“...Huh?”
Luca’s eyes flew open. He’d expected the sensation of floating on top of machine legs, and it wasn’t that. This was closer to the feeling of actually standing on two legs.
“Whoa...?”
Marveling over and over, Luca took a careful step without meaning to.
It wasn’t simply walking. He sent the flow of force running from his toes to his knees and on to his hips out along the footwork of the martial art.
Slide.
His movement, gliding across the carpet, was so smooth it was hard to believe the prosthetics had only just been connected. Startled by his own motion, Luca swung his right hand lightly through the air. The prosthetic was reproducing his trained muscle memory perfectly.
“My god... Captain, look at that! The synchronization rate is climbing ridiculously!”
Kai shouted excitedly at his holographic pad. A faint smile at his mouth, the captain watched Luca carry the martial forms on in the middle of the room as though dancing.
Luca turned a smooth full circle in place, then came right up to the captain and stopped. He was still unsteady, but his eyes sparkled with a vitality no one had seen in them before.
“Haa, haa. You were right.”
Breathing hard, Luca looked up at him.
“This feels far more like my own body than I expected. No, it’s clearer than before. I can tell exactly where I’m standing, where I need to send my strength.”
Luca, always so busy pushing people away, laid his palm quietly against the captain’s chest for the first time. The heartbeat carried through the machine hand resonated with his nervous system.
“Luca, does it feel good?”
“Mm...!”
“Impressive. Moving like this right away. I didn’t expect this place to become your training ground, though.”
The captain ruffled his hair and then swept him up. With the prosthetics attached, Luca seemed twice as heavy as before. To the captain he was still light as a feather.
“There. For a first session, that was excellent. But push it and Obel will get angry again, so let’s stop here for today.”
“Ah, I can do more...! Put me down, and stop treating me like a kid...!”
“No. Until you’ve adapted, your nerves will tire fast under that much information. We’ll add thirty minutes a day.”
“I can do more!”
“Stubborn thing.”
Grumbling, Luca shoved at the captain’s shoulder with the machine arm, far harder than before. The captain caught the force and turned it gently aside.
The output might have been dialed down, but it was still a chrome alloy body that didn’t break easily. Under a grip that would have had Kai or Obel howling Agh! My hand! Ease up!, the machine arm didn’t budge.
Of course, he had no intention of pointlessly breaking a precious prosthetic that had only just come into resonance with Luca, so the captain slowly eased the pressure out of his hand.
“Shall we check whether you’re really all right?”
The captain’s large hand went to the soft inside of Luca’s thigh. The moment he gripped firmly at the boundary where machine met flesh...
“...?!”
A prickling electrical signal surged up Luca’s spine and through his whole body as though running out of control. His over-activated nervous system was reacting sensitively to outside contact.
“Ah...!”
A short moan slipped from between his lips. It wasn’t simply painful, nor was it unpleasant. It was an unfamiliar stimulus.
Luca shrank instinctively. The captain only pulled him deeper against his chest.
“Well? Just as I said, the sensations are strange, aren’t they?”
Had Obel been there, he’d have explained the phenomenon expertly.
“A very typical case of sensory hypersensitivity. It’s a micro-current backflow at the junction where organic tissue bonds with the neural interface.”
But the only people in the quarters were Kai, busy monitoring the prosthetics’ responses, and a captain with no intention of laying out medical knowledge so grandly. So Luca went on twitching, not understanding the prickling sensation at all.
“Th-this is strange...”
There was no trace left of the boy who’d shouted so eagerly about moving as much as he liked. Flustered by his own body’s sensitivity, Luca faltered.
“Where your hand is, it’s too hot. It’s like... it’s burning.”
His head went dizzy in an instant. He couldn’t tell whether the heat was simply his overloaded nerves or whether there was some other reason for it.
“Very uncomfortable?”
“Nn, ngh... it is. Take your hand off.”
“Bear it a little. Your body needs to get used to my temperature.”
Even that tender order made him flinch. Now it wasn’t only the places bonded to the prosthetics; the voice flowing into his ear, no different from usual, registered just as sharply.
