. Her posture changed. She stood straighter. She wasn't just a wife anymore. She was a boss. She was the smartest person in the room, and she knew it.

  "You were Firefly?" she asked. Her voice was cool and calm. She wasn't asking out of fear. She was just gathering facts.

  "I was," Ben admitted. He didn't look ashamed. "Black Ops Division. I was one of their best. Until I realized they were idiots and I left."

  "A defector," Eun-ha said. She tilted her head, her dark eyes scanning him from head to toe. "That explains why you are so arrogant. Firefly agents always think they are gods just because they have batteries and flashlights."

  Ben grinned. He didn't get mad. He actually looked happy that she figured him out so fast.

  "We think we are gods because we understand how things work," Ben replied. "We don't pray to spirits for help. We build solutions. Just like you did."

  Lloyd watched them talking. He felt a little left out. He realized that Ben and Eun-ha spoke a language he only half-understood. Lloyd was a mechanic; he liked to build things with a wrench. But Ben and Eun-ha? They were theorists. They dealt with code, data, and systems.

  "So," Lloyd interrupted. "You guys know each other? Kind of?"

  "He knows my work," Eun-ha corrected him. "I don't know him. But I know his type. Smart. Violent. Gets bored easily. Doesn't play well with others."

  Ben nodded his head. "That sounds about right."

  Eun-ha stepped away from Lloyd. She walked toward Ben. She moved like a predator, smooth and dangerous. She stopped right in front of him. Because she was floating slightly off the ground, she looked down into his eyes.

  "You bowed," she said. "Firefly agents don't bow. Especially not to 'biological errors' like demons."

  "I didn't bow to a demon," Ben said smoothly. "I bowed to the Professor. I respect the mind that built this palace. I respect the woman who organized Hell."

  He raised his heavy metal arms. The joints clicked softly.

  "I look at this place," Ben said, pointing to the glowing crystal pillars. "I don't see magic. I see engineering. I see a mind that hates chaos. That is worth respecting."

  Eun-ha stared at him. Then, a small smile appeared on her face. It wasn't a warm smile. It was a smirk. She had found someone who understood her.

  "You have good eyes, Defector," she said. "Better than my husband's, sometimes. He looks at me and sees a woman. You look at me and see a system."

  "I see the upgrade," Ben corrected.

  Eun-ha laughed. "Flattery won't work on me. But competence? I like competence."

  She reached out with her hand. Her long, sharp black claw tapped against the metal plate on Ben’s chest. Clink.

  "You call yourself a King," she said. "But look at you. You are running on scrap metal. Your hardware is embarrassing."

  Ben’s smile faltered. His ego was his shield, and she had just dented it.

  "I work with what I have," Ben said, sounding a bit defensive. "Lloyd built these limbs for me. They are... strong."

  "They are crude," Eun-ha said bluntly. She glanced at Lloyd. "No offense, honey."

  Lloyd shrugged. "None taken. I built those in a cave with a hammer. It wasn't exactly a high-tech factory."

  "It shows," Eun-ha said. She turned back to Ben. "You have the soul of a killer, but you are trapped in a body made of junk. You are trying to run a supercomputer program on a pocket calculator."

  She walked around him. Her eyes were dissecting every bolt, every weld, every magic rune on his body.

  "The energy is leaking at the elbow," she pointed out. "The heat isn't venting properly. You are wasting 30% of your power just moving your arms. And the connection to your nerves... my god, it’s primitive. You are using pain to control the metal, aren't you?"

  Ben went stiff. She was right. Every time he moved his metal arms, it hurt. He had learned to ignore it, to use the pain as fuel, but it was always there. A constant, grinding ache.

  "Pain works," Ben muttered. "Pain is fast."

  Chapter : 1894

  "Pain is noise," Eun-ha snapped. "It slows down the signal. If you want to kill a god, Ben, you can't be fighting your own body at the same time."

  She stopped in front of him again. The playful look was gone. Now, she looked intense. She looked like a scientist who had found a problem she needed to fix.

  "Do you want to stop being a man in a clunky metal suit?" she asked quietly. "Do you want to stop pretending that this primitive magic is enough?"

  Ben looked at her. For the first time, he felt a hunger that matched hers. He didn't want to just be strong. He wanted to be perfect.

  "What are you offering, Professor?" Ben asked.

  Eun-ha raised her hand. Her palm began to glow with a strange, blue-green light. It wasn't a magic spell. It looked like a blueprint. It looked like streaming numbers.

  "I'm offering you a patch," she said. "Version 2.0."

  ________________________________________

  The light in Eun-ha’s hand was hypnotic. It didn't flicker like a candle flame or a torch. It pulsed with a steady, rhythmic beat, like a heart made of neon. It was composed of millions of tiny, glowing symbols—magic runes that had been broken down, stripped of their mysticism, and put back together as raw, unadulterated computer code.

  Lloyd watched from the side, fascinated. He knew that look on his wife’s face. It was the same look she had forty years ago in their bunker on Earth when she finally cracked the enemy’s secret encryption keys. It was the look of a problem solver who had just found the answer key.

