Episode-949
Chapter : 1897
"Twelve milliseconds is an eternity," Eun-ha finished for him. "In twelve milliseconds, a laser burns through your chest. In twelve milliseconds, a devil rips your head off. You were trying to fix it by making the mana conduct faster. You were trying to upgrade the hardware."
She tapped Lloyd’s forehead lightly with a clawed finger.
"But the problem wasn't the hardware. It was the translation. The soul speaks one language, and the machine speaks another. The delay comes from the translation time. You were forcing his brain to speak 'Machine.'"
Lloyd’s eyes widened. The engineer in him felt a sudden, electric jolt of understanding. It was the feeling of a puzzle piece finally snapping into place after months of frustration.
"So you stopped translating," Lloyd realized.
"Correct," Eun-ha said, a proud smile touching her lips. "The data I just gave Ben is the 'Theory of Soul-Circuitry.' It’s a method I developed over sixty years in the dark. It teaches the user how to etch command lines directly onto their own spirit."
She gestured to Ben, who was now moving his arms through complex combat katas, the metal limbs moving faster than the eye could follow. He was punching the air, stopping millimeters from the crystal pillars with perfect control.
"He isn't telling the arm to move anymore," she explained. "He isn't sending a command to a rune. He has extended his own soul into the metal. As far as the universe is concerned, that metal is no longer an object. It is biological tissue. It is him."
Lloyd looked at Ben. The movements were terrifyingly fast. There was zero latency. The thought was the action. It was absolute unity.
"It’s a bio-digital fusion," Lloyd muttered, his brain spinning with the implications. "You turned a spiritual concept into a circuit board. You essentially created a nervous system made of mana."
"I optimized the interface," Eun-ha corrected, her tone playful. "You were building external tools. I turned them into internal organs. It’s the difference between wearing a glove and growing a hand."
Lloyd ran a hand through his hair, laughing breathlessly. "This... this is genius. Do you have any idea how long I spent trying to calibrate the Lilith Stones to fix this? I burned out a dozen high-grade crystals trying to build a faster processor. I thought I needed more computing power."
"I know," she said softly. "I watched you. Well, my spies watched you. I saw you struggling with the Golem Heart. I saw you trying to make the Aegis Suit walk without stumbling."
She looked deep into his eyes.
"I couldn't come to you, Evan. I couldn't hold the wrench for you. But I could do the math. I spent hours in this library, running simulations in my head, writing this code, just waiting for the day I could give it to you. This is my contribution to the project."
Lloyd felt a lump form in his throat. He looked at the complex, glowing equations floating in Ben’s aura—equations that only he and Eun-ha could truly understand. She hadn't just been surviving in Hell. She had been working. She had been solving his problems before he even knew he had them.
"It’s perfect," Lloyd said. "It’s elegant code."
"It had to be," she replied. "Because where you’re going, sloppy code gets you killed."
Ben stopped his practice. He turned to them, his face flushed with adrenaline. He looked at his metal palm, clenching it into a fist. The air around the fist distorted slightly from the sheer speed of the movement.
"Bro," Ben said, his voice trembling with excitement. "I can feel the air pressure changes on the metal plating. I can feel the mana density in the room through my fingertips. I am not just faster. I am... expanded. The metal feels like skin."
Ben looked at Eun-ha and bowed again, deeper this time. "Thank you, Professor. I will not waste this update."
"See that you don't," Eun-ha said, her voice shifting back to the regal tone of the Devil Queen. "That 'update' is worth more than this entire kingdom. It represents a fundamental shift in how magic interacts with matter."
She turned back to Lloyd.
"Now," she said. "Let’s talk about the big metal elephant in the room. You didn't just need this for Ben’s arms, did you? Ben is just the proof of concept."
Lloyd shook his head. His mind flashed back to the secret hangar in his manufactory, where a massive, matte-black giant stood silent and frozen.
Chapter : 1898
"The Aegis," Lloyd said. "My battle suit. The God-Killer."
