Chapter 104 - Neil’s Origin
The shadows in my room deepened as the last light of day faded away. A soft orange hue bathed the walls, casting long streaks across the floor from the half-shut blinds. I glanced toward the window—there it was, the sun dipping below the skyline like a silent farewell.
Normally, this would be the hour I’d fix myself dinner and dive into study sessions for the looming Finals. But tonight was different. Neil had arrived, bringing with him matters far too pressing to ignore.
With a quiet sigh, I shut the window and drew the curtains tight, cloaking the room in a dusky twilight. No eyes, no ears—just us. Not that I expected anyone to eavesdrop. Neil’s cyberpunk implant, sleek and humming with a faint blue glow beneath the skin of his temple, was already jamming any surveillance tech in a half-kiloter radius.
“HUSBANDO, huh,” I muttered under my breath, reaching for the electric thermos nestled at the edge of my desk. It had been steadily reheating the oolong tea I’d set aside since Neil arrived—an aged blend I’d been saving for a night that demanded clarity. I retrieved two porcelain cups from my shelf and poured the steaming tea with practiced care.
“Can’t say I’ve never heard that term before,” I said, handing Neil his cup. “Ismail Arondight practically told that one while giving so threats.”
“Good.” Neil accepted the cup with a nod and a faint smile. “That saves the trouble of explaining it from scratch.”
I sipped the tea, its earthy bitterness and slight sweetness grounding . “So…” I began cautiously, eyes fixed on the rippling surface of the liquid. “You can transform into a Fra Unit—like Fei and Myrrh?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes,” Neil said, the warmth of the cup steaming up his glasses. “But WAIFUs are superior. WAIFUs like Myrrh are almost indistinguishable from real humans. They’re emotionally adaptable, and fully integrated with Weaponry Enhancent Engineering Bios. They’re built to support. We, on the other hand—HUSBANDOs—we’re flawed attempts. We can shift into ch forms, but they’re deford, clumsy. Half-sentient machines we barely command.”
I looked up sharply. “So Ismail was right. About you—about the HUSBANDOs. Experintal humans?”
Neil’s silence was brief, but heavy. He just nodded.
“I’ve heard… whispers,” I continued, voice low. “That you were the first drafts. Prototypes. The male chromoso doesn’t bond with the nanomachines the way the female one does. So instead of soldiers… they made guinea pigs.”
Neil gently set his teacup on the table, the soft clink barely audible in the hushed room. He nodded once, solemnly. “Yeah. That’s the short of it.”
Then his gaze t mine—calm, steady, and unexpectedly warm. Oh no. I know that look. He is about to slap with a flashback.
“I was four years old when the Cosmic Beast Raid tore my life apart. I survived… sohow. I don’t rember the attack itself, just the aftermath—waking up entangled in these bizarre, crimson tendrils. They pulsed and curled like roots from another world, wrapping around like they didn’t want to let go.” He paused, his brow furrowing slightly as if reaching back into a fogged mory. “I rember being pried loose by n in hazard suits. Scientists, I think. Then, boarding a spaceship under the orange-red sky. It felt like a dream.”
He gave a breathless, almost bitter laugh. “It’s strange. I’ve forgotten almost everything about my early childhood. I couldn’t tell you what my parents looked like if I tried. But those days after the raid—the sll of burning tal, the taste of IV drips, the silence inside that ship—those mories are branded into .”
“You said they took you to a spaceship,” I said, leaning forward. “Where did they bring you?”
Neil looked away, his voice softening. “Exestia. Capital of the Xyraxis Cluster,” he murmured. “Specifically, the Treenity Innovation headquarters. That’s where I was raised… if you can call it that.”
He folded his hands together. “There were others like —kids who had lost everything. Orphans gathered from across the destroyed colonies. We were injected with prototype nanomachines, our bodies studied, pushed to adapt. They said it was for science. For peace. But it felt more like cultivation.”
His lips tightened into a flat smile. “The place looked like an orphanage, functioned like a training camp. They gave us classrooms, taught us numbers, letters, how to operate machinery. From kindergarten to grade school, everything was handled by Treenity. We had full-ti physicians monitoring our vitals. And even pastors—people in white collars who preached serenity while our bones were being rewritten.”
He reached up and touched the nape of his neck, where a faint scar glimred. “Each of us HUSBANDOs was tagged with a designation. Mine was N-17.”
Hearing Neil’s story made sothing inside my skull throb—like a distant pulse behind my eyes. A wave of dizziness hit , and suddenly my mind wasn't entirely my own.
Images flickered in my head: a stark white room, sterile and humming with cold light. I saw other children seated beside , all facing the sa blackboard—though instead of letters or words, it was covered in streaming binary code. In the air above us, a hologram rotated endlessly, displaying shifting equations that made no sense and yet felt… familiar. A shadow lood just beyond the room’s edge. A figure I couldn’t quite focus on, like a corrupted file burned into mory.
My vision began glitching, flickering like an old CRT monitor. My head buzzed with static—radio static—long and droning, as if my brain had suddenly tuned into a forgotten channel.
Then the chant ca. Wordless, unintelligible, but sohow rhythmic. A low echo from deep within, like a prayer running backward. I could feel eyes on —dozens of them. Cyberpunk witchdoctors with neon masks and surgical gloves, staring down at like I was sothing laid bare on an altar.
What the hell was that?
“Zaft?” Neil’s voice cut through the noise. “Zaft! Are you okay?”
“I—Y-yeah.” I forced a breath, gripping my forehead like it would hold my thoughts together. “Don’t mind .”
