Everyone warned Laura never to touch Marco Bellini’s father’s chair, but when his heart device started beeping, she cut it open and uncovered a terrifying secret… / Chapter 96 / 100

Chapter 96 - Surgical Counter-Strike

"Marco, you have to slow down!" I commanded, gripping both sides of his face and forcing him to look directly into my eyes. "If your pulse hits one hundred and twenty, the turbine reaches critical mass!"

"I can't control it, Laura!" he gasped, sweat dripping from his chin onto my hands. "The feedback loop is too strong. Every pulse from the core shocks my heart, and my heart sends the signal right back. It's an acoustic loop!"

"Then we cut the loop," I said with absolute surgical certainty.

I turned to Luca. "Cover the entryway. More of those automatons will be coming once they realize the system is under threat."

Luca nodded grimly, racking his weapon and taking cover behind a heavy hydraulic stanchion at the threshold. "Do your work, doc. Nobody gets through this door while I'm drawing breath."

I dropped to my knees in front of Marco, pulling open my surgical kit. I had no sterile field, no general anesthesia, and only local lidocaine to numb the agonizing trauma I was about to inflict on his chest.

"Laura... what are you going to do?" Marco asked, his breath coming in short, agonizing wheezes.

"Your father designed this device with an obsidian bypass valve," I explained, pulling the fine-tipped obsidian scalpel from its velvet case. "I saw it when I cut open the chair in your study, and I saw it when I examined your initial telemetry. Samuel Bellini was a perfectionist. He would never build a primary circuit without an emergency shut-off—a manual arterial shunt."

"Where is it?" Marco breathed, gritting his teeth as I began applying antiseptic directly to his torn surgical scars.

"It's buried three centimeters beneath your main left coronary conduit," I said, looking him dead in the eye. "I have to cut through the fibrous scar tissue while you are fully conscious. If I miss by a fraction of a millimeter, I sever your thoracic aorta. If I cut too shallow, the bypass won't engage, and the core will overload."

Marco stared at me for a long, silent moment. The madness of the turbine hummed around us; the cold iron of the ship vibrated with catastrophic energy. Then, the corner of his mouth curved into a faint, defiant smile.

"I trust your hands, Nurse Vance," he whispered. "More than I ever trusted my father’s."

"Bite down on this," I ordered, placing a rolled strip of sterile gauze between his teeth.

I didn't hesitate. With surgical precision, I pressed the tip of the obsidian blade into the seam of his mechanical sternum.

A sickening crunch echoed through the small space as the blade parted the calcified scar tissue. Marco let out a muffled scream through the gauze, his muscles locking in blinding agony, his hands clawing into the grated metal floor until his fingernails tore.

Blood—thick, dark, and smelling faintly of machine oil—welled up from the incision.

I ignored the gore, my fingers moving with mechanical certainty. My fingertips brushed against cold, faceted stone: the internal shunt valve. It was a tiny, intricate lever of solid obsidian, no larger than a grain of rice, designed to decouple the mechanical escapement from the heart’s biological nerve bundle.