The door to the recovery wing whipped open.
Nova stepped through quietly, breath held somewhere behind her teeth. She didn't know what she expected - gauze, machinery, the hum of emergency stabilization equipment. Maybe just silence. Maybe nothing. But not this.
Caelus stood at the center of the room.
Shirtless. Towering. Still.
Three calibration drones floated in slow, calculated orbits around him, beams of light dancing across his frame; measuring tension, stability, heat. They hummed gently, like they didn't dare speak louder than the man between them. Nova froze at the threshold. Measuring tension. Sync ratios. Core distribution.
His new body was massive. Not grotesquely so, but built with intent. This was not a soldier. This was a stronghold.
"Okay," she whispered. "You're alive."
He turned, slowly, and for the first time, their eyes really met. He didn't smile. He didn't speak. But his shoulders relaxed a fraction, and that was enough. He remembered her voice before he remembered her face. The woman beside the gurney. The one who ran toward the blood, not away.
But now, for the first time, he saw her - really saw her. She wasn't tall. Maybe 5'5. But she stood like someone who didn't care how tall you were. Her frame was all coiled sharpness and focus, brown eyes moving faster than her mouth. Brown hair, petite face, but with a radiance of energy hidden just beneath the surface. No unnecessary decoration. Every motion she made felt like it had already been tested and refined. Engineer's hands. Maker's eyes. Between her labcoat and clothes, if she was augmented, he couldnt tell.
There was oil on her knuckles and ache in her posture. But she looked at him like she saw through the plating. And he wasn't used to that.
"You look... indestructible," she said, stepping inside.
Light danced beneath his skin - thin lattices of embedded shielding flickering in sequence, reacting to the drones' proximity. Every inch of him shimmered with layered defense: pulse-absorption coils, reactive muscle filaments, threat-priority indicators tucked behind dermal plating. He flexed one arm, and the nearest drone pinged. Adjusted.
"Pretty, isn't he?" came a voice from the shadows.
Nova glanced sideways.
One Calyx leaned against the diagnostics console, smirking. Two more hovered near the far walls, posture too casual to be unarmed. A fourth moved like she was playing tag with the drone readouts.
"And the subdermal system?" Nova asked, voice quiet.
"Solid. Responsive. Adaptive shielding. His body flinches before he does."
Nova nodded. "So he's still him."
"Yes, but mostly titanium now," Calyx offered. "We only stitched him back together. We didn't add a personality."
Nova stepped closer to Caelus, stopping just outside the drone path. "I didn't think I'd see you again. Not like this."
Caelus's voice was soft. "Neither did I."
"They sent you in like you were disposable," she said gently. "But... you weren't. You're not."
He didn't reply.
But something in his expression changed. He heard her.
Nova circled him, inspecting the augments. "Is this what it feels like? Being made into a weapon?"
"I was always a weapon," he said.
She stopped in front of him. "Well you aren't any longer."
Without warning, two of Calyx bodies lunged in at Caelus with blinding speed, moving faster than scattered shadows - fast, silent, sudden.
Caelus's body responded instantly.
Ablative shielding flared to life around him in a shimmering pulse. One Calyx hit the field and was thrown back in a controlled kinetic rebound. The other triggered an overload reaction - his chest pulsed, and a resonant shockwave dispersed her mid-lunge like dust in a storm. The room went quiet again.
The shielding flickered, then dissipated. Caelus didn't even blink, but Nova's heart was still racing.
"Is that... new?! I... didn't design those interfaces." she asked, looking toward the console.
"No," Calyx said, grinning, "but you built the bones. I just added some flair."
Calyx, barely mussed, stood and dusted herself off. "Reflexive defense suite, joined with predictive shielding. Very polite. We married reflex with threat magnetics. Hostile intent triggers protection."
Nova took a breath. "He didn't even choose to defend himself."
"Exactly," Calyx said. "He doesn't need to. His body does it for him."
"This interface point," she said, gesturing at his shoulder. "This was meant for small-scale lattice stabilization. You scaled it for a distributed load?"
