The first sensation upon waking was one of drowning.
I inhaled sharply, but no air entered. A dense, viscous liquid flooded my lungs. Panic made my eyes snap open, thrashing against the asphyxiation, clawing at the invisible walls of my prison.
But I saw nothing. Or at least, nothing clear.
Everything was a murky blur of gray and green.
I remembered the fire. I remembered the darkness and the smell of burnt flesh.
I forced myself to stop fighting. Calm down, I ordered myself. Think.
I wasn't drowning. I was breathing LCL—Liquefied Cicatrizing Liquid. I was floating in the weightlessness of a Bio-Thaumaturgic Regeneration Tank.
Slowly, my heart rate stabilized, synchronizing with the rhythmic hum of the pumps oxygenating the fluid. Tiny bubbles tickled my skin as they escaped my nose.
I turned my head slowly through the resistance of the liquid.
To my left, floating in another glass cylinder illuminated by the same sickly green light, was another student. Half his torso was missing. To my right, a girl floated in the fetal position, her burnt skin shedding in gray tatters like a snake molting.
I was in the Biological Maintenance Center. Or as we students called it: "The Scrapyard."
This wasn't my first visit. It wasn't even my tenth. At Belisarius Academy, ending up in a tank wasn't an exception; it was part of the curriculum. If you weren't breaking, you weren't learning.
Vorakh's medical technology, a brutal amalgam of alchemy and war surgery, could fix almost anything as long as the brain was intact.
They could give me back my legs. They could re-grow my eyes.
But knowing that didn't eliminate the trauma.
The body keeps the score. The mind remembers the pain of dismemberment, the terror of blindness, and the humiliation of defeat. Every time I woke up here, a part of me expected to still be broken. The assimilation that I was still alive, that I would have to go out and return to the arena, was a weight heavier than gravity itself.
I brought my hand to my face. My fingers grazed my eyelids. They were intact.
I opened my eyes fully. The vision was still blurry from the liquid, but it was there. The red darkness was gone.
I breathed in the metallic fluid deeply and decided to use the time; I began to observe. If I was going to be trapped here for hours while my flesh re-knit itself, I would at least learn something.
I closed my eyes again and activated my gift.
The military had classified it in my file with a boring, bureaucratic name: "Passive Analytical Vision."
To them, it was an F-rank ability. A party trick that allowed me to see a little better than average, useless for actual combat because I couldn't "project" power.
But they didn't see what I saw.
In the darkness of my mind, the world lit up. Not with light, but with data.
I concentrated on my right leg, or what was becoming it.
The mental image appeared with microscopic clarity. I no longer saw skin or blood; I saw a complex architecture under construction.
I saw the stem cells, stimulated by the LCL, dividing in a frenzied dance of accelerated mitosis. I saw the strands of artificial mana, fine as spider silk, acting as ethereal scaffolds upon which calcium was deposited to form new bone.
It was fascinating. And grotesque.
I could see the nerves stretching like fiber optic cables seeking their connections. Every time a nerve ending connected, my physical body felt a phantom twinge, an electric "cramp" that shook me in the tank.
I watched the muscle tissue form, layer upon layer, red fiber upon red fiber.
Inefficient, my analytical mind thought.
The process was a miracle of imperial science, yes, but it was crude. The regeneration spell wasted almost 30% of the energy in residual heat—that's why the liquid was lukewarm. The bone structure being formed was dense, but it lacked the elegance of the original; it was "replacement" bone, functional but heavy.
It was ironic. The Vorakh Empire prided itself on perfection, but its medicine was like its philosophy: brute force applied to a delicate problem. They forced the cells to obey rather than guiding them.
Hours passed. Or maybe days. In the tank, time is relative.
I stayed there, floating, watching my body cease to be a mutilated corpse and become a functional tool again. I memorized every step of the process. I understood where the magic failed and where the biology succeeded.
When the liquid finally began to drain, lowering the level and letting gravity crush my newly formed body against the tank floor, I was no longer trembling.
The glass hatches opened with a hydraulic hiss, and the cold, real air hit my damp, naked skin.
I coughed violently, expelling the rest of the fluid from my lungs, falling to my knees on the metal grate.
I looked at my hands. They were mine again. I looked at my legs. They were there, pink and new.
I stood up, swaying slightly. I was "cured." The Empire had fixed me so I could be broken again tomorrow or next week, depending on how much time had passed while I recovered.
But as I dried myself with the rough towel waiting outside, an idea began to crystallize in my mind, as clear and cold as the tank glass.
I knew I wasn't the only one who thought of flesh as something malleable. Rumors about the Ascension Division and their attempts to create "super soldiers" were an open secret in the academy. But their failures were just as famous: subjects going mad, bodies collapsing under their own power, unstable monstrosities dying within months.
The Empire's problem wasn't a lack of capability, but its philosophy. They treated biology as if it were metallurgy or ballistics. They tried to impose rigid, perfect magical geometries onto chaotic organic tissues, seeking to maximize power output at the cost of structural integrity.
To Vorakh, a soldier who lived five years as a god of war was a success. To me, it was a flawed design. They created disposable weapons; they forced evolution through stress and overload.
I wouldn't make that mistake.
My gift allowed me to see the dissonance they ignored, the truths they were unaware of.
I wouldn't be the first to try to redesign life. But if I managed to get into those laboratories, I would ensure I was the only one capable of making it perfect.
The mechanical sound of the locker room doors opening interrupted my thoughts.
I walked toward the metal lockers. There was no one waiting to discharge me, no doctors to ask how I felt. I found only a standard gray uniform, clean and folded, on the cold bench.
I dressed in silence. The fabric was stiff and itchy against my newly formed skin, an alien sensation, as if this body didn't entirely belong to me.
Stepping out of the building, the Vorakh night greeted me with its starless sky, choked by the smoke of the foundries. The cycle continued. The empire's machinery didn't stop for a broken cadet.
I clenched my right fist, testing the tension of the new tendons. There was a slight friction, a millimeter-sized error in the joint that no one else would notice.
No one but me.
I lowered my gaze and began walking back to the barracks. Tomorrow would be another day of survival, but for the first time, I didn't just feel the pain. I was beginning to understand its structure.
Perhaps, after all, there was a hidden value in being torn apart time and again.