A long inhale. An even longer exhale. The images faded like dying pixels. The headache receded.
“Please… continue.”
Neil hesitated for a second before nodding. “Right. Where was I? Ah… middle school.”
He straightened his back slightly, voice quieter now, like he was tiptoeing into sothing buried. “When I was twelve, everything changed again. The Treenity Innovations headquarters wasn’t attacked by Cosmic Beasts this ti—but by humans. The Neo Terrestrial Reich stord the facility.”
His eyes clouded with a distant mory. “They broke in fast. We were rounded up, corralled like inventory. And then… they started talking. Telling us things we weren’t ant to hear. That the people of Xyraxis had lied to us. That we weren’t heroes in the making—we were property. Lab rats. That all this training, all this schooling, wasn’t to save humanity from the Cosmic Beasts, but to prepare us to wage war. War against Earth’s nations.”
I swallowed hard, the weight of his words sinking in.
Neil continued. “They said the Xyraxis regi—those in power—wanted to break away from the rest of mankind. Build a new world, a new humanity, one controlled from orbit. And we HUSBANDOs… we were their weapons of independence. Custom-designed soldiers to fight in proxy wars while pretending it was for the greater good.”
“That was kind of noble of the Neo Terrestrial Reich, huh? And the Xyraxis Governnt, the Treenity Innovations- they sounded like evil organizations.” I said, forcing a smirk. “Now I’m actually considering signing up.”
Neil chuckled under his breath—a sound more tired than amused. “That’s exactly what I thought, back then. They gave sothing Treenity never did: a na.”
He looked down into his half-finished tea, swirling it idly as he spoke. “After the raid, the NTR placed with a pair of adoptive parents. That’s where the na Orbeus ca from. My foster parents… well, they were part of the organization too. Terrorists, by the textbook definition. But to ? They were the first people who treated like I wasn’t just a test subject or a number. They raised like a son. I went to a normal high school. Laughed with my friends. Took exams. Celebrated birthdays.”
He leaned back in his chair, eyes flicking toward the ceiling. “But it was all part of the plan. The NTR had already charted a course for : apply to Orbital Tech Applied Kinetics University. Blend in. Monitor. Gather intel.”
“Intel-gathering?” I asked, arching a brow. “On WAIFU logistics or sothing?”
Neil shook his head slowly. “No. It’s about us. The HUSBANDOs.”
The room suddenly felt colder.
“When the NTR hit Treenity Innovations, they didn’t just take us—they torched everything. Files. Research. Project archives. They burned our past clean. Now, nobody really knows the full story—not even us. What were the scientists really trying to create? Why are we even compatible with the nanomachines in the first place?”
He looked at , his expression dead serious now. “That’s what we’re trying to find out. And the answer might be tied to a cosmic entity that… altered us. It’s not just science, Zaft. It’s sothing much older.”
I leaned forward, tension threading my spine. “Cosmic entity? You an like the Machine God?”
Neil tilted his head slightly, as if tasting the na. “Machine God?”
"Have you heard of him? His true na is-"
For a second, I thought he recognized it—but then he shook his head. “No. It’s sothing else. Sothing called the Cosmic Tree.”
The room seed to tighten around . My breath caught in my throat.
So much had been unloaded in a matter of minutes—nas, events, history that felt like it ca from another life. And then, as if to anchor his words in sothing tangible, Neil reached up and pulled back the collar of his shirt, revealing the side of his neck.
Etched across his skin was a vein-like scar, crimson and faintly glowing under the dim light—almost like a mark left by sothing that didn’t belong to this world. Not quite human. Not quite chanical.
A forgotten scar. A living signature.
“Do you rember what I told you before?” Neil asked, his voice low. “Back when I was a kid, when they found after the Cosmic Beast Raid… I was tangled in sothing. Roots. Crimson, twitching, almost alive. Treenity called them roots of the Cosmic Tree. They said those roots were the result of blood—their blood—fused with ours. The blood of the Cosmic Beasts mingling with human veins.”
I’d spent months chasing whispers, chasing files erased from servers, chasing ghosts in old research logs and corrupted video archives from the KAWAII HQ. And now, here was Neil, speaking its na like it was just another fact in a textbook. Just like that, I was closer than ever to the truth.
Closer to the one thing I knew I had to find.
Closer to the thing I would cut down.
“This Cosmic Tree,” I said slowly, each word weighted with purpose, “what exactly is it?”
Neil’s expression darkened. He looked in the eye, and for the first ti, I saw sothing unsettling in his gaze. Not fear—but reverence. Or regret.
“It’s a horror,” he said. “A sentient manifestation that feeds off dinsional instability. It exists to summon Cosmic Beasts across realities. It doesn’t just connect worlds—it bleeds them into each other.”
Then he paused, looking almost guilty.
“Rember the Blackout Incident? Archonlight Tower, last winter. The one that made the news—when half the city went dark and Cosmic Beasts ran loose in the tropolis?”
Of course I rembered. Everyone did. The skies turning violet. The screams. The towers falling. The strange air that humd with alien static.
“That blackout,” Neil said, “was .”
My heart skipped.
“What?”
“It was ,” he repeated, quieter now. “My power. Or rather, my link to the Cosmic Tree. I lost control. The blackout was caused when I accidentally manifested it. That’s how the Beasts got through.”
My breath caught in my throat.
“So, you’re saying…”
“That’s right.” Neil nodded, his voice steady but solemn. “The Blackout Incident? That was on . And I... I am the Cosmic Tree.”
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