"Mmmhm," Calyx nodded. "And added conditional transfer buffers. He can redirect force. Tank. Absorb. Shield his squad with it."
Nova moved closer again, reaching out - fingers brushing a glowline beneath his collarbone.
"I recognize this lattice, it's one of mine. It wasn't supposed to be used for combat at all."
"It's not just for combat anymore," Calyx replied. "It's for keeping others alive."
Nova let her hand rest gently on the plate. "Then maybe it's doing what it was always meant to."
Without mention or warning, a passageway opened beneath them - gesturing an all-expenses paid trip to the training deck - a massive arena which casually boasted its size, like the floor of a colosseum; octagonal but silent. Inside the center ring, the walls shimmered faintly, lined with reactive projectors - blank, but waiting. Calyx walked ahead, the sole of her boots echoing softly against the composite panels.
"Welcome to the sandbox!," she said, gesturing with a flourish. "Built for testing failure. But don't worry, today we're doing success."
Nova followed beside Caelus, still glancing sideways at him, half scientist, half someone watching someone else come back from the dead.
"You good for this?" she asked quietly.
"I wouldn't be here if I wasn't."
Nova gave a faint nod. "Let's see what all that shielding is really for."
Calyx's voice piped in from a raised control platform above the arena. Three of her bodies stood at consoles; the fourth leaned over the edge with a smile like a game show host.
"Sim run: Dynamic Hostiles - Alpha Pattern Variants. Scaling aggression now... let's spice things up for our war boy."
She snapped her fingers. Targets bloomed from the floor like summoned ghosts. Armored constructs, shifting in shape and movement, painted in Sovereign red and Ascendent blue. A palette of archetypes. Caelus stepped into the center.
His body adjusted. Shoulders rolled. Breath steady. The first drone lunged, but he didn't dodge. He absorbed the strike, which landed against his shoulder with a thunderous crack. The ablative plate shimmered, hissed, and ate the energy. His pulse lattice stored it. Another target flanked him.
His body rotated just enough to bring the attacker into range. The kinetic shield flared, turning the hit into a counter-blast. The drone flew backward, disintegrating before it hit the wall.
Nova leaned on the railing. "He's not reacting... but he's definitely leading the combat."
"Reactive aggression," Calyx confirmed. "He doesn't need to outpace you. He outlasts you. And then makes it hurt."
A barrage of attacks came next. Three-on-one.
Caelus pivoted, taking one to the chest, another to the thigh, absorbing them all. His body lit up; an energy pulse building beneath the skin, glowlines cascading down his arms. Then he dropped a knee into the floor and released it.
The shockwave rolled outward, about as tall as Nova herself - soundless, beautiful. All three constructs shattered mid-strike. The room went still. Calyx applauded.
"And to think, not too long ago, he was mulch."
Nova chuckled softly. "He's better than the models ever predicted. You did good work."
"We did," Calyx corrected, smiling faintly.
Nova turned to watch Caelus breathe. He wasn't even sweating. Just standing tall in the center of silence. She stepped down onto the platform, walked to him, and held up a small calibration tool.
"Your right arm's energy relay is off by a few microseconds. Let me fix that."
He nodded once. She stepped closer, adjusted the small port under his bicep, and paused. They were standing close. He didn't move, and she didn't step back.
"You look good," she said.
"Functional," he replied.
"No," she said. "Alive. That matters. When I saw them wheel you past my lab," she said quietly, "I thought you were going to die. Not figuratively. Not dramatically. Just - gone. Like everyone else they use and burn out." Her eyes didn't waver. Neither did her voice.
"I don't know who signed the order to send you in alone. I don't know if it was Ward or Kreel or some faceless strategist with a body made of spreadsheets. But it was wrong. You're not expendable. And this..." she gestured to him, to the plating, to the glowlines, "... this is proof."
Caelus held her gaze.
She took another breath. "And you look... incredible. Not because of the tech. Not just because you can throw drones through walls. Because you're still here. And you're stronger. Not in spite of what happened, but because you came through it. You're not just functional ok?"
