"This is great! Let me try!"

Amelia pursed her lips, eyes focused on her hands like she was trying to see right through them. Her fingers began to ripple, and I did something quite stupid.

I grabbed her hands.

You know, while they were in the process of turning into deadly implements.

"Adrian! What are you doing?! Do you WANT to get hurt?!" she yelped, her concentration dropping immediately as she glared at me.

I felt her fingers stop wiggling very disturbingly in my hands and go back to proper grabby physical constructs.

"If I could maybe ask you not to do something reckless right after hearing that it's possible, please?" I snapped, freezing her indignation in place.

"Reckless? Why?"

"Because, while the 'Essence black hole' thing is useful, it's also producing a whole lot of corrupted Essence. Remember what happened when I tried to replicate this and used my cybernetics alone? Yeah, that's still a thing. It's just getting… I don't know, diluted."

"Then…"

"Yeah, this isn't — I mean, it could be, but I'm not sure it's safe," I corrected quickly, hoping not to worry her.

Except Amelia was obviously not stupid enough to believe my bullshit.

"It's slowly corrupting you, isn't it?" she asked quietly.

"Most… probably…"

I hated the way her eyes began to tear up.

"I'm sorry," she mumbled.

Now, that just confused me. "Sorry? What for? Please don't do this," I pleaded, brushing her tears away as gently as I could.

I could handle aggression and hatred easily. I had no idea how to handle tears.

"We made those. I helped make those. The whole reason why my stupid father even tried to send them out to that stupid gang was because he wanted test data. Neither of us anticipated this kind of corruption, though. Well, I didn't. Maybe he did, b-but it's not like he was going to let me learn about Essence and how to use it."

"Amelia, that's simply not your fault. I mean, come on. He put these on you." I tried for a gentle smile which was probably more like a grimace as I gently waved her own arms in her face. "You're as much a victim as me, so please don't cry?"

"F-Fine." Her giggle was not a happy sound. "Fine. We'll just have to find a solution. I mean, it's not like we know the whole 'corrupted' Essence is a bad thing, anyway."

She gave me a fake grin to go with her bluff.

But it was still a bluff. Because yeah, corrupted Essence was bad. I mean, it was weird eldritch shit. None of that crap was particularly good for my sanity, even though I had to admit it was very effective in combat.

Didn't stop me from doing some bluffing of my own, though. "Yeah, we'll figure it out. And who know, maybe it's really good for us?"

She giggled again, and this time it was far more sincere as she buried her face into my chest. "We'll beat him. I know we will. Then maybe we can even replace these things with some regular cybernetics. I mean, those work just fine!"

They didn't come with awesome special useful powers, but yeah, that was true enough. Maybe it could even work… for Amelia, that is.

Removing my eyes and arms in favor of more normal replacements probably wasn't going to fix the fact that my blood was now eldritch tar. What could even do that? Complete bone replacement and synthetic blood substitutes?

I didn't say any of this, of course. I just wrapped my arms around her and mustered a bright, soothing tone.

"Yup. I'm sure everything will be fine. Still… I can't lie and say this isn't useful. Better Clairvoyance is a game changer, too," I enthused, feeling my own cheerfulness returning. "I can't wait to see what other skills can be boosted this way."

Amelia pulled away from me just enough for her narrowed eyes to meet mine.

"Adrian…"

"Amelia!" I echoed with forced enthusiasm.

She didn't find it funny.

"You stopped me from experimenting with my hands."

"Yep."

"Because they might start producing corrupted Essence I have no way of analyzing or neutralizing."

"Yep!"

"But you are going to continue experimenting with the skills your cybernetics imparted on you, with no regard to your health and the long-term effects of doing so."

"Yep…?"

She gritted her teeth, and her grip on me intensified. It was easy to forget most of the time, but Amelia's arms were the exact same brand of weird cybernetic as my own, increased strength included.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

So, my smile was starting to turn a little brittle as she put more and more pressure into her 'hug.'

"No. You don't get to stop me and then do something stupid all on your own. Either both of us experiment, or neither of us does it. I'm not letting you risk your mind and humanity while forcing me to stay safe."

"But —"

"No buts, Adrian! I care about you. I thought we established that already? You know, when I dragged you off to bed and ravaged you?"

"Not how I remember it, but okay…"

"Point is, just… no! We're in this together. So, why do you keep acting like I should stay out of it all while you take stupid risks on your own?"

I looked away, because what was I supposed to tell her?

It was simply a fact that we were… different. She had skills, knowledge, and connections to actually make something of her life. Me? I was a slum rat, barely a step up from some poor street kid starving on the sidewalk, with a messed-up mind and half-baked netrunner knowledge.

Sure, I was getting better and better. I probably could have ruled a good portion of the slums based solely off of what I could do already. But how much of that was me and how much of it was due to the cybernetics? How long would it have taken me to learn without cheating eye powers that pointed out errors and potential improvements? How long could I have survived without the eyes helping me blunder my way through combat?

I was messed up in so many ways that she wasn't, and I could easily see myself crashing and burning sooner rather than later. Not that I wanted to heroically leave her or anything, but there was still plenty to be done before we could say we were safe.

