Chapter 125 Monster-maker [Dr. Sequence]

“This is rather troubling,” I murmured, adjusting the surgical lenses resting on the bridge of my nose. “It looks like I’m still far off from achieving true superpower transplant.”

The lab smelled like burnt copper, blood, and formaldehyde. It was the perfume of progress. I always found comfort in it. Around me, my clones moved like well-rehearsed dancers, each a reflection of my genius and my depravity.

Clint Windsor… or as the world preferred to call me, Dr. Sequence.

I was young, handsome, charming, and many other lies. But in truth, I was just a man hopelessly obsessed with anatomy, the divine symmetry of flesh and potential, and the obscene joy of putting them together where they didn’t belong.

“I think Eclipse just killed Lovelies,” said one of my clones, the one impersonating Dullahan through the comms. He was slouched before the monitor, his voice lazy but tinged with unease.

Another clone complained from across the room, “Why is it that of all the times she has to patrol, it has to be now?”

“Because fate’s a comedian,” I said absently, stapling the final piece of muscle tissue onto a misshapen form on the table. The rhythmic chik-chak of the stapler was almost hypnotic. “And so am I.”

I stepped back to admire my work. A masterpiece, as always.

The body on the table convulsed faintly, a grotesque mosaic of parts. The remains of Assessor had proven… useful. I had replaced his heart with a core of regenerator cells, added a third eye capable of discharging kinetic blasts, and grafted nullifier claws onto his hands. His torso bore a gaping maw of serrated teeth, and within that cavity coiled a tongue like a serpent. The legs… oh, the legs were furry, digitigrade, strong enough to leap stories high. The brain, my favorite piece, was a cocktail of chemical aggression and empathic sensitivity. It was a predator that could feel its prey’s fear. However, if there was one trait that really made this monster scary… It was the invulnerable skin I plastered on it with difficulty.

“I’m going to call you…” I paused for dramatic flair. “Stomachman.”

A nearby clone whistled. “Boss, that’s… quite a name. But isn’t it a bit sloppy for a masterpiece?”

“Sloppy?” I turned to him, feigning offense. “My art transcends labels.”

“Still,” said another, “calling everything you make a masterpiece might be underselling your better creations.”

I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose. “You’re not wrong. But one must stay positive in this line of work, or the corpses start to judge you.”

One of them snickered, but another piped up, more practical. “Should we recover Lovelies’ body, Boss? She’d make fine research material. Maybe push the transplant program forward?”

Ah, yes… the program. Mrs. Mind’s endless demand. True transference, not mimicry, not cloning, but the seamless grafting of power itself. I had gotten close before, but only temporarily. The flesh accepted the energy briefly, only to decay.

I glanced at my left wrist, flexing it slightly, where the latest regenerator heart pulsed beneath my skin, faintly glowing. It was my 112th heart transplant. My “immortality” was more maintenance than miracle now.

“Temporary benefits, degrading stability,” I muttered. “The flesh rejects divinity. How disappointing.”

My clones quieted, watching me think.

Finally, one asked the question hanging in the air. “So… what about Eclipse? How do you want to handle him?”

I smiled faintly, removing my gloves and dropping them into the bio-waste bin. The sound of latex slapping metal echoed in the sterile room.

“Leave him,” I said. “He’s unpredictable, but I’ve accounted for that. The Stomachman will serve as insurance.”

The clone at the console frowned. “You’re not going to—?”

“No,” I interrupted, smiling wider. “Send Eclipse straight to the Tenth Floor. I imagine Mrs. Mind has been dying for some excitement. And if anyone can handle that little ghost…”

I trailed off, staring fondly at my abomination on the table as its stitched eyelids trembled open.

“…it’s her.”

“Or maybe Paleman,” one of the clones suggested from the other end of the lab, his voice far too casual for the subject at hand. “He looks like he can handle it.”

I didn’t even look up from the dissected forearm I was suturing back together. “No,” I said simply. “Leave Paleman alone.”

Another clone, the curious one, always the first to die when I ran low on patience, tilted his head as he asked. “Why?”

I smiled faintly, wiping the scalpel on a bloodied rag. “Because,” I said, turning to face them, “we don’t want Ning to be angry.”

The room went quiet for a heartbeat.

Paleman was his pet project. Ning treated him the same way a child treated a beloved science fair exhibit, curious, protective, but utterly cruel when displeased. If someone killed Paleman, Ning wouldn’t just retaliate; he’d fry them inside out and make them watch themselves die from every angle possible. Heck, I’d seen it a couple of times already in my lifetime.

