Massive Disaster III-10 (Patreon)

Overhead lights cut sharp, without even an inch of shadow softening the edges in Zedd’s super-clean sub-basement. I feel like I should get some sunglasses too. All of it was just white glare and a low constant humming that almost made him homesick for the hub. Being homesick for work…  something’s definitely wrong with me.Caleb shook his head and shifted carefully in the metal chair, spine stiffening a bit as he once again failed to get comfortable. Not nervous, not nervous. He wasn’t sure exactly how many odd-seconds he’d spent repeating the same pointless two-word mantra in his head, hoping he could convince himself of it if he could manage some particularly lazy self-hypnosis. So far, it failed to stick. 

If anything, he could feel his pulse pick up the pace as he waited for whatever this was to get started already.

Zedd sat across the room, aviators glinting cold blue as he flicked through the holo interface in front of him. His fingers were precise as ever as he rotated and manipulated the model floating lazily in front of him with fingers so steady they didn’t seem to even twitch unless Zedd was purposely moving them. Always looks so weird. The way his hands didn’t seem human while he worked, still as a statue, while the rest of him moved normally. 

Caleb pulled his attention upwards as he recognized the shape floating in front of Zedd—his own body, lungs and legs and all the bits and pieces his docs had jammed in over the years spinning slow and surgical in the white room.

Each flick of Zedd’s hand peeled another layer away—titanium supports, synthetic mesh, pulmonary stent gleaming pale-blue and almost delicate. Just another doc with another procedure, he thought to himself, only this one had better toys.

“So.” Zedd’s voice cut crisp across the silence, even and utterly casual, like detailing a routine oil change rather than casually gutting Caleb’s insides. “Six hours, give or take. Start by pulling the synthetic scaffolding from your lungs.” Another idle gesture and Caleb watched his lungs rotating in stark, impersonal detail. “Then remove titanium from the leg. After that, subcutaneous defibrillator, pulmonary stent—gone. None of it needed anymore.”

Caleb’s hand drifted instinctively to the shallow ridge beneath his collarbone, defibrillator's smooth edge familiar beneath fingertips. “Right. ‘Cause my body’s always super reliable without spare parts. Love it so far..”

Zedd’s mouth twitched up briefly, barely a smirk, eyes not leaving the interface. “You’ll manage.”

“Glad one of us thinks so.” Caleb said it dryly, like a joke he wasn't quite selling. He’d heard that tone enough—doctors and specialists and techs all promising easy fixes, ignoring his charts and the way his lungs fought for each breath. Nothing new. Just fancier.

Zedd paused, adjusted his shades briefly, a sharper gesture Caleb had learned meant shifting gears, refocusing. Another hologram materialized—sleek, black helmet threaded through with intricate crystalline blue circuitry, delicate and dangerous-looking in equal measure. Zedd eyed it critically, lips pressing thin for half a second, fingers brushing over the console. “This,” he said finally, more deliberate, “is why you lose the hair.”

Caleb blinked slowly, stared at Zedd, then the helmet, then back again, incredulity masked beneath careful flatness. “Come again?”

Zedd didn’t miss a beat, voice level, the barest hint of amusement sneaking in beneath careful patience. “Hair. Gone. Direct cranial contact’s necessary. No interference.”

A small exhale slipped from Caleb, sharper than he wanted, not quite a laugh. “Gonna guess you aren’t offering styling options either.”

“You’ll rock the look.” Zedd reached under the console, pulling the actual helmet from beneath, solid and cold-looking, luminescent circuitry catching reflections that danced sharp across polished surfaces. He tilted it deliberately, letting Caleb see the intricate weave lining the inside, functional beauty threaded with quiet menace. “This’ll wake something up—psionics. Closest analogue is what I would term human-specific biotics.”

Caleb’s brows furrowed together slightly; caution, skepticism and curiosity all fighting for dominance on his face. Biotics for humans. Seemed straightforward enough, but he’d learned straightforward was never the full story. Especially with Zedd. “And that translates to what, exactly?”

