5 More reviews and 30 more Power Stone donors are needed before the bonus chapter.
I had a thought about Nier: Automata and the world of Cyberpunk 2077 separated world travels. Imagine him going to the Automata world as the only human, gaining their trust over time, and eventually being treated like a god, as they would for any human. He could manipulate them to gain master control as only human follow orders of and work them as his police force. As for Cyberpunk, I have no idea.
*****
Location: The Apple Inn – Room 303 (Executive Suite).
Time: 07:15 PM.
His self felt heavy, swollen with the implications of his research. He saw the threads of the Resident Evil movies—the desert wasteland, the clones, the telekinesis—tangled hopelessly with the intricate bio-political thrillers of the Resident Evil games. He saw the Mold. He saw the Las Plagas parasites. He saw the C-Virus turning cities into gas chambers.
But after doing some research, he figured out he didn't know much, and he wasn't sure how helpful what he did know was in this mixed bag of a world. But that didn't stop him from coming up with theories and mixing both worlds in his head, creating possible futures and figuring out his next moves.
He ran simulations in his mind, combining both worlds.
'If the Red Queen releases the T-Virus to stop the Hive... but Wesker is operating in the shadows for the Organization... and James Marcus is singing opera to leeches in the train tunnels...'
It was a chaotic, discordant mess. The timeline was a fractured mirror, reflecting a thousand different doomsdays.
Atlas sighed, the sound heavy in the quiet room.
"I can't predict the script," he admitted to the empty air. "Because there is no script anymore. I am the butterfly flapping its wings in a hurricane."
He realized that knowledge, while powerful, was useless without the strength to survive the consequences of it. Knowing a Nuke is coming eventually doesn't help if you can't run fast enough to escape the blast radius. Knowing Nemesis is hunting you doesn't help if your bones shatter when he punches you.
He needed to stop thinking. He needed to start actions.
He pushed himself up, the hotel mattress groaning under his weight, and settled back against the pillows. He closed his eyes, shutting out the physical world to focus on the digital one.
"I like how this is going," Atlas murmured, his resolve hardening like concrete setting in a mold. "Now, let's move on to the next evolution. No more hesitation."
He summoned the System interface. The blue light washed over his mind's eye.
"Hmmmm," Atlas hummed, looking at the list. "Defense. Structure. Durability. I choose the Skeletal Reinforcement option."
[Affirmative.]
[Processing Transaction...]
[Cost: 160 Evolution Points.]
[Remaining EP: 87.]
The transaction cleared instantly. The numbers dropped.
But then, the atmosphere in the room shifted.
It wasn't just a vibration; it was a pressure drop. The air grew heavy, static-charged, as if a thunderstorm had materialized inside the four walls of the suite. A low, resonant hum filled Atlas's ears—the sound of the System gathering the bio-energy required for a total reconstruction.
[WARNING: Invasive Biological Restructuring Imminent.]
[Target Areas: Cranium, Vertebral Column, Thoracic Cage, Spinal Cord, Pelvic Girdle, Extremities.]
[Scope: Total Marrow Overhaul & Matrix Purification.]
Then, Pleione's voice cut through the standard alerts. Her tone was different—sharper, urgent, almost... concerned.
[Be prepared, Atlas. The pain in this evolution will be intolerable at your current level of resistance. You are not just adding muscle; you are literally undergoing a full skeleton replacement while conscious.]
[Do you wish to proceed?]
Atlas stared at the prompt. "Intolerable." That was a strong word for an AI.
He gritted his teeth, his hands gripping the Egyptian cotton bedsheets so hard the fabric began to tear. He didn't have a choice. The world was ending, the Hunters were coming. He couldn't face them with brittle human bones.
'Well shit,' Atlas thought, bracing himself against the mattress. 'This is going to hurt. Do it.'
[Acknowledged. Skeleton Reconstruction in progress...]
[Initiating Genetic Overwrite...]
For a single, terrifying heartbeat, there was absolute silence. The world seemed to pause, holding its breath.
Then, the eruption began.
From the deepest abysses of his Soul Matrix, a torrent of mysterious, molten energy flooded his skeleton.
"Ghh... GGGRAAAAAAGHH!"
The sound didn't start as a scream; it began as a tectonic rumble deep in his chest, escalating instantly into a raw, feral howl that stripped his throat raw.
Atlas collapsed backward, his legs giving out as if the strings of a marionette had been severed.
The previous evolution—the evolution of his claws and strengthening of whole body—had been a localized torment, a hot knife slicing through tissue. It was manageable. It was finite.
This?
This was a supernova detonating inside every single cell of his existence.
The pain arrived like a catastrophic tidal wave, drowning his consciousness in blinding white noise. It didn't attack the nerves on his skin; it originated from the marrow, scraping against the very anchor of his soul. It felt as if his blood had been transmuted into a volatile mixture of liquid nitrogen and boiling lead, freezing and incinerating him simultaneously.
He hit the bed with enough force to crack the frame, his body seizing in a violent, epileptic arc that lifted his spine off the mattress.
CRACK. SNAP. GRIND.
The sounds erupting from inside his skin were nauseatingly loud—wet, mechanical, and heavy.
His spine—permanently curved by the slouch of the zombie infection and a lifetime of human posture—was being forcibly disassembled and realigned.
The vertebrae ground against one another like millstones. The discs were crushed and re-inflated. The calcium matrix shattered into dust and reformed in milliseconds. He felt his spine locking into a new, terrifyingly perfect alignment—the posture of an predator.
"Gaahhh-HAAAGH!"
His muscles danced violently under his skin, rippling like water in a storm. It felt as though millions of invisible hooks were tearing the muscle fibers away from the bone to allow the skeleton room to expand.