“Hmm, the sensitivity response is high, sure. But I can’t tell on my own.”
Kai, who hadn’t picked up on Luca’s reaction as keenly as the captain had, scratched his head.
“Should I call Obel? I gave him a heads-up before I came, so he’d probably get here fast.”
Only then did the captain lift the hand resting on the inside of that thigh. Twitching under the excess sensation, Luca let out a small breath of relief, and then, belatedly, startled and cried out.
“Ah...! Wait, don’t call Obel...!”
Kai stopped halfway to the comms port. The captain looked down at him. Luca kept twitching, unable to bring the flush in his face under control.
“J-just let me stay like this a bit. It’ll pass soon...!”
The captain’s gaze slid down to Luca’s lower body. The front of his trousers was swollen taut. The sensitivity seemed to have reached other sensitive places as well.
“...That’s why I told you to take your hand off... nn... why won’t you listen...”
Swallowing his irritation, Luca tried to raise a leg and cover himself. Even that movement looked precarious, and the captain bit down hard.
As when he’d hidden his feelings yesterday, the tendon at his jaw bulged and then settled. If he didn’t clench his teeth like this, he was going to reach for the front of Luca’s trousers, so he crushed the impulse down.
“...It’s all right, Luca. Obel knows about reactions like this. He’ll give you a sedative.”
“But...”
“It’s all right. Don’t worry.”
Head down in embarrassment, Luca had gone red all the way to the back of his neck. Unable to take his eyes off the sight, the captain spoke without turning toward Kai.
“Call Obel.”
Neither oblivious Kai nor Luca, too distracted by his own condition, registered that the voice was lower than usual. With all five senses trained on the boy at a loss in his arms, the captain whispered.
“If it starts getting worse, tell me. I’ll help you.”
Help him with what, exactly, and how? At something he didn’t dare imagine, Luca glanced up with a flushed face and then turned away.
“It’ll go down if you leave it alone...”
“That would be a relief.”
“Nn... it’s only because it’s unfamiliar. I’m not a pervert...”
“I know. You think I’m the pervert.”
“Th-that’s...”
“How is it? I’d like you to describe the sensation a little.”
Luca kept his mouth clamped shut. As though coaxing him, the captain whispered again.
“You have to explain it so I can report your symptoms to Obel accurately.”
Hiding symptoms and failing to get proper treatment would put Luca in difficulty from another direction. His hesitating lips stirred, and he answered in a tiny voice.
“It’s strange and unfamiliar...”
“Strange and unfamiliar how?”
“Just, kind of...”
Struggling to put it into words, he dithered, then whispered in a voice too small for Kai to catch.
“...It’s lewd.”
In the captain’s ears the words landed like thunder. The lips that had been addressing Luca so evenly twisted slightly, as though holding their calm any longer was beyond them. It was, truly, a moment that demanded a vicious amount of patience from him.
“Haa. Good grief...”
At that heavy sigh, Luca broke out in a nervous sweat and watched him for cues.
He insisted he was an adult who’d had his coming-of-age ceremony, and objectively Luca was an adult whose body hadn’t finished growing. A being situated between boyhood and young manhood, and as full of hot blood as any man his age.
Because of the unnatural state of his body, the drive to survive had simply been outrunning the drive to reproduce, and he’d forgotten about it for a while. Now that his senses had sharpened, being forced to feel an arousal he’d only ever experienced back in peaceful times clearly had him at a loss.
“Now you finally look your age, Luca.”
Luca bristled, and his eyes turned fierce.
“I’m not a kid.”
“Calling a sensation this mild lewd is what a kid does, though.”
“Ugh, I said I’m not...”
“You’ve never even held hands with a girl at the Academy? Never kissed one?”
Luca’s mouth opened and then snapped shut. Then he glared, as though the teasing captain were thoroughly detestable.
“...I’ve never dated anyone. And this is different from that... it doesn’t even feel the same as when you just touch me, so what does kissing have to do with anything...”