Her voice cracked, just slightly. "And no one's going to send you to die again. Not while I'm around."
A silence settled between them. The hum of the simulator faded into background noise. Nova stepped back half a pace, wiping her palms on her jacket. "Look, I don't know what any of this means yet. For the mission I mean. Well, for... anything, really. I hate that they use my designs the way they do. But I know I feel better with you standing in front of me than bleeding on a table. So maybe... that means things can be different."
She offered a small smile. Worn, but real. "So. That's how I feel."
Caelus looked at her for a long moment. No words, just the faintest shift in his expression. An unspoken agreement. Gratitude without ceremony. She turned, walking back toward the console. Then paused.
"Also?" she called over her shoulder. "The new frame makes your head look slightly less unapproachable."
"Slightly," she added, with a smirk.
Behind her, Caelus exhaled. Almost a laugh.
Almost.
The training chamber had dimmed. The constructs were gone. Only the silence and the faint ozone of spent shielding remained. Nova stood at the edge of the arena, arms folded, gaze still fixed on where Caelus had stood.
"You're quiet," Calyx said, gliding up behind her.
"I've been thinking."
"Always dangerous."
Nova ignored that.
"When I was inside the projection body, in Sovereign City - I moved like I was born in the air. Light. Precise. Like my body knew what I meant before I told it."
Calyx tilted her head. "You miss it."
Nova nodded. "It wasn't just the speed. It was the... freedom. Nothing held me down. And then I see Caelus today, holding a battlefield together with his chest, and..." She paused to gather more thoughts. "My balance, my speed, the precision? I didn't have to calculate it. My body just knew. It listened. Reacted."
She turned then, finally facing Calyx.
"And it didn't hurt." A pause. "I want more of that," Nova corrected. "Not weapons. Not armor. Just... fluency. Freedom. I'm tired of designing brilliance for other people. I want to wear my own blueprints."
Calyx's grin returned, bright, not mocking. Almost reverent.
"We could make you something elegant," she murmured. "Not a fortress like him," she nodded toward Caelus, "but something else. Something lean. Fluid. Synaptic precision, kinesthetic overlay tuning, subtle reinforcement over skeletal anchors..."
Nova raised an eyebrow. "Tell me you've already been designing it."
Calyx gave a faux-gasp. "I design everything, dear. But this one? This one would have your name on it."
"No," Nova said, slowly. "It would be my name."
The words hung between them - electrified.
"That's a bold step," Calyx said. "From human to post-human. Most people get dragged into it by trauma." Calyx's eyes gleamed. "You want to become what you build. You're walking into it with taste."
"I'm simply done waiting for emergencies to give me permission to evolve."
Calyx leaned forward, beaming. "Then let's get your evolution tailored."
The Fabrication lab hummed like a church full of surgical hymns - clean light, precise machinery, everything arranged with the clinical grace only Calyx could engineer. Dozens of synthetic limbs, scaffold arrays, and suspended augment matrices hung in quiet suspension like sculptures waiting to be named.
Calyx swept in first, two of her other bodies already hard at work reconfiguring holo-interfaces, one weaving a new polymer spine across a skeletal test frame. Nova followed behind, Caelus beside her. He said nothing, but his presence filled the room like a shield that didn't need to be raised.
"Welcome," Calyx declared, arms wide, "to the showroom of possibility. Everything you never dared ask for, and probably a few things I invented out of spite."
Nova looked around, jaw tight with thought. "Arms first," she said, straightforward.
Calyx arched an eyebrow. "Oh, no foreplay? Just straight to the limbs?"
"You want me to order a charcouterie board first?" Nova replied.
"I was hoping for a toast. Perhaps a vow."
Nova gave her a small smile. "Later. Right now, I want my hands back."
Calyx's demeanor softened. "Then let's get started!"
As she gestured, a thin frame of projected prosthetics appeared between them; floating, wire-smooth outlines that traced forearms, wrists, digits.
"Lightweight," Nova said. "Elegant. Minimalist. No bulky hydraulics. No bicep flex mods."
