8:38 PM October 5th

Ripley

Heaving the heavy bag of materials out of the elevator with ease, I lumbered the entire thing over to Elsa's door. She opened it with a smile, still in bedhead and pyjamas. Welcoming me in with a kiss and a hug, I had to stop her before I got distracted.

"So, can I borrow your bathtub?" I zipped open the duffel bag and began to organize parts, my shirt coming off so my Arachne could fully splay open.

"You still haven't said what for, and that's what's worrying me." She took an interest in the various parts I arranged, then her eyes laser focused on the metallic skull I just juggled out. "Are you-?"

"I'm not replacing my skull!" I stopped her before she could outdo my mother in explaining why that was a bad idea. Full skull transplants were two things — risky and unnecessary. I agreed with my mom in most regards since I wasn't a Metal Heavens freak who believed flesh was for the weak.

Your skull was more than just bone, it was a framework for every blood vessel and cranial nerve that ran through your head. A true replacement would require a complete rewiring of those systems, and would probably result in me losing my ability to smell or taste. Not unless I had whatever expensive-ass sensors and translators Diamante had to emulate those senses.

Second, yeah, it was likely to kill you if you weren't careful.

However, the reason I needed it was pretty damn simple. I was moving much faster than the average human now, and while I hadn't yet pushed into absurd speed like the R0N1N had, any faster and I was liable to giving myself concussions just from moving. It was a miracle I hadn't blacked out when I rushed back to Elsa's apartment from the sheer gravitational forces pulling my blood out of my head. This skull was modified to add additional cushioning to my brain, and… other additional features.

"Then why the hell do you have one in your hands?!" She grabbed it out of my grip. "Don't you know that it can cause you to look… different. I like you the way you are, don't change it, please." Her eyes, although metallic, seemed larger and more wet as they dug guilt out of me.

"Alright, fine, I'll spoil the surprise." I grumbled in response to the conflict in my heart. "I'm… not going to replace my skull entirely. Just the chondrocranium, the part that's actually housing my brain — the dome basically. The rest is just going to be really fine plating that I've adjusted perfectly to mesh over my current bone structure. But… I might be tearing my face's skin off."

"I swear to god, Ripley!" Her eyes flashed red, Midnight growling out. "Oh you don't come into our house and say that you're going to leave your face on our bathroom floor! That's just- actually, would you let me keep it?"

"No!" I didn't know what I would do with my face after today, but knowing Midnight — I'd rather let Diamante have it.

"Then you can't just!-"

I pulled up a cloth I knew she'd recognize, it was a dark black cloth very familiar to those in Little Requiem. Mr. Skeleton's henchmen had a habit of wearing this cloth on their faces, so tight that you could make out their bone structure. Except, it wasn't really a mask — as I'd figured out.

"This cloth is actually a texture-shifting metallic polymer that can mimic skin texture. Yuzhou had research into face-morphing tech as well, I couldn't take any of their actual prototypes, but it was the first thing I managed to decrypt from their files. They used a different Warp Material, but the premise is the same — I've made a working prototype. I call it Reactive Weave."

The Reactive Weave cloth was perfectly woven to fit over the skull, immediately taking a shape similar to my own if my cheeks were sunken in after months of starvation. Turning on the Maskshift Feature Link installed in the skull, it began to blur past spectrums until it was a replica of my own face.

Blue eyes stared at my head's empty sockets, Daylight stuttering as Mirage's face turned slightly green. "I… I don't like that, Ripley. It's freaky! You'd basically become another Tonguelasher."

"I don't know who that is, but ew to the name." I pulled the glove of skin off. "I need it to keep my identity secret, I haven't yet figured out how to get it to mimic other people's faces, but I might kinda need it since… I might have made a third identity for myself as Dreadwire's Shard Operator — The Ripper."

Lavender eyes returned, and Mirage's eye quivered. "You named Dreadwire's Operator as… The Ripper? Didn't you and Diamante already use that alias back with Razorpede?"

Her berating was bad enough, I didn't want to know how worse Diamante would be.

———

Grabbing the razor, Mirage forced herself to look away as my hair fell to the floor on her bathroom. As for why I couldn't do this at Harold or Diamante's place? I didn't exactly want either of them to know about my false-face just yet, but I still required someone to watch over me in case the procedure went wrong.

The skull was delicate, and I would be removing my entire scalp. Once my head was bald and the hair swept up, I sterilized everything before settling myself comfortably in a little harness mechanism I set up in the bathtub so that my Arachnodyne would have full range.

Mirage entered, the syringes ready in her hand.

"You have sights on my biomonitor, right? When you see any of the parameters I've highlighted turn red, you inject me with the vial associated with it. It'll counteract the painkillers and sedatives in my body so I can stop the process." I held my anxiety at bay, even swapping out my spine didn't get me frightened like this.

Hooking an intravenous catherer into my brachiocephalic was a small jolt of pain before the drugs flooded my system. My Arachne wasn't impacted so far, they grew and contorted until all four of them pointed towards my scalp — like they were a pack of wolves hungering on a lone rabbit.

