The sound of a bone saw is distinct. It is not the clean shuck of a knife through meat, nor the dull thud of a hammer on iron. It is a high-pitched, vibrating whine that travels through the table, up the spine, and rattles in the teeth. It is the sound of structure being forcibly dismantled.
Most people are unconscious when they hear it. If they are lucky, they are under heavy sedation. If they are unlucky, they are screaming.
Dante Silvergrin was awake. He was eating an apple.
He took a bite, the crisp snap of the fruit echoing strangely in the damp, subterranean silence of the lab. He chewed slowly, methodically. The apple offered him nothing in terms of sustenance. To his altered physiology, the fructose and fiber were negligible—ghosts of nutrition that would burn up in his furnace before they reached his stomach. He needed uranium, high-grade steel, or the life force of a living being to survive.
But he ate the apple because he remembered liking apples. He ate it because the act of chewing, swallowing, and tasting was a ritual of the living, and Dante was terrified that if he stopped performing the rituals, he would forget the script entirely.
"Hold still," Silas Vane muttered, peering through a set of magnifying lenses that zoomed in on Dante's ruined shoulder. "I'm cutting through the rotator cuff. If you twitch, I might nick the spectral artery. Do you know how hard it is to get ectoplasm out of concrete? It stains like wine."
"It tickles," Dante said, his voice buzzing slightly as the liquid metal of his lower jaw shifted to accommodate the next bite.
He looked down at his right arm. Or rather, the ruin that had once been his right arm.
The limb was a catastrophe of physics. The "Prime Output" he had channeled during the battle with Lady Vespera—raw, unfiltered white mana from the Origin—had not just burned him, it had erased the fundamental concept of "life" from the limb. The skin wasn't just charred, it was grey and flaking like old parchment found in a tomb. The muscle beneath had withered into dry, black jerky.
Silas revved the saw. The blade spun with a hungry blur.
"It's not necrosing," Silas observed, his voice detached and clinical. He wasn't looking at Dante's face, he was looking at the fascinating pathology of the wound. "Necrosis implies rot. This is... vacancy. The cells aren't dead, they've just resigned. They've forgotten they are supposed to be part of a biology."
"It feels like wearing a heavy coat," Dante noted, watching the saw blade bite into his own flesh.
There was no pain. That was the horror of it. As the serrated steel cut through the deltoid muscle and bit into the humerus bone, Dante felt nothing but the dull vibration of the tool. The nerves had been scoured clean by the mana. The arm was attached to him, but it was no longer of him. It was just dead weight—a piece of furniture he happened to be bolting to his torso.
"Your chassis is primitive," a thought echoed in Dante's skull.
It wasn't a voice from the outside. It didn't have sound. It felt like a second track of consciousness running parallel to his own—a cold, logical narration overlaying his internal monologue. It was Prime, speaking from the library at the end of the world, transmitting across the link they had forged.
"The biological medium is inefficient for high-voltage mana transmission. I suggest replacing the limb with a tungsten-carbide alloy. Greater conductivity. Higher melting point."
"The voice in my head says tungsten," Dante relayed to Silas, taking another bite of the apple to drown out the sound of his own bone being sawed in half.
"The voice in your head doesn't pay for the materials," Silas scoffed, not looking up. "And tungsten is too heavy. You're a skirmisher, not a siege tank. If I put tungsten on you, you'll walk in circles. We're going with Dead Iron and grafted muscle weave."
ZZZRRRRT.
The saw hit the marrow. A puff of white bone dust sprayed into the air. Dante flinched, not from pain, but from the sudden drop in weight as the limb finally gave way.
With a wet, heavy thud, the blackened arm fell onto the metal tray. It landed with the finality of a gavel.
"Good riddance," Silas said, kicking the tray aside with his foot. He wiped the bone dust from his goggles and leaned in to inspect the stump. "Clean cut. The cauterization from the mana actually made my job easier. No bleeding. Just... emptiness."
He stood up and walked to a covered tank in the corner of the lab. The tank hummed with the sound of a circulation pump. Silas grabbed the edge of the tarp and pulled it off with a theatrical flourish.
"Behold," Silas announced. "Prototype Model 4."
Dante leaned forward, the apple forgotten in his hand.
Floating in the bubbling green preservation fluid was a masterpiece of nightmares.
It was an arm, but it rejected the dichotomy of machine and flesh. It was a synthesis. The skeletal structure was made of matte-black Dead Iron, etched with microscopic runes that pulsed with a faint, rhythmic light. But wrapped around the metal, threaded through the gears and pistons like ivy strangling a trellis, was pale, vat-grown muscle fiber.
It didn't look built. It looked grown.
The fingers were long, elegant, and tipped with alchemically sharpened silver claws that gleamed even in the murky fluid.
"I call it 'The Gentleman's Ripper,'" Silas said, looking at the limb with the proud gaze of a father looking at his child (or perhaps a bomber looking at his bomb). "Internal gyroscope for perfect balance. Reinforced knuckles for crushing armor. And the forearm housing is hollow."
"Hollow?" Dante asked, tilting his head.
"So you can load your reagents directly into the arm," Silas explained, grinning maniacally. "No more fumbling with the bandolier in the middle of a knife fight. You load a vial of mercury into the elbow port, and the delivery system injects it straight into your transmutation circle at the palm. It's a syringe, a gun, and a hand, all in one."