But the System wasn't destroying him; it was forging him.
Atlas clawed at the bedsheets, his fingernails shredding the duvet and gouging deep, ragged furrows into the mattress foam. He tried to scream again, but his jaw snapped shut with a bone-jarring CLACK as his mandible was reshaped. His teeth vibrated in their sockets, the roots dissolving and reforming to anchor a bite force capable of crushing force much higher than humans.
Then came the weight.
It was the phenomenon of Bio-Condensation.
The System was taking the porous, fragile bones of a human and compressing them into a singularity. It was purging the micro-impurities within the bones, layering carbon and calcium into a hyper-dense lattice structure harder than stone.
He felt gravity crushing him, pinning him to the bed as his mass increased a little while his volume remained the same.
And then, the heat.
Inside the hollows of his bones, the marrow was boiling.
The Hematopoietic System was being overhauled. The biological factories that produced his blood were being torn down and rebuilt. The old, red human blood was burned away, replaced by a new generation of cells.
He could feel the viscosity changing. The new ichor was thick, heavy, and sludge-like. It flowed through his veins not like water, but like molten mercury—dense, nutrient-rich, and pathogen-resistant. As the marrow pumped this new life into his system, his veins bulged, turning a dark, shimmering silver under his translucent skin.
Simultaneously, the Blood Residue Channels were being carved.
It felt like microscopic diamond drills were boring ventilation tunnels through his femurs and ribs. These canals were being excavated to balance internal pressure during high-impact combat, preventing his hyper-dense bones from cracking under stress. But in the moment? It felt like being eaten alive by a million fire ants from the inside out.
The agony was so exquisite, so absolute, that a normal human mind would have shattered. The brain would have triggered a chaotic shutdown, forcing unconsciousness to protect the psyche from trauma.
But Atlas was Undead.
That was the cruelest part. His Soul, tethered to the Undead self, refused to let him sleep. He was a prisoner in his own breaking body, forced to remain lucid. He had to feel every fracture, every boil, every stitch. He had to witness the violent reconstruction of his own existence.
'Endure...'
The word was a desperate mantra echoing in his fracturing mind.
'Endure. Endure. Endure.'
He felt the energy rushing toward his hands, seeking bones.
SNIKT!
His claws extended involuntarily, ripping through his knuckles in with little, silvery-red fluid.
Through eyes swimming with tears of blood, Atlas watched the transformation. The dull, ivory-white bone blades were shedding their organic weakness. They were being infused with the metallic minerals drawn from the system knows we're or just energy turned into matter.
They shimmered, turning from a matte bone to a gleaming, lethal silver. They were becoming High-Density Bone Metal.
'Endure...'
He wanted to pass out, but sadly he couldn't. He had to own this pain.
The suffering transcended the physical. It felt like his bones had been placed upon a cosmic anvil and was being hammered into a new shape by a god of forge. The weakness of his past life—the evolutionary mistakes, the fragility, the structure mistakes—was being beaten out of him.
For eight agonizing minutes, the Apple Inn's Executive Suite echoed with the wet, grinding symphony of a body breaking and reforming.
It was the music of evolution—terrifying, bloody, and beautiful.
---
Chapter: The Sound of Breaking Glass
Location: The Apple Inn – Third Floor Corridor / Room 303.
Time: 07:23 PM.
And Atlas lay in the center of it, screaming silently, being born again.
Except, as the minutes dragged on, the silence broke.
The pain of the Skeletal Reinforcement was too absolute, too invasive to be contained by sheer will. By the fifth minute, the "Blood Residue Channels" were being drilled through his femurs. By the sixth minute, his skull was knitting itself into a denser, armored shape.
A sound began to leak from Room 303.
It started as a low, guttural vibration that rattled the expensive vase on the hallway table. Then, it escalated into a muffled, rhythmic thudding—the sound of a body convulsing against a mattress—punctuated by jagged, strangled cries that sounded less like a man and more like a wild animal caught in a steel trap.
The Apple Inn prided itself on discretion. The walls were thick; the doors were heavy oak. But even soundproofing has its limits against the agony of a biological rewrite.
By the seventh minute, the third floor was buzzing with nervous energy.
Chloe, the room service maid who had been charmed by Atlas earlier, was pushing a cart down the hall to Room 306. She stopped dead in her tracks as she passed 303. The sound emanating from within made the hair on her arms stand up. It wasn't the sound of pleasure; it was the sound of someone breaking.
She dropped the linen napkin she was holding and rushed to the elevator phone.
Two minutes later, the elevator dinged.
Lucy, the Hotel Manager, stepped out.
Lucy was a woman who knew everything that happened in her hotel. She was thirty-two, elegant, with sharp auburn hair and a tailored navy suit that screamed authority. She had heard the whispers from Veronica at the front desk and the giggles from Chloe about the "Adonis in 303." They spoke of his money, his muscles, and his strange, intense eyes.
Lucy was a professional, but she was also human. She was curious.
"Stay back," Lucy ordered Chloe and the security guard she had brought with her. "I'll handle this."
She walked down the plush carpet toward the end of the hall. The screaming had stopped, replaced by a heavy, ragged muffles that was almost worse.
It was a stroke of luck that the neighboring suites were empty for the weekend. If they hadn't been, the police would have already been called.
Lucy stood before the door of Room 303. She smoothed her skirt, adjusted her expression to one of polite concern, and raised her hand.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
"Mr. Atlas?" she called out, her voice projecting clearly through the wood. "This is Lucy, the Hotel Manager. We received a report of... distress. Is everything alright in there?"