His friend almost frowned, just enough that Caleb noticed, expression tightening slightly in that same sort of way he did when he was struggling to use words normal humans might actually use. “Manipulating energy. Moving objects. Think biotics minus eezo dependence—”

“So, magic,” Caleb deadpanned, hand rising absently, knuckles brushing his temple, anticipation of cold metal shaving close against his scalp crawling beneath his skin. “You’re shaving my head and promising magic powers. Feel like I read this story once. Didn’t end great.”

Zedd’s eyes narrowed slightly behind the aviators, mild annoyance edged with something else—maybe amusement, maybe genuine empathy, hard to tell. He didn’t elaborate further, apparently deciding Caleb had enough detail. 

Typical. Information rationed like meds.

Caleb eyed the helmet again, feeling the muscles between his shoulder blades tighten just a bit the longer he looked. He breathed as deep as he could, at least before he felt his breath hitch again, pulse skipping then steadying. He’d been a guinea pig before. Difference now, he actually had some say. 

“Stellar,” he said finally, dry and flat and pointedly resigned. Not quite acceptance. More like reluctant surrender to practicality. Magic or not, he’d dealt with worse.

Zedd’s expression stretched into an amused smirk, then reached into the pocket of his lab coat, a long vial in his hands as he pulled it back out. The thing was about the size of two of his fingers on top of each other, filled with a liquid so bright blue it looked radioactive. He held it up between two fingers, letting it catch the light. “This,” he said, “is what I call the Rebirth Serum.”

Caleb leaned forward slightly. “And what does that do?”

Zedd turned the vial slowly, Caleb unable to take his eyes away as the liquid shifted. “You know how strong asari biotics are compared to human biotics?”

He blinked, wishing he had his glasses on right now. “...Yeah?”

A low hum left Zedd’s mouth before he spoke again. “This is that, but for the human body.”

Caleb blinked. He took a second to let that sink in. 

Then another second. Then—

“Oh.”

Zedd nodded. “Yeah.”

Caleb squinted at the vial, something about that deep, unnatural blue setting off all the warning bells in his brain. “Is... is it made from asari blood?”

Zedd froze. 

Then, almost mechanically, he turned to stare at him over the rims of his aviators. “Y—what? No!”

Caleb shrugged, raising his hands. “I just assumed—”

“What, because it’s blue?”

“I mean—yeah, kinda? Also, you were asking me all that weird shit the other day about rare materials and people dying and—”

Zedd cut him off with a sharp gesture. “Stop thinking about the questions.”

Caleb’s lips pressed into a thin line. He inhaled, slow, thoughtful. Then exhaled. 

Then, finally: “I don’t think that’s possible, boss.”

Zedd sighed, rolling his shoulders like he was shaking off the conversation. “Yeah, figured.” He set the vial down on the table beside the helmet, then turned back to Caleb. “So. Six-hour surgery, head shave, helmet, serum, psionics.” He tilted his head slightly. “Any objections?”

Caleb’s mouth opened, then closed. Then opened again. He looked at the helmet. The serum. The schematics still flickering behind them, a blueprint of his body being stripped down and rebuilt. He exhaled slowly, steadying himself.

Then, with a dry laugh, he leaned back in his chair and rubbed a hand over his soon-to-be-gone head of hair. “Well,” he muttered, “Guess I better say goodbye to the curls.”

Caleb’s hand lingered in said curls, fingers idly twisting the ends as he stared at the vial. The liquid inside caught the overhead lights, refracting like it had a mind of its own, shifting from deep, unnatural blue to something almost electric. Something that shouldn’t exist outside of a holovid.

Zedd sighed, breaking the silence finally.

“Anyway,” he said, twirling the vial between two fingers, “the Rebirth serum alters you on a genetic level. A top-down systemic rewrite. Cellular restructuring, metabolic acceleration, neural enhancement.” He tilted his head slightly, like he was running through an internal checklist. “Strength, speed, endurance, reflexes—all increased past normal human limits and continuing to grow the more you stress yourself. To a degree.”

