Fight, Flight, or Freeze: The Healer's Story - Chapter 25: A Kidnapper With A Conscience

Rex was an ordinary salaryman, resigned to a dull life of monotony in a towering megacity. But his world shatters when he’s conscripted by Nexum Dynamics, a ruthless megacorporation, and thrust into a brutal war for a barren, alien world. The planet holds unimaginable riches, but it’s also swarming with the Krhyssari, an insectoid race that dominates the surface with their hive-mind precision and relentless aggression. Amid the carnage, Rex had an extraordinary encounter with Cleo, an ancient AI, a survivor of a long-extinct civilization. Cleo isn’t just an artificial intelligence; she’s a consciousness imbued with memories of her people’s interstellar empire and equipped with advanced bio-nanotechnology. Offering Rex a new purpose and unmatched power, she transforms his fragile human body into a hybrid of living metal and flesh, making him the ultimate weapon. But Cleo is more than a tool of war. As she journeys alongside Rex, her cold, logical algorithms evolve, shaped by his humanity. Together, they form a bond that transcends the boundaries of man and machine, discovering love in the midst of chaos. As Rex and Cleo fight for survival, they uncover a shared ambition, to rise as intergalactic overlords, uniting or conquering the galaxy.

“Had that night been quiet and windless… If she had never appeared in front of me…”

Whenever he recalled the past, Clyde felt endless regret. If he had known that being a Suzerain would be so troublesome, he would have never picked up that troublesome Bloodkin. In fact, he would never have even left that secluded Death Canyon.

“Big Brother Clyde, don’t be so dejected. You are now a well-known Suzerain, a hero of the entire continent, the Human Race’s Savior!”

“Lucifer, enough. I just want to return to my quiet life.” Clyde, an Evil God, had yearned for a quiet life, but by chance— or fate— he had met a young a mysterious Bloodkin Lolita named “Lucifer.” Under her guidance, Clyde embarked on his destiny, rising from the unknown as a nameless wanderer to become a Suzerain of a fief before taking the throne of the entire Ximengsi Continent.

There was just one problem: he who would be the torch of the human race wasn’t even from this dimension.

In all my life, I’ve only made two mistakes that I regret. The first was filling out my entrance exam application wrong, and the second was offending Zhong Yuan. If I had to use an idiom to describe the impact of my mistake, it would be simply, ‘Life is no better than death’. And if I had to use an idiom to describe Zhong Yuan’s offenses to me, it would be simply, ‘Too many crimes to record’. And yet, for as evil and wicked as he was, he attracted girls the way that flowers attracted bees and butterflies.

It happened that one day, for some reason, I taunted Zhong Yuan, “The King of Hell sent you to torture some more people, didn’t he?” Without a change in expression, he replied, “In order to torture fewer people, I decided to just choose one person to torture for the rest of my life.” I asked him, “What do you mean?” He smiled at me and answered, “If you don’t go to hell, who will?”

- Description from Novelupdates

It is an era of artificial superintelligences, interstellar travel, gene medicine, and virtual reality worlds. Far into Earth’s future, 15-year-old Gu Ding is a student of Cerulean Military Academy by day, and tavern waiter by night. His ambition: Become the space pirate with the highest bounty offered by the Universal Federation Government. With the help of Neptune, a neonate super-intelligence, Gu Ding finds himself thrust into a galaxy of shadowy organizations, political underdealings, and otherworldly forces that lie beyond human comprehension…