  "Lloyd," Eun-ha said, keeping her eyes locked on Ben. "You tried to fix his problem with hardware. You built him stronger arms. You gave him heavier armor. You treated him like a tank."

  "He is a tank," Lloyd pointed out, crossing his arms. "That's his job."

  "He is a pilot," she corrected sharply. "The problem isn't the metal, Lloyd. The problem is the driver. You are using magic runes to translate his thoughts into motion. That is an old solution. It’s like trying to send a high-speed data file using smoke signals. It works, eventually, but it’s slow, and a lot of the message gets lost in the wind."

  She pointed a clawed finger at Ben’s metal shoulders, where the heavy steel plating met his human flesh.

  "Right now, your brain sends a signal. The rune catches it. The rune figures out what it means. The rune tells the metal to move. That creates a delay. A tiny split second. In a fight against a goblin or a bandit, that doesn't matter. But Ben was Firefly. He knows that in a fight against a railgun or a laser, that split second isn't just a delay. It’s death."

  Ben swallowed hard. She had said the one thing he never admitted to anyone, not even Lloyd. He felt slow. He felt heavy. He knew he was faster than any human in Riverio, but against the memories of the high-tech soldiers he used to fight on Earth, he felt like he was moving through invisible water. He missed the instant response of the cybernetics he used to have.

  "So how do we fix it?" Ben asked. He realized he said "we." He was already on her team. He was already the student waiting for the lesson.

  "We remove the translator," Eun-ha said. "We don't use runes to read the signal. We etch the command lines directly onto your spirit."

  Lloyd straightened up, his eyes widening. "You're going to graft code onto a soul? That... we theorized about that on Earth, but we never had the technology to touch a soul. We barely understood consciousness."

  "We didn't have mana on Earth," Eun-ha reminded him. "Here, the soul is real energy. It has mass. It has a frequency. And if it’s energy, it can be directed. It can be wired."

  She stepped closer to Ben. The blue-green light in her hand got brighter, casting sharp, digital-looking shadows on her pale face.

  "I can't rebuild your arms right now," she told Ben. "I don't have the materials here in the Abyss. I don't have the tools to forge alloy. But I can upgrade the driver. I can teach your spirit how to speak directly to the metal without needing a translation."

  She looked him right in the eye, her expression deadly serious.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Chapter : 1895

  "This is going to hurt," she warned him. "I am going to force a massive amount of raw data directly into your brain. I am going to rewrite the way your mind processes movement. If you are weak, your mind will break. You will forget who you are. You will become a vegetable in a metal suit."

  Ben didn't flinch. A slow, arrogant grin spread across his face. It was the grin of a man who had walked into an enemy base with nothing but a knife and walked out with their flag.

  "I survived the Fire Fly training camps," Ben said. "I survived the wilderness. I survived your husband’s cooking. I think I can handle a little data."

  Eun-ha smirked. "Good answer."

  She didn't hesitate. She reached out and slammed her glowing palm against Ben’s forehead.

  Whirrrrrrrr.

  There was no sound of a slap. Instead, there was a high-pitched, electronic whine that seemed to come from inside their heads. It was the sound of a server room powering up, amplified a thousand times.

  Ben’s body went stiff. His eyes rolled back in his head. His mouth opened in a silent scream.

  For Ben, the room disappeared. The darkness of the Abyss vanished. He was no longer standing on crystal. He was floating in a sea of white, blinding light.

  He saw streams of numbers. He saw geometric shapes. He saw complex blueprints flying past him at the speed of light. It wasn't magic. It wasn't the vague, mystical feeling of spirit power. It was math. It was physics. It was pure logic.

  He saw the schematics of his own arms, but they were different. The clumsy runes Lloyd had carved were gone. In their place were glowing lines of light—circuits that looked like veins, nervous systems made of code.

  He felt a presence in his mind—Eun-ha’s mind. It was cold, vast, and incredibly organized. She wasn't attacking him; she was organizing him. She was taking the messy, chaotic way he fought—the rage, the instinct, the pain—and filing it into neat little boxes. She was defragmenting his soul.

  Logic Gate Open, a voice whispered in his head. It sounded like her, but it also sounded like a machine. Latency reduced. Optimization beginning.

  He felt the connection to his metal arms change. Before, they felt like tools—heavy things he had to drag around. Now, the feeling changed. He could feel the cold air on the metal plating as if it were his own skin. He could feel the hum of the magic in the joints as if it were his own blood. The wall between flesh and steel disappeared.

  The pain was terrible. It felt like someone was carving lines into his brain with a hot needle. It felt like his neurons were being stripped bare and rewired. But Ben didn't fight it. He welcomed it. He drank the knowledge in.

  He saw the memories attached to the data. He saw flashes of Eun-ha’s life on Earth—laboratories, chalkboards, sleepless nights writing the code that would one day define him. He realized that this power wasn't magic she found in a book; it was her life's work. She was giving him her legacy.

  You are the Uncrowned King, the voice whispered. Now, wear your crown.