Caleb swallowed, eyes still locked on the vial. “...That little thing? That’s gonna do all that?”

Zedd smirked and gave the vial a light shake. “No,” he said, catching Caleb’s gaze over the rim of his aviators, “seven of these will do all that.” Then the smirk faded, replaced by something heavier. “For now, this is permanent. No reversals, no take-backs. This isn’t me fixing you. It’s building you back from zero.”

Caleb’s mouth felt dry. He wasn’t sure if it was nerves or something else, something deeper. A warning bell, maybe. He swallowed again, forcing a breath out through his nose. “Juice me up, doc.”

Zedd tilted his head to the side. “...I should also warn you. I’m not a doctor.”

Caleb let out a breathy, almost-laugh. “Yeah, I know.”

His friend nodded once, then gestured vaguely toward him. “Alright, then. Strip.”

The young Rogers closed his eyes for a second, shaking his head. “Man, I hate hearing that.”

Fifteen minutes later, he lay flat on the elevated table in the sub-basement lab, bare except for a pair of loose blue boxers and white socks that suddenly felt way too conspicuous. His arms rested at his sides, fingers twitching against the cool surface of the table. Above him, surgical-grade lights buzzed softly, glowing even brighter against the surrounding white walls.

His scalp tingled, still hyper-aware of the fact that his hair was actually buzzed to near-nothing just minutes ago. The drone that had buzzed it off floated idly on the table nearby — AY something, Zedd had the weirdest names for his drones, honestly — both its arms folded neatly, like it was proud of a job well done. Caleb had never really been attached to his hair, but now that it was gone, he couldn’t really lie that he wished it wasn’t.

He wasn’t vain or nothing. It’s just that, without it, he  felt weirdly... incomplete. 

Wow, he let out a soft sigh, Weird what you miss only when you don’t have it.

Across the room, Zedd moved around carefully but quickly all the same, Caleb assuming he was checking and double-checking every piece of equipment. 

A slow exhale escaped Caleb’s lips as he finally got bored and voiced the thought left on his mind. “So... what happens after?”

Zedd didn’t bother to look up, but Caleb still noticed the way he paused, a moment of silence — just a single moment — before he answered. “Depends.”

“Uh-huh?””

“How you handle it.” Zedd adjusted a setting, his expression unreadable behind the blue tint of his lenses. “Your body’s gonna change fast. Your brain, too. You’ll get faster, sharper, stronger—but it won’t happen overnight. You’ll have to push yourself. Stress-test the limits.” The other man in the lab coat clicked his tongue, glancing off to stare at nothing before quickly turning his hidden eyes back to Caleb. “And there are limits.”

Caleb hummed. “And if I break them?”

He couldn’t see Zedd’s eyes but he could tell they were narrowed. “Don’t.”

Instead of questioning that, he let out a huff of a laugh. “Reassuring.”

Zedd let a smirk ghost across his lips, but it didn’t stay. “Push but not too far that you do something stupid. I need you functional.”

Caleb nodded slightly, fingers flexing against the table. This was real. More than real, it was happening. I’m gonna be fixed.

A minute later, Zedd stepped up beside him, lifting a mask from the tray and interrupting his thoughts before he could say or do anything to interrupt what he had been waiting for since he was a little kid. “Okay,” he muttered to himself as he adjusted the fit, then held it over Caleb’s face, hands perfectly steady as always.

“Gonna need you to take some real deep breaths for me, Rogers,” Caleb heard him say as he pressed the seal tight over his mouth and nose.

The cool rush of anesthesia filled Caleb’s lungs. His eyelids felt heavy as soon as he took that first breath, the world narrowing at the edges almost immediately. The last thing he saw was Zedd watching him, voice calm and clear as he counted down.

“Ten Missisipi... nine Missisipi... eight Missisipi... seven Missisipi... six...”

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –​

Zedd exhaled slow, fingers flexing against the micromanipulator gloves, servos whirring as they adjusted to the shift in pressure. The gloves responded with the kind of precision that made most surgical teams obsolete—every micro-adjustment calibrated to his movements, down to the nearest micron. 