I chuckled to myself, thinking. “If someone killed my pet, I don’t know what I’d do… maybe stitch their face to their anus. That’d be new.”

A few clones groaned in unison, but one of them scribbled it down in the “Ideas for Later” log. I loved that one. Efficient.

See, the rest of the Ten liked to pretend they were equals, a council of monsters in suits. But Ning Light… Ning was the leash around all of our throats. The rest just hadn’t realized it yet.

I had.

He was the true leader of the Tenfold Keep, not Mrs. Mind, not Dullahan, not even the old Project Tenfold that no longer existed. Ning ruled by trickery, and it worked. I’d seen what he was capable of. I’d felt it, too… Ning was the kind of man who’d give his dog a shock collar just to train it to flinch at his footsteps.

And I… well, I knew my place.

As long as I could do my research, play with my toys, and follow the symphony of meat and mind, I was fine with anything His Lordship wanted. He could erase memories, kill subordinates, and rebuild the Keep from its ashes every week for all I cared.

Because, unlike the others, I had contingencies.

Always contingencies.

Heh.

Still, what fascinated me most wasn’t his brutality. Instead, it was his story. The whisper that Ning Light came from the future. I’d heard it in the recovered echo of an old memory from one of my backup brains. A fragment of conversation, distorted, but distinct enough to give me pause.

A traveler through time? Or merely delusion, a self-myth to justify his cruelty? Either way, it intrigued me. Perhaps the key to evolution wasn’t in my surgical splicing, but in his temporal mystery.

That was a thought worth dissecting later.

I set down my scalpel and stretched, feeling my spine crack pleasantly. My clones returned to their duties, busy, obedient, humming in unison. I wandered to my corner, my private sanctuary of silence amid the chaos.

The tablet waited there, still open where I had left it: a glowing window into secrets few living souls could ever access. The SRC’s classified database… the kind reserved only for its directors.

I’d long since bypassed their encryption.

When inspiration failed me, when the dance of biology and madness began to dull, I always returned here to read.

They said there had been precious knowledge lost during the Dark Ages, from wisdom, techniques, and even sciences forgotten to dust. Every faction today hunts for those lost fragments like carrion birds over a rotting god. But I’d always found the idea strange.

How could there be “lost science” in an age when the concept of science didn’t even exist?

Still, the mystery intrigued me. And intrigue, for me, was an excellent stimulant.

I scrolled through the tablet’s archive, devouring text with obsessive hunger. The SRC secret files were more scripture than database. In the last century alone, humanity had rediscovered or reinvented horrors once thought myth.

Take the “Null Draught,” for instance.

The most advanced invention of the last hundred years. A potion capable of taking away powers. Or so the SRC claimed.

I chuckled quietly. “Take away” was too generous. The truth was more primitive, more human. It didn’t remove your abilities. Instead, it simply made you believe you didn’t have them to the point you couldn’t use them.

The concoction was a clever fusion of nullifier energy and hypnosis-based powers. You drank it, your brain convinced your body it was powerless, and suddenly, the power obeyed that belief. A lie strong enough to reshape biology.

“Magnificent.”

I’d procured a sample, of course, through morally flexible channels. My early research suggested it wasn’t merely alchemical. It was organic. The base ingredient was human. A processed human, specifically, someone with an active power whose psychic signature was ground into the serum itself.

I smirked. “Science through suffering,” I murmured. “Classic humanity.”

But the rabbit hole went deeper.

Rumor had it, the SRC maintained a null farm… a secret facility where they harvested the blood of null-class capes. Null blood was the essential reagent in creating null metal, the SRC’s so-called “trump card.”

I’d always found that idea… romantic. A field of screaming nulls, hooked to machines, drained dry for their purity. If it were real, I’d visit someday. Take notes. Perhaps improve the process.

I was still smiling at the thought when something dropped off the ceiling..I didn’t recognize him until the moment my eyes got a careful look at him… It was Eclipse.

The ghost boy himself, falling through the upper floors like a specter.

My clones reacted before I did; three of them sprinted forward, pulling guns, shouting warnings. I barely had time to register the object he threw.

A grenade. Compact. Black casing. The faint shimmer of a null core.

“Oh, fu—”

The blast wasn’t loud. It was hungry. It ate the sound, the air, the psionic threads connecting my clones to me. One heartbeat, they were alive; the next, they were gone. The psychic recoil hit me like whiplash. Blood dripped from my nose, and the sterile hum of the lab turned into static. My creations had been unmade.

