All the bumps, jolts, and brutal high-G maneuvers during the flight were already doing a number on me. I was a wounded man lying flat on a rock-hard deck, struggling to breathe, and the whole experience felt like getting beaten half to death, then being used as a pillow by a drunk wrestler running through an entire free-fall routine.
When the aircraft slammed into something with a heavy impact from the ground, my chest wound—which had barely been treated at all—felt like it tore open again. I let out a muffled groan, my vision went dark, and I nearly blacked out on the spot.
I couldn't help recalling some old posts I'd read about "experiences riding military aircraft." Looks like no matter where you are, military transports are universally miserable.
When the hatch opened, I saw an enormous hangar, absurdly huge. The vaulting overhead was impossibly high, with countless thick steel ribs bracing a stone ceiling like the chest cavity of some prehistoric beast.
Yellowed light spilled down from far above, illuminating rows upon rows of aircraft identical to the transport I'd been riding. The air was saturated with heavy machine oil, ozone, and the sharp tang of some unknown fuel.
What unsettled me more were the "people" working inside.
Most of them couldn't really be called people anymore. They looked more like stitched-together monsters from a horror film. Some had tracked lower bodies, but their upper halves were bare human torsos, with several thick mechanical arms replacing hands as they loaded and unloaded heavy crates from the aircraft.
Others had been rebuilt entirely into mobile cranes or welding rigs, with only a single numb, expressionless human face preserved somewhere in a corner of their metal shell, like a grim proof that the thing had once been alive.
This is what "cyberpunk gone wrong" looks like, I guess. And this was definitely not Valhalla. At least, it shouldn't have looked like this.
Two soldiers carried me down from the aircraft and placed me onto a grav-stretcher. The stretcher rose soundlessly and drifted forward at a steady, unhurried pace toward a massive door deeper in the hangar. The hulking Captain Kairen and the rest of the squad followed at my sides, their footsteps heavy, like a funeral procession.
We passed through a colossal blast gate carved with the Aquila and skulls and entered a long corridor.
If the cathedral I'd seen earlier felt like "sick grandeur," then this place was that sickness fully upgraded and militarized.
The corridor was terrifyingly tall. The walls on both sides were built entirely from a black, marble-like stone and covered with dense reliefs.
The subject matter was always the same: war, sacrifice, and the glorious achievements of some big shot I didn't recognize.
Countless warriors in heavy armor butchered strange aliens and monsters in scenes both bloody and magnificent. Skulls were worked into every detail of the architecture—embedded into arches, forming the bases of lampstands, or simply strung together and hung from the ceiling like wind chimes.
I even saw life-sized niches spaced at intervals along the corridor walls. Inside them stood not statues, but real human skeletons, gilded in gold. They wore ornate capes, held gleaming weapons, and posed as if mid-battle, their hollow eye sockets silently watching everyone who passed.
Honestly, if the owner of this place had lived in my era, they'd have been the most in-demand art director for the funeral industry, dark film studios, and heavy metal bands. This aesthetic was hardcore. Hardcore to the point of shredding your sanity.
The grav-stretcher slid forward without a sound. All that accompanied us were the heavy footfalls of our group echoing through the empty corridor. Oppressive. Cold. Silent. Everything here seemed to declare: an individual human means nothing.
You are just an insignificant screw in a vast war machine. This stubborn, conservative, arrogant, slightly neurotic dark aesthetic felt like someone had taken Victorian-era European Gothic gloom and the inhuman, ice-cold machinery of the Industrial Revolution, mashed them together at maximum intensity, then left the mixture to ferment—or rot—for ten thousand years.
At last, the stretcher stopped before a door that looked thicker than a bank vault. The door had only a small ident-scanner blinking red. Kairen stepped forward and pressed his palm to it.
Beep.
The door slid aside without a sound, revealing what lay inside.
For an instant, I thought I'd been delivered to some medieval torture chamber.
The room wasn't large. The walls and ceiling were cold, dark metal. In the center stood an operating table made of the same metal, covered in grooves and restraints of unknown purpose.
Suspended above it was a huge circular device packed with probes and mechanical arms, like a metal octopus coiled and ready to strike. In the corners sat various machines blinking with indicator lights, but without exception their casings were decorated with gears, skulls, and prayers engraved in a Gothic script I couldn't read.
What made my scalp prickle even more was that the floor, the table, and even the walls around it all seemed smeared with stains that hadn't been cleaned—old blood, blotched and dark.
There wasn't even the faintest smell of disinfectant in here. Only cold oil, metal, and the stench of blood.
"Put him on it." A voice like ice, utterly emotionless, came from the shadows.
I turned toward the sound and saw a man in a dark red robe stepping out. Half his face had been replaced with machinery. One eye was a mechanical augmetic that glowed red. One arm had been swapped for a metal claw that gleamed coldly. He looked less like a doctor and more like an industrial butcher—or a mechanic.
Two soldiers came forward, hauled me off the grav-stretcher with casual roughness, and tossed me onto the operating table like I was a sack of potatoes.
Clang.
My back met the metal surface intimately, and the pain nearly killed me on the spot. Stars exploded across my vision as agony knifed up from the wound.
Completely unprepared for them to treat an injured man this roughly, I groaned on instinct, "E-easy… easy…"
No one cared.
