Seraphs of the Emperor’s Judgment

Chapter 3: Recruit (2)

He was a ten-year-old child, currently being cut open by machines.

Although he had already fallen into a deep slumber, his body was still convulsing. Harrowing dreams and sleepless nerves were reacting to the rejection caused by the surgery.

It started with pain—a pouring deluge of pain, pain that seeped into the marrow.

The pain was boundless, like a surging ocean surging straight toward the horizon, undulating back and forth, devouring time.

Seconds stretched and expanded into hours, and hours shattered and compressed back into minutes. Past and future entirely dissolved into the present, tearing and spreading.

Red clouds billowed and drifted within the gray matter in his brain. Time and time again, the pain transformed into stinging sensations. One second they vibrated like the cut of a knife, and the next they turned into flames enveloping him.

He could hear absolutely nothing. The pain severed all his other senses, leaving him with nothing but the wheels of torment constantly rolling and crushing across an endless shore.

He should have been broken. They wanted him to submit, to surrender, so he would bow to the red ocean and monstrous waves.

He could not even remember who they were, but that did not matter.

The key to everything was that he absolutely could not give up. He absolutely could not yield. And so the pain continued, and so he held on.Then everything ended.

He bellowed due to the abruptly ending process. A chilling emptiness poured into him, and then he ascended into a hazy dimness, tumbling from one end to the other.

Perhaps this was death, devoid of any agony. It was the end of suffering; it was nothingness.

Then came sounds from the nothingness, hundreds and thousands of sounds, whispering and accompanying him as he glided through the void, existing just beyond his hearing.

Then colors replaced the pitch-black, and various images came thronging. Every color he had ever seen in his life was there, cut into fragmented strips.

Sometimes he thought he could even see the patterns clearly and identify the shapes, like viewing a picture through a sliding curtain of water. But immediately after, the patterns shattered, and he returned to the colorful vortex.

Soshyan's only remaining consciousness told him that he was undergoing surgery without injected anesthetics, which under normal circumstances would be enough to kill an adult.

But he told himself that if he wanted to live, he had to endure.

——————

He was a twelve-year-old child, currently being reshaped.

Two robust hearts beat within his gaping chest. This second, new organ was slightly smaller than the new heart. It would alter the growth of his bones, stimulating his skeleton to absorb unnatural minerals over the course of his life.

Many hands, some human and some mechanical, sliced and sutured the boy's body without the slightest tremble, implanting the new organs inside.

The boy trembled once more. His eyes opened for a moment, and something cold touched the skin beneath his eyes.

His vision began to clear, and he tried to blink again.

A godlike being shook his head at the boy. A gray tabard covered tough muscles, and a starburst-shaped tattoo covered his chest and neck. His eyes were gray, revealing a sense of tranquility.

"Don't do that—"

A voice sounded beside him, gentle yet extremely firm.

"Your eyelids have been pinned open. Trying too hard to blink will tear them off."

The boy tried to resist, but was quickly enveloped by thick drowsiness again.

He felt, just for an instant, as if he were sinking into the deep oceans of his Homeworld.

He complied, because the chemicals in his bloodstream forced him to comply.

——————

He was a fourteen-year-old child, destined to be born different.

The third organ was implanted into his chest not far from his new heart. At the same time the Ossmodula altered his skeleton to make it rely on the new minerals for growth, the Sinew Coils would generate massive amounts of hormones to strengthen his muscles.

The Apothecary sutured the boy's medical wounds, then casually flipped a yellow wrench.

The restraints keeping the boy's body upright released, and he fell forward head-first onto the ground.

He lay there for a few seconds, breathing heavily, and then supported himself to kneel up.

"What..."

He started to ask, but the pain from his throat and lungs made him stop.

"What is your name?"

The Apothecary paused, looking down at him, the tattoo on the right half of his face twitching.

"My name is reserved only for myself. It is not for you to use."

The boy wanted to retort, but his mouth was dry and empty.

"Most would ask me why this is."

The Apothecary shook his head.

"I know why."

The boy said stubbornly. The Apothecary raised an eyebrow on one side.

"You think I'm a Failure."

The Apothecary shook his head again, hesitated for a moment, and then hauled him to his feet.

