Chương 201: B2 Chapter 201: When We Were Level 1

Getting out of the XTachyon was brutal. Meno had expected the flash-frozen material around his body to thaw back into the same heavy fluid that had filled the capsule. Technically, that was exactly what happened. His nervous system interpreted it as being dropped into scalding cooking oil.

Heat exploded across his entire body the moment sensation returned, so intense he could not tell whether the capsule was actually cooking him or his brain had forgotten what normal temperature felt like after being locked inside frozen stuff. Every nerve came back online at once, his muscles seized, and the pressure around his chest made breathing through the mask feel like work. That was when Meno understood why some engineer had named the containment box the Deep-Fryer, and it had nothing to do with the box.

The pilot had to become the fries first. The capsule lid finally opened, and technicians pulled Meno free before he could decide whether his legs worked. They did not. His body shook hard enough to click his teeth together, while the pounding behind his eyes felt one step away from his skull shattering. The others were not doing any better.

Thorn tried very hard not to scream and failed anyway, Aurelia came out swearing between chattering breaths, Arayu held both hands clenched against her chest, and Karmabeast looked out of his mind. Nobody could stand. Hyperion staff loaded all five onto stretchers and rolled them from the dark capsule floor into a medical section that looked like a private hospital.

White walls, glass partitions, diagnostic beds, and enough machinery around each station to make Meno wonder whether part of the hundred-million-credit payout had been budgeted for repairing whatever the XTachyon did to people. He got injected seven times. Maybe more. Meno lost count when one nurse put something into his arm while another hit his thigh with a separate injector. Nobody explained the tooltips beyond throwing around names. Eventually the shaking eased, but the headache stayed.

The doctors told them they were staying in bed until morning, which was not how Karmabeast and Arayu had imagined spending their first night as a married couple. Karma waited until a nurse turned away, pushed himself upright, and tried to make it across the room to Arayu. He made it one step, then two nurses grabbed him.

"No, no, wait, I am fine—" They put Karmabeast back down and strapped him to the bed. Then, with the kind of foresight Meno respected, the medical staff restrained everyone else too. Smart. That had been Meno's next move. Once one person discovered the exploit, leaving the rest unrestrained was just bad design. Sleep refused to happen for a while, not because of the pain, but because reality felt wrong.

Meno moved one finger against the restraint and could swear there was input delay even though there obviously was not. His own body had become inferior. After the XTachyon made intention and movement nearly indistinguishable, normal nerves felt like playing through lag. Even blinking felt slightly off. The doctors assured them it would fade, then buried the explanation under enough technical jargon that Meno stopped caring somewhere around neural reintegration and sensory prediction mismatch.

He fell asleep halfway through it. The next morning arrived with lawyers. A lot of lawyers. Meno had barely finished breakfast before the medical floor filled with dark suits carrying tablets and folders, apparently specced entirely into making terrible things technically legal after they happened.

The documents retroactively established contractor status, special security clearance, medical consent, operational authorization, nondisclosure requirements, liability limits, and whatever else Hyperion's lawyers had words for. Apparently dates were flexible if your legal department had enough DPS. The contract ran for more than a hundred pages, which meant it had been specifically designed so nobody would read it. Meno tried anyway.

For almost two hours, the lawyers waited while he worked through dense paragraphs containing nested references to other paragraphs, which then pointed toward schedules buried forty pages later. Eventually his brain hit a hard cap and he signed. Everyone else had finished long before him. Once the legal raid boss died, Hyperion returned their belongings, including Meno's dragon sunglasses, and he discovered that one hundred million credits had already been wired into his account.

The number was real, and matching payments had gone to everyone else. Karma looked dangerously close to crying. Then the lawyers left and PR arrived in different suits from the same breed. They made everyone change back into the clothes they had arrived in, arranged the five of them for a group photo, and told Meno to upload it to Connect with a reassuring message confirming that the Hyperion tour had been amaaaazing and, critically, that everyone had made it out alive.

For one beautiful moment after the post went live, he thought they were finally free to leave, but Xarr corrected the misunderstanding personally. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website. Hyperion, Xarr explained, would be graciously hosting them on one of the guest floors while the medical team conducted an extended observation period after XTachyon synchronization. This was not imprisonment.

It was a privilege, and the doctors would decide how long they got to enjoy it. Naturally, the contract covered that too. None of them remembered reading the clause. Meno was willing to bet it lived somewhere around page ninety-nine in a font small enough to qualify as stealth. Eyxim had been assigned as their primary contact, which was the polite corporate term for handler.

Food, clothes, equipment, or anything else went through her, and if she was unavailable, Hyperion would automatically forward the request to someone else. Then they were escorted upstairs. This time, Hyperion gave them actual windows. The guest floor occupied a high section of the tower, with Skyline spread beneath huge glass walls. No aquariums, sharks, or octopuses, just towers cutting through the haze and sunlight reflecting through the cleaner air far above street level.

The entire floor was basically a penthouse, with a private gym, full kitchen, large living room, several seating areas, and ten bedrooms. They only needed four. Arayu grabbed Karmabeast almost immediately and dragged him into one. Within ten minutes, Meno discovered that even Hyperion sometimes cheaped out. The soundproofing could have been better. Thorn ignored all of it and attacked the gym like the wormhole mission had merely been an annoying side quest inserted between sessions.

The best part was inside the bedrooms. Each one came with an XAnnihilator capsule connected to its own workstation. Meno had never used one. Not long ago, that alone would have broken his brain. An XAnnihilator cost two million credits, and Grandpa had once described it as roughly eleven percent better than the XPro Meno used at The Pearl. After the XTachyon, it looked cheap. Still, new tech was new tech. Unfortunately, there was nothing Meno wanted to log into. Veyrath remained dead.

