“What is so funny, boy?” the doctor snapped.

  People had referred to me as ‘boy’, ‘kid’, and ‘kiddo’ countless times. And yet, it was only when he used the word that it felt like a true insult.

  For a moment, I wondered how all the eldritch fuckery would translate into my prospective future growth. I was still just sixteen, and the shadows were pretty tall —

  A slap made my head bounce off the operating table I was once more hanging from by my wrists and ankles.

  “I asked you a question, you slum trash!”

  Ah, right. He did! Something about fun? No, what I found funny…

  Seriously, it was amusing to me that all the recent trauma had made my head clearer rather than more scrambled. But while I’d managed not to chuckle outright about this, I hadn’t been able to keep a grin off my face. My host seemed to take exception to that.

  So, I looked him right in the eye. Then, for the first time since they tried to feed me to the shadows and I was forced to nibble on the corpse of a former human who’d failed the eldritch-horror metamorphosis, I spoke.

  “??ou? o? ???l no? ?'uplnoM”

  The words came out of my mouth easily. Yet something unnatural and cold infused them on the way out, making them prickle slightly against even my own ears.

  Their effect on everyone else was far more pronounced.

  The loose circle of guards clutched at their ears and scrambled a couple steps backwards. Miss Assistant winced like I had slapped her. Her father, though? He let out a startled gurgle and staggered away from me, eyes flaring in that good old ‘fight or flight’ response.

  I let a languid smile stretch across my lips. Apparently, the ‘Tongue of The Ravening Observer’, or whatever my stat screen called it, was an actual thing. I had a much better term for it, though: Shadow Language!

  Submit to the eldritch munchies, eat the corpse of a former human who died in the process of turning into a monster, and you, too, can start talking the eldritch tongue! Limited time offer! Minimal madness and other side effects included!

  I cackled, letting that same cold energy infuse my voice. The sound came out as the crackling of ice or the snapping of branches in the darkness, rather than the human definition of laughter.

  Once more, everyone jerked away from me. The doctor actually swayed on his feet, looking like he might pass out.

  Then he must have issued some kind of alert or order, because electricity erupted out of my restraints. I was left jerking within them, teeth clacking together as I tried and failed to will my body to stop.

  “Gag him!” the good doctor bellowed, then looked around in frustration when no one moved to obey him. “Well?! What are you waiting for?!”

  It was his daughter he turned to in the end. The poor girl shied away at first before rallying and heading towards me.

  I was still doing the electrical waltz when she tapped the side of the torture device I was strapped to. A panel slid open. The gag she retrieved from it looked more like a mouth guard, designed to fit between my teeth.

  Of course, she was then stuck looking between me, all tweaking out because of the electricity, and her father, who was watching with a stormy expression.

  “Um, I…” she stammered. “I can’t…”

  “Be quick about it,” he snarled.

  The electricity finally cut out, leaving me panting as I hung there.

  Tentatively, Amelia reached out to secure the gag in place. “Please don’t say anything else,” she whispered.

  I didn’t. She was the closest to me now, and I didn’t think she deserved that particular treatment. Even if she was still helping her father.

  I’d been right about the gag. It kind of went between my teeth, but the wedge forced my jaws open almost uncomfortably wide.

  “That’s better. I did not expect his mind to be perfectly damaged in such a fashion,” the annoying man rambled to himself, observing me from different angles. “I wonder… is he now effectively a human-shaped shadow? An eldritch mind, trapped inside of human flesh? How fascinating…”

  That was when it hit me.

  Does he think I’ve gone insane? I mean, I probably have, but… like, fully? Does he think I’m speaking that weird language because I can’t speak normally anymore?

  I wasn’t sure how yet, but I suspected I could turn that to my advantage eventually. Somehow.

  “Hmmm, I can’t wait to see what will happen to him once we extract the eyes! Will he retain his ability to speak? Will he die upon the extraction? Or will his mind simply… collapse?”