I dropped the tablet, glass cracking as it hit the floor, and stumbled backward. “Stomachman!”

The hulking creature stirred.

Assessor’s stolen flesh writhed, teeth clicking, muscles tensing like coiled serpents beneath translucent skin. The crimson glow of its third eye ignited.

Through our mental tether, I whispered the command not in words, but intent.

“Target. Engage. Dissect.”

Stomachman roared in compliance. A burst of kinetic energy shot from its central eye, turning a line of surgical benches into molten slag. The explosion of pressure ripped through the lab, flinging instruments, glass, and half-finished projects into chaos.

But Eclipse was nowhere near the blast.

He flickered through the wreckage like smoke through a sieve with intangibility shifting in rhythmic bursts, unpredictable, and impossible to lock onto. Every time the kinetic beam flared, he was gone, then reappeared behind a cascade of falling tools or half-melted tanks.

He was hunting, and I hated being the prey.

“Eclipse, pray tell… what are you doing here?” I asked, forcing a polite smile through my unease. My voice wavered only slightly, though my heart drummed hard enough to vibrate my ribs.

He didn’t answer.

Then I heard her.

“This isn’t nice of you, Dr. Sequence,” came Mrs. Mind’s voice inside my skull, sharp as a scalpel. Her telepathic tone dripped venom. “Sending him directly to me? Do you want me dead?”

I blinked. “What are you talking about, Mrs. Mind? Surely, you don’t accuse me of betrayal…”

“You think yourself unexposed to my prying?” she hissed. “You’re wrong. I see your intentions. I hate it when someone looks down on me. Now, be a good little henchman and deal with the traitor.”

Her voice vanished like static fading out.

I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose. “And here I thought I’d finally have a quiet day of progress…”

My work… always interrupted.

I gestured toward Stomachman, my voice weary. “Fine. Do your thing.”

But Stomachman didn’t move. The hulking figure stood still in the ruin of the lab, trembling faintly. His many eyes rolled upward, blood leaking from the seams of his flesh. Eclipse hadn’t moved an inch. He was just watching.

“What did you do?” I asked him.

He said nothing.

My throat tightened. “Was there… a flaw in my design?”

He only tilted his head.

I could feel something was wrong. A static hum crawled through the telepathic thread connecting me to Stomachman. Then came the voice.

Low. Distorted. Painful.

“M–My… name’s… Assessor.”

The chill that ran down my spine wasn’t metaphorical. Instead, it was physical, an electrical jolt that burned the back of my skull. The monster’s torso-mouth yawned open, teeth slick with bile and metal, and screamed. The sound was wet and layered, a hundred voices tearing through one throat.

“No, no, no!” I shouted, stumbling backward.

The tongue lashed out, wrapping around my waist, tight. Flesh-like wet cables constricted me, dragging me toward that gnashing pit.

“Kill him! Kill him!” I screamed as I created more of my clones.

They obeyed instantly, charging forward, firing their guns, hacking at the tendons of my own creation. It did nothing. The bullets bent mid-air, drawn into the magnetic pull of the creature’s invulnerable skin. My clones exploded into red mist as the kinetic blast and powerful limbs of the creature tore through them.

“Help!” I shrieked, twisting as the monster yanked me closer.

The smell of iron and stomach acid filled my lungs as teeth closed around me. I could feel the bite sink into my arm, shredding bone, tendon, and skin with surgical precision, my own kind of poetry turned against me.

Eclipse didn’t move.

He just watched.

I reached out, blood slicking my fingers, grasping for his boot. “H-Help me!”

For a second, I thought he might. For a second, I saw something… recognition, pity, maybe. Then he spoke. His voice was calm, flat, and disgusted. “I have no regrets,” he said. “You made monsters out of people… It’s only fair one of them eats you.”

I gasped, the pain swallowing my scream. The torso-mouth tore upward, taking my chest with it. My vision went white.

Eclipse sat down on a nearby crate, resting his chin on his hand, expression unreadable as the room filled with the sound of my body being reduced to pulp.

He sighed.

“You know,” he said softly, half to himself, “I’m starting to get really tired of Mrs. Mind screwing with other people’s powers. I guess it has something to do with the development of her powers, considering what she did to Missive… Hmmm… I am sorry, just rambling to myself…”

He glanced at me for one last time.

"I guess, this is goodbye, Dr. Sequence... I don’t think you are that bad, but you have to go…”