Several cold mechanical arms lowered from above. Click, click—my wrists, ankles, and even my forehead were locked down on the table. I was like a lamb on the block, unable to move.
Fear—stronger than anything I'd felt on the battlefield—seized my heart. In combat, at least I could run, I could hide. Here, I was a helpless specimen, an experiment waiting to be carved.
"My lord, please endure." The hulking captain's rough voice sounded beside me. There was some concern in his tone, but more than that, there was obedience and faith that allowed no argument. "Be at ease. The Tech-Priest will heal you. To preserve the purity of the treatment, we must withdraw."
With that, he and his men saluted the half-man, half-machine "doctor" in the corner, then turned without hesitation and filed out. The heavy door closed slowly, sealing in my despair.
"…Timestamp 214ah976. One routine casualty. Designation t15Ω073. Physical damage assessment begins." The thing called a Tech-Priest spoke in a flat electronic voice, dead and empty, like someone repeating the same lines hundreds of times a day. He didn't even look at me, only tapped at a control panel beside him.
The terror of being treated like livestock clogged my throat. I wanted to shout something—anything—but nothing came.
Above me, the metal octopus began to move.
Countless probes and lenses extended from it, shining lights of various colors as they scanned over my body. I felt like I was undergoing the most invasive CT imaginable—inside and out, every cell, every hair, all laid bare.
"Vital signs stable. Seventh rib fracture, displaced. Penetrating injury to the upper lobe of the right lung, accompanied by minor pneumothorax. Estimated blood loss: eight hundred milliliters…" The red-robed thing recited a string of terms in the same tone you'd use to read a grocery list, and each word made my scalp tighten.
"Cause of injury: high-energy kinetic penetrator. No psychic or biochem-corruption signatures detected. Conclusion: pure physical trauma."
"Repair plan generated. Standard Trauma Repair Protocol 7-B. Remove necrotic tissue, rejoin rib, suture lung, inject tissue growth stimulant and broad-spectrum antibacterial agent. Estimated duration: seven minutes, thirty-two seconds."
My hair practically stood on end.
They were going to operate on me? Here? No anesthesia? No pre-op briefing? Not even a consent form?
"Hey! Wait! What are you doing? Anesthetic! Give me anesthetic!" I finally snapped and bellowed at the top of my lungs.
At that, the red-robed creature slowly turned his half-mechanical head. The entire lower half of his face was copper-colored metal, like he wore a copper 3M respirator. The skin around his eyes and across his forehead was a sickly pale, stretched tight. His right eye was cloudy and vacant, like a cataract, while the red electronic left eye lingered on my face for two seconds.
"Anesthesia interferes with sacred machinery's perception of the neural network, degrading data detection and feedback. It is also a desecration of the treatment rite." His icy electronic voice explained. "Pain is proof of the weakness of flesh. Endurance is the obligation of mortals."
I swear to God, in that moment I wanted to greet his entire family.
What kind of deranged nonsense was that? This was the most bizarre, "fresh and refined" explanation for "being afraid of pain" I had ever heard. Desecration? Proof of weakness? Of course you don't know pain, you half-human, half-demon tin can!
But my protest meant nothing.
All I saw was a slender mechanical arm lowering from above. At its tip was a cluster of high-speed spinning—surgical blades? Or more like a precise cutting drill glittering with cold light.
Was this thing here to heal me, or to carve me open?
"Don't—!"
I screamed like a pig being slaughtered.
I felt it clearly: that cold metal drill touched the skin of my chest, and then, with a teeth-grinding "zzzz" sound, it cut in without the slightest hesitation.
Damn it AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
Pain I couldn't even describe.
Pain a hundred times stronger than getting shot crashed over every nerve in my body like a tidal wave. My body convulsed in frantic instinctive struggle, but the restraints held me down like iron clamps. My screams bounced around the sealed room, while the robed monster acted as though he couldn't hear a thing, calmly operating his instruments.
I felt my chest being cut open alive, cold machinery stirring inside me—cutting, probing, stitching. I heard the crack as my bone was forced back into alignment. I felt icy fluids injected into my veins. I even smelled the scorched stench of my own flesh being cauterized by a laser.
A thousand thoughts stampeded through my mind. The "life flashing before your eyes" thing might actually have started. I extended my highest contempt to those people who describe uterine curettage in vivid detail.
I swore I'd never talk trash about dentists behind their backs again. I decided anesthetists were the greatest profession on Earth. I wondered whether I should switch careers and go work in a slaughterhouse someday—
They weren't treating me like a living human being.
To them, I was a broken machine.
And they were "repairing" me in the most efficient, and most brutal, way possible.
Human rights? Dignity? Patient care? The most basic concepts of modern civilization were luxuries that clearly didn't exist in this hellhole.
I remembered a game I'd played years ago called Quake 4—there was a scene where the viewpoint watches itself get dismembered on a conveyor belt and rebuilt into a cyborg. It was thrilling as hell. I strongly recommend anyone who hasn't seen it go look it up—
But when it happens to you?
Oh, wow.
I don't know how long I screamed, and I don't know how long this nightmare lasted. My consciousness bounced back and forth between agony and terror until, at some point, my brain seemed to shut down entirely in self-defense.
I passed out.
Thank God.
(End of Chapter)
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