[Volume 1 | Chapter 37: Schweißhund (II)]

The change began subtly at first. It was a ripple in reality's fabric, a whisper of wrongness that made the very air recoil. Then came the steam, erupting from his flesh in white clouds of dark pink—cerise—that twisted like living things in the moonlight. His skin bulged and shifted as if thousands of serpents writhed beneath its surface, blood vessels rising to prominence in patterns resembling circuit boards designed by a mad god.

He took a step forward.

The concrete beneath his foot began to melt, molecules separating into component atoms as if reality itself rejected his presence. The air around him shimmered with visible heat distortion which created a mirage effect that made it taxing to track his exact position.

"Stay back!" Leila's voice carried more desperation than command as she fired another [Gran Prana Burst].

The spell, powerful enough to burst open steel at close range, simply unraveled as it touched the steam.

"Oi, oi, didn't your dad teach you better manners?" Nemesis clicked his tongue, examining the dissipated spell amusedly. "Though I guess I should thank you. Now my cells have had a nice taste of your prana signature." His grin widened as he tapped his temple again.

Acacia's eyes narrowed at those words, his mind latching onto the peculiar terminology. Cells? The way Nemesis's blood vessels pulsed with each new attack, the way he tapped his temple…

"What's wrong, Irregular? Finally realizing just how outclassed you are? Or maybe..."

Those red eyes gleamed with terrible knowing.

"That big brain of yours is starting to assemble the pieces?"

He vanished.

One moment, he stood meters away; the next, he existed in their space, his fist stopping mere inches from Acacia's face. Only Leila's desperate [Claustra] saved the Irregular from having his skull cave in. The barrier shattered as fragments of prana dispersed like stardust in the night.

Nemesis's eyes narrowed.

"The equations you use in Claustra's Integration Sequence are different from other people. That tripped me up for a bit," he mused, steam coiling from his form like serpentine fractals. His other hand shot forward, catching Leila's throat in an ironclad grip before she could bring Novascope to bear. "Nothing but pointless, though,"

"Let her go!" Acacia charged, desperation overriding logic. Another steel pole in his hands whistled through the air only for Nemesis to catch it with his free hand. The metal sublimated this time, turning directly from solid to gas as his touch triggered chain reactions at the molecular level.

"You know what's funny?" Nemesis violently released Leila, letting her crumple to her knees gasping for air. "The more you struggle, the stronger I become. Every substance..." His foot shattered concrete. "Every force..." His hand dispersed another [Gran Prana Burst] before it could form.

"Every desperate attempt just gives me more time to adapt!"

Acacia's mind raced as he helped Leila to her feet. The way Nemesis's veins flared with each new interaction, how his cells seemed to process information like living computers...there was a pattern here, something just beyond his grasp.

The steaming demon vanished again, but this time Leila was ready. Her Contender sang, firing three [Gran Prana Bursts] as each shot targeted a different vital point.

Nemesis didn't dodge.

The first shot dissolved before impact.

The second barely dimpled his coat.

The third didn't even reach him.

Distance blurred again.

Leila barely had time to register movement before Nemesis's fist impacted her [Claustra]. The barrier didn't just break this time—it inverted, its own prana patterns turning against it as his Ars Magna shattered its fundamental properties. She flew backward, Novascope spinning from her grasp as arguably the strongest defensive spell in her arsenal became nothing more than another data point to Nemesis.

"Your Claustras have a frequency of around 442 hertz," he lectured almost academically as he advanced. "You use different equations than others to intentionally lower the frequency of your barriers so their density is artificially increased. It took me a while to adapt to them, but they might as well be paper now."

Acacia moved without thinking, placing himself between Nemesis and Leila. But even as he stood his ground, his mind kept working, kept analyzing. The way Nemesis's body responded to each new threat, how his cells seemed to process and adapt to stimuli…

Something about that process nagged at him, a half-remembered lesson from his studies of biological systems back at Heinemann.

"Oh?" Nemesis paused, those terrible red eyes studying Acacia like he was a prized lamb in a slaughterhouse. "You want to try again, Irregular? You think your body is harder to process than your sticks?" He flexed his hands, steam coiling from his fingers like serpents made of mist. "Go ahead, then...let's see what your cells have to offer!"

