I have Nine Lives

Chapter 154: The root of the problem and it's fix

Mirkov didn't know what Felix wanted to do, but from the glint in Felix's eyes, Mirkov knew that it wasn't anything that he wanted to be a part of.

He knew that proximity was needed so he could actually find out why Felix had grown these wings, but no matter how smart he was, his trauma was something hard to get over.

It wasn't that he didn't want to help Felix, but when he looked at his small cute face, he would see the dead faces of his killed colleagues, bloody and disfigured.

The closer he was to Felix, the better he saw the faces, and this was the sole reason he didn't want to get closer to him. He was a smart man, and he wasn't petty. Even though he regretted the death of his colleagues, it wasn't entirely Felix's fault.

He could work with Felix, but as Felix got closer to him, he felt that notion slowly disappear from his head.

The faces of those he knew kept popping in his vision as he slowly walked backward. And fear embraced him as he tripped and fell, which confused Felix greatly as he had been ok up till now.

He couldn't help it. He just couldn't help it. He put his hands forward in an attempt to defend himself as he shook and said:

"Please don't hurt me!"

Felix was confused as he started to take a few steps backward 

"What's wrong with you, Mirkov?"

Mirkov's face warped under the images of his dead colleagues before Felix started to get away from him. However, the farther Felix got, the more normal Mirkov became.

It was an instinctual reaction from the way his brain had been imprinted with the images- when he had escaped, during that big fight between Shima and Felix. 

He got up from the floor and dusted his clothes before bowing and apologizing to Felix:

"I'm sorry for my behaving, but I just cannot control it. I think it should be better to continue this with someone else, .aybe someone who hadn't been affected by that event as much as I've been."

Mirkov kept his head down as he left the notepad with data near the box with emptied Rubix cubes.

The door of the room opened, and he left without looking back as he sent a message towards the other scientists in the base:

"Felix from the military needs help with an energy conversion problem and the creation of a new appendage from his ability, the rest of the information you need to know. Is in the main room with him."

Mirkov sighed as he disappeared into one of the rooms of the base.

Since Mirkov left Felix remained alone in the room, he had no more energy. So he couldn't fly around. All he could do was meditate and wait to restore his stamina.

The more he restored his stamina, the better he felt. That was until a jolt of pain went through his cranium and he felt the wings on his back slowly enlarging.

The wings started to grow slowly, and it was a very painful experience for Felix. He wasn't sure what was happening as he started to trash on the floor.

One second he was well, and the other second he felt as if ten thousand needles were being pierced into his back, all poisoned ones to boot.

He hadn't eaten anything else, so he didn't know why would his wings react this way, he did put them through some extensive training, and a lot of energy coursed through them. Could have that been the catalyst for this to happen?

Felix couldn't even think straight anymore as his thoughts jumbled up into a mush due to the pain he was feeling. This was worse than when he died. It was a pain that affected everything about his body.

From his knees, toes, and even bones, were being ground into a soup of pain until nothing remained of them.

He could feel his paws curl and his brain shake. This was wrong, this was very, very, wrong.

Why was he feeling like this? What was wrong with him?

Suddenly his wings burst apart as a big ball of flesh appeared there instead.

The flesh was a hard protrusion. And Felix's blood veins could be seen pulsing inside of it.

The protrusion was round like an egg and equally white as it had no fur from Felix's body on it.

The moment this happened a new scientist entered the room. And came to the horrific image, he quickly ran towards Felix and did some scans, using a small handheld device that looked like a phone.

"Radiation... blood radiation, cancer?"

The scan results were very surprising to the man. Cancer was a disease that had been cured thousands of years ago by his ancestors. He never thought he would be able to see this disease ever again, especially in a non-human person.

A small needle came out of his handheld device, and he inserted it in Felix's protrusion which started to slowly become smaller and disappeared afterward.

Then he took a silver can out of his lab coat pockets and opened Felix's mouth before feeding him the contents of the can.

Felix woke up coughing black putrid blood as he got up from the floor.

He looked down at his shaking paws and felt the weakness and pain that he had experienced before slowly disappear from his body.

Then Felix glanced towards the new arrival, it was another male scientist, this one wore the same outfit as the last one, the only difference being that this one was pretty tall and skinny like a bamboo pole, his hair was also done in a ponytail.

He had a sharp nose like a raven's beak and small eyes.

"It's good that I arrived before the thing popped on its own, but considering you have more lives, I don't think you would have minded when you lost one."

Felix shook his head as he asked:

"What the hell was that?"

"Cancer, I'm not sure how you even got it. Considering the disease had been cured for thousands of years, and the outside planets are so advanced that they should have theirs cured as well. Where would even be able to encounter cancer cells?"

The man looked at the downed notepad with the information that Mirkov registered before he took it over and scanned over it a few times with his eyes, it was obvious he was of a higher level than Mirkov as it was most likely that Vangar interfered after Mirkov's failure.

"It seems that Mirkov hadn't studied biology and energy conversion well enough before he was assigned to this part of the base."

He shook his head as he looked at Felix:

"Your ability seems to have given those wings because they are a natural energy gathering point for the Dragonoids, and they passively use them to gather energy in their bodies before flying."

"However, unlike them you are different, your body didn't fully evolve like theirs, and you don't have hex veins as well, so while the energy gathered in your body it didn't do much besides radiating it, to speak in easier terms the wings were the problem which gave you cancer. You are not like the Rubix cubes, your body cannot purify the energy that you absorbed passively and unknowingly while you flew in the universe."

"I'm surprised your ability can do such a mistake."

Felix was surprised as well since this never happened before.

Why would his ability even do that?

"Hypothetically speaking, from my point of view, your ability lets you evolve accordingly to the best options that the body and DNA you ingest but it also takes into consideration your base DNA, which is that of a cat that doesn't have a humanoid form."

"I'm not sure how this leads you to gain the wings of the dragonoids, but I guess they don't have that many good points about them, they have limited abilities, and this is also the reason they were left behind by us, they have a limited growing path unlike us."

"Now that we fixed one problem. Let's see the other. Try to fly for me."

Felix tried to do the same thing as before, and even though he didn't have wings anymore, he slowly started to float from the ground, regardless of that.

Actually, it seemed easier to him compared to before.

He felt something in his body wasn't blocked anymore. He felt free.

Felix made his way through the air at a moderate pace before increasing his flight speed as he blitzed around the room until he couldn't control himself anymore and found the end of a wall before crashing head-first into it.

The man nodded seeing Felix's flight ability, Felix had already dropped on the floor as a big bump appeared on his head that he nursed using his paws.

"It seems that everything should be okay from now on, this was a problem that would have fixed itself with time, but you would have had to die first for it."

"Anyways I think this should have been all. You should be able to fly with the energy that you normally find around yourself on the surface of the planet, and the consumption from the Rubix cubes should be around 1,2% per half an hour."

The man bid his farewell as quickly as he came, while Felix looked at his receding back.

A notification appeared on his armor's interface as Vangar's face appeared in front of him:

"I heard you are done with your problems, ready for another mission?"