"Dad, can we stop with the daily hard sparring already?!" Zachary complained as he checked a right low kick with his shin, the impact thudding through his leg before he brought both gloves high to catch a left hook on his forearms. "It's been forty-six consecutive days!"
"What?" Neil scoffed, a grin tugging at his mouth. "Can't keep up already? That's all the more reason to continue."
He stepped in immediately, posting his lead hand on Zachary's guard and firing a sharp rear teep straight into Zachary's midsection.
Zachary absorbed the push, shifted his hips, and scooped the teep under his arm, trapping Neil's shin tight against his ribs as he stepped back at an angle. A knowing smirk crossed his face.
Neil reacted on instinct, hopping forward on his base leg, shoulders squared and hands high to keep his balance. He was lucky—had his posture broken or his weight drifted too far back, Zachary could have dumped him cleanly or chopped the standing leg.
"I just can't keep knocking you out like before," Zachary said, tightening the trap and dragging the captured leg backward in short, measured steps, careful not to overcommit. "It's been forty-six days. And don't think I haven't noticed—you've been talking to yourself lately. Mom's worried too. Let's just stop."
Neil matched the retreat one hop at a time, pivoting his hips to relieve pressure while keeping his hands ready to frame or clinch if needed. "You saying I've got CTE or something, boy?" he snapped. "I don't remember teaching my son to be this rude."
Before Zachary could answer, a voice rang out from the far end of the gym.
"Hey, Dad! You've been shadowboxing there forever!"
A chill ran down Neil's spine.
He turned sharply—and there stood Zachary near the equipment rack, gloves half-strapped, shin guards still loose, looking fresh and untouched.
Neil's breath hitched.
Ah shit.
His balance faltered. The resistance against his ribs vanished. The leg he'd been controlling was gone. The space in front of him was empty—no clinch, no pressure, no opponent.
His hands lowered an inch.
Something was wrong with his head.
"Son," Neil said slowly, forcing his stance square and his voice steady, "I think we should end sparring today."
Zachary blinked. "Alright… why?" He tilted his head. "Something come up?"
Neil had been off lately—reaction timing inconsistent, eyes unfocused between exchanges—but Zachary had chalked it up to accumulated fatigue. Now, watching his father strip off his gloves with unsteady fingers, unease set in.
"Yeah," Neil said, managing a tight smile. "Just remembered I've got something to handle at the port."
Zachary's frown deepened.
"Dad," he said quietly, his tone turning grave, "the ports across the peninsula have been shut down for weeks."
Silence stretched between them.
Neil didn't argue. He didn't scoff or snap back with a joke. Instead, he turned away, reaching for a towel he didn't immediately use, his grip tightening and loosening as if he'd forgotten why it was in his hand.
Zachary watched him closely.
There it was again—the delay. Not physical fatigue, but something subtler. A fraction of a second where Neil seemed to lose continuity with himself, eyes unfocused, posture held together by habit rather than awareness.
"Dad," Zachary said again, more carefully this time, "you weren't actually just shadowboxing, right?"
Neil's shoulders stiffened, and that cue alone told Zachary everything he needed to know—something was very wrong.
He didn't press further. Instead, he stepped aside to his locker, stripped off his gears, and pulled out his communicator, already scrolling through a secure channel reserved for royal clan–related emergencies.
Neil noticed.
"You calling someone?" he asked.
"Yup. No worries, I know who to contact," Zachary said lightly. He already knew a little after a brief scan of Neil's Life Code, but explaining things to his father wouldn't be easy since all his knowledge was otherworldly by nature.
He had conducted no formal tests and was unqualified to speak on neurology. His words carried no credibility compared to those who had studied and practiced it extensively.
It was better to contact the royal clan and let them send a credible specialist instead.
Doctor Wilson Abbar, a man well into his fifties who still looked steady without any obvious signs of deterioration, was escorted down to the private facilities beneath the estate by the butler, Gins.
Amanda Kent had left the mansion early that morning to take care of her jewelry store chains, especially since business hadn't been good lately. She had many employees, and as their boss, she needed to show concern by being present and helping when needs arose.
Doctor Wilson was well accustomed to working at high efficiency, as he was under the royal clan's payroll. Being capable enough to work for the royal clan itself was a great honor for any citizen.
Naturally, Doctor Wilson was a man whose pride lay in his expertise in the field of neurology. Upon arrival, he didn't waste time on unnecessary words before immediately entering work mode.
The neurologist neither raised his voice nor softened his expression. He expanded another layer of the scan and let the data speak for itself.
Older images appeared beside the current ones—records taken years apart, meticulously archived. For most of Neil's life, they were clean and remarkably stable.
