Chương 207: Physics Optional

Meno was immediately besieged by every Hyperion bigshot in existence. They had clearly been preparing for this, pumping target dummies for the exact moment he woke up, because once the doctors managed to extract him from Aurelia's arms and confirm that he was conscious enough to answer questions, the hospital wing filled fast.

Zirya arrived with several scientists carrying tablets, more suits followed behind them, and Xarr stood near the back while everyone else crowded around Meno's bed like he had become Hyperion's newest research sample. They all wanted the same thing.

"How did you intercept multiple railgun projectiles with a single blade sweep?" Zirya asked.

"The rounds were fired simultaneously, not sequentially. At the interception point, their velocities leave effectively no usable separation in timing. We reconstructed the engagement from telemetry, visual data, Frame-state logs, and timing estimates, then ran more than a million simulations. Not one succeeded."

"What do you want me to say?" Meno asked.

"The obvious answer is that your simulations are wrong." He glanced toward Aurelia, who was still beside the bed after the medical staff had shoved her back.

"I only pulled it off because of her. Otherwise I never would have tried it."

"That does not resolve the problem," Zirya said.

"The projectiles converged on your position, but they were not traveling along identical trajectories. By the time your blade contacted the first round, the remaining five should already have crossed the lethal boundary. Telemetry shows you cut all six anyway. Then you repeated the interception while rotating through an unstable approach vector, which makes the second event even harder to reproduce. Impossible."

"I cheated. You can't beat the math boss fair." Meno flexed one hand against the blanket.

"If you want me to explain how, I have no idea either. You know when your skill gets high enough, physics becomes optional."

"We did not know that," Zirya said dryly.

"Thank you." The questions kept coming. Scientists asked about relative angle, perception lag, the exact moment Meno recognized the firing plane, whether he had consciously tracked all six rounds, and how much of the corkscrew interception had been deliberate rather than instinct. After several minutes, Meno started wondering whether he had actually woken up or simply traded one nightmare for another. The system prompts from the dream had been nonsense.

[Compatibility Verified] meant nothing after dreaming that Rina dragged him into Senfestra and shoved him into a capsule that probably did not even exist. Unless. Meno raised one hand.

"Stop. Is XMelter a thing? An actual capsule?" The room quieted.

"Not to my knowledge," Zirya said.

"Soma maintains undisclosed prototype programs, so I cannot exclude the possibility that the designation exists outside our records. Why?"

"Nightmare. I was put inside one and incinerated." That produced a different kind of attention. Every scientist within arm's reach started taking notes at once, while Xarr remained farther back and let the technical people exhaust themselves. Meno decided the notification could stay private. The last thing he needed was Hyperion locking him in the hospital wing for another six months while somebody tried to determine whether [Compatibility Verified] had come from aliens, or his cooked brain.

Then a much more important thought finally reached him: Veyrath 2. 0. Meno turned toward Aurelia.

"Is it out yet? Tell me it's not."

"It releases in a week," Aurelia said.

"You got back just in time." Meno frowned.

"That's a bit weird."

"Yes," Zirya said.

"The timing is statistically notable. You regained consciousness almost exactly as Feltforge announced the launch window." She shifted the tablet against one arm.

"What else did you experience? Any detail may be relevant. Your neurological state was highly atypical, and no XTachyon synchronization has ever been terminated by a Turbo-Nuclear cascade."

"Turbo what?"

"Turbo-Nuclear. The explosion goes beyond a conventional fusion event and collapses onto itself, briefly forming a small star," Zirya said.

"That star then collapses further into a black hole. The mass is insufficient to sustain it, so the black hole vanishes almost immediately. The phenomenon does not occur naturally." This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. That sounded high DPS.

"I don't know if any of it was real, but I saw a few things. Earth covered in huge black towers. They reminded me of servers without the blinking lights. Nothing else on the planet. The Moon was gone. Mars was a glass ball with some kind of focused light at the center." That hit the room like a railgun. Scientists started talking over one another. One moved away from the bed while speaking into an earpiece, another scrolled rapidly through a tablet, and Zirya turned to answer a question Meno could not hear.

For once, Hyperion had found something more interesting than him. Meno looked back at Aurelia.

"How long was I out? My mom okay?"

"Yes, she's fine. A bit over six months." That was a lot. No wonder his body felt like garbage, though Meno could not tell how much came from sleeping for half a year and how much came from being mentally burned alive in a fake XMelter five minutes ago. One of the doctors stepped closer and checked the displays beside his bed.

"You will need structured rehabilitation before you are cleared to leave medical care. We'll begin anabolic support alongside neuromuscular electrical stimulation to restore baseline muscle recruitment. Six months of immobility has caused substantial atrophy in your supporting musculature. If you attempt normal activity immediately, you are likely to injure yourself even if you feel capable of standing."