His phones worked again, but while checking through them, Meno noticed the fake cleaner app had been completely scrubbed. Interesting. Morlando liked to talk about Hyperion as if the company was staffed by hardware monkeys who could build giant robots but install malware opening an email. Apparently not. While the group was synchronized, Hyperion had gone through every device and removed Feltforge's backdoor without asking. Meno wondered how long Grandpa would take to notice.

Vivi called not long after to explain that someone wanted to license Maximum Pump: Veyrath on Fire for a product campaign. Meno tuned out before she finished the pitch.

"Do whatever you want. Split it with Thorn and Aurelia." Vivi kept talking, and Meno let her. He doubted either of them cared much about music-video royalties right now. His brain kept returning to Rina anyway, which was annoying because Meno did not want to theorycraft about her anymore. He did not want more tracking or theories about why Rina had been with him. He wanted to talk to her. Meno called Eyxim and asked whether Hyperion could arrange contact with Rina through Senfestra.

She said they would look into it, then confirmed that any question about future missions was above her pay grade, which told him enough. After the call, Meno checked the wardrobe and found it already stocked with Hyperion-branded clothes in several sizes. He changed into a T-shirt and sweatpants, dropped across the huge king-sized bed, and stared at the ceiling. Technically, he could stream from here. He just did not feel like it. Maybe doing absolutely nothing for a while would help.

That lasted about an hour before someone knocked.

"Can I come in?" Aurelia asked through the door.

"Sure." She entered wearing the same Hyperion uniform build as Meno, grey sweatpants and a dark T-shirt, then crossed the room and sat on the edge of his bed.

"Meno, are you okay?"

"Not really."

"That's good. You aren't supposed to be. What happened with Rina is unfortunate." Meno kept looking at the ceiling.

"Aurelia, do you remember when you told me you didn't want to be content and that we had nothing to talk about anymore? I still resent you for that. If that was how you felt, you should never have kissed me in the first place. You knew how much of an idiot I had been. Without Veyrath keeping my brain busy, I would have lost it." Aurelia shifted farther onto the mattress and lay beside him, both of them staring upward.

"I always try so hard to justify what I'm doing that eventually I believe myself," she said.

"You were the one who made me notice it. I want something, then I don't, then I want it again because now I'm annoyed that I stopped wanting it. I'm used to getting things even when I don't know whether I actually want them." She folded her hands over her stomach.

"I want everything and nothing at the same time. It's stupid."

"Then I got together with Oxy, and Morlando's security goons barged into my apartment. It scared her enough that we broke up." Meno turned his head slightly.

"Then there was Rina. Even if it was fake, I had fun with her. She also has way bigger tits than you." Aurelia snorted and covered her face with one hand.

"True. When I saw you guys were a thing, I did some research. Meaty. I'm sure you could grab her real nice. Way bigger everywhere. Just huge. Massive. Gigantic. Enormous."

"Okay, okay. My bad," Meno said.

"I was kind of having a moment before you invaded."

"I had to intervene before you cried yourself into doing something stupid or decided we should knock on Senfestra's front door because the building happens to be nearby."

"That's not a bad idea, but how do we leave? We're definitely being watched." Aurelia turned her head toward him.

"Meno. No. Enough. I will physically restrain you if you try to leave. I said I like feeling alive. I did not say I want to set the forest on fire just so I can run through it naked. Our actions have consequences."

"Doing something has consequences. Not doing it has consequences. Somebody else doing it first has consequences. I'm fine with that. I'd rather move because I chose to than get dragged along by somebody else's momentum. Like you."

"At least you're self-aware. I would appreciate it if you stopped implying I was an NPC, though," Aurelia said.

"If you were an NPC, you would be like Marcel's entourage. Maybe Isabel. Going, 'Oh, Marcel, how may I please you? How can I comfort you? Having a rough time? I am here for you.'""Oh, really?" Aurelia said.

"Then you would be Excrino, hanging for eternity with a million swords sticking out of your body because you managed to unite the entire world against you as the rank-one asshole."

"Cool. So you consider me on the level of a god. I can live with that."

"Exactly. Ever since I dumped a handsome god like you, Meno, I have been living with unbearable regret." Aurelia kept her voice completely serious.

"I've been collecting pictures from your stream. I have a whole book now. Every night before bed, I pick a new one before I touch myself." That broke Meno. He rolled onto his side laughing, and Aurelia started laughing with him.

"You know… I use…" Meno barely got the words out.

"Never mind. Bad joke."

"What?" Aurelia turned toward him.

"No, now you have to say it. What do you use?"

"I don't actually use it. It was stupid. Just the first thing that popped into my head."

"Meno. Tell me."

"Fine. It's not true." He fought down another laugh.

"I was going to say I use the spoon you gave me." Aurelia froze for half a second before both of them completely lost it. Meno rolled farther across the bed, barely able to breathe, while Aurelia curled forward with one arm across her stomach. They were still laughing when the bedroom door flew open and Thorn filled the entrance.

"Shut up! Thought you were dying." He left before either of them recovered. By the time the laughter finally burned itself out, Meno and Aurelia were lying on their backs again, breathing hard and staring at the ceiling.

"What now, Meno?" Aurelia asked.

"The newlyweds are having fun, but I'm already bored. Should we also get married?" Meno turned his head toward her.

"Not yet. I want to see if I can find someone better first." Aurelia turned to him too, and the stillness lasted barely a heartbeat before they were kissing and rolling across the bed together. Meno knew this was a terrible idea. His head was a total mess, he was emotionally debuffed, and it was way too soon. Too much history. Too much pain. It was also the only thing that felt right in the moment.