Chapter 115: The Unsolvable Problem (Patreon)

For the moment, he had no intention of hauling the Deep Sea King back to the institute for study.

First, the Deep Sea King was no pushover. Studying him alive would be difficult and hard to keep under control, and accidents came easy.

Second, Mysterious Beings of this type — pure sea creatures that had simply mutated — had no special abilities to speak of. Their research value was next to nothing.

Whenever he felt like it, he could dredge up any number of the same breed from the deep sea for experiments. There was no reason to go out of his way to keep this one.

With that hidden threat settled for good, Alex glanced down at his own towering body, and a flicker of resignation crossed his eyes.

"I really do need to hurry up and develop a dedicated supersuit that stretches and shrinks freely."

He muttered it under his breath, thoroughly fed up.

An ordinary supersuit simply couldn't survive the change in his frame when he transformed. Every transformation shredded it to nothing, which meant that after every all-out fight he was left standing there bare.

The sight was excruciating, awkward in every possible way.

A thought stirred, and he was about to release the giant form and return to his usual size.

But in that one downward glance, Alex's body locked up and his mind went blank — exactly the way the Deep Sea King's had a moment ago.

Floating level with the thigh of his colossal body were a handful of tiny black dots.

The distance looked vast, but with his current eyesight he could make out the scene below with perfect clarity.

Those specks were Tornado, Blizzard and the others!

And beside them stood a whole crowd of news reporters, high-definition cameras and boom mics in hand.

Every last one of them was frozen in place, heads tilted back in unison, staring blankly up at the giant figure that spanned sea and sky.

The sea wind died. The waves went still. The whole world seemed to drop into absolute silence, every sound gone, the air congealed solid.

Time itself seemed to stop, the frame locked on that unbearably awkward moment.

The corner of Alex's mouth twitched on its own. A wave of pure social death shot up from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head and swept across every inch of skin.

As America's *, his position was anything but ordinary.

And right now, in the shape of a sky-piercing giant with nothing covering him at all, exposed, he was being stared at — and worse, tracked from every angle by countless reporters' lenses, live on national broadcast!

A kilometer-tall giant made for a majestic sight, like a god walking the world.

But no amount of grandeur could hide the fact that he was .

No normal person could sit calmly through being watched in real time by an entire nation in a state like that. It was mortification taken to its absolute limit.

Alex didn't hesitate. His thoughts raced, and the enormous kilometer-tall body shrank at a rate the naked eye could follow.

The next second a blurred afterimage tore across the sky without a sound to spare, vanished from everyone's field of vision, and streaked toward the institute in the city.

Right then he wanted nothing more than to find a crack in the ground and crawl into it, to escape that stretch of ocean for good.

A live national broadcast. Hundreds of millions watching. A social death on that scale would stay with him for a very long time.

His speed kicked up a gale in the upper air. He crossed the open sea in an instant, staying inside the cloud layer the whole way, so no one on the ground could make out his shape.

A few breaths later he had cleared the ocean, returned to the skies over New York and dropped straight onto the rooftop terrace of the institute.

He landed lightly, steadied himself, and was finally out of every last line of sight.

Back inside the familiar institute, sealed off from every gaze and every lens, Alex let out a long breath and felt the tension bleed out of him.

That feeling of standing naked in front of the public was awful, embarrassing enough to make his scalp crawl.

He had never been the showy type. This whole mess came down to a supersuit that couldn't adapt to his transformed body, and there had been nothing he could do about it.

"Until the new stretchable supersuit is finished, I am never transforming on a whim again!"

Alex ground his teeth and set the rule in stone.

If some future enemy started mocking him over an exposure before the fight had even begun, that would be humiliation of the highest order, every shred of dignity gone.

"Hm? Chasing a thrill on purpose, are we?"

Just as Alex was heading back to his room to wash up and change, a flat voice came at him from up ahead.

One of Dr. Genus's clones walked over at an unhurried pace, steady on his feet, calm in the face.

A sweep of Alex's eyes caught the number stamped clearly on the man's chest — 125.

