Chapter 94: Fuck Off, 01
A week after the paralysis finally faded from his limbs, Yuki realized that physical agony was far easier to deal with than Primarch 01’s complete lack of personal boundaries.
Everywhere he went, she was there.
He’d walk down the cobblestone paths of the High Capital’s lower district, and a fold of crimson space would ripple open right beside him. She’d step out, arms crossed, her volcanic aura singeing the hemlines of passing civilians, and immediately start barking questions.
"The core," she demanded for the fourth time that afternoon, matching his slow, deliberate pace down the market alley. "The metal cage with the internal star. Explain the secondary compression loop again. How did you force the mana conversion without a containment rune? How did you make it generate so much power? Hey, I’m talking to you!"
Yuki didn’t even turn his head. He just kept walking, carrying a heavy brown paper bag filled with fresh bread, herbs, and stewing beef.
"I told you a hundred times," Yuki said flatly, his tone completely devoid of life. "It wasn’t mana. It was physics. And the blueprints are gone, and I can’t get them back, so bug off."
"Nothing is gone!" Primarch 01 snapped, stepping directly into his path. The sheer pressure of her aura rattled the windowpanes of the nearby apothecary. "A mind doesn’t simply un-learn a weapon of that scale! You dropped a sun on a Calamity, boy! Why are you carrying groceries?!"
Yuki stepped around her without missing a beat. "Because Vee likes garlic bread, and Kasumi requested beef stew."
Primarch 01 stared at him in utter disbelief before snapping her fingers, reappearing right in front of him again.
"Why aren’t you taking High-Tier Inquisitor missions?!" she demanded, leaning down until her fiery eyes were level with his. "The Guild board is flooded with Rank 4 and Rank 5 extermination requests following the Citadel’s collapse! The Red Faction needs vanguard captains! Yet I checked the roster this morning, and you registered for a... a Rank 1 herb-gathering contract?!"
"Yep," Yuki replied, adjusting the grocery bag in his arms. "Low difficulty from now on. Slimes, local goblins, maybe clear out an overgrown cellar if I’m feeling ambitious. None of that crazy stuff from now on."
"Are you insane?!" she hissed, her hands twitching, wanting to grab Yuki by the neck and wring it a few times to snap him out of his mood. "You possess the cognitive capacity to wipe out regional armies, and you want to pick flowers in the safe zone?!"
"I’m not fighting gods anymore," Yuki said, his voice dropping into a cold, unshakeable quiet. "I’m not chasing points. I’m taking low-risk contracts, making enough gold to pay for a comfortable house, and spending the rest of my time taking care of Vee and Kasumi. End of story. I am not a Rank 5 Primarch like you, nor some overpowered man—just a guy who is good at survival. So I’ll prioritize the survival of my family."
Primarch 01 stood frozen in the middle of the street, watching him walk away. Her lips curled into a deep, visceral grimace of absolute disgust.
"I hate this," she growled, her voice echoing down the alley.
Yuki paused, glancing back over his shoulder. "What?"
"I hate this new version of you!" she shouted, pointing an armored finger at his chest. "Where is the arrogant bastard who slammed a Dyson core at my feet and called me a ’witch bitch’?! Where is the unhinged lunatic who sat in a chair in front of a Calamity and quoted ancient execution texts?! I want that man back! Not this boring, docile house-pet!"
Yuki stopped completely. He turned around, staring at the most powerful living Primarch in the kingdom.
"How the fuck did you see that and survive?"
"None of your concern—unless you tell me what I want to know."
Yuki stared at her in silence for a long moment.
A tiny, dark spark flickered in the back of his milky, half-blind eyes.
"You want him back?" Yuki asked softly.
"Yes!" she barked. "I want the man who knows how the universe burns!"
Yuki set the grocery bag down on a wooden bench by the side of the street. He folded his arms, looking her up and down. High Command had banned him from dropping radioisotopes, building warheads, or spawning energy cores from his pocket dimension... but they hadn’t banned him from talking. And since Varisa had placed a divine protection proxy over his file to keep him alive as a cripple, Primarch 01 couldn’t actually hurt him without triggering a god-level counter-penalty.
She was completely at his mercy—she just didn’t know it yet.
