Chapter 552 | I’m Going To Need More Samples

Chapter 552: 552 | I’m Going To Need More Samples

The medical wing smelled like antiseptic and something else I couldn’t place. Something chemical and slightly sweet, like someone had tried to mask the hospital smell with a candle that cost too much and did too little.

I sat on the edge of the examination table in a hospital gown that left approximately nothing to the imagination, waiting for Juno Mak to finish whatever she was doing on the other side of the privacy curtain. The gown was one of those backless nightmares that hospitals seemed to design specifically to remind patients that dignity was a privilege, not a right.

〘 Physical Examination Event Detected. 〙

〘 Medical Personnel: Juno Mak. Temptation Gauge: 0. 〙

〘 The Host is reminded that maintaining cover during medical examination is paramount to continued operation. 〙

Zero. A flat zero on the Temptation Gauge. I wasn’t sure if I should be relieved or insulted. Every other woman I’d spent more than five minutes with had at least registered something on the scale, even if it was just the ambient baseline of proximity. Juno Mak looked at me the way a mechanic looked at an engine. Interesting problem. Nothing more.

The curtain pulled back with a sharp rattle of metal rings on metal rod.

Juno stood there with a tablet in one hand and something wrapped in plastic in the other, still chewing. Her dark hair was pulled into those two loose buns that looked like she’d done them in thirty seconds and then forgotten about them entirely. Her medical coat hung open over a band shirt I couldn’t quite read, something with faded lettering and what looked like a cartoon skull. Her eyes swept over me once, top to bottom, with the enthusiasm of someone cataloging inventory.

"You’re healing faster than yesterday."

Not a question. Not a greeting. Just data.

"Good morning to you too."

She crossed to the counter and set down the tablet, still chewing whatever she was eating. Granola bar, from the wrapper sticking out of her coat pocket. "I don’t do mornings. I do patients. You’re a patient. Take off the gown."

I blinked. "The whole gown?"

"The gown is preventing me from seeing your back. Your back is where the interesting data is. Remove the gown." She turned to face me fully, and those half-lidded eyes held absolutely nothing resembling shame or awareness that she’d just told a teenage boy to strip. "Unless there’s something under there I haven’t seen before. I’ve seen a lot. I’m not expecting surprises."

The thing about Juno Mak was that she wasn’t flirting. She wasn’t being coy. She wasn’t even being provocative on purpose. She was being clinical in a way that somehow managed to be more disarming than if she’d been trying to seduce me.

I pulled the gown over my head and dropped it on the table beside me.

She didn’t react. Her eyes tracked to my torso, to the fading marks where my ribs had been broken four days ago, to the shoulder that had been separated and was now just slightly stiff in the morning. Then she circled behind me, and I felt her fingers press against my spine without warning.

"The scarring is minimal. Your epithelial regeneration is tracking at four hundred percent of baseline now." Her fingers moved up, pressing against spots I couldn’t see. "The burn margins are closing faster than the tissue samples suggested they would. Either your body is learning, or there’s a secondary mechanism I haven’t identified yet."

"Learning sounds good. I like the idea that my body is getting better at not dying."

"Learning implies adaptation. Adaptation implies your Aspect is responding to damage input and adjusting output accordingly." She pressed harder on a spot near my left shoulder blade, and I felt something that was almost pain but not quite. "That’s not standard Channeler behavior. Channelers project. They don’t adapt."

"Maybe I’m special."

"Maybe your file is fiction." She said it the same way she might have said the sky is blue or the soup machine is broken. Just fact. No judgment. "I told your mother figure I wasn’t interested in the literary analysis. I’m interested in the numbers. The numbers say you’re not what you’re registered as. The numbers don’t care why."

Her fingers found another spot, pressed, released. I felt the warmth of her palm against my skin, and for a moment I was acutely aware that I was shirtless in an empty medical wing with a woman who was touching me without any of the usual social scaffolding that made touch make sense.

〘 Physical Contact Detected. 〙

〘 Temptation Gauge: Juno Mak — 0. 〙

〘 The System notes that the target’s physiological response to the Host is within normal professional parameters. 〙

〘 The System also notes that the Host’s physiological response to the target is not. 〙

I very deliberately did not think about the fact that the System could apparently read my vitals.

Juno circled back around to face me, and her eyes dropped to my chest, my stomach, the lines of muscle that two months of Halloran training and whatever the System had done to my body had carved into place. She looked at all of it the way someone might look at a particularly interesting specimen in a jar.

"Your muscle density has increased since your intake physical. By a significant margin."

"I’ve been training hard."

"Training doesn’t account for this. Neither does your registered Aspect classification." She reached out and pressed two fingers against my stomach, right above my navel, and I felt my abs tighten involuntarily under her touch. "Standard physical development caps around age twenty-two for males. You’re eighteen. Your baseline should still be establishing. Instead, your tissue reads like someone in their mid-twenties who has been training at professional intensity for years."

Her fingers pressed again, and this time they traced a line up the center of my chest, following the path of my sternum. Clinical. Totally clinical. Just a doctor examining a patient.

I was not thinking clinical thoughts.

"I’m going to need more samples."

"More?"