Dr. Wagner practically stormed into his private examination chamber, his long white coat flaring behind him like a cape. The sliding door hissed shut behind him.
On the reinforced beds sat the three Metallurges two of them still young, one a seasoned Exo-Guard with a stern posture but kind optics. The youngest shifted nervously as Wagner approached, his boots echoing with purpose on the steel floor.
"Ahhh... finally," Wagner said, clapping his gloved hands together as he approached. "Meine kleinen Wundern… my little wonders. You are ze ones who survived exposure to raw Void-Energy fusion, yes? Mmm… fascinating."
He stopped at the foot of the beds, giving them a once-over with eyes that glittered with scientific curiosity. Then, without warning, he softened surprisingly gentle in his approach.
"But! Before we begin… I vill not treat you like test subjects. Nein. You are guests. Survivors. Family to Evolto."
He extended a hand toward the youngest first.
"Your name, bitte?"
The young one straightened, metal fingers fidgeting slightly. "I'm Rixel, sir."
Dr. Wagner gave a nod of approval, then turned to the girl.
"Und you, Fräulein?"
She gave a small bow. "Cerna."
Then the Exo-Guard, towering and calm.
"Tarnis, sir. Assigned as protector. Not that I did very well…"
Wagner chuckled, patting the armored arm of the Exo-Guard.
"You brought them back alive, ja? Zat alone is worthy of commendation. Now all of you please. Lay down. Relax. I am only going to scan. No poking today… maybe later," he said with a teasing grin as he activated a tray of floating medical tools and scanners, hovering like hummingbirds around the room.
As they lay back on the reinforced beds, Wagner began adjusting dials and speaking to himself half in English, half in German.
"Void-energy saturation… but no physiological meltdown… stabilizing arc pattern… Gott im Himmel, zese readings..."
He paused, then glanced at the three of them again.
"Tell me. Before ze energy wave what did you feel? Fear? Pain? Or something else? This is important."
He wasn't just gathering data.
He was listening.
And behind his focused eyes… a spark of excitement danced.
As Rixel lay still under the scanning arch, his curiosity finally bubbled to the surface.
"Dr. Wagner… is this the first time something like this has happened?"
Wagner didn't respond right away.
He was deep in concentration, hovering a strange scalpel-like instrument just above Rixel's arm. His gaze darted between the readouts on the hovering holo-screens and the subtle pulses glowing beneath Rixel's alloy skin.
A low hum filled the room as scanning beams shifted across their bodies.
When he finally spoke, it was more to himself than anyone else.
"Hmm… fascinating. Your body… When I upgraded your kind generations ago, you were techno-organic hybrids metal and code blended with living neural net tissue. But now…"
He gently pressed a finger against a glowing black vein pulsing through Cerna's forearm.
"…Jetzt now the Void has fused with you completely."
He turned and walked to Tarnis, tapping lightly against his chest plating. A dull, resonant thunk echoed as the metal pulsed with soft, star-like void light.
"You are no longer simply advanced machines with artificial cores. No. Ze Void has rewritten you not just physically, but at a conceptual level. Your existence parameters are… fluid. Mutable. Just like the Void itself."
Cerna shifted, her voice quiet.
"Are we still Metallurges?"
Wagner finally paused, his intense gaze softening for just a second.
"…Ja. But more."
He held up a small data crystal. The screen displayed a tangled fractal spiral — a never-before-seen energy signature.
"You are something new. Something between machine, being, and Void."
Then, poking Rixel with a diagnostic probe eliciting a tiny yelp Wagner smirked.
"Also, you are terrible at staying still. Stop squirming, ja? This is for science."
Rixel grumbled under his breath, "You didn't even answer my question…"
Wagner raised a brow, smiled mischievously, and simply said: "I did. You're just too distracted by ze poking to notice."
Dr. Wagner paused, his gloved fingers hovering above the young Metallurges.
Behind circular lenses, his sharp gaze swept across each subject one by one silent, calculating.
Then, with a breath as quiet as a scalpel's whisper, he murmured in his thick German accent: "No… you weren't the first."
The three Metallurges blinked, confusion flickering across their half-synthetic faces.
But before any of them could speak
Click.
Wagner tapped the device on his wrist.