"Alright," Yuki said, a small, terrifyingly hollow smile creeping onto his face. "You win. I’ll tell you everything I remember. I’ll show you how it works."
Primarch 01’s eyes lit up with intense, ravenous greed. "Finally! Speak, boy!"
"First, we need to cover the foundational mathematical frameworks," Yuki said, taking a step toward her. "To understand the core, you must first master Special Relativity, non-Euclidean tensor calculus, and quantum chromodynamics."
Primarch 01 blinked. "...What?"
"Let us begin with the speed of light in a vacuum, denoted as c," Yuki continued, his voice monotone, continuous, and absolutely relentless. "When an object with rest mass m0 approaches c, its relativistic mass increases according to the Lorentz factor: γ=1−v2/c21. Do you understand tensor index notation, or should I spend the next six hours explaining covariant and contravariant vector transformations on a Riemannian manifold?"
Primarch 01 stared at him, her brow furrowing in deep confusion. "Vector... what? Where is the spell array?!"
"There is no spell array," Yuki said flatly, taking another step closer. "Now, let’s derive the stress-energy tensor Tμν. T00 represents energy density. If we cross-reference this with the thermodynamic entropy of a black hole horizon—SBH=4ℓP2kA—we find that to compress a stellar core inside a spatial pocket, you must continuously solve forty-two simultaneous differential equations regarding subatomic quark-gluon plasma pressure."
Yuki continued rattling off the scientific jargon. He himself had no idea if all of it was completely accurate or slightly off, but it wasn’t like he cared either way—all he cared about was pissing her off.
"Stop," she muttered, pressing two fingers to her temples as a sudden, sharp headache began to bloom behind her eyes. "Just... skip to the part where it explodes."
"I can’t skip it," Yuki said, his tone entirely serious. "If you don’t understand quantum field theory, the core decays into Hawking radiation and turns your brain into soup. Now, grab a stick and draw a three-dimensional Cartesian coordinate grid in the dirt. We are going to calculate the Schrödinger wave equation for a hydrogen atom’s electron shell."
"I am the Rank 01 Primarch!" she bellowed, her face turning as red as her hair. "I cleave mountains! I do not draw grid lines in the dirt!"
"Do you want the knowledge or not?" Yuki asked innocently. "Because if you can’t integrate a simple second-order polynomial differential, we can’t even discuss Teller-Ulam secondary fusion stages."
For three straight hours, Yuki stood in the middle of the market square, lecturing one of the most dangerous warriors in the human realm on real-world advanced theoretical physics.
He didn’t skip a single equation. He explained quantum tunneling, thermodynamic laws, electromagnetic wave propagation, and fluid dynamics in excruciating, mind-numbing detail. Every time she tried to interrupt or ask for "the magic part," Yuki would coldly inform her that her lack of mathematical discipline was embarrassing and reset the lecture back to basic calculus.
By the time the sun began to set, Primarch 01 was sitting on the wooden bench, her head buried in her gauntlets, smoke practically pouring from her ears.
"My head hurts..." she whimpered, her voice entirely stripped of its usual terrifying majesty. "Why are there so many letters in the numbers...? Why is the alphabet in the math...?"
Yuki calmly picked up his bag of groceries, checking the bread to make sure it was still fresh.
"That was just the introduction to Newtonian kinematics," Yuki said, turning to walk away. "Tomorrow at dawn, we start Quantum Mechanics. Bring a notebook."
"Get away from me!" Primarch 01 shrieked, snapping her fingers and tearing open a spatial rift. She practically dove headfirst into the portal, fleeing the alley at maximum speed to escape the terrifying wave of real-world science.
Yuki watched the spatial tear snap shut, leaving the alley quiet once more.
A genuine, faintly amused smirk tugged at the corner of his lips as he adjusted the paper bag and started his walk home to Vee and Kasumi.
After reaching home, Yuki cooked dinner, ate with the girls, and spent time talking with them. Later, he walked over to the barn he had built for Sky Terror and checked on the egg to inspect its progress.
Sky Terror was growing steadily by the day. How was it possible for an egg to continuously grow larger? Yuki had no idea, but in a fantasy world, things like that were to be expected.