  Oh, fuck no.

  Now I started to squirm, testing my bonds. Both my instincts and my rational mind agreed fully on one thing: those eyes were staying where they belonged. In my skull.

  “Um, on that subject…” Amelia broke in hesitantly. She had picked up a large scroll and was clutching it to her chest.

  Her father whirled on her. “What is it now?”

  “The eyes… um, well…”

  “Out with it, you useless thing!”

  “They’ve bonded to him, sir. He has the full package now, too. Here.” Amelia handed the scroll over.

  The look on her father’s face was glorious.

  It ran the full gamut. From disbelief, to rage, to agony, to something suspiciously like panic, to resignation, and back to all-out wrath.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Finally, he managed to wipe the lot away and sweep it under a perfect corpo mask: polite, disinterested, and highly functional.

  That surprised me. I knew he had to be some flavor of corpo, but the impression I had of him was of a highly unstable, fickle individual, always ready to lash out against everyone and everything.

  “Full package installation? With a level or two in everything?” he asked quietly.

  Amelia drew away from him like she was expecting to be struck, but tentatively nodded.

  “What is this… ‘Tongue of The Ravening Observer’?” he went on, still eerily calm. “I don’t recall programming anything of the sort when we tapped into the innate knowledge of the shadow and placed limiters on its transfer to a host.”

  “We must have missed it, Doctor. It just… appeared once we extracted him from block A.”

  He turned to me again, but the look in his eyes had shifted. Gone was the disdain that implied I was a bug or a curiosity to toy with.

  The assessing gleam in those mechanical orbs was far more unnerving.

  “I see. That explains his shift in language usage, I suppose. Hmmm, this is… a loss. The Shadow Runner cyberware has always been the most uncooperative when it came to production. All that work, and we still only have one working prototype: the pair of eyes inside his head.”

  Amelia hesitated, then opened her mouth. “I did…”

  “You warned me something like this might happen, yes. I am aware.” He bunched his hands into fists, but didn’t strike her. Yet. “I admit I let my curiosity and desire to see him suffer get away from me. He has cost us so much time and effort, and we still don’t know what happened to the other prototypes… No matter.”

  “Should I prepare him for long-term holding, Doctor?”

  My ears perked up. ‘Long-term’ sounded good to me. It at least implied I wouldn’t be disposed of in a hurry.

  The doctor’s voice was cold. “No.”

  As usual, my hopes crashed and burned.

  “His danger level is much higher than a regular shadow,” the good doctor continued. “Those, at least, are relatively docile in the physical world. For all their viciousness inside the netspace, they seem to flounder when torn out of it. He is obviously different. Still, that doesn’t mean we can’t learn anything from him… even though his mind is already lost.”

  Rude! My mind’s just fine!

  I brought up my stat screen, like that could somehow drive the point home.

  I wasn’t sure what to think about the fact that my Acuity had finally reached ten, or the fact that I apparently had another ten points waiting for me.

  I had, however, reached a rather depressing conclusion on another matter: ‘Mind Synchronicity’ was not connected to mental stability. Whatever ‘Indelible Harmony’ meant, it had diddly-squat to do with keeping my mind from fracturing into a billion little pieces.

  I mean, my status had insisted I was in the middle of ‘Waning Instability’ even when I thought it was the best idea in the world to let electricity keep zapping away at me to lethal effect.

  Thankfully, be it due to my increased mind stats, my recent experiences, or whatever else, I had a good idea of what the stat did govern: my so-called ‘compatibility’ with the eyes. And according to said eyes, we were apparently getting on like a house on fire.

  Probably ‘cause my mind was still melting out of my ears.

  I giggled a little. I could swear my eyes flared brighter for a second. But the sound was muffled by the gag, and no one was paying attention to me, anyway.

  “What would you like me to do, Doctor?”

  Amelia’s voice dragged me back to the present. I blinked at the father-daughter duo a couple of times to refocus.