A pulse of light burst from the ceiling. The medical chamber's neuro-calming emitters whirred to life, invisible waves rolling outward.
One by one, the Metallurges' bodies slackened, their expressions frozen in the brief confusion of interrupted thought. Sleep overcame them not natural, but clinical. Induced.
Another tap.
Time-lock: engaged.
Golden glyphs bloomed around each operating table, glowing in sacred circles locking them in stasis. Suspended. Their vitals paused. Not alive. Not dead.
Still.
Wagner exhaled slowly, obsession gleaming in his eyes.
With mechanical grace, he pressed another command and the tables slid apart, each subject vanishing behind silent partitions into isolated chambers.
He turned to the surgical tray, fingers wrapping around a scalpel forged of refined Voidsteel, its blade catching the sterile light.
"For science," he whispered.
Then he began.
The outer casing of the arm came first not armor, but a seamless mesh of alloy and bio-synthetic flesh. It peeled like silk-bound steel, revealing void-infused musculature, dense and faintly luminous.
Layer by layer, he moved inward until he reached the organs.
And paused.
"Impossible…"
The lungs weren't lungs. Hollow crystal chambers shimmered with internal energy, circulating light instead of air.
The liver gone replaced by a micro-furnace, quietly devouring entropy.The heart? Not a pump, but a black opal, crystalline and alive, beating with an eerie rhythm that echoed beyond the physical.
He tapped the recorder clipped to his collar.
"Subject One: Cerna. Organic systems have transcended biology. The heart pulses not with blood… but void resonance."
Carefully, reverently, he extracted the heart and placed it into a lev-suspended containment pod, tagging it with a glowing identifier.
He continued.
With the torso hollowed, Wagner leaned deeper, parting the rib structure searching for the secondary AI core.
It wasn't there.
His eyes narrowed.
"Gone… no. Absorbed."
Then came the head.
With the patience of a clockmaker, he opened the cranial casing expecting latticed synthetic fibers and a familiar neural sphere.
Instead
He saw a brain.
Real. Metallic. Alive. It shimmered with fractal void-circuits, threads of glowing logic woven into gray matter forged from living alloy.
Wagner froze.
For the first time in years, he smiled.
"...Magnificent."
"They've become something else."
"No longer machines given life..."
"But life, reborn through machine."
He stepped back from the table, scalpel still in hand, breath catching in his throat.
Dr. Wagner, still clad in his sanitized coat now stained faintly with Void-glow residue entered the adjacent chamber. The lights automatically adjusted to his biometrics, shifting to surgical white.
On the second table lay Tarnis, the one-time proud Exo-Guard. Larger, tougher, and more reinforced than his companions or at least, he had been.
Now… there were anomalies.
"Let's see what secrets you hold, soldier," Wagner muttered, activating the time-stasis field again.
As before, Tarnis went completely still an unblinking statue suspended in a moment stretched to eternity.
Dr. Wagner pressed record on his collar again, his voice low but sharp:
"Subject Two: Tarnis. Former Exo-Guard. Initial scans show anomalies in neural feedback systems… previous command implants unresponsive to diagnostic queries."
He brought his scalpel to Tarnis's chest thicker armor, denser plating.
But as the Voidsteel edge slid along the plating, Wagner noted something strange:
The metal parted itself.
Like obedient flesh.
Wagner didn't hesitate he pushed deeper, dissecting layer after layer of enhanced muscle fiber, woven tight with Void-threaded carbon veins. Unlike Cerna or Rixel, Tarnis had Voidsteel bones forming along his spine, anchoring strange growths that flickered with dormant power.
Then, he reached the sternum the location where the Exo-Guard neural command implant should be.
Only to find… nothing.
Wagner frowned.
He dug deeper.
Still nothing.
Instead, where once lay circuitry, cabling, and armored cores… now shimmered raw Void-resonant nerve-tissue. Like it had grown to replace the implant not reject it, but consume it and repurpose it.
"Verdammt…" he whispered. "Gone. No trace of the Exo-core. Even the alloy matrix has been absorbed."
He moved to the skull.
This time, he didn't expect a typical AI core.
He was not disappointed.
The moment he opened the cranial plate, he saw something extraordinary
Tarnis's command interface node once responsible for real-time battlefield updates, targeting assistance, and obedience subroutines had mutated. It now resembled a sub-dimensional helix, pulsing gently, as if it were… dreaming.