Then with sharp scalpels, they dug in. Skin peeled off like a layer of a fruit, exposing the gooey underlayer under which a bony plate hibernated.

Saws whirred, dust from my skull fell into the drain, and Mirage did everything she could not to vomit.

The pain only intensified, the drugs doubling to compensate, my thoughts slimmed, but Scrapyard ordered my Arachnodyne to fulfill its task.

Blood drained into my eyes, my head felt lighter.

My brain breathed. Only for a moment.

A new scalp of metal was on it in a second, a gel substance in their internal cavity inflating to merge with the meninges of the brain.

My Arachne's peeled downwards now, blood dripped off my face. Then skin slipped down, all the way down. Fine incisions were made under my jaw, around my zygomatic arches, my temples and mastoid processes.

Like clockwork, metal slid through the gaps, latching onto my bone as the fascia was intercepted by miniscule lasers. It hurt.

Alerts went out, my blood was running low and a quick infusion of O-Positive Blood squeezed out of a bag to my right. My face was heavy, like steel. And blood continued to drip, drip, drip. Right off my skinless face.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

The mask went on, it was painful, itchy, rough and crass. My Arachne stitched inorganic and organic together, blending them as the bleeding was frozen over by sprays of healing nanomachines much like my own Goliath-

Database Protocol: Nanoswarm Reprogramming is detecting foreign nano-machinery in body, analyze data?

Uhhh… yeah?

I couldn't exactly think, considering I was just a skull right now but… that had to be good, right?

Identified… SynTec MedSpray Nanomachines…

Grade: Bronze

Lifespan: Five minutes

Purpose: These nanomachines can promote blood coagulation and seal torn blood vessels, as well as sterilize any wound to a viral degree.

Quantity: Approximately 1,000,000

Structure Analyzed… Replication of this variant is now possible using the Goliath Nanoswarm.

Pretty sure that means I can now produce healing nanomachines in my own body.

But to make them in the first place meant tearing my own body apart.

I'd figure it out later.

A few minutes in, my new face was installed, and my Arachnodyne sunk in. Midnight captured me in her arms, despite those fierce red eyes, they were wide in terror of a different future. "I am never doing this again!"

"Uh… but I also brought ribs and a hip." I groaned tiredly in her arms.

"Not today."

"Yeah… fair."

———

After washing off all the blood, I'd moved to Elsa's bedroom where I stared at my chrome dome in the mirror. Bald was not a good look on me, especially when the skin I had was partially metallic and gave it a sheen like it had been waxed up.

Elsa had just the thing for my baldness. She came back with a large tuft of what looked like multiple wigs torn apart.

"Imperium Harlequin Weave." She tossed some over to me, despite the nausea she must have felt while I was performing surgery on myself, she seemed a bit excited at the aspect of giving me new hair. "It's what I use, you'll be able to change your hair color between black and white, even alter the texture a bit."

"Oh." I tussled the hair in my hands. "Am I going to have to weave… all of this into my hair?!"

"Yeah, I paid twenty-thousand for my hairdo." Elsa flicked her black-and-white hair into the wind. "Bought a little extra for extensions, so you'd better like me even more for giving it to you."

Thankfully, there wasn't anywhere near enough for me to end up with a… who was it… Rapunzel-length river of hair. At most, it would be a pretty ugly mullet. Weaving the hair into my skull took hours, especially with Elsa and her two Persona's interrupting to make adjustments.

In the end, my hair was a little longer than it used to be, but we cut it down to length until it was a neat crop from the top that flowed backwards, but I could also part it sideways if I wanted.

I even tried out turning my hair white, which… wasn't a bad look, honestly. Might even use that later on for some covert operations.

She sprayed my new hair-do down with some protective spray, and handed me a can of it to take home with me, before fluffing it up to take in my appearance.

"I hate that you're a genius, sometimes, you know that." She cupped her hands over my cheek. "Four months ago you could barely hold a gun, now you stab a blade into your head."

"I incised a blade through my head." I corrected her. "Do I look okay?"

"Nothing too noticable, but it feels off… in a way that I guess I can only know because I saw you replace your damn skull." She laughed it off, but I was beginning to consider if what I had done was honestly fair to her.

Yeah, fuck, just because I was willing to put that sort of pain on myself didn't mean she had to see it. "Hey Elsa, I'm sorry for…"

"Don't." She shuddered, making the final adjustments in my hair. "You needed help with it and I… well, if you chose anyone else I'd be pissed."

"Real overprotective, aren't you?" I laughed into her reflection on the mirror.

"Why wouldn't I be? You're all mine, Ripley." She slid her hands lower, crossing them over my chest. "And well… maybe I'd be yours if you wanted me to."

"And me!" Daylight chimed through.

I chuckled. "What about Midnight?"

Those red eyes came with the same shade creeping over her cheeks. Midnight only nodded.

"We'll be each other's." I cemented, turning around to face her directly. "How's this new visage of mine doing in your opinion?"

