Global Awakening: Starting With Ten SSS-Rank Talents

The sterilization lights hummed with a low, monotonous vibration that quickly became the background track to Jet’s waking nightmare.

”Lie down,” Master Kuze commanded, adjusting a sterile black glove over his right hand.

The digital rotary machine held in his left fingers whined to life, its hyper-fine titanium needles moving at ten thousand cycles per minute.

Jet stripped down to his boxers, stepping onto the cold tile floor, and laid flat on his stomach against the rigid leather procedure bed. He gripped the metal edges of the frame, staring straight down into the floor drainage system.

He knew what was coming. He remembered the scientific journals from his past life. He knew that the human skin was a massive biological conductor, and forcing ten tattoos onto a skin was the equivalent of rewiring a house while the main breaker was still on.

”We are starting with the back,” Kuze’s voice drifted down from above him, completely detached and clinical. ”The Eight-Armed Asura. If you scream, I don’t care. But if you twitch even a fraction of a millimeter, the geometric alignment fails and I will personally throw you out of my shop. Understand?”

”Do it,” Jet muttered, his voice muffled by the headrest.

The first strike of the needle felt like a line of liquid fire being poured directly into his shoulder blades.

Jet’s entire skeletal frame locked up. His jaw clenched so hard his molars ground against one another with a sickening crunch. The organic, high-conductivity black pigment injected into his dermis didn’t just stain his skin; it felt as if it were actively boring into his nerve endings.

For twelve continuous hours, Kuze did not stop. The master artist moved with frightening, machinelike efficiency, tracing the six paths of slaughter across Jet’s upper back, carving the monstrous, multi-armed war deity into the flesh. Blood and clear lymphatic fluid welled up continuously, only to be wiped away by Kuze’s steady, gloved hands.

Jet did not make a single sound.

He forced his mind to disconnect from his physical body, anchoring his consciousness to the memories of the armored monster’s foot crushing his world ten years in the future.

Compared to that absolute despair, this agonizing burning was a luxury.

When Kuze finally switched off the machine, Jet’s back was a raised, bleeding mess of raw, crimson-tinted skin. The outline of the Asura was complete, its menacing eyes etched perfectly over his spine.

”Three days of recovery,” Kuze said, stepping back and tossing his bloodied gloves into a biohazard bin. ”Get into the isolation tank. The regeneration fluids will stop the tissue necrosis, but the neurological shock is entirely on you.”

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By the second week, the studio had become a blurred sensory loop of blinding white lights, the metallic scent of blood, and the ceaseless, high-pitched whine of the rotary needles.

The second tattoo was the Rakshasa, winding its fanged, right chest, shoulder and upper arm, demonic sleeve.

The pain was different here, sharper, biting deep into the thin skin of his inner wrist and trailing over the sensitive tendons of his elbow.

During the three-day recovery windows, Jet didn’t go home. He couldn’t face Inez with his body wrapped in medical bandages and his skin radiating heat like a furnace.

He called her every evening, forcing his voice to sound light and regular, telling her that he had landed an intense, highly lucrative security shift for a major corporation that required him to stay on-site.

He transferred a portion of his remaining credit to her account to ensure she could buy whatever she needed, then crawled back into the studio’s medical isolation tank to let the synthetic regeneration fluids mend his torn cells.

By the time Kuze began the fourth tattoo—the Ouroboros coiled tightly around his waist and abdomen, Jet’s biological limits were beginning to fracture.

His skin was severely inflamed. The continuous injection of heavy, dense runic pigments had triggered a massive immune response. His body was treating the ink like a foreign parasitic invasion.

A persistent, burning fever of 103 degrees locked his joints in constant pain.

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”Your lymphatic system is reaching its saturation threshold,” Kuze warned on the sixteenth day, his own gaunt face looking increasingly exhausted as he stared down at Jet’s trembling waist.

The skin around the serpent’s tail was swollen and bright red, rejecting the initial shading lines.

”The tissue is too tight. If I keep pushing the needle into an active inflammatory field, the lines will bleed into each other under the skin. The conceptual precision will be ruined.”

Jet forced his eyes open, his white pupils bloodshot and wild through the haze of the fever. He reached out with his left hand, grabbed Kuze’s wrist, and pushed the rotary machine back down toward his arm.

”Increase the cellular regeneration dosage in the iv lines,” Jet rasped, his cracked lips bleeding as he spoke. ”Do not stop. We have fourteen days left. Use the freezing agents to numb the local tissue, but keep carving.”

Kuze stared at him for a long, quiet moment. He was a man obsessed with his craft, but looking at Jet, he realized he wasn’t working on a human being anymore.

He was working on a demon driving a broken meat suit.

”Fine,” Kuze muttered, turning up the dial on the medical support console. ”If your waist falls off from gangrene, I’m keeping the deposit.”

By the twenty-fourth day, during the execution of the eighth tattoo, Ilios, the Undying Sun, directly over the center of jis chest,Jet was barely sleeping.

He could no longer lie flat without experiencing intense, radiating agony across his entire torso and back. His chest felt as if it were being compressed by an industrial vice.

Every single breath he took required a conscious effort of willpower. He sat upright on the edge of the procedure table, his head hanging low, his hands gripped around his knees to keep from violently shaking.

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”Your blood pressure is bottoming out,” the receptionist said, her usual bored expression completely gone as she adjusted the medical monitoring lines attached to Jet’s neck.

Her hands were trembling slightly as she swapped out a fresh bag of nutrient fluids. ”Master, his heart rate is spiking past one hundred and sixty. If we don’t administer a neural blocker, his central nervous system might short-circuit.”

”No neural blockers,” Jet snarled, his voice a low, animalistic growl that echoed throughthe sterile room.

Kuze didn’t argue anymore. He simply wiped the sweat from his own forehead, grabbed a fresh needle cartridge, and dipped it into the dense solar-gold pigment.

The machine roared back to life, and the needle pierced the thin skin over Jet’s breastbone. Jet clutched the edge of the metal table so hard the steel casing deformed under his fingers.

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