"No."

He answered in this manner, leading the boy toward the rest of the Hall.

Beneath the frost-covered ceiling, rows of metal racks stretched out in alignment. In the middle of each rack stood a humanoid figure, stark naked and bound by several loops of Ceramite.

Numerous helmets covered their faces, of the same design as the one the Apothecary had taken from the boy's head.

While light flickered at the edges of their vision, their bodies trembled. Numerous tubes were connected to their arms and chests.

The boy could see the blood vessels bulging beneath the skin where the needles were inserted. He rubbed his own arms, feeling the stinging pain of those wounds. Many of those figures leaned slackly against the restraints, blood covering their bare skin.

Numerous Servitors wearing red tabards and single-eyed masks moved among the rows of racks, pulling slack corpses from the restraints and discarding them onto numerous transport carts.

The first phase already meant one in a hundred survives.

This chilling reality appeared in the boy's mind. The Apothecary had told him about it, but he had previously expressed doubt.

"That is what a Failure looks like."

The Apothecary pointed to a figure that had fallen from a rack due to the restraints being undone. The youth was still alive, but only barely.

Blood dripped from his mouth, and his eyes rolled back white. His arms and legs flailed haphazardly as he tried to stand, but then he was attacked by the servitors. That youth was as frenzied as a wild beast.

Ultimately, one of them inserted a thick tube into the back of the youth's head. Accompanied by the sound of a pneumatic burst and fracturing bone, the youth fell shortly after, blood leaking from a neat hole in his skull.

"We don't want you to fail. We want you to succeed."

"I will not fail!"

The boy growled lowly. This scene pierced him deeply.

The Apothecary looked down at the boy, and then a trace of gratification flashed in his gray eyes.

"Very good."

At this moment, this child was no longer human.

The work of this night was entirely to achieve this goal. Time would tell people just how different that boy would become.

——————

He was a fifteen-year-old child, a new god waiting to rise.

When they cut him, he could feel it under most circumstances, but he was already numb. They extremely roughly gouged out large chunks of flesh and blood, then substituted in fresh organs, implanting them into those places.

Before this, he had already come to understand why anesthetics could not be injected for his surgery.

Because he was special. His augmentation surgery was different from everyone else's. Normally, a Space Marine's surgery involved nineteen stages, but Soshyan's surgery actually consisted of twenty stages. There was a step named 'Grey Marrow' that had to be conducted while he remained fully conscious the entire time.

When they finished, the pain slowly returned, as if a bundle of barbed wire had been bound into his chest.

He did not reveal a single trace of that pain, because he already understood some things inaccessible to Mortals, things brought about by those implanted new organs and Hypno-Indoctrination.

"You've accepted it very well, child."

The gray-eyed Apothecary said with a smile, simultaneously inspecting the series of anchoring sutures lined up down the center of the boy's chest.

"Even having made it this far, some will still die from this."

"Most."

The boy's voice was hoarse; his vocal cords were currently being altered.

The Apothecary looked up at him, his gray eyes staring straight over. The boy stared back unblinkingly.

"Most will die, before all this is over."

"Yes, they will die."

The structure of his train of thought had changed. He could feel it. Information and experiences had become far clearer, and the gap between thought and action had narrowed. Some emotions withered away and then subsided.

Things from his memories regarding what had happened in the past drifted off into the distance. He could still see them, but it felt like these were certain things that had never truly belonged to him.

At the same time, new memories filled his mind—some clear, some blurry and mixed together. He knew more than his past self ever did, but he completely failed to understand how this could be.

The machine they clapped onto his head did this, he knew very well. Instilling changes into his brain was like pouring liquid metal into a mold.

The pain became much worse, but his ability to endure it had also grown. The pain from the surgery and Hypno-Indoctrination became numerous islands within a vast, profound ocean.

Time lost its meaning. Life became experiencing numerous different agonies.

Aside from the Apothecary occasionally flashing through the mist of pain, he never saw any living person again. The only words he heard came solely from those Servitors repeating remote-controlled commands as they moved his limbs in accordance with the arrangements for the next stage of adjustment.

Everything seemed so utterly devoid of life.

(End of Chapter)