He barely had to think about it. 

Overhead, the fluorescents burned bright and clinical, washing out the already too-white walls, as ADAM’s mechanical arms descended from the ceiling, his VI's multi-jointed appendages already moving. The sub-basement smelled like antiseptic and ozone, the quiet hum of active monitors pressing in from all sides. 

No noise. No distractions. 

Just him, ADAM, and the slow, careful process of dismantling a body built to fail.

First step: lungs.

The incision came smooth, scalpel tracking the seam in the organs where reinforced polymer met skin. Augmentation knowledge had come to him months ago, right before it was overshadowed by the memories of his teenage years with ADVENT. Said knowledge also came packaged with a bunch of surgical skill and experience, at least when it came to the altering of the human body in things like this. Specific and annoying because of it. He wasn’t sure if he could help if someone was having a heart attack but if they wanted a new heart, he was your guy.

Either way, synthetic scaffolding wasn’t the hardest thing he could be cutting through right now, but it was intricate, delicate. The webbing peeled away in thin, near-translucent strands, curling under the grip of his tools, each filament dissolving on retrieval as ADAM sterilized the open tissue. 

Zedd’s jaw locked for half a second as he exhaled sharply, buried the potential thought of how he would have mechanically augmented Caleb under motion, under process. Bit by bit, the webbing unfurled beneath his hands, delicate filaments peeling away like unraveling thread. The Greater New York surgeons hadn’t half-assed their work on this and it showed. He was looking at some expensive, invasive augmentation, designed to compensate for a body that had already been falling apart before it had the chance to grow into itself. 

Focus. Frowning, he slid the final strands of polymer free and watched as ADAM’s precision clamps sealed the open tissue with micro-sutures before he even had to ask. One down.

Next: leg.

The titanium fiber lattice was bonded tight, anchored tight and firmly to bone and, meant to stay in place for life. Heat application loosened it just enough for the gloves to hook into the threading and start pulling, slow and controlled. The metal resisted at first—like it knew what was coming. Zedd ground his teeth, adjusted the frequency, and watched as it finally lifted free, strand by metallic strand, falling away in perfect succession, until nothing remained but bone and muscle.

The defibrillator and pulmonary stent were easier—almost insultingly so. Scar tissue made the cuts predictable, the implants themselves already showing stress fractures. He worked quickly, cutting carefully and unhooking the connections without so much as a micro-spasm from Caleb’s body. 

Someone had expected them to be permanent. 

Someone was wrong.

By the time Zedd sealed the last incision, letting ADAM smooth another layer of medigel over the site with an applicator, two hours had disappeared. He straightened slightly, rolling his shoulders as ADAM ran the final diagnostic pass. 

Everything green. Just a body stripped down to its baseline.

Now for the fun part.

Zedd reached for the Psionic Induction Headpiece.

It was heavier than it looked. Not in weight, not really—barely a few kilos—but in everything else. Months of work, theoreticals spun into prototypes, failures collapsed into iterations until something held. 

A clean system. 

A stable one. Not what ADVENT did. 

He tilted it slightly, letting the crystalline threading catch the light. Eezo-Ψ. His own little breakthrough. Standard eezo didn’t interface with neuroelectricity cleanly, it simply didn’t have the sensitivity needed and the conductivity thresholds? Far too low to even hope without a purposeful workaround like a Bio-Amp.

The usual workarounds… Well, let’s just say they didn’t do much working around.

But he had figured out his own.

Pure progress. And nothing but, just the way he liked it.

Zedd fitted the helmet carefully over the unconscious Caleb’s shaved head, making sure the neural spikes aligned—prefrontal cortex, pineal gland, occipital mapping. The contacts weren’t invasive, but they felt invasive, the kind of design that read wrong if you didn’t understand what it was doing.

But Zedd understood.

The interface flickered to life as he keyed in the activation sequence. Blue-tinted holos lit the space between his fingers, crisp readouts unfolding line by line as the system ran its first deep sync.