If I could get us over that line, I'd gladly risk losing my mind to my cybernetics again.

"Adrian, don't think you can go silent and look off into the distance! Answer me!" Amelia demanded, growling in a way I could honestly say was more adorable than intimidating.

The concern in her eyes easily overruled my need to tease her, though.

"I'm just… I mean — I'm a mess already. You can't tell me that's not true."

"And you are getting better!"

"At the cost of turning people into shadows and then eating their corpses, yeah. I still don't know how long I'll stay ahead of all my issues, either. What happens if my arms and eyes decide not to play nice again? What's up with my blood?" I laughed, low and resigned. "I mean, saying I'm a mess is really underselling things."

She shook me a little. "All the more reason to let me help, you idiot! We can do this together. If you try to do everything on your own, you'll just get yourself killed."

I opened my mouth to argue again, but her eyes stopped me short. I'd never seen her look so serious before. So determined. Not even when she was ranting about wringing her father's neck, and let me tell you, she put some passion into those rants.

I could do nothing but nod, even as my mind spun in a million directions looking for ways to limit her involvement.

—

In the end, Amelia got her wish. With about ten minutes of glaring and a ton of concentration, she managed to push her arms further than she ever could have before, through the application of Essence.

Without the mystical energy, she could transform her fingers into a wide variety of tools that let her perform better as a ripper. She had confided in me already that those tools were way more useful than their mundane counterparts. From the experience she got operating on me, both on my shoulder and later for my surgery, she'd learned that she still maintained a ton of feeling and feedback from her transformed fingers. This gave her a much finer sense of control over any ongoing surgery.

On top of that, her fingers could, for lack of a better word, secrete some kind of substance that coated them completely and allowed her to treat skin and flesh the way most would putty. It didn't really affect a large surface area, but it helped her 'shape' wounds if chunks of flesh or skin were missing. It also sealed any wounds in a way that almost perfectly mimicked healthy tissue, letting her wipe away weeks if not months of healing and recovery. She'd even tried it out on bones, and while it wasn't quite as effective, it still worked well enough to seal breaks or cracks in a matter of minutes.

She theorized that putting Essence into the skill would enhance this adhesive property of the secretions even further, if not outright evolve them into something superior.

The main benefit, however, was how much Essence extended her control over her limbs.

Amelia's expression was equal parts feral and awed when she managed to shift her entire hand and a good chunk of her forearm, transforming her arms into a duo of deadly-looking blades. Then the menace offered me a hug, proceeding to giggle and chase me across the living room when I declined.

Messing around aside, this also let us confirm what we were worried about. When her Essence pool got low enough, she experienced the same enhanced draw on Essence as I did, even if her case wasn't as bad as mine.

For one thing, the draw was more like a slow draining of Essence into her, rather than a devouring black hole. For another, her arms' ability to process Essence into its corrupted form seemed to be much less potent than that of my own cybernetics.

Plus, you know, she didn't have eldritch eyes funneling the corrupted stuff directly into her brain.

As far as she could tell by tracking the corrupted Essence stream, her corruption was contained to the area directly connected to her cybernetic arms. Just her shoulders and bits of her back and chest. Obviously, that went a long way towards quieting the worst of my fears.

On my end, experimentation was as exciting as it was disappointing.

I was kind of hoping I could dump Essence into my Programming skill and suddenly become a netspace virtuoso. I could not. The only skills that responded to Essence at all were Clairvoyance and Assault from the Shadow Runner package, and Faultline and Focus from the Unseen Stalker package.

Well, I had suspicions that it was the Essence-enhanced 'Tongue of The Ravening Observer' that let me turn others into shadows, but I wasn't particularly keen to test that when my only available subject was Amelia.

Programming grumbles aside, my enhanced skills were all sorts of exciting.

Assault, which I tested with my shadow pal's assistance, was bonkers. If I ever came across a netrunner while snooping around a place, I could crush their mind in a matter of seconds. I had a feeling the skill could be used to punch my way through all sorts of defenses, too, particularly anything based around AI.

The Stalker skills, meanwhile, were downright unnerving.

Focus sharpened my mind to the point that everything but what I was working on fell away, boosting my observation skills, memory, and learning capacity several times over. I could only imagine it would have a ton of applications in combat, but again, no way to test it.

Faultline just terrified me.

I fed the skill Essence, and the world around me stopped being a thing to observe and appreciate. It turned into a series of weak points for me to target if I wanted to cause maximum destruction and suffering.

But what the skill revealed didn't bother me as much as the mentality it put me into.

With Faultline on, I looked at Amelia and failed to see my lover. I saw a meat puppet, with so many lethal points to poke that it would have been hilarious if it wasn't horrifying.

Sure, Faultline didn't make me faster or stronger. But it did transform a slum rat with barely adequate training into a killer, with an intimate knowledge of the various ways to make people stop functioning. I knew the skill would be invaluable when it came time to fight the mercenaries, but in the meantime, it creeped the fuck out of me.

Of course, as was inevitable, something happened a couple days later that forced us to step back from murder-y thoughts and focus on our current life instead.

Yuri's staff members finally came around to introduce themselves. And with them, Amelia's first patients couldn't be far behind.

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