"I like it, well, it looks the same, good job," Elsa said as she pivoted her eyes into mine. "You were kidding about the ribs, right?"

"…no."

———

October 6th

God damn did stitching metal to your ribs suck, I'd heard from Diamante that it was bad, but the sheer itchiness of the steel armor expanding with my bones every breath was gnawing at me. At the very least, I'd managed to introduce some artificial musculature to my frontal axial muscles.

Flexing my artificial pecks, I was wondering if this was cheating. Then again, I'd based it mostly on designs of what people in the gym were already using. My entire body was cut but not bulging, from front to back I pretty much lacked any fat and the artificial musculature was thick enough to act as padding preventing deep slashes or bullets from poking at my organs. At the very least, no standard or Iron-Grade tech should be a real issue for my body now.

Washing all the blood into the drain of Elsa's bathtub, I noticed the way her eyes trailed up and down on me with a slightly agape mouth.

"You good?"

"Yeah, just… damn." Elsa blushed and turned away. "Come to the bedroom."

I was flattered but… "I'm still sore from surgery, you know that?"

"I've got an ice pack."

———

October 7th

Looking over the scan of my body, I'd done it once I layered metal over my hips. I'd introduced my grandfather's entire endoskeleton into my body. From the framework of my limbs and the steel joints of my axial skeleton extended a network of muscle that had trace amounts of livewire flowing through it.

Not enough to make a considerable difference, partially because I didn't have enough of the thread-like Warp Material and neither did I figure out how to make a fully integrated version of the muscle fibers. My Arachnodyne joints were reinforced with a variant higher in concentration, but it was shoddy work at best. I could pull more out of the muscles with further experimentation.

Mr. Anderson was helping me with that, and already, some of the changes he proposed increased output by 20%. I'd wager I could probably lug around a car if I used my Arachnodyne for leverage. I was firmly in the upper echelons of Bronze-Grade tech now.

In terms of my musculoskeletal system, I was 65% inorganic. The only other Shardware organ was my liver, and I guess you could count my eyes. The thought of humanity burned within me, how far could I push until I stopped being human? Which, I guess, was the point of Implants after all.

Tier IV was known as Evolution, the threshold at which the Implant would assimilate into your nervous system entirely. At that Tier, your very genome would be distinct from every other human. You'd be a different species, unable to reproduce. Homo Ascendens.

Then again, kids… I couldn't imagine myself having a child in the life I currently lived in. And my thoughts weren't exactly alone on that, genetic damage caused by The Collapse had meant 40% of the remnants of Humanity had been infertile, the rest were likely to produce children with genetic disorders.

That was why the Cradles had been made in the first place.

Moving on from that thought, I stared across my body, finally feeling like a damn Tier II should. Powerful.

And I wasn't even done with this week's adjustments.

October 8th

I'd finally cracked the code on the damn stealth-suit, literally, with Daylight's help. We'd managed a system to let her safely bypass my frame's Firewall shielding, but it wasn't exactly foolproof. I had to carry around a Warpcube containing her in my pocket, and connect her with wires into my left claw through which she could act.

Without the safety of residing within my frame, she could very easily be damaged or stolen since she was stored in a physical vessel, but within the safety of Elsa's apartment, it was fine to act in this manner.

She joked that she felt like a worm sitting in my pocket as I carried her around.

Now that I could finally fix up and even modify the stealth suit. I got to working. No more tearing holes through my shirt just to use the Arachnodyne, I'd finally have Shardware reactive cloth.

October 12th

Spending two days, and 40,000 Shardyne in parts, I'd adjusted the Stealth Suit to be quite a bit better than it used to be. Creating an entire new suit would be costly, the price for it's photo-manipulatory Warp Material would push a complete reproduction into 180,000 Shardyne.

Thankfully, there was enough in there that I could just repair it. This new suit was slightly bulkier, having integrated plating and stabilizers for my equilibrium. My new muscles could regulate blood flow so that I wouldn't lose consciousness with the G-forces my Arachnodyne weighed on me.

Another bonus was that I could now feasibly make what was coined in the suit's metadata as 'Reactive Weave'. The cloth could seamlessly retract to allow Shardware to reconfigure without getting snagged on. With this, I could create new suits that allowed my Arachne to expand and contract as it pleased, but any advanced Exo-suits would be on the drawing board for now. They were... expensive.

This current suit was incredible, capable of withstanding attacks at the Bronze Grade, and I was practically immune to most weaponry employed by typical rank-and-file Adapters. And my arms were capable of withstanding a weak Silver's attack. Two months after the Shandian Raid, I was more than capable of embracing my reputation as a Gold Mercenary.

The suit fit tight but wasn't constricting. The black material contrasted with the faint golden glow of its seams and my mask's signature design. Dreadwire was coming together nicely.

And now… I had to make The Ripper.

But that would take a moment. With Elsa's help, she was about to locate the mark Metal Heavens had wanted me to kill. Before that, however…

I had to appear in a music video produced by Los Diablos.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.