"ADAM, set a timer for three hours."

“Understood,” the AI responded, smooth, clinical, like Zedd hadn’t just spent hours elbows-deep in the single most invasive experiment of his career.

Zedd exhaled slow, finally letting himself drop into the chair, arms stretching over his head before he slouched deep, bones settling like they were owed the break. His shoulders ached, hands stiff, muscles still wired from precision work that didn’t tolerate even the slightest tremor. He flexed his fingers, rolling out tension, exhaling again as he let himself sink further. His body felt the hours. 

His brain? That was still spinning.

Months to get to this point. The theory had always been solid—psionics could be forced into human architecture, no question. The issue had never been if. It was how. 

Elerium didn't exist here, not in the neat little veins ADVENT had been so comfortable exploiting, which meant starting from zero. No shortcuts, no stolen tech, just pure, ground-up problem-solving. It was… irritating but also, downright addictive. 

Because eezo wasn’t built for this. It couldn’t interface with neuroelectricity cleanly, and the second you tried to force it, the charge variance turned volatile. Unstable. 

Explosive.

That meant experimenting. That required... research.

Well, he'd like to say that, but it was mostly just fucking around with bits of eezo and on top of that, kept him up for days at a time running iterations with ADAM, testing equations that didn't hold, hundreds of thousands of simulations failing before they even hit runtime.  

Eezo sensitive enough to respond to neuroelectricity passively while also stable enough not to explode every time the temperature shifted half a degree. That required suspending said isotope of eezo in a crystalline lattice, at the very end of it. 

Time-consuming, sure, but worth it, all the same, when he’d finally figured it out, the solution just really falling into his lap after he tried some random shit on a whim. 

Eezo-Ψ, pronounced Eezo-Psi.

Zedd’s fingers tapped idly against the console as he watched the real-time neural readouts on the holo-screens. The headpiece was running through its calibration protocols, stimulating key regions of Caleb’s brain, systematically reinforcing and rewiring synaptic pathways. Plus, the helmet served to block external stimuli, forcing the mind to focus entirely on psionic frequency harmonization. More than anything, it was a crazy process and if Zedd wouldn't have bet his life on the fact that it didn't have any complications, he wouldn't have gone through with this part. Thankfully, ADVENT had tested it on so many many humans that the chances of something going wrong were as likely as the sun going supernova 5 billion years early.At the very least, the bioelectrodes—his neural spikes—ensured the process was precise. Clean.

An awakening to the sort of power inside almost every single human being , harmonizing neural structures with dark energy frequencies the same way Asari did naturally. Truthfully, it was probably within every organic being capable of higher thought, but Zedd would rather shoot himself than let this spread outside of humanity if he had a choice. No, this is our ace in the hole. 

And judging from what Kai Leng had told him about the Alliance’s secrets, they had been searching for one to prop humanity up for years against the aliens that outnumbered, outmuscled and outgunned them. Our fucking ace.

Two hours, twenty minutes in, the first signs appeared—sharp deviations in brainwave structure, oscillations where there shouldn't be any. A new pattern. A ripple where none had existed before.  

ADAM’s voice cut through the quiet, steady, unbothered. "Initial neural restructuring detected. Psionic resonance establishing. Current estimates have him at Tier C psionic potential."

Zedd leaned forward, elbows braced on his knees, Zedd’s lips parted slightly, another slow breath leaving him as he watched the patterns shift, the signal anchoring itself in the synaptic map. Pure fuckin’ progress. 

He clicked his tongue, exhaling again, smirk curling sharper at the edges.  “Let’s bring it home.”

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –​

Two hours later, Zedd exhaled, rolling the tension out of his shoulders before leaning forward and ending the process finally. The Psionic Induction Headpiece hissed softly as it powered down, neural spikes retracting from Caleb’s scalp in smooth, fluid precision. No tearing, no residual trauma—just the slow, deliberate release of tension as the system finalized its last cycle.