"The paperweight," Eun-ha corrected mercilessly. "It’s a beautiful statue, Evan, but right now, it’s too slow to fight a real war. If you got into that suit and tried to fight a Fire Fly Mech, you’d be scrap metal in thirty seconds. They react at the speed of electricity. You react at the speed of biology."
Lloyd didn't argue. She was right. The Aegis Mark I was powerful, but it was clumsy. It relied on joysticks, pedals, and voice commands. It was a tank trying to race against ninjas.
"But with this..." Lloyd trailed off, his eyes losing focus as he visualized the schematic. "If I treat the entire suit like Ben's arm..."
"With this," Eun-ha whispered, leaning close to his ear, "you don't pilot the suit. You become the suit."
________________________________________
Lloyd walked over to one of the crystalline tables in the hall. He swept his hand over it, using a basic illusion spell to project a wireframe schematic of the Aegis Suit into the air. It was a complex, hulking design—thick armor, massive hydraulic pistons, and the glowing Golem Heart in the center.
"Okay," Lloyd said, the engineer taking over completely. He rubbed his hands together. "Let’s run the simulation. If I apply the Soul-Circuitry theory to the Aegis frame, we have to strip it down."
He began to manipulate the hologram. With a few gestures, he stripped away the cockpit controls. He removed the physical levers, the mana-keyboards, and the manual triggers.
"The conduction lines are the bottleneck," Eun-ha said, pointing at the glowing blue lines of the schematic that represented the wiring. "Those copper and mythril wires you're using? Too much resistance. They are solid matter. Soul energy doesn't like traveling through solids; it creates friction."
Lloyd nodded, biting his lip in thought. "I need a liquid medium. Something that can carry the soul essence to the extremities of the suit instantly. Something living."
"Mercury mixed with pulverized Spirit Stones?" Eun-ha suggested, testing him.
"No," Lloyd said immediately. "Too toxic. It would corrode the seals. Maybe... blood?"
Eun-ha smiled. "Blood is good. It carries DNA. It carries intent. It is the natural conductor of the soul."
"If I infuse the hydraulic fluid with my own blood," Lloyd reasoned, "and treat it with high-level alchemy to prevent coagulation... and then imprint the Soul-Circuitry onto the liquid itself..."
"Then the fluid becomes a liquid nervous system," Eun-ha finished. "The suit becomes a biological extension of your body. If you want to punch, you don't pull a lever. You just punch. And the suit mimics the action instantly, with a thousand times the force."
He adjusted the schematic. The image of the Aegis changed. It became leaner, more organic. The internal structure looked less like a machine and more like a giant, metal human skeleton filled with veins.
"This solves the power distribution problem, too," Lloyd muttered, his fingers twitching as he mentally moved components. "The Golem Heart... it has a will of its own. That was always the danger. It fought me for control. It wanted to be the brain."
"But with Soul-Circuitry," Eun-ha said, "you aren't fighting the Heart. You are bypassing its logic centers."
"No," Lloyd corrected her, his eyes lighting up. "I'm not bypassing it. I'm merging with it. The Soul-Circuitry acts as a handshake protocol. It tells the Golem Heart that I am the brain. I become the CPU, and the Heart becomes the battery. It creates a closed loop. I feed it intent, it feeds me power."
Lloyd stepped back, looking at the floating blue image. It was terrifying. It was beautiful. It was no longer a vehicle; it was a shell.
"This isn't just a suit of armor anymore," Lloyd said quietly. "If I build this... if I install this software... the Aegis becomes a living thing while I'm inside it. It will have reflexes. It will have instincts. It will breathe when I breathe."
"And it will have vulnerabilities," Eun-ha warned, her voice turning serious. "That’s the trade-off, Evan. Zero latency means zero separation."
She walked through the hologram, disrupting the blue lines.
"If the suit takes damage, your soul takes damage," she explained. "If the suit’s arm is ripped off, you will feel the phantom pain as if it were your own flesh. If the Golem Heart overheats, your own blood will boil. You are removing the safety barriers. You are removing the insulation."