"Thanks." Meno turned back to Aurelia.

"Did you get rank one?" Aurelia's lips tightened and her eyes dropped toward the bed. Tears started running down her face before Meno understood what he had hit. She lowered her head against the mattress.

"I'm… sorry. I'm useless. I let you down. Sorry." Meno grabbed her shoulder.

"Hey. It's all good. Tell me what happened."

"I got rank two, but Chadculator is unbeatable. He got above Level 100. Every time I catch up, he pushes the lead again almost immediately."

"Level 100?" That was enough.

"Okay, he's cheating. One hundred percent. Do you have my phone?"

"It's… in your room."

"Don't cry anymore. Please." Meno squeezed her shoulder.

"We'll confirm it. Even if he's legit, it's no big deal. It's just a stupid game, and I wouldn't have beaten him above Level 100 either. That's pure RNG hell."

"It is." Aurelia wiped her face, then covered his hand with hers and held it there.

"Thanks, Meno."

"Anything else happen?" She went quiet.

"My father died."

"Oh."

"Yes, Meno. Big oh."

"Sorry."

"It's fine. I don't miss him. I'm just glad to have you back."

"Me too." Meno let that sit before his brain found the next problem.

"Anyway, what did Solar cook up?"

"Excrinon: Grave of Masters," Aurelia said. Meno immediately started getting worked up.

"Grave of what? Are you serious? The bastard. What grave? I never died. This is pure fanfiction. Should be Excrinon: Artificial Stupidity. Unbelievable. Asshole AI."

"Yeah…" Aurelia said.

"The Excrinon part is a mystery too."

"Well, Excrino was the dominant god when Veyrath went offline. Maybe Solar carried that forward for continuity. Somebody forced the lore on me once, and I remember Excrino deleted his entire continent to become a god. Maybe that's the point. Rise to the top and become a god like Excrino."

"Or it takes place on Excrino's dead continent, whatever that means. That would still make it Veyrath, since Veyrath was the name of the world," Aurelia said.

"Maybe, but gods could clearly leave the planet, so who knows." The doctor stepped between the growing lore debate and Meno's bed.

"Okay, enough. Everyone except medical staff out. We have treatment to begin, and he has already been awake longer than I would prefer for an initial recovery window. You can continue somewhere else."

"One more thing," Xarr said. The room made space for Xarr automatically. He extricated himself from the cluster of executives and scientists and approached Meno's bed, carrying the same ability to control a room without ever needing to raise his voice.

"What you did changed the future," Xarr said.

"You went into that fight knowing the odds were against you, knowing the enemy was stronger, and knowing that failure might cost you everything. You still chose to stand between it and Earth. Because you did, the Carrier came home, the astatine came home, and humanity now has a chance to build toward a future where we do not have to fear whatever waits beyond our world." He held Meno's gaze.

"There is no adequate way to repay that. Gratitude is not enough, but you have mine, and the gratitude of Hyperion. What you secured may become the foundation for everything we build beyond Earth from this point forward. Whatever road you choose next, there will always be a place for you here. You have earned that much, and far more." Classic ego play. Increase recruitment DPS with gratitude, importance, belonging, humanity, the whole package.

Meno could call it out, but that would ruin the moment and accomplish nothing.

"No worries. If you need to delete another giant space robot or want some impossible deflections again, you know where to find me. Most likely in the capsule upstairs." Meno adjusted himself against the pillows.

"But I'd prefer if you didn't bother me with quests like collecting rocks into a box. I don't do quests." Xarr laughed naturally enough that Meno had to give him credit. The guy had probably practiced corporate laughter for longer than Meno had been alive.

"Certainly," Xarr said. Aurelia leaned over and kissed Meno before the doctors finally started ushering everyone out. Xarr left with the executives, Zirya disappeared while still arguing with two scientists about the black towers, and Aurelia was the last one through the doors. Then the medical raid started. Electrodes went across Meno's chest, back, arms, and legs while one doctor explained the stimulation pattern and another prepared several injections.

Before long, enough substances were going into him that the whole process started feeling weirdly normal. This must have been how Thorn felt every day. Meno had no idea how the guy tolerated it. At least these buffs had an obvious purpose. Walking was definitely a skill Meno wanted to retain. Now he only had to get out of Hyperion, recover enough to use a capsule properly, and prepare for launch.

For one dangerous moment, he wondered whether an XTachyon could log into Excrinon: Grave of Masters and what zero-latency VR combat through that monster would feel like. Then he remembered getting out of one. He had fried himself enough lately. Frying Solar again sounded much more fun.