The Martial Unity

The action of resurrecting her friends drained Ria more than anything else she had ever done in her life. Manipulating materia prima in such large quantities and with such precision and accuracy wasn’t easy. If not for the fact that she was accustomed to wielding a spark of it in battle, she would not have succeeded even to the extent that she had.

It took every ounce of willpower and control that she had. It took all the concentration she could muster, diverting all of her attention towards the sole task of resurrecting her friends.

Reversing the autolysis and the coagulation of blood was not easy, but she painstakingly reversed much of the process, undoing the chaos of death that had begun to consume the otherwise pristine order of life.

However, the Second Law of Thermodynamics stated that the entropy of a closed system increased with time, making it more complicated for her to drastically reduce the entropy from the returning bodies of her friends.

The solution was rather simple and uninspired even.

She borrowed a page from the virus’s book.

She vented entropy from her domain, just like the virus vented entropy from the manifold.

RUMBLE

The world around her continued tremoring rather violently as a steady flow of heat was released from the environment, flowing outwards. The heat gradient and flux caused the wind currents to blow stronger, washing across the entire region. The darkness of the night sky was cut through with the bright glow of her domain, radiated as a result of the generation of countless electromagnetic nano-tractor beams.

RUMBLE

”Huff… hufff… huff…” she breathed heavily and frantically, her determined eyes never once moving away from the bodies of her friends. The breathing technique that she was using was extremely taxing to use, especially when used through an exo-Martial suit. But she managed to manipulate currents finely to generate a tremendous amount of heat.

Heat generated light and, if manipulated accurately and finely, could be used to generate the tractor beams that she used to weave her friends further and further away from death, and closer to life.

The first among them to arrive was Runark.

He was the last to die; his body had been dead only for five minutes.

Her amber eyes lit up as she patched his wounds up, restoring his blood to how it had been at the moment of death. She had restored all of his tissues to how they had been, all of his cells had been rewound to the state they were in at the moment of his death.

His skin regained color, the blood causing it to look more alive and less pale. His blood was in the liquid state that only living blood normally could be, his flesh and skin returning to their loose and soft state.

He had arrived at the edge of death and the brink of life.

Now all that was left was the final push.

The final push that crossed the boundary.

A synchronized kickstart of the metabolism of all the systems in his body and at all levels, from the micro to the macro.

BADUMP

She manipulated his heart with targeted pulses of current, causing it to beat even though they had to return to life. Then she forced oxygen into his lungs, causing it to meet with blood, where she further pushed the exchange of gases within cells, replacing carbon dioxide with oxygen.

The beating heart, along with manually operated circulatory systems, sent the oxygenated blood across the entire body, but most importantly to the brain, where she had prepared the blood-brain barrier and the neurons in his brain to be in the right chemical state to accept the oxygen.

She watched as the oxygenated blood reached his head, causing oxygen to be exchanged for carbon dioxide. She had to go as far as to force the oxidation of ATP molecules to trigger the creation of energy.

And then, chemistry took over.

Like a car that merely needed to be pushed or a bike that needed to be kick started in order to work, the cogs of biochemistry began moving and a surge of neural activity spiked in his brain. The first to light up was his cerebellum, immediately sending a flood of neuron signals through his nervous system to each and every single part of his body, taking over involuntary function.

Including the heart, which she had prepared to be restarted immediately.

BADUMP

BADUMP

BADUMP

”Huff…!” His chest suddenly expanded as he inhaled of his own volition, even if involuntarily, before breathing out. ”…fuuuu.”

Ria’s amber eyes lit up with ecstasy and delight. ”Runark…!”

His heart beat by itself.

He breathed by himself.

His brain continued to light up with neural activity.

He was alive.

His condition was stable for the moment, from what she could tell. Every bit of her wanted to celebrate, but she knew that she wasn’t done yet.

She had three others.

With one scratched off her list, her burden had reduced substantially.

She could focus more on the others. It increased the odds that she would be able to revive them successfully.

She moved next to Misha, who had died before Runark. She had been harder to bring back from the brink, but she had managed to succeed. Misha also posed other challenges, such as not being a Martial Artist.

She was a hybrid between a hemosapien and a tekvore. Her blood wasn’t biological, but rather biotechnological. She could literally weave biotechnological constructs with her blood from scratch.

Ria had noticed that her blood hadn’t coagulated. Even though the cells died, they didn’t immediately begin breaking apart the way blood cells normally could be expected to upon death.

It made her job easier, but it also raised the possibility that she was missing something about the unique biology and biotechnology in her friend’s body.

’That doesn’t matter. What matters most is the brain.’

If the brain was restored and stabilized, then the body could almost certainly be restored as well. Modern medical technology was unprecedented.

’I must restore her mind, no matter what!’