"No flex mods? Blasphemy." Calyx spun the model, tuning the tension lines. "Titanium alloy, carbon fiber reinforcement. Hollow-bone configuration. Haptic pads here... " she marked the fingertips, "... and kinetic feedback sensitivity tuned to tools and touch."
"I want EMP pulses too," Nova said.
Calyx paused. Blinked. "Darling, you want hwhat?"
"Directed EMPs. Microbursts, aimed from the palms. Enough to fry an interface or drop a drone at mid-range."
Calyx gave a low whistle. "Subtle."
"I don't want to destroy infrastructure," Nova said. "I want to cut connection."
Calyx's eyes flicked to her. "You want to weaponize your handshake? That's not very Ascendent of you." Calyx's expression shifted. Her projection paused the hologram. "Care to unpack that over tea and psychological risk assessment?"
Nova didn't laugh. She stared at the model hands. At the lines of her future. "Back before we projected into Sovereign City... before the lounge. Before the Fabrication wing. Something happened."
Calyx grew still, her grin slipping into a listening shape.
"It wasn't Cutter. It wasn't Sovereign. It wasn't... anything that should've been there. But it was. In the interface, it was there with me. Or rather, I was in there with it. Underneath everything. Watching me. Whispering through code." She flexed her real fingers once, as if remembering the weight of not having control. "It wasn't like a person. It was like... falling into someone else's memory and realizing they're still in it."
Calyx said nothing.
"I couldn't scream. I couldn't move. At times I couldn't even think in my own words. My mind didn't belong to me for a few seconds, and when it did again, I couldn't tell if something came back with me."
Nova's voice didn't tremble. It landed like a mission report. Clinical, but real.
"So yeah. I want EMP pulses. Not to break things. Just to make it stop. To make sure it never gets ahold of anyone again."
Calyx was quiet for a long moment. Then - softly, without wit: "That's not a weapon, then. That's a lifeline."
Nova nodded. "Exactly. And I want the lattice."
"Your neural interface?"
"The mesh I built. It stabilized something nothing else could. I want it returned back to me. But in my body. Properly this time. Tuned to me."
Calyx smiled, softer this time. "We'll shape it to your nervous system. It'll let you speak to machines like they're old friends. Or old enemies." Calyx turned back to the blueprint. "We'll tune the field radius. Line your arm channels with a feedback grid. Nothing touches your mind again without your permission."
"Good," Nova said. "Because whatever that was... I don't think it's finished with me."
Nova held out her arms, one last look at the flesh she'd soon leave behind. "Let's get to work." The next few days passed in a rhythm that felt almost like normal.
Caelus came and went from the lab in silence, his footsteps unmistakable -measured, weighty, ever present. He didn't speak much, but he hovered. Close enough to be available. Far enough to leave Nova her space. Sometimes he stood by the glass and watched Calyx's diagnostics run like a priest overseeing a ritual. Other times, he sat across the room, eyes closed, listening to nothing and somehow everything.
Calyx, by contrast, never slowed. She danced between fabrication pods with balletic ease; her primary body handling the fine precision of sculpting Nova's new arms, while her others handled testing scaffolds, compatibility software, and cortical bridge simulations.
Nova was the constant.
She lay in the frame-bed for most of it, neural leads snaking from her spine into the hovering calibration halo above. Her organic arms were surgically removed, not with violence but with ceremony. Calyx didn't treat it like a loss. She called it excavation... digging out what no longer served to make room for what would.
The pain was minimal. Nanites flooded her bloodstream, rewriting trauma in real-time, numbing nociceptors and accelerating tissue adaptation. The procedure for the arms themselves lasted five hours. The neural lattice, five more. The rest of the time was recovery. But by the end of the second day, she could already move her new fingers, carbon-dark, titanium-narrow, humming with intent.
"You're not fixed," Calyx whispered during calibration, eyes aglow with joy. "You're forged."
Nova smiled. Small, tired, and real. On the third day, she stepped into the simulator with no hesitation.
