LIGHTNOVELONLINE 167 – Abara Morph
As the flyman performed a simple grafting operation on himself out in the open, he spoke: "I almost pity you. You must think highly of Silberblut. It must be difficult to know you will never live up to what he was. To know you tarnish his legacy with this deluded impersonation. Perhaps I was wrong to fear you after all, if such a pale imitation is all you can manage."
His apathetic tone of voice was tinged by a smug sense of superiority, but also true, genuine pity.
"You like the sound of your own voice far too much for that man-of-a-few-words affectation," Cornelius seethed.
"I am no such thing, and this is no affectation. This is just how I speak. "I understand why you accuse me, however, if such poor pretenders as Casus Aristedes are the norm within the church," Tsetse retorted, pulling out the last of several pins around the base of his mechanical forearm. They had been previously hidden under a ring-shaped protective shroud that also served as an adapter for the power cables. Crude design, but effective, and also entirely defiant of common design principles. The prosthetic was either a one-off or the work of someone unknown. Alongside itself, it pulled out a bone of some description, leaving a hollow cavity inside the upper arm, which now dangled uselessly.
The moment Tsetse pressed his original forearm to the stump, however, tendrils of flesh whipped forth to join the two together. There was the sound of flowing fluid, accompanied by the hissing of air being forced out of the limb's internal cavity. With a final shift that weirdly resembled someone shoving his arm into a sleeve from the inside of a zipped-up jacket, Tsetse's arm sprung back into motion as if it had never been detached.
Wrapping the cables of his detached replacement around his wrist, the flyman took his machine forearm, got up, and walked away. Casus vividly felt both his own and the Silberblut coupler's desire to come after him, but he was aware of his own inability to do so just as vividly. Over the next twenty minutes Cornelius fashioned a temporary plug for his wound, being a grafter after all, and the two men painstakingly made their way to the nearest safe place that could treat their injuries properly. It was a small temple-clinic. One of the resident grafters, a red-haired woman, gave them both an earful about how the clinic wasn't equipped to treat serious injuries. Nonetheless, their injuries were treated to an admirable standard. It turned out that out of the clinic's four resident grafters, three were sisters who looked just different enough to be distinguished, but still unsettlingly similar.
Afterwards, the two men retreated to the shrine's inner sanctum for some rest and privacy.
"How did he find you?" Casus asked eventually.
Cornelius looked up at Casus with tired eyes, giving a weary smile.
"How did you find your belt?" he shrugged, as if the answer was as obvious as the colour of the sky. "Direct sympathetic resonance. The arm reacted when he focused on it, so I had some forewarning... But not enough. Not nearly enough. Shame. I was halfway to unraveling the Abara Morph."
Casus hated that habit of his; dropping jargon and waiting for him to ask what it meant. So he just sat, and stared, and Cornelius broke. His desire to share the fruits of his research was stronger than his desire to be asked questions about it.
"You're joyless sometimes, you know that? You sure the coupler isn't giving you personality shift?" Cornelius complained. "Alright, fine. You saw how he looks, right? Sort of like a war morph, but not quite. And the insides of his arms. Those aren't just hemolymph cavities."
Shifting in place, Cornelius began listing off on his hands: "Additional internal reinforcement, improved muscular design, body segment detachment musculature, latticed chitin structure for extra hardness without loss of flexibility. Casus, the arm contained dedicated, physicalised Thauma channels. A new subtype of them at that, with a superior delivery rate and pressurization to the closest equivalent I am aware of. If I can replicate just these 'Tsetse-type' channels, adapted for a Mamon Armor design, I could create a full-organic unit that would- urhk!"
Cornelius grew more and more excited, until his gesturing became too violent and the irritation of his wound made him crumple up into himself in pain, clutching his side. After a minute or so of silence, he continued to speak: "You know what all of these things have in common, and you know that I know how a War Morph is built. War Morphs are the extremification of evoy biology for the purposes of warfare, but Tsetse defies baseline evoy biology without clear evidence of grafting. Whatever your Tsetse is, he isn't a War Morph."
"He is an Abara Morph, you've made that much clear. Now explain what the term means. I am sure you feel terribly proud of inventing it."
Cornelius gave Casus the kind of stare that only fell half a step of openly asking if he really hadn't figured it out yet, or if he was just trying to make him say it out loud. It Casus took some effort to prevent a smirk from pushing its way onto his face.
"He's an Evoy-specific version, or rather a counterpart, for the Mamon Knight. You know, funny thing is, I don't think I could've learned much more from that arm than I did. The last thing I did was a simple saturation test. Positive. The ratio was all wrong, but there was a distinct host and catalyst signature. Can't expect our tests to work perfectly on their technology, I suppose."
"You know what this means."
"Of course. Whether we like it or not, this must be reported to the church."
Krahe wasted no time in taking the proof of Eutropia's death back to Garvesh. Right next to the door in that back alley, right next to one of the cobbles that was still stained with evoy hemolymph, she found a pile of scrap. After taking a closer look, she recognized a few parts. A rack, a mangled burner, a burst-open thaumine tank. Her stomach wrenched when she realized it was none other than Imraal's food cart, mangled by what was likely an explosion.