  “For now… fetch the Stalker cybernetics. They should still be down there in that mess. The rejection between the two different types of infection was fascinating. I am hoping our new test subject will be able to shed further light on it, and on the ways it might be overcome… Yes, fetch the Stalker, and run diagnostics on it. I want to make sure the cybernetics weren’t damaged.”

  “Right away, Doctor.”

  I had calmed down somewhat, hearing that they wouldn’t be getting rid of me immediately. But the instant the Stalker was mentioned, a bad feeling welled up inside of me. I couldn’t get my frantic heartbeat to slow down, nor could I do much about the cold sweat breaking out all over my body.

  I watched with bated breath as a pair of robotic arms descended into the cell below us. They sifted through the remains before returning with two pale grey arms clutched in their grippers. I recognized the arms. The last time I’d seen them, they were attached to a woman from ‘experimental group 2.’

  At least I hadn’t munched on their previous owner. My shadow bestie had shoved my face into the remains of the man, I was pretty sure.

  Amelia received the arms with a vaguely ill expression, placed them on a table that popped out of the wall, and proceeded to clean them meticulously.

  Taking a closer look at the cybernetics, I immediately thought they were odd.

  The material they were made of was not only unnaturally bright, but it also seemed to drink in the light around it. When it was in the slightest bit of shadow, it turned almost see-through, giving the impression that my eyes were sliding off of it rather than ‘not seeing’ it. Then, under the glare of the room’s artificial lights, it turned glossy.

  For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what that material was.

  The design was a bit suspect, too. Oh, it was definitely humanoid. The joints were so seamless, it was like looking at an actual, if strangely textured, human arm.

  That illusion crashed and burned when you got to the hands.

  The fingers were incredibly intricate and articulated, but they also seemed somewhat animalistic. The pads of the fingers almost reminded me of paw pads, too. The overall shape of the hands looked like it would lend itself equally well to a human or animal range of motion, as if their designer suspected the user would be spending at least as much time on all fours as they would on two feet.

  “The Unseen Stalker cybernetics are cleared of errors and fully functional, Doctor,” Amelia declared after a while, turning to look at her father.

  He gave her the very first smile of approval I’d spotted on his face so far.

  “Excellent! In that case, it’s time to see if the rejection we noted during the experiment is absolute, or if two different kinds of eldritch influences can coexist in one body. That should net us all sorts of useful data, don’t you think?”

  I froze when he turned to me, an unhealthy amount of anticipation shining through his crazed eyes.

  I started fighting my bonds again.

  “Should I anaesthetize the subject, Doctor?”

  “Hmmm… no. I am curious to see his reaction to the procedure. Do immobilize him, though. We don’t want his squirming to interfere.”

  Amelia’s expression was extremely apologetic when her eyes briefly caught mine, but she still typed away at a terminal. Several more restraints suddenly unfurled from the chair and clasped around me before tightening. By the time it was over, I was so hogtied that I couldn’t twitch. Even breathing was a bit of a struggle.

  “Excellent. Now, why don’t you adjust those cybernetics for his build while I get started? I knew adding the adjustment modules would come in useful!”

  The doctor cheerfully delivered his order even as another wall panel slid away, presenting him with three full collections of various surgical tools.

  I say ‘surgical’, but some of them looked like they belonged in a slaughterhouse.

  The good doctor hefted one of them. As the saw spun up, more robotic hands unfurled, this time from the operating table I was bound to. Several syringes stabbed into my flesh. I bit back a cry at the flash of pain they produced, whimpering when I noticed that whatever they’d given me had intensified my senses, not dulled them.

  “Do try not to squirm too much,” the doctor whispered, voice barely audible above the whirring of the saw. “Or do, I suppose. I’ll need to trim and adjust this rough work later to create proper connections between your flesh and the cybernetics anyway.”

  Then he brought the tool down on my arm, just under my shoulder.