The platform shimmered to life around her, hexagonal walls rising with faint pulses of light. Nova's new arms gleamed in matte black titanium, patterned with latticework just beneath the surface - light flickering beneath skin that wasn't skin.
Above, Calyx's voice crackled from the command tier:
"Sim run: Autonomous Hostiles. Set One: stun and scatter. Set two: overwhelm and dominate. Try not to make it look too easy, love."
Nova rolled her shoulders once, feeling how quiet her body had become. No resistance. No lag. Just response. The first wave appeared: six drones, quadrupeds, armed with subdermal shock rigs and flanking protocols. They skittered into a loose circle, closing with high-frequency chirps. Nova's eyes narrowed. She raised her hands.
"Let's see if this works."
The EMP charges spun up, a soft crackle building from her palms outward. Sparks shimmered along her wrists - beautiful, ghostlike -then burst.
A pressure wave of white-blue force leapt out, branching like fingers through the air. The drones locked up mid-stride. One crumpled instantly. Two fell in twitching spirals. The rest staggered, optics burning white before dimming into blackout. The platform recalibrated.
"Oh, nice," Calyx cooed over the comms. "Theyre totally fried. Set Two incoming. No sympathy this time."
Eight humanoid drones dropped from above. Armed, upright, armored. Aggressive AI protocols. They split into two squads, flanking fast. Nova exhaled through her teeth.
"Alright. We do it my way."
She ducked left, letting two drones fire wide. Her fingers flicked mid-dash, interfacing through air. The neural lattice spun up... faster than thought.
She saw them.
Digital silhouettes layered behind their forms. Patterns. Weak points. Port entries.
She sliced in.
Two drones froze, mid-step.
Their heads tilted.
Then turned toward their allies.
Nova grinned. "Welcome to team Nova."
Her hijacked pair lunged, catching the brunt of the formation. One used its own shock baton to knock down a heavy-type unit, while the other overclocked its weapon fire rate, driving back two more.
Nova moved behind the chaos, precise and weightless. She dropped another drone with a palm strike to the back of its spine - not strength, but the shock burst woven into her wrist. The last enemy tried to retreat. She flicked her hand again. A ripple of code lashed out from her fingertips.
"Nope."
The final drone shut down in mid-air and crashed to the floor with a satisfying clang. Silence.
Nova stood in the center of the wreckage, shoulders high, expression calm. Her hands eventually stopped humming.
"Testing complete," Calyx said, awestruck. "You didn't just pass, cupcake. You rewrote the exam."
Nova flexed her fingers once.
No tremble. No hesitation.
Just mastery.
"I think I'm finally me again."
But then - Movement, from behind.
One drone, undamaged, missed in the count; charged in with a lurching, brutal gait. Its left arm, a steel-forged hammer limb, raised high above its frame.
Nova turned, but too late. There was no time for elegance. No code. No prep. Just instinct. She brought her arms up to block, crossing them in front of her face.
"Shit -"
The drone's hammer came down with a shriek of torque, slamming directly into her forearms. The impact sounded like metal screaming. Sparks exploded outward in a radiant burst... but not from Nova, but from the drone. The mechanical limb shattered on contact. Twisted plating tearing apart, servos rupturing against the unyielding titanium of Nova's augments. The force of the blow barely pushed her back a step.
The drone staggered, off balance, exposed. Nova's expression didn't flinch. She raised one hand, palm open.
"My turn."
The EMP burst fired point-blank, straight into its core. The effect was instant. At point blank range, the top half of the drone vaporized, ripped apart by a bloom of ionized feedback. Its body collapsed into steaming shrapnel, smoke curling upward from the molten edges. Silence returned, broken only by the soft whir of her fingers retracting into rest mode.
Calyx's voice cracked over the speaker with a laugh and a gasp. "Oh, that was obscene. You made it explode with dignity. I am so proud right now I could reboot."
Nova didn't smile. She stared at her hands, still steady, still whole. "That could've been my face," she muttered. Then she flexed her fingers, saw the way the light rolled through the carbon-fiber mesh, and added:
"Guess I'm harder to break now."