Episode-947
Chapter : 1893
"I read your textbooks when I was in training," Ben told her. "I memorized your theories on how brains talk to machines. My first combat suit... the software was based on your designs. To us, you weren't just a scientist. You were the Mother of the Interface."
Eun-ha looked at Ben. The soft, loving look she had given Lloyd disappeared. Her posture changed. She stood straighter. She wasn't just a wife anymore. She was a boss. She was the smartest person in the room, and she knew it.
"You were Firefly?" she asked. Her voice was cool and calm. She wasn't asking out of fear. She was just gathering facts.
"I was," Ben admitted. He didn't look ashamed. "Black Ops Division. I was one of their best. Until I realized they were idiots and I left."
"A defector," Eun-ha said. She tilted her head, her dark eyes scanning him from head to toe. "That explains why you are so arrogant. Firefly agents always think they are gods just because they have batteries and flashlights."
Ben grinned. He didn't get mad. He actually looked happy that she figured him out so fast.
"We think we are gods because we understand how things work," Ben replied. "We don't pray to spirits for help. We build solutions. Just like you did."
Lloyd watched them talking. He felt a little left out. He realized that Ben and Eun-ha spoke a language he only half-understood. Lloyd was a mechanic; he liked to build things with a wrench. But Ben and Eun-ha? They were theorists. They dealt with code, data, and systems.
"So," Lloyd interrupted. "You guys know each other? Kind of?"
"He knows my work," Eun-ha corrected him. "I don't know him. But I know his type. Smart. Violent. Gets bored easily. Doesn't play well with others."
Ben nodded his head. "That sounds about right."
Eun-ha stepped away from Lloyd. She walked toward Ben. She moved like a predator, smooth and dangerous. She stopped right in front of him. Because she was floating slightly off the ground, she looked down into his eyes.
"You bowed," she said. "Firefly agents don't bow. Especially not to 'biological errors' like demons."
"I didn't bow to a demon," Ben said smoothly. "I bowed to the Professor. I respect the mind that built this palace. I respect the woman who organized Hell."
He raised his heavy metal arms. The joints clicked softly.
"I look at this place," Ben said, pointing to the glowing crystal pillars. "I don't see magic. I see engineering. I see a mind that hates chaos. That is worth respecting."
Eun-ha stared at him. Then, a small smile appeared on her face. It wasn't a warm smile. It was a smirk. She had found someone who understood her.
"You have good eyes, Defector," she said. "Better than my husband's, sometimes. He looks at me and sees a woman. You look at me and see a system."
"I see the upgrade," Ben corrected.
Eun-ha laughed. "Flattery won't work on me. But competence? I like competence."
She reached out with her hand. Her long, sharp black claw tapped against the metal plate on Ben’s chest. Clink.
"You call yourself a King," she said. "But look at you. You are running on scrap metal. Your hardware is embarrassing."
Ben’s smile faltered. His ego was his shield, and she had just dented it.
"I work with what I have," Ben said, sounding a bit defensive. "Lloyd built these limbs for me. They are... strong."
"They are crude," Eun-ha said bluntly. She glanced at Lloyd. "No offense, honey."
Lloyd shrugged. "None taken. I built those in a cave with a hammer. It wasn't exactly a high-tech factory."
"It shows," Eun-ha said. She turned back to Ben. "You have the soul of a killer, but you are trapped in a body made of junk. You are trying to run a supercomputer program on a pocket calculator."
She walked around him. Her eyes were dissecting every bolt, every weld, every magic rune on his body.
"The energy is leaking at the elbow," she pointed out. "The heat isn't venting properly. You are wasting 30% of your power just moving your arms. And the connection to your nerves... my god, it’s primitive. You are using pain to control the metal, aren't you?"
Ben went stiff. She was right. Every time he moved his metal arms, it hurt. He had learned to ignore it, to use the pain as fuel, but it was always there. A constant, grinding ache.
"Pain works," Ben muttered. "Pain is fast."
Chapter : 1894
"Pain is noise," Eun-ha snapped. "It slows down the signal. If you want to kill a god, Ben, you can't be fighting your own body at the same time."
She stopped in front of him again. The playful look was gone. Now, she looked intense. She looked like a scientist who had found a problem she needed to fix.
"Do you want to stop being a man in a clunky metal suit?" she asked quietly. "Do you want to stop pretending that this primitive magic is enough?"
Ben looked at her. For the first time, he felt a hunger that matched hers. He didn't want to just be strong. He wanted to be perfect.
"What are you offering, Professor?" Ben asked.
Eun-ha raised her hand. Her palm began to glow with a strange, blue-green light. It wasn't a magic spell. It looked like a blueprint. It looked like streaming numbers.
"I'm offering you a patch," she said. "Version 2.0."
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The light in Eun-ha’s hand was hypnotic. It didn't flicker like a candle flame or a torch. It pulsed with a steady, rhythmic beat, like a heart made of neon. It was composed of millions of tiny, glowing symbols—magic runes that had been broken down, stripped of their mysticism, and put back together as raw, unadulterated computer code.
Lloyd watched from the side, fascinated. He knew that look on his wife’s face. It was the same look she had forty years ago in their bunker on Earth when she finally cracked the enemy’s secret encryption keys. It was the look of a problem solver who had just found the answer key.
"Lloyd," Eun-ha said, keeping her eyes locked on Ben. "You tried to fix his problem with hardware. You built him stronger arms. You gave him heavier armor. You treated him like a tank."
"He is a tank," Lloyd pointed out, crossing his arms. "That's his job."
"He is a pilot," she corrected sharply. "The problem isn't the metal, Lloyd. The problem is the driver. You are using magic runes to translate his thoughts into motion. That is an old solution. It’s like trying to send a high-speed data file using smoke signals. It works, eventually, but it’s slow, and a lot of the message gets lost in the wind."
She pointed a clawed finger at Ben’s metal shoulders, where the heavy steel plating met his human flesh.
"Right now, your brain sends a signal. The rune catches it. The rune figures out what it means. The rune tells the metal to move. That creates a delay. A tiny split second. In a fight against a goblin or a bandit, that doesn't matter. But Ben was Firefly. He knows that in a fight against a railgun or a laser, that split second isn't just a delay. It’s death."
Ben swallowed hard. She had said the one thing he never admitted to anyone, not even Lloyd. He felt slow. He felt heavy. He knew he was faster than any human in Riverio, but against the memories of the high-tech soldiers he used to fight on Earth, he felt like he was moving through invisible water. He missed the instant response of the cybernetics he used to have.
"So how do we fix it?" Ben asked. He realized he said "we." He was already on her team. He was already the student waiting for the lesson.
"We remove the translator," Eun-ha said. "We don't use runes to read the signal. We etch the command lines directly onto your spirit."
Lloyd straightened up, his eyes widening. "You're going to graft code onto a soul? That... we theorized about that on Earth, but we never had the technology to touch a soul. We barely understood consciousness."
"We didn't have mana on Earth," Eun-ha reminded him. "Here, the soul is real energy. It has mass. It has a frequency. And if it’s energy, it can be directed. It can be wired."
She stepped closer to Ben. The blue-green light in her hand got brighter, casting sharp, digital-looking shadows on her pale face.
"I can't rebuild your arms right now," she told Ben. "I don't have the materials here in the Abyss. I don't have the tools to forge alloy. But I can upgrade the driver. I can teach your spirit how to speak directly to the metal without needing a translation."
She looked him right in the eye, her expression deadly serious.