Zedd lifted the helmet carefully, slow and controlled, eyes flicking between the real-time neural scans on the holo-display and Caleb himself, searching for—anything. A reaction. A misfire. A spike in vitals. Something that told him what the hell had just changed.

Because something had changed.

Caleb’s breathing stayed even, steady, the anesthetics still holding him under, but the second the helmet left his head, his hair—light  brown, the same color it had been since the day Zedd met him—shimmered.

Not just a trick of the lights. 

Strands shifted, rippling like static caught in low gravity, color bleeding out from the roots until nothing remained but platinum blond. Nearly pure white, what was left of Caleb’s hair almost lmost glowing under the too-bright fluorescents.

Zedd stared. Huh.

That… wasn’t expected.

He turned the helmet over and over in his hands, his thumb tracing the etched grooves along the crystalline inlays, barely feeling the heat still lingering from the process. I… Did I fuck up somewhere? The stabilizing lattice had done its job, locked in the neural structuring, anchored the resonance. So why—?

He blinked, mouth flattening slightly before tapping his omnitool. “ADAM. I’mma need you to log this for me. Albinism a potential response to the Eezo-Ψ?”

“Noted, boss.”

Zedd let out a slow breath, pressing his knuckles into his temple for half a second before forcing himself back into motion. Later. That was a later problem. For now—

He straightened, slipping the helmet onto the console, fingers tapping out a quick recalibration before shifting his focus back to Caleb’s vitals. Everything still stable. Still within expected range. Except for the part where his genetic markers just pulled a full-blown UI color swap. Right. Later.

“ADAM,” he muttered, still watching the monitors. “Begin the intramuscular injections.”

Above, the whir of hidden compartments sliding open sent a ripple of cool air through the sterile sub-basement. Pressurized seals hissed as the automated injectors descended from their housings, seven mechanical arms moving in controlled unison, multi-jointed clamps locking onto vials filled with Rebirth Serum.

Vibrant blue liquid, pulsing faintly in slow, rolling waves. Zedd crossed his arms, exhaling through his nose as the needle-like injectors extended, moving into position with a precision he’d stopped appreciating months ago. One for each limb. Two for his chest. One aimed dead center at the solar plexus.

“Proceed,” ADAM confirmed, and the arms deployed in perfect sync.

The needles sank into Caleb’s skin, thin and sharp enough that the punctures barely registered, vials emptying in controlled, deliberate increments—not a flood, not a surge, just a slow, steady rewrite of the human form in real-time.

For a long moment, nothing. Just the mechanical hum of the injectors, the soft whir-click of the monitoring system running its loops. Then—

Caleb’s chest jerked. A sharp, sudden inhale, muscles tensing as his entire respiratory system adjusted to the hit, a deeper breath than he had ever seen the frail man take.

And then Zedd saw it.

Muscle fibers stretched as they reknitted, each one restructuring like something sculpted from the inside out. His limbs thickened, sinew reinforcing as mass filled the spaces that had once been hollow. His bones adjusted, expanding just slightly, recalibrating for strength. Arms stretched, legs lengthened—his entire frame recalibrating, pulling itself into something new.

Not just repair. Reconstruction.

Five minutes.

That’s how long it took. Five minutes, and the person lying on that table wasn’t the same one who’d been there before.

The mechanical arms withdrew, sealing the injection points in their wake, vials emptied, process complete. The scrawny, brittle frame Caleb had carried for his entire life was gone.

Zedd let out a slow breath, pacing around the table, eyes raking over the proof of his work.

His lips twitched, smirk lazy, sharp at the edges. “My very own super soldier.”

He let the moment sit, rolling his shoulders, taking in the sheer success of it. Then, with an exhale, he turned back to the console, fingers flicking across the interface.

“Wake him up.”

The process was quick and simple. 

Another hiss of the injector system sent a sharp release of pressurized gas into Caleb as the counteragent flooded his bloodstream, neutralizing the anesthetic as quickly as it was introduced. Caleb’s vitals shifted almost immediately,, his entire body kicking into gear like an engine revving to life.

