Rosa and Melati fought on, their actions a blur of urgency and determination, each movement sharpened by the edge of desperation.
Beads of sweat gathered on their foreheads, tracing glistening trails down their flushed faces before falling soundlessly onto the sterile, unyielding tiles below.
Their limbs burned with fatigue, muscles trembling beneath the weight of relentless effort yet neither faltered.
Their will, like iron, held fast against the pull of despair.
Little by little, hope began to stir fragile at first, like the faintest tremor on still water.
Felzein's breath, once a whisper on the brink of silence, now returned with a hesitant rhythm.
His heartbeat, though still frail, began to beat once more with the uncertain cadence of life returning from the edge.
And then...
"Cough!"
A sudden, guttural cough tore through the quiet, startling Rosa and Melati as though the very air had cracked open.
From between Felzein's parted lips, a thin plume of vapour curled upward, pale and ghostlike, dissipating into the cold laboratory air like breath from some otherworldly fire.
His eyes fluttered, struggling against the weight of unconsciousness, then slowly opened.
Glazed, searching, but unmistakably awake.
"You… Ocha… stop touching things without thinking…" His voice emerged in a rasp, gravelled and dry, but unmistakably tinged with rebuke.
Melati let out a long, trembling breath, as though her lungs had been frozen until that very moment.
Relief crashed over her in a silent tide, her whole body sagging beneath the weight of it.
Beads of sweat trickled down her face, mingling with the tears she hadn't even realised had formed.
Rosa, overwhelmed, bowed her head. Her shoulders shook as emotion overtook her, an unspoken storm of guilt, gratitude, and fierce, undeniable joy.
"I… I'm sorry, Felz…" she whispered, her voice breaking like light on water, fragile and full of remorse.
And still, amid the aftermath of panic, of fire and frost, he was there.
Breathing. Alive.
Felzein's lips curved into a faint, weary smile, his eyes glinting with the soft light of returning clarity.
"If you would… my cloth mask. It's in my trouser pocket," he murmured, his voice no more than a rasp carried on fragile breath.
"Cloth mask?" Rosa and Melati echoed in tandem, the question laced with bewilderment, as if the request had arrived from a dream rather than the aftermath of near-death.
He offered no further explanation, only that same enigmatic smile, and a slow gesture toward the left pocket of his trousers.
Without delay, Rosa leaned in, her fingers careful and quick as she reached into the fabric.
Her hand closed around a neatly folded piece of black cloth. Unassuming, soft to the touch, yet oddly weighty with unspoken purpose.
"Here, Felz," she said gently, offering the mask as one might hand over a relic or talisman.
"Thank you," he breathed, the gratitude in his tone quiet, but not insubstantial.
With a kind of reverence, Felzein let his fingers trace the mask's seams, caressing it as though reacquainting himself with an old companion.
His fingertips paused near the edge, hesitated, then pressed.
CLICK!
A subtle, almost inaudible sound, a whisper of mechanism hidden in plain sight. The mask had a secret, and Felzein knew exactly where it lay.
Rosa and Melati watched in stunned silence, their eyes wide, poised on the brink of question.
But before inquiry could form, Felzein lifted the mask to his face.
He secured it in one fluid motion.
The soft fabric moulded to his skin with eerie precision, too perfect, too smooth to be ordinary.
His face disappeared behind the black veil, but the eyes that remained visible gleamed with something new.
Purpose, awareness, and a quiet, veiled intent.
All at once…
The unassuming mask, draped in the stillness of aftermath, stirred with a hidden life of its own.
Beneath Zein's fingers, the soft black fabric stiffened, no longer mere cloth, but something altogether other.
With a quiet click and a breath of unfolding energy, the mask shimmered, transformed.
It did not simply harden, it re-forged itself.
The once-plain surface became a sleek metallic sheen, smooth as glass and dark as the night sea.
Along its curves, delicate filaments etched themselves into existence, glowing faintly in cerulean pulses like veins of some dormant star.
From the bridge of his nose to the hard edge of his jaw, the mask clung with uncanny precision, elegant and exact, yet tinged with something dangerous.
Then came the light.
A surge of electric blue raced down from his throat, trailing like a living current across his skin.
It danced with purpose, an intelligent glow unfurling across his frame, as though reading him, remembering him.
His clothes, once simple and human, dissolved as if devoured by time itself.
In their place, the armour awakened.
Plates of dark cobalt metal formed with a fluid, magnetic grace, first at his chest, then shoulders, then arms snapping into place with soft metallic sighs.
Each segment moulded to his shape with eerie intimacy, embracing bone and muscle in layers of synthetic muscle and steel.
His trousers reconstituted, fibre by fibre, into a flexible alloy weave.
The material shimmered between fabric and armour, as if undecided which it was, until joints began to appear at knees and hips, mechanical and precise.
Protective plating coalesced over thighs and shins, the faint blue glow still pulsing between the seams like the breath of a hidden reactor.
His shoes were no more. In their stead, armoured boots, fused into the ensemble, their form built not for style but survival.
The kind of boots worn not in corridors, but in craters. Not in cities, but in warzones.
And in that moment, he stood no longer the man they had pulled from the edge of death.
No longer simply Felzein the scientist or Felzein the doctor.
He was something else now. An echo of lost technology. A storm reborn in steel.
"W-What on earth?!" Rosa and Melati exclaimed simultaneously, their voices ringing out sharply in the still, charged air.
"How can that be..." Rosa stammered, her words trembling as her gaze fixed unblinkingly on the figure before them.
"Felzein… Y-You… what was that just now?" Melati's voice cracked, thick with disbelief and a flicker of awe.
Felzein said nothing, offering only a faint, enigmatic smile, calm yet heavy with unspoken truths, like a man who had danced with death and returned changed.
With deliberate grace, he rose to his feet. Each movement was measured, imbued with quiet confidence, as if the invisible shackles that bound him moments ago had dissolved completely.
He inhaled deeply, drawing the breath as one might upon awakening from a long, harrowing dream, a breath not merely of survival, but of profound rebirth.