Wagner activated a thin probe and touched it gently.
The entire operating table shivered and a burst of tactical code flashed across the monitor beside him:
ERROR: THOUGHT PATTERNS NO LONGER BINARY NEW CLASS: STRATEGIC VOID INTELLIGENCE FUNCTION: EVOLVING ENTITY
He stared.
"You've rewritten your own operating system…" he whispered. "You're not just alive… you've outgrown command."
"You don't take orders anymore."
Dr. Wagner's lips curled into a smirk, half in pride, half in concern.
"You're not an Exo-Guard…"
"You're a Voidborne General."
He shut off the probe, re-sealed Tarnis's cranial plate, and stood back.
Dr. Wagner entered the final chamber, the air already heavy with sterilization mist and hums of active diagnostics. Laying on the table was Rixel, the youngest and smallest of the trio but the one who bore the fabled golden lines.
Dr. Wagner folded his arms and chuckled under his breath as he stared at Rixel's void-encrusted forearms, where luminous golden filigree pulsed softly between the cracks of the blackened Void residue.
"Ah, the anomaly… the glitch that refuses to fade," he said, voice laced with curiosity and amusement. "Every generation… one or two bear the gilded threads. Coincidence, they said. Aesthetic artifact, they claimed. And yet… always the brightest. Always the most unstable."
He pressed the stasis field again, halting time around Rixel as he began his dissection.
With surgical grace, Wagner peeled away the plating of the boy's forearms. The Void-coating parted like silk, revealing a lattice of organic metal, intricately braided with gold-etched neural fibers. They sparked faintly as if they were… thinking.
"This isn't just ornamentation…" he whispered, lowering his magnifier lens. "This is an interface. A network. You weren't touched by Void alone no, you were chosen by something deeper."
As he moved further into Rixel's chest, he noted a peculiar phenomenon: unlike Tarnis and Cerna, Rixel's internal structure wasn't just fused with the Void it was symbiotic.
Where Tarnis had absorbed and overwritten, Rixel had merged.
The Void and the techno-organic tissue didn't compete. They danced.
His heart was now a tri-chambered core, stabilized by a pulse of Void energy and lined with golden flux veins that shimmered like liquid sunlight.
Wagner's hands hesitated.
"This… isn't Void corruption. This is Void evolution. Controlled. Sculpted." He moved to the head, gently opening the neural casing. "And if I'm right…"
He gasped.
Inside was not an AI core.
Nor a brain.
Instead, nestled within a crystalline cradle of adaptive Void-gel, was a multi-faceted prism, pulsing in colors beyond the visible spectrum fragments of cognition dancing through its edges.
"Mein Gott…"
"You don't just think, Rixel."
"You remember... everything."
Wagner activated his recorder one last time: "Subject Three: Rixel. Youngest Metallurge. Unstable genetic path. Most fluid Void integration. Neural core replaced with something… higher. Fragmented memory vault predictive cognitive network."
He leaned in, eyes gleaming.
"This is not a soldier."
"This is a conduit."
He turned off the device, staring at the golden lines glowing stronger now almost as if they reacted to his presence.
"No glitch. No fluke. You're what comes next."
As he sealed Rixel's chest and disengaged the stasis field, Wagner stood silently for a moment, breathing heavily.
He then sent a signal through his private channel a message only Zalthorion would see: "We've breached into a new frontier. I've found the first step in bridging techno-organic life with stable Void cognition. We're not just creating evolution anymore. We're watching it awaken."
With the finesse of a master artisan and a mind sharpened by centuries of bio-mechanical innovation Dr. Wagner set to work.
The room was utterly silent, save for the rhythmic hum of diagnostic scanners and the soft metallic clicks of his tools. His hands, steady as iron, moved without hesitation. Not a single misstep. Not a tremor. Every organ was restored exactly where it had been. Angles corrected. Vessels rethreaded. Neural pathways realigned down to the micron.
The scalpel danced.
The Void-infused muscles and organs were not just reinserted, but stitched back with strands of adaptive nano-thread laced with neural recognition nodes his own invention, of course.
"Your body isn't rejecting anything," Wagner muttered with satisfaction. "You're not just accepting the Void. You're commanding it."