He flickered like a madman's fever dream, appearing right before Acacia with his hand outstretched—

"[Gran Nautilash]!"

Water agglomerated in the humid night air, forming a crystalline whip that wrapped around Nemesis's torso. For a fraction of a second, surprise flickered across his features—not at the attack itself, but at the fact that he hadn't sensed it coming. Taught to her by Pandora Kircheisen, Leila's spell yanked him like an unchained wrecking ball, launching Nemesis into one of the deep massive craters his own footsteps had created.

Leila collapsed to her knees as she clutched her stomach. Blood trickled from her nose. It was a telltale sign of prana overuse.

"Move!" Acacia grabbed her arm, already calculating trajectories. "The warehouse—now!"

They ran.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Each footfall felt like thunder in the oppressive silence, their breaths coming in ragged gasps as they crossed the killing ground between crater and building. Behind them, the cerise steam erupted from the pit like a geyser from hell, carrying with it the sound of Nemesis's laughter.

But they were fast enough; the Irregular managed to open and lock the door to the main building.

"—Acacia!" Leila gasped, staggering and wheezing as she held onto her stomach. She winced as she clutched her abdomen, clearly straining with pain as she attempted to keep it together. She held onto the wall of the warehouse for dear life as the agony settled in from prana overuse. Nonetheless, she persevered. Her prana seemed to move in erratic patterns, unable to locate a determined direction, aimless and frantic.

"Calm down," Acacia whispered sharply. "If you talk any louder, that bastard Nemesis will find us." His tone alone seemed to quiet her nerves, forcing her to steady herself. "We don't have much time," he added, his voice low and hurried. "I've figured out what that 'Ars Magna' thing he mentioned about is."

"...His Ars Magna?" Slowly, she slid down the steel wall, clutching her stomach in pain as her cells were strained from the prana exertion.

"Have you heard of neuroplasticity?" Acacia asked rhetorically. "It's the brain's ability to adapt and reorganize itself in response to new experiences. But Nemesis's body has taken this a step further. What he called «Deathblossom»… it most likely enhances his neural connections but the biological pathways tied to his immune system—specifically, microglia."

"...Microglia?"

"They're specialized immune cells in the brain. Normally, they act as the cleanup crew, identifying threats like dead neurons or pathogens and signaling the rest of the body to respond. But with his Ars Magna, Nemesis has supercharged them. They're no longer just passive defenders. They act as bio-sensors, detecting anything foreign… chemical, physical, even prana-based attacks, and sending that data directly to his brain. The data stimulates his thalamus, which acts as a relay center, and from there, it spreads to his temporal lobe and hippocampus, essentially hardwiring new defensive responses into his system."

Leila blinked and sighed.

She wasn't dumb by any means, but his explanation flew over her head just as well as it could for almost anyone else. She stared at him with a blank face as she tried her best to comprehend everything he just said, but alas, it didn't work.

"So…what does this all mean?"

"You don't get it?" He asked, taking a finger to his temple and tapping his head knowingly. "I'm saying that this Ars Magna thing, or whatever, revolves around perfect adaptability. Nemesis has essentially trained his body to adapt to threats in real time. Say you hit him with your [Gran Prana Burst] or even just a [Prana Burst], those enhanced microglia would break down the attack's signature and send detailed chemical and energy data to his brain. Within moments, his neuroplasticity would rewire his neural pathways to counteract that exact attack."

"That's... insane." She blinked, stunned. "But isn't that just overclocking his brain? How can he sustain that?"

"When we were fighting him, his movements before he activated his Ars Magna were extremely precise and calculated. But once he activated it, and that steaming red aura came off his body, his movements became a lot more jagged and forceful, lacking less care in his muscle distribution or technique. Whenever he swatted away your [Gran Prana Burst] from earlier or when he threw his weight around, they felt unnatural like there was extra weight or lethargy around his body. An adept Thaumaturge such as him who probably possesses fine prana flow like him wouldn't have acted so tired. Based on that, he's probably focusing on other things that slightly lessen his agility. And what would be besides..."

"His brain processing so much sensory data that it hinders his agility?" She said, finishing his sentence.