  In the real world, the transfer only lasted ten seconds.

  Eun-ha pulled her hand back. The light faded instantly.

  Ben collapsed. He hit the floor hard, his metal limbs clattering against the crystal. He gasped for air, his chest heaving. Sweat poured down his face, soaking his shirt.

  Lloyd rushed forward to help him, but Eun-ha held up a hand.

  "Wait," she ordered. "Let him reboot."

  Ben lay on the floor for a long moment, staring up at the dark ceiling. His breathing slowed down. His shaking stopped. His eyes, which had been wild and unfocused, suddenly snapped sharp. They were clearer than Lloyd had ever seen them.

  Slowly, Ben raised his right hand—his metal hand. He moved the fingers. They didn't whir. They didn't click. They moved silently, instantly, with the smooth, terrifying grace of a spider.

  Ben sat up. He looked at his hand. He made a fist, and the air around it seemed to warp slightly from how fast it closed.

  "It's..." Ben whispered, his voice full of wonder. "It's silent. The noise in my head... the delay... it's gone."

  He looked at Eun-ha. The arrogance was back in his eyes, but it was sharper now. It wasn't the arrogance of a bully; it was the arrogance of a master. It was earned.

  Chapter : 1896

  "You gave me the root access," Ben said, using a term from their old world. "You didn't just patch the system; you gave me the admin keys."

  "I gave you control," Eun-ha said, crossing her arms. "Lloyd can forge the metal, but you? You have to build the pathways in your mind. I gave you the map, Ben. You have to drive the car."

  Ben stood up. He moved differently now. The heaviness was gone. He moved like a cat. He felt faster. He felt smarter. He felt like he had just traded a stone axe for a laser rifle.

  He bowed to her again. This time, there was a smirk on his face.

  "Thank you, Professor," Ben said. "I think I'm going to enjoy this war."

  Eun-ha turned to Lloyd, a satisfied look on her face. "He took the update well. Most subjects vomit when they receive that much raw data."

  Lloyd looked at Ben, who was testing the rotation of his wrist with a look of pure, lethal joy. Lloyd felt a sudden chill. He realized that Eun-ha hadn't just healed Ben; she had evolved him.

  "You realized what you just did, right?" Lloyd asked Eun-ha, watching Ben shadowbox with invisible enemies, his metal fists moving faster than the eye could follow. "You didn't just fix his arms. You just made him the most dangerous thing on two legs."

  "I know," Eun-ha said, her eyes gleaming in the dark light of the Abyss. "We're going to need him. The things coming for us... they don't have lag. Now, neither does he."

  Lloyd nodded, looking between his wife and his best friend. The reunion was over. The team was assembled. And looking at Ben's new speed, Lloyd knew one thing for sure: the Fire Fly Corporation wasn't going to know what hit them.

  ________________________________________

  The light from Eun-ha’s fingertip faded, leaving Ben standing in the center of the dark crystal hall, blinking rapidly. He looked like a man who had just woken up from a very long, very vivid dream. He stared at his own hands—the metal prosthetics that Lloyd had forged for him—as if he were seeing them for the first time.

  Lloyd stepped forward, his eyes narrowed. He wasn't looking at Ben’s physical body; he was looking at the invisible data stream that was currently settling into Ben’s mind. Thanks to his link with the System and his own high-level perception, Lloyd could almost feel the information transfer. It wasn't just a spell or a memory. It was a manual. A blueprint. A complete operating system written in the language of the soul.

  "Ben?" Lloyd asked, his voice low. "Status report."

  Ben didn't answer immediately. He flexed his metal fingers. Usually, when Ben moved his prosthetics, there was a tiny, almost imperceptible sound—the whir of a mana-servo, the click of a rune activating. It was the sound of a machine reacting to a command. It was the sound of a split-second delay.

  But this time, there was silence.

  The metal fingers moved with a fluidity that was unnerving. They didn't jerk or snap into place. They flowed. It looked less like machinery and more like liquid silver obeying the laws of gravity. It looked biological.

  "It’s... gone," Ben whispered, his voice thick with disbelief. He rotated his wrist, watching the plates slide over each other seamlessly. "The echo. The lag. It’s gone."

  Lloyd looked at Eun-ha. The Devil Queen was watching Ben with a critical, academic eye, her arms crossed over her chest. She looked like a lead engineer watching a prototype run its first diagnostic cycle.

  "What did you give him?" Lloyd asked. "I see the data structure. It looks like... logic gates? But they aren't written on stone or paper. They're written on his aura."

  "I gave him the bridge," Eun-ha said simply. She walked over to Lloyd, standing close enough that he could smell the ozone scent of her power. "You’re a brilliant mechanic, Evan. You built him a Ferrari. But you were trying to drive it using a horse’s reins."

  Lloyd frowned, his mind racing to catch up. "The latency issue. I knew about it. The delay between the neural impulse—the brain saying 'move'—and the magical rune interpreting that command. It’s about twelve milliseconds. In a normal fight, it’s negligible. But against a Fire Fly agent or a high-level demon?"