Then came the recent data.
The contrast was no longer subtle.
"There is acute-onset microdegeneration," the neurologist said. "Diffuse, but temporally clustered. Predominantly along the frontal and temporal pathways, with secondary involvement of the limbic interface."
He overlaid a timeline.
"Your past scans were within expected parameters for a Royal Clan member who had been granted the Ichor, with no pathological markers," he continued.
He advanced the sequence frame by frame.
"Everything we are seeing now developed within the last six and a half weeks."
Neil's eyes narrowed. "That's impossible."
"In a normal case for a Malais Ichor recipient," the neurologist agreed. "It should be nearly impossible, because the Ichor turns its users into, essentially, superhumans."
He isolated a protein-binding assay.
"However, in your case, Sir Bohrson, there is abnormal tau aggregation," he said. "Low-density but rapidly deposited. This is not long-term saturation, but accelerated pathology from repeated loss of consciousness."
He added, "Each knockout caused transient global neuronal depolarization. Individually survivable. Collectively catastrophic."
He brought up another chart.
"You were rendered unconscious an average of once per session," he continued. "Forty-six knockouts in forty-six days. No recovery interval sufficient for glymphatic clearance or synaptic recalibration."
Neil didn't speak.
"The Malais Ichor did what it was designed to do," the neurologist went on. "It reinforced tissue integrity, prevented hemorrhage, and maintained cerebral perfusion. That is why you are alive and functional."
He paused.
"It also allowed you to continue taking damage that would have killed a regular, non-enhanced human several times over."
"That explains the hallucinations?" Neil asked, his tone low, disbelief faintly laced beneath it.
"Yes," the neurologist replied. "These are acute regulatory failures. Memory engrams are misfiring because inhibitory gating in the prefrontal cortex is temporarily compromised. Sir Bohrson's brain is powerful enough to still generate complete sensory constructs when those safeguards fail."
He changed the display again.
"We're also seeing synchronization errors between cortical regions," he added. "Milliseconds of delay, but enough to create duplicated perception under stress."
Neil finally spoke. "Progression?"
The neurologist answered immediately. "If exposure stops, stabilization is possible."
Silence tightened the room.
"If exposure continues," the neurologist said evenly, "this will become true chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Rapid-onset. In all honesty, this is my first time handling a neurology case involving a royal clan member who has already assimilated Malais Ichor—simply because it has never happened before. Nobody, and I mean nobody, has ever been pushed this far."
He paused, then delivered the part that mattered.
"Continuing high-impact combat—especially repeated knockouts—will accelerate tau deposition exponentially. At your current rate, measurable cognitive instability will appear within months. Possibly weeks."
Zachary had taken his time inspecting Neil's Life Code more closely while the neurologist conducted the rest of the scans, from X-rays to MRI.
As much as he could simply use his abilities to fix Neil's condition, Zachary did not wish to expose what he was capable of to anyone—Neil and Amanda included.
Calling in a neurologist under the royal clan's payroll was the best course of action. A normal neurologist would have gone insane over Neil's physical and mental thresholds. After all, regular people were not aware of the Eli's Staff secrets, nor of Malais Ichor.
Everything that occurred beneath the mansion, within the underground facilities, was completely outside of Amanda's awareness.
Zachary had wanted to make Neil stop his maniacal sparring for quite some time, but he hadn't meant to cause CTE. He knew this was largely his fault, even though Neil had repeatedly told him otherwise.
Now that the situation was clear, with the neurologist having said his piece and outlined Neil's next course of action, Doctor Wilson Abbar took his leave.
"I guess there won't be any more sparring from now on," Neil sighed. He felt more remorse over being unable to spar than over having CTE.
During his inspection, Zachary had noticed that Neil's Material Edict had several affected sections, specifically in regions detailing brain structure, function, and connectivity.
While the Soul Edict was largely unaffected—aside from being slightly weakened—the Mind Edict had suffered considerable damage.
Zachary had been spending a lot of time with Neil lately, which made the changes easier to notice compared to weeks prior.
He had everything he might possibly need to begin fixing Neil's condition right then and there, but he decided against it entirely. Doing so would only turn his father into an even bigger sparring maniac.
Also, doing that would expose a lot more of himself, regarding his past life, way too much. Definitely way more than what he's comfortable with. Too many questions will arise and that's just troublesome.
What worry or hesitation would Neil have if he knew Zachary could cure him in an instant? Well—not quite an instant, but certainly fast enough.
For now, Zachary believed it was better for the man in question to take things slowly—especially with the tension in the air thickening by the day.