This was Dr. Genus's Clone No. 125. Not the original, but he had inherited a hundred percent of the original's thinking, personality and knowledge. The only difference lay in the division of labor, each clone assigned to a different field of research.

"Do I look like I'm that bored?"

Alex, glum all over, spread his hands.

"It's the transformation effect of the Biceps Brachii King serum causing trouble. All that power and no gear to match it. It's stifling."

Raw, overwhelming strength he couldn't deploy freely, and an awkward mess every single time he did. The feeling was enough to give a man a headache.

"Oh?"

Clone No. 125 raised an eyebrow, a spark of investigative interest crossing his eyes.

"So you ran into an unusually strong opponent. Want me to contact the original for you?"

He was already pulling out the tablet he carried before the words were finished, fingers sliding rapidly across the screen, not bothering to wait for Alex's answer.

"I hope this one brings our research a few unexpected surprises."

Clone No. 125 tossed the line off casually and turned to leave.

To him, Alex's embarrassment and Alex's experiences were beside the point. From the day it was born, every clone carried its own dedicated research assignment.

The only thing they cared about was whether the enemy Alex had met held research value, whether it could add fresh samples and data to the institute's archives.

"Naturally. Even the rotten personality is a perfect copy of the original. Not one bit different."

Alex watched him go and shook his head, grumbling.

But there was no time to dwell on it. The urgent thing now was to wash up, change clothes and be rid of this state.

He walked briskly back to his own room, stepped into the bathroom and carefully rinsed away the seawater and the faint traces of blood still clinging to him.

Warm water sluiced down his body, washing off the damp and the fatigue of the fight out at sea.

Once he had clean clothes on, the awkwardness that had been circling his mind finally dissolved, and a full sense of security came flooding back.

But he had barely stepped out of the bathroom into the living room when he saw a familiar figure standing quietly ahead of him.

No number on the chest, steady in the brows and eyes, his presence deep and settled. This was Dr. Genus himself.

"Let's hear it. What kind of opponent did you meet this time?"

Dr. Genus lifted his gaze, eyes full of amused curiosity, his tone carrying a hint of teasing.

"Some run-of-the-mill weakling of a Mysterious Being couldn't force a full transformation out of you, and certainly wouldn't have you making a scene like this."

As the man who understood Alex's strength best, Dr. Genus knew better than anyone that Alex's baseline power had long since left the vast majority of Dragon Level Mysterious Beings behind.

Short of an enemy worth taking seriously, he would never reach for the serum.

Short of an imminent, lethal crisis or some special situation that gave him no choice, Alex would never call up his transformation at all.

That power was stronger than anyone imagined, but the awkwardness and trouble that trailed after it — nobody understood that better than he did.

"Same as the Forest Tribe that turned up before. This time's opponent was another Mysterious Being race."

Dr. Genus nudged the lenses up his nose, his gaze dropping to the rough monitoring data laid out on the table, his expression flat and unmoved.

"The Deep Sea Tribe."

Alex leaned casually against the edge of the lab bench and said it offhandedly, as if reporting something of no importance whatsoever.

"The ones that live year-round in the deep ocean. They look more or less like sea fish, only fully Monsterized."

"The Deep Sea Tribe?"

Dr. Genus glanced up, his eyes leaving the dense sheets of data for the man beside him.

"Any samples left over?"

"I took care of a few outside the Walben mall earlier. The bodies have been properly collected, and I'll have them sent over shortly."

Alex paused, then went on to the specifics.

"The reason they suddenly got stronger and came ashore to make trouble traces straight back to that absurd stunt of Fukegao's."

"To destroy the leftover material from his budget knockoff of the Biceps Brachii King, he dumped the finished product into the coastal waters in bulk. The Deep Sea Tribe out there got strengthened and reshaped by the stuff."

"Across the board they're far above the usual wild Mysterious Beings."

"Their leader especially. In raw strength he ranks above Maeve."

Alex gave a small shrug, a trace of disdain in his voice.

"He never awakened a signature superpower the way the Forest King did, though. No uncanny innate techniques. Pure physical strength and nothing more."

"My take is that this kind of Mysterious Being has very little research value. Not worth the time and effort of capturing a live sample."