"You're reaching my train of thought. Added on the top that to activate his Ars Magna, he touched the temple of his forehead with one finger, that's probably the substitute for his Aria. Arias can be used to visualize the flow of prana or spell you're currently activating, so doing that is already a giveaway that his Ars Magna revolves around neural patterns in the brain. Put simply: neural activity is his trigger," Acacia confirmed. "I also noticed that you were looking at his veins. That must've been because your Empyrean was detecting an influx of prana flowing through that area, confirming that the process he's doing is solely internal and not done by any external factors."

"...You noticed that even when he was coming at us?" Even in a dire instance such as this, the human condition could not resist gaping at sudden revelations, and Leila was not an exception to such an axiom.

"I managed." He shrugged. "Microglia, the brain's primary immune cells, are the only cells capable of detecting, responding to, and regulating changes in the brain's environment at the cellular level. Therefore, they have to be the mechanism through which Nemesis gains his adaptive defense processes. Once I figured that out, everything started making sense."

"Wait! But how does he process all of that sensory data? Surely his brain can't handle that much information at once?" Leila pressed.

Acacia's sapphire eyes took a focused gleam that appeared whenever he was unraveling a complex problem.

"I noticed something interesting about his defensive patterns. When you first blocked him with [Claustra], his system took several seconds to adapt. However, with each subsequent hit, the adaptation time decreased exponentially as he understood the equations you were using. That suggests he's not processing the full complexity of each attack…unless he wanted to. He's identifying critical thresholds."

"Critical thresholds?"

"Think about how hospitals handle poison cases, for example. They don't need to understand every molecular interaction to treat someone. They just need to know the Median Lethal Dose—the LD50 to be exact—which is the point at which a substance becomes fatal. It's the most efficient way to quantify threat levels."

Understanding flickered in Leila's eyes. "So Nemesis's system is doing the same thing..."

"Exactly. His enhanced microglia aren't trying to process every aspect of an attack. They're calculating the specific threshold at which it becomes lethal to his system. Once they have that value, his neuroplasticity can adjust his cellular defenses to neutralize anything below that critical point."

"But how did you make that connection between poison treatment and his defensive abilities? Isn't that too much of a leap in logic?"

"Four things," Acacia replied, ticking them off on his fingers. "First, the steam rising from his skin: excess heat from neural activity. Second, the time delay in his adaptations follows the same curve as biological systems processing toxins—rapid initial response followed by diminishing adjustment time. And third..." He gestured to Leila's eyes, still glowing with Empyrean's power. "You probably saw it yourself. The prana flow in his cerebral blood vessels likely spikes right before each adaptation, just like how the liver floods with blood when processing poisons."

He sighed, realizing he was talking way too much.

"And lastly, just going in raw and Flash Analyzing seemingly indecipherable data from your neural network would not only be impossible without pouring in ungodly amounts of prana, but also extremely impractical in battle. He doesn't go from microglia to invincibility instantly."

"That's why he touches his temple to activate it! A suggestion to his brain to maximize blood flow to stimulate the microglia network..." Leila deduced.

"Maximum cooling efficiency too." Acacia chuckled, imagining Nemesis to be machine engine. "Also, recall what I said earlier about his increased erratic movements. When he first activated his Ars Magna, his movements were precise, controlled. But as the fight continued, they became increasingly erratic. I think you can understand why—"

"Cognitive load," Leila interrupted. "It makes sense that each new threshold calculation adds to the strain..."

She didn't even need me to finish. He smirked at her intelligence.

"It also generates more heat that needs to be dissipated. The steam expelling from him is his body desperately trying to prevent his enhanced neural activity from cooking his brain. It seems like he's using it cleverly as a way to add heat into his attacks to make them more destructive. Regardless, the more thresholds he has to maintain simultaneously..."

"The closer he gets to his biological limits," Leila finished. "But then..." Her eyes widened as she followed the logic to its conclusion. "If we could force his system to calculate multiple lethal thresholds at once..."

She gasped. Late it was, she understood his scheme—a desperate gamble.

Sweat dripped down Acacia Belmont's brow. Dread or excitement? Not even he could explain the sudden rush of adrenaline.

"Let's see how well the great Nemesis handles secondary school chemistry."

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