Over the coming days, the Adamas Organ settled in, and Krahe began noticing the changes. They were subtle, at first, only for her skin to rapidly begin turning black and growing stiff, starting on her side right where the organ had been implanted. Over the course of around half a day, the affected area would return to normal, shedding in a manner resembling forgescale. It progressed outward in waves, leaving behind subtly firmer flesh. Firminus described this as a normal part of the process, noting only that it was progressing even faster than he had expected. Apparently, it normally took months for an Adamas Organ to settle in, and upwards of one to two years to become effective. The Firminus-Valerian Pattern was intended to be much faster, but, in the grafter’s own words, “Not this much faster.”
Though uncomfortable, it was just a nuisance. At worst, it temporarily limited her range of motion, but that was all. Her only concern was whether the gradual tissue reinforcement would cause issues with the following operations, but she assumed that the grafters had planned for this, and Firminus said just the same when she brought it up during her next checkup. She could also feel the transformation spreading through her organs, but it was slower, gradual.
Krahe waited until the change had passed over her entire torso and reached her limbs before she actually tested the adamas function. She set a training automaton for low-powered straight punches to the midsection, peeling the biosuit away from her stomach. Already knowing these wouldn’t hurt her, she braced herself, and using the trigger artifact, weathered two strikes from the gleaming machine. With a mustering of will, she, at first, attempted to harden her flesh directly. To say it was hard would have been an overstatement, but it wasn’t easy, either. Reaching for the right mental trigger, she felt a dull thrumming, almost churning sensation coming on, as if the blood itself was rioting. Veins bulged under her skin, blackness spread from them, and within a few seconds, her stomach had become as if living granite, and only the dull thrumming remained to notify her of this fact. There was bleedover — it spread further than she had wanted — but it had worked on the first attempt without the command word, and that was enough.
The training automaton’s punches barely even registered, now. Knowing she was on a time limit, she dialled the automaton’s strength higher and higher, repeating until its strikes started hurting again. The force was such that it sent her sliding backwards over the training area’s sand-covered floor. Krahe released the hardening, seeing the bruise already taking shape, as black as pitch. There was one more thing to test.
“Adamas,” she incanted, visualizing the exact area she wanted to harden. This time, it was nearly instant, with far less bleedover. Dismissing it again, she considered what to change the trigger word to. Adamas was three syllables, and it would give away what she was doing. Until she could harden any area faster and more precisely than with the trigger word, she would keep that crutch in her back pocket. After some thought, she eventually settled on “Nemea,” the home of the Nemean Lion of Greek myth. Zastreon had no Greece, let alone a myth of the 12 Labours of Hercules, but the word still had the inherent mental association necessary to make it function as the trigger.
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She continued passing the time in any way she could. When she found out Audunpoint’s already warm climate wasn’t even the hottest it would get this year, Krahe arrived at the realization that she hadn’t actually built up her wardrobe all that much, not even with her disguises accounted for. This realization resulted in a lengthy order list for tailored clothing, from completely normal to an armored, self-repair capable short jacket with a back patch directly based on the Wandrei Faust talisman. Given the absence of a surveillance state or an ever-present network that could allow someone to identify her digitally, Krahe had the idea of intentionally cultivating a distinct appearance, so that people would more easily dismiss her as being someone else when wearing a disguise. She’d never intended to keep wearing those same green pants to begin with. For the time being, she filed it away, seeing as she wasn’t exactly in walking distance of a tailor.
By the time she had her ocular modifications done, it had been a month since the raid. She hated low-intrusion ocular operations like this. Had it been an option, she would have chosen to have her eyes replaced wholesale, but the grafters simply considered this the safer option, considering the other grafts she was also having done within this short timeframe.
Zaveshian neurosurgery was, in its own way, just as advanced as that of Megacity Gamma. On Krahe’s part, it involved nothing more than having her head in a vice and responding to prompts every couple minutes. In this case, most of them included Fidelia waving one or more of her tendrils in front of Krahe’s face at varying speeds — over the course of the operation, she was able to observe a rapid improvement in her own ability to track fast-moving objects even with interference. From listening to the two grafters speaking during the procedure, Krahe surmised that it involved a mixture of cultured tissue and “patterns” of some sort that both needed to be adjusted to fit her ocular cortex specifically. She couldn’t quite tell how much of this procedure relied on feel, but then, she had never considered neurosurgery to be an exact science.
Satisfying as it was to be closer to her former peak, it didn’t help with the splitting headache she got from constantly overshooting things. She couldn’t even read properly for the time being — and so, she decided to turn her attention towards something she had been putting off for some time: Razormind. Lucky for her, Firminus was, if anything, eager to observe her attempts.
Of the two months she spent at Fidelia’s compound, it would take Krahe two and a half weeks to achieve Razormind a sufficient number of times for Firminus to discern exactly what the mental state entailed. She made it clear that a real fight would make it easier, but she also came to learn that the monitoring equipment they had on-site wasn’t suited to that purpose. So, it was left up to Krahe to push her visualization as far as it would take her. Eventually, she started going through various katas from Sector 7 Style while visualizing fictitious opponents, and this, in the end proved to be the key.
It truly was akin to walking along the blade of a razor. Even the tiniest moment of hesitation, the smallest stray thought would throw her out of it. But time and time again, she managed to stay in that zone for a bit longer, and eventually, Firminus announced that he had a plan.
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