Zedd leaned forward, bracing an arm against the console, watching.

First twitch—fingers shifting against the metal, curling slightly like his body was re-learning what movement felt like. Then his chest rose sharp, lungs sucking in air like they were starved for it. A second inhale, deeper, steadier, control slotting into place.

Then, finally—his eyes opened.

Zedd didn’t say anything. Just observed, picking apart every microexpression as Caleb blinked up at the ceiling, pupils dilating, flickering through a dozen unreadable reactions before he moved, slowly at first… but surely.

His eyes tracked the tension in Caleb’s arms as he pushed himself up on the table, weight rolling into his shoulders, gaze dropping straight to his hands.

And there it was. 

The way he took in a breath, deep and strong, without the usual hitch like he didn’t quite believe what he was seeing but couldn’t bring himself to doubt it either.

ADAM’s voice  filled the silence. “Serum physiological integration complete. Subject exhibits a seven-centimeter increase in height, expanding from 170 cm to 177 cm, with proportional musculoskeletal adaptation. Growth remains evenly distributed across all structural components, maintaining optimal biomechanical efficiency.”

Zedd barely glanced at the readout and didn’t really need to or want to.

His focus was squarely on Caleb, tracking the minute shifts in expression, the way his fingers twitched before curling into loose fists, testing, recalibrating. 

“Subject’s muscle fiber density increased by approximately 300% relative to pre-administration baseline. Myofibril compaction suggests force output potential far exceeding standard human potential, pending live assessment. Connective tissue elasticity and durability enhanced proportionally to prevent structural failure under stress.”

Caleb flexed his fingers again, slower this time, rolling his wrists like he was still convincing himself this was real. His breathing stayed steady. No sign of strain. 

No rejection.

ADAM kept going. “Neuromuscular efficiency recalibrated. Fast-twitch muscle response accelerated significantly, indicating increased sprint velocity and reflexive reaction time. Coordination systems automatically adjusted to compensate for enhanced biomechanical output.”

Zedd hummed under his breath, tilting his head slightly. Beautiful.

“Skeletal microstructure reinforced to withstand amplified kinetic loads. Density augmentation and tensile redistribution reduce risk of structural compromise under high-impact conditions. Blunt-force trauma resilience heightened beyond prior thresholds, though live testing required for precise tolerances.”

Caleb turned his hands over again, studying them, expression caught somewhere between fascination and disbelief. The fingers were thicker, more defined, veins running subtly beneath the skin where there had once been nothing but sharp angles. Solid. Stable.

“Cardiovascular and metabolic functions have adapted to support accelerated energy consumption. Oxygenation efficiency and ATP synthesis operating at peak capacity, sustaining enhanced exertion levels without immediate onset of fatigue. Core body temperature and caloric demand projected to increase proportionally—nutritional intake and hydration levels must be monitored accordingly.”

The report wrapped itself up neatly. “Current status: All modifications successfully integrated. Subject’s physiological parameters now significantly exceed pre-enhancement levels. Precise capability metrics pending field evaluation.”

Zedd let the words sit, let the moment breathe before finally speaking. “How do you feel?”

Caleb didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he swung his legs over the edge of the table, feet hitting the ground silent. He moved slowly, deliberately, like he was waiting for something to go wrong. 

But it didn’t.

He stood. Taller. Shoulders squared. His weight settled different, balanced into a frame that was built for it now.

Zedd noted the differences immediately. Not just the body. The face.

The sharp, almost sickly hollowness was gone. His cheekbones stood out stronger, his jaw more defined. His eyes—

Zedd narrowed his own gaze. Bright.

They weren’t the pale blue they’d been before. There was a glow now, faint but noticeable, the iris a bright purple.

Then Caleb lifted a hand, curling his fingers into a fist.

The air around it shimmered.

Psionics. A soft hum vibrating the space around his knuckles, the faint, pulsing violet glow tracing the curve of his fingers, sinking into the bones beneath.

He smirked, exhaling slow, rolling his shoulders like he was settling in.

“Great, boss.”