"Silas," Dante said, genuinely impressed. "You are a disturbed genius."
"I know. That's why they expelled me." Silas reached into the tank with a pair of rubber gloves, fishing the prosthetic out. Fluid dripped from the metal and meat, sizzling slightly as it hit the floor.
He carried it over to the operating table. The arm was heavy, dripping, and cold.
"Alright," Silas said, his tone shifting from pride to seriousness. "This is the hard part. The old arm was dead, so cutting it off was like trimming fingernails. This..." He tapped the vat-grown muscle of the new limb. "...this is alive. And I have to convince your nervous system to accept it."
He held up a thick strip of leather.
"Bite down. I'm going to use Alchemical Fusion to splice the nerve endings. It's not going to stitch them, it's going to melt them together. It will feel like sticking your finger in a light socket."
Dante spat out the apple core. He took the leather strap and placed it between his metal teeth.
Silas lined up the prosthetic with the stump of Dante's shoulder. The visual was jarring—the pale, chalky skin of Dante's torso meeting the black metal and raw muscle of the machine.
"Three," Silas counted.
Dante gripped the edges of the metal table.
"Two."
"Brace for impact," Prime noted dryly.
"One."
Silas slammed the prosthetic home.
CRUNCH.
Dante screamed.
It wasn't a scream that traveled through the air. His jaw was clamped shut on the leather. It was a scream that vibrated through his skeleton.
It wasn't pain. Pain was a signal that something was wrong. This was an overload of rightness.
Thousands of microscopic alchemical filaments shot from the prosthetic into his shoulder, seeking out his dormant nerves. They didn't stitch, they flowed. The metal and the flesh liquefied at the point of contact, boiling and fusing into a seamless, horrific union.
Dante felt the cold. The absolute, freezing cold of the Dead Iron rushing into his warm body. Then came the heat—the feverish, thumping pulse of the vat-grown muscle syncing with his own heartbeat.
His body tried to reject it. His immune system flared, recognizing the intruder. Foreign object. Purge.
But the alchemy overruled it. Assimilation. Accept.
"Stabilizing," Prime's voice cut through the red haze of agony, turning the sensory overload into data. "Regulating bio-feedback loop. Neural handshake initiated. 40%... 70%... Acceptance rate: 89%."
The silver jaw clamped down harder. The leather strap didn't just tear, it disintegrated under the pressure of the Living Quicksilver, sliced cleanly in half as Dante's jaw convulsed.
Then, silence.
The burning stopped. The cold settled into a dull, heavy ache.
Dante slumped back on the table, his chest heaving. Sweat—cold, oily, and smelling of toxins—ran down his face, pooling in the hollow of his throat.
"Breathe," Silas instructed, checking the seal. "Look at the join. Seamless. Not even a scar."
Dante looked. Silas was right. Where his pale skin met the dark machinery, there was no jagged line, no stitches. The flesh simply transitioned into metal, as if he had slowly turned into a machine over millions of years.
He looked at his new right hand. It lay heavy on his chest.
"Move it," Silas commanded.
Dante focused. He didn't think about moving a machine. He thought about moving his hand.
Whir-click.
The servos hissed softly. The fingers curled. It was instant. There was no lag, no clumsiness. It felt... powerful.
"Move the index finger," Silas said, holding up a diagnostic chart.
The finger twitched, the silver claw tapping against the metal breastplate of his chest. Clink.
"Make a fist."
Dante squeezed.
CLANK.
The fist closed with the force of a hydraulic press. The air inside the palm was compressed with a sharp pop. He could feel the power in the servos—enough to crush a brick, enough to bend steel, enough to tear a throat out.
"How does it feel?" Silas asked, wiping green slime off his apron.
Dante held the hand up to the light. The Dead Iron absorbed the glare, while the silver claws reflected it. He opened the panel in the forearm—a smooth, sliding action that revealed the empty chamber waiting for a chemical payload.
It was a weapon. But it was attached to his soul.
"It feels," Dante whispered, his voice vibrating through the exhausted silence, "like an unfair advantage."
"Adequate," Prime noted, his mental voice sounding bored, though Dante could sense the approval underneath. "Though the aesthetic is crude. The exposed gears... we look like a steampunk pirate. It lacks elegance."
"Shut up, Prime," Dante muttered aloud, flexing the claws again. Snick-snick.
"Who are you talking to?" Silas asked, looking around the empty lab.
"My roommate," Dante said, sitting up. He felt heavier on the right side, a comforting, lethal weight. "He hates the style."
Silas picked up a heavy wrench and brandished it at the air.
"Tell him if he complains, I'll install a cup-holder on the next one. And I'll paint it pink."
Dante swung his legs off the table. He stood up, testing his balance. The gyroscope in the arm whirred, instantly correcting his center of gravity.
He walked over to the tray where his old, burnt arm lay. He looked at it—a piece of dead meat that had failed him. Then he looked at the gleaming black claw at his side.
"I'm hungry," Dante said, the new hunger of the machine mixing with the old hunger of the void.
Silas sighed, tossing the wrench onto a workbench. "I have leftover pizza. Or, if you prefer, I have a jar of iron filings and a side of motor oil."
Dante smiled. The Silvergrin shifted, liquid and terrifying.
"Both," Dante said. "I need the calories. And the iron needs the company."