They peeled the broken plating off him one piece at a time. Each fallen plate hit the floor with a metallic groan, the sound of old armor dying. No one spoke. Even the engineers—demon specialists hardened by years of war—worked with steady, reverent silence. The thing on their table wasn't just a soldier anymore. Not after what he survived at the human fortress.
Steam hissed from the seams of Kaiden's ruined frame, carrying the smell of burned oil and ruptured mana channels. His remaining hand twitched at random, fingers firing broken signals like a dying insect.
Sylen stood in the corner, arms wrapped around herself, watching his chest rise in glitching stutters. She had dragged him out of that battlefield, sparked his heart-runic line by hand, and now she watched them rebuild him.
Kaiden blinked awake.
Not into pain, but into pressure—deep, thrumming, rhythmic, as if the whole world were breathing around him. Cold lamps burned above. Runes glowed along the ceiling. The air tasted like metal storms and engineered lightning. His last memory was the fortress turning white, the world buckling, the river, and everything shutting down.
An engineer whispered, "Hold still, sir," as if speaking to something holy and dangerous.
He tried to move. Something inside him moved instead.
He felt the shape of himself before he saw it: tighter, denser, too perfectly aligned. His weight was wrong—balanced differently, controlled with precise internal tension. They had not repaired him. They had rebuilt him.
Dark alloy plating sealed his ribs, drinking the lamplight into itself. Flexible runic threading lined every joint, flickering gently like glowing veins. Servo-muscles beneath synthetic dermal metal responded like flesh, not like welded machinery. His old frame had been a cage. This one felt like a decision.
He sat up slowly. Engineers scattered back instinctively.
Kaiden raised a hand to his face—and froze. The upper half of his visage had human contours now: cheekbones sculpted from mana-glass, faint brow-lines shaped like a memory of humanity, smooth curves where once there had been only angles and plates. But his fingers brushed the mouth: a metal jaw. Exposed steel. Brutal teeth forged like wedges, each etched with stabilizing glyphs. It clicked softly when he breathed, like a clock counting toward something inevitable.
Sylen's breath hitched. "Kaiden…"
Everyone's attention drifted to his chest. Not the new plating, but what glowed beneath. The new core pulsed through the armor seams—not humming like his old one but thudding, slow and heavy, like a heart too strong for its ribcage.
THUM. A soft vibration ran through the floor. THUM.
The light inside him brightened, a deep, violent violet.
The chief engineer whispered, "Emperor preserve us…"
Maela staggered back, clutching her temple. Linho winced as though something brushed against his thoughts. One of the engineering aides dropped a tool and backed away until he hit the wall. Even the runes on the walls flickered. The Pulse Engine reacted to every breath Kaiden took, and it was getting stronger.
Sylen stepped closer, though her pupils had dilated, her breath unsteady. "You're… loud," she said quietly. "Every mage in this building is staring at this wing right now."
Kaiden lowered his gaze to the glowing seams of his chest. "What did you put inside me?" His metal jaw clicked softly on the last word.
The chief engineer swallowed hard. "A Rank V mana-reactive engine. A Pulse Core. It's… experimental. We've never installed one in a living frame."
The door opened with a sudden hydraulic shriek. Zarkus entered like a storm in uniform, his appearance cutting through the engineer's frantic defense.
"It will make you stronger," Zarkus said, voice calm but sharp with satisfaction, circling Kaiden like an architect admiring a weapon made real. "Faster. More resilient. And significantly harder to kill."
"But there is a cost," Zarkus continued, planting himself directly across from Kaiden. "Every Circle Mage within half a league will sense you when this core is active. You will shine through mana like a flare. A warning and a threat both."
Kaiden flexed a hand. The movement was smooth—organic. It felt like skin. "It feels alive," he murmured.
Zarkus smiled thinly. "That's because it is."
THUM.
The Pulse Engine answered like a second heartbeat.
Sylen stepped closer, drawn and repelled at once by the glow. "Kaiden…" Her voice cracked. "You're lighting up the whole damn room."
He looked at her—really looked—and the new face made his expression strangely readable, unsettlingly human in the upper half and brutally inhuman in the jaw.
"How bad is it?" he asked.
She swallowed, eyes fixed on the pulsing core. "Every mage outside this wing just stopped what they were doing."
A beat of silence.
Good.
Kaiden stood. The table groaned under the shift of weight. The ground trembled with the pulse.
"Let them feel it," he said softly. His voice carried through metal, through runes, through every mage-sensitive surface in the room.
Nobody breathed.
Kaiden took his first step.
The Pulse Engine thudded again.
Not reborn.
Reforged.
A weapon with a heartbeat.