The golden-threaded void veins pulsed faintly, responding to each reconnection with subtle pulses of light. It was like plugging stars back into a night sky.
Once the final layer of their armored dermis sealed shut, the seams faded like water into sand no scars, no blemish. Just clean, seamless surface.
If anyone were to look at the trio now, they would never suspect that each had been taken apart, studied, and rebuilt.
Wagner stepped back, letting out a deep breath.
He removed his gloves, placed his tools on the sterilization tray, and walked to the edge of the chamber activating the wake-up sequence.
"Rise, my little paradoxes. Time to see how you function... now."
Rixel's optics flickered to life first a soft golden light in the dim medical bay. His chest expanded slightly with a low hiss, the void-infused lungs re-engaging. Then Tarnis stirred, followed by Vella.
They all sat up slowly, dazed but alert.
Rixel looked down at his arms the black void coating shimmered faintly, golden lines pulsing beneath the surface like veins filled with starlight. He flexed his fingers. Everything felt the same. And yet… something was different. He could feel the hum of the Void around him, like it now breathed with him.
"Dr. Wagner…" Rixel began, eyes narrowing. "Before you"
But Wagner, already one step ahead, turned without a word and handed him a sleek, black tablet. Its interface glowed with strange symbols and familiar UI. The header read: Classified Authorization - Ordan Karris.
"Take this," Wagner interrupted calmly, voice low with finality. "Show it to Ordan Karris at the Warframe Hall. You're being assigned to the Warframes. You'll train with them. Learn from them. Hone your Void-bound abilities like they did."
Rixel gripped the tablet tightly, unsure what to say.
"And what about what you said? That we weren't the first…?"
Wagner gave a small smirk as he turned back to his instruments.
"Come back after training. If you survive…" He tapped the side of his head. "Then I'll answer your questions."
The metallic hum of the lab surrounded them again. Wagner didn't look back.
Tarnis and Cerna exchanged glances with Rixel, unsure but undeniably curious.
"Warframes…" Tarnis muttered. "That's no ordinary assignment."
"No," Cerna added, looking at the glowing veins in her wrist. "But then again… we're not ordinary anymore."
Zalthorion sat with one leg crossed over the other, staring at the horizon beyond his massive window a sky split with soft light and fractal anomalies dancing along the skyline of Evolto City. The sound of the door sliding open pulled his attention back.
Dr. Wagner stepped in, his coat stained faintly with Void residue, and a datapad in hand. His usual confident stride slowed slightly, out of respect. He handed the pad to Zalthorion, who took it wordlessly.
"Void infusion complete," Wagner said in a quiet voice. "The three Metallurges show full synchronization with their altered bodies. No rejection, no anomalies though the fusion process absorbed both their implants and dual-core systems. They now possess entirely new neural matrices. Techno-organic brains."
Zalthorion skimmed the data, his fingers tightening slightly.
"They're stable?" he asked.
"Perfectly," Wagner nodded. "And I've already assigned them to Ordan Karris. They'll be trained under Warframe-level protocols."
Before Zalthorion could respond, a violent ripple in the air crackled behind Wagner the dimensional fabric tore open like stretched silk, and from it, Vidarath tumbled out face-first with a loud "UUGH!"
Covered in glowing stickers and interdimensional coupons for something called "Sweetheart Shampoo," Vidarath rolled to his feet, panting.
"No sign of Nyxia in that one either!" he wheezed, brushing glitter off his arm. "But there were a lot of pastel-colored demon bunnies… and I think one tried to marry me!"
Zalthorion sighed. Wagner muttered under his breath in German, "Of course it was bunnies…"
Vidarath pointed a finger dramatically into the air, his voice energized again:
"No matter! Onto the next one!"
With a snap of his fingers, his Multiversal Transition Device flared to life, creating another glowing rift. As it spun open with a sound like a choir inhaling, Vidarath looked over his shoulder at Zalthorion.
"You owe me lunch if I find him before you do!"
And with that, he leapt into the rift gone with a shimmer.
Zalthorion finally looked at Wagner.
"Should we worry?"
"About Vidarath or the fact Nyxia is still missing?"
"Both."
"Yes," Wagner replied bluntly, adjusting his coat. "Very much so."