Besides, the Deep Sea leader had been strong enough that forcing a live capture would have cost more than it was worth, so he had simply cut the creature down on the spot.

"It doesn't matter. Corpse samples are enough."

Dr. Genus nodded lightly, not a shred of regret on his face, entirely unbothered.

To a top-tier biologist like him, ordinary Mysterious Being samples were lying around everywhere and hardly counted as a scarce resource.

And exactly as Alex had judged, within Dr. Genus's research framework a Mysterious Being with no special ability, strengthened purely by an external force, held very little worth digging into.

Worse, their enhancement wasn't clean. Their strength had been piled on by force out of the residual energy of the budget knockoff Biceps Brachii King, which made them contaminated, malformed products at their core.

Set against Mysterious Beings born naturally, their research significance fell further still.

After a short silence, the ease drained out of Alex's face, replaced by frustration and irritation.

He mulled it over for a while and finally put the question, a note of struggle in his voice.

"Speaking of which — do you honestly not have a single reliable solution?"

"Can't you fix that awkward little problem I have after transforming, once and for all?"

Bringing up the day's farce, Alex let out a heavy sigh, his whole face written over with a misery too complicated to explain.

Today's battle against the deep sea Mysterious Beings had been locked in the reporters' lenses from start to finish, broadcast in full.

The high-definition feed went out without a hint of delay, sweeping across all of America in the first instant and covering countless screens.

Information moved at a terrifying speed these days. Barring a miracle, the footage was already spreading like wildfire across every major social platform.

All Alex had to do was picture the way he'd looked after transforming, nothing covered, taken in by countless pairs of eyes, and his stomach lurched.

It took no thought at all to know that before long the whole farce would circle the globe and become everyone's favorite topic.

At that thought his expression turned worse still, brows knitting tight, the corners of his mouth sagging, gloom written across every feature.

If an ordinary man made a fool of himself streaking in public, passersby would rib him for a while and then forget he existed. It wouldn't stir a single ripple.

His position was another matter entirely.

He stood at the very top now, the core power holder of all America. Every move he made drew the eyes of a nation and the attention of the world. Privacy simply didn't exist for him.

The smallest slip got magnified without limit — let alone a scene as excruciating as this one.

Watching Alex stew in his own gloom, Dr. Genus fell silent for a few seconds, then spoke slowly, unusually serious.

"There is a way, actually. It just isn't very practical, and the drawbacks are obvious."

Alex's head came up at once, hope flashing through his eyes as he pressed.

"What way? Out with it."

"Targeted Biological Modification of your body."

Dr. Genus laid out his idea at an unhurried pace.

"We imitate the exoskeleton structure of insects and cultivate a dedicated biological exoskeleton over the critical private areas of your body."

"That biological plating would be bound deep into your flesh. The moment you enter your transformed state and your size explodes, the exoskeleton grows and expands right along with it, covering every vital spot. Your awkward problem, solved for good."

Alex raised an eyebrow, sketching out the picture in his head, and instinctively felt the plan might actually work.

"That doesn't sound half bad?"

"I have to give you the drawbacks up front."

Dr. Genus poured cold water on it at exactly the right moment, breaking the mood before Alex's hopes could rise.

"A biological exoskeleton like this is a permanent modification of the flesh. It won't disappear when you drop the transformation."

"Even back at normal size, going about an ordinary day, the exoskeleton stays fixed to your body, and it will make daily life inconvenient in a great many ways."

"This is Biological Modification, not a detachable mechanical device. You can't take it off at will. The flexibility is terrible."

Alex's brows drew together as he weighed the pros and cons in earnest.

The thought of the vital parts of his body wrapped year-round in a layer of hard, cold insect shell made his skin crawl.

Moving around, eating, sleeping — all of it would be constrained. Even the most basic things, using the bathroom, washing up, would turn into an ordeal.

And the part he really couldn't accept: whenever he got close to Starlight or Maeve in the future, a slab of hard shell in the way would make the whole scene bizarre beyond words. The wrongness would be off the charts.

After weighing it from a few angles, Alex shook his head decisively and dropped the plan.

"Let's forget that one."