Point Zero by Aer-ki Jyr (christmas read aloud TXT) 📕

And that was definitely Morgan in a nutshell.

“Will you set it up?”

“I’ll be there every step of the way. Just let me know when you’re ready.”

“I think better in motion,” she said, thumbing over her shoulder to the track.

“Get going,” Wilson said, with her turning and taking off with more vigor than he’d seen her running with before, then she disappeared around the gradual curve as the interior wall eclipsed the view of her on the 3 mile long track.

“So you’re saying she’s going to kick more ass in a smaller body?” Jarod asked, not fully buying it.

“If size was all that mattered, we’d make you King Kong size, now wouldn’t we?”

“Is that even possible?”

“Not without a lot of modifications beyond size, but theoretically there is no limit.”

“Has anyone tried it?”

“Not in Star Force.”

“Somewhere else?”

“Yes.”

“Did it work?”

“They died within 3 weeks as their body crushed itself under its own weight.”

“I’ll pass then,” the Golden Knight said. “Am I done here?”

“Yes, thank you. I wanted her to see you to provoke a reaction, but it ended up being different than I assumed. She wasn’t scared of you.”

“I could have told you that,” Jarod said as if that was the stupidest thing ever as he walked off. The truth was, the Golden Knights were scared of her, save for Vermaire, and were immensely glad she was on their team, for they would not want to meet her on the opposite side in the battlefield. And in sparring, they always expected to get their ass kicked. That’s how they got better, with her highlighting their weaknesses and exploiting them, but it was always scary how someone smaller than them could light them up every time.

And now Wilson said she was better off being smaller in her new body, and Jarod cringed at what that was going to feel like after she mastered it.

It was going to hurt. A lot. Even for Vermaire.

8

July 16, 154931

Solar System (Home One Kingdom)

Earth

It took three days for Morgan and the medtechs to finalize her rebuild, which wasn’t entirely unnatural. Her Human body had been designed to shrink when needed, mainly in her muscles, and it didn’t just chop off sections at random. It downsized as expertly as it had grown, but things like skeleton and brain tissue were not meant to do the same…but when the medtechs dug into her new genome they realized that everything in her could downsize on its own.

That surprised both Morgan and Wilson, but both agreed that rather than try to figure out how to train herself into a smaller, faster form it was best if they took the quicker route in order to start to get her rebalanced enough to get a handle on her new body, for right now she was arguably a mess and going through this blind looking for a size reduction protocol was a challenge that Morgan did not want to take on. She just wanted to be normal sized again, then start her new journey from there.

When they felt they had a handle on the new tweaks in her genome associated with the size alteration, Morgan reported to a specialized medbay and sat down on one of the elevated beds that was minimal in its design. Just a platform with a thin, but soft pad that looked like a piece of metal until you touched it.

She swung her legs back and forth lightly, but with a high cadence, and it wasn’t because she was nervous. Morgan always felt the need to be in motion, even when sitting. Ninja skills weren’t her preferred avenue when it involved holding still, so she’d always be tapping, waggling, or swaying a little to defy the stillness.

That said, she was also worried. This kind of alteration was crazy, but Star Force had done it many times with Knights that didn’t like the upgrade, as well as with other cases involving races that were too large for some reason or the other and needed reduction for health reasons.

The medtechs weren’t in the room at the moment, nor was Wilson. Morgan was alone and having to wait…which she also didn’t like. If you were going to be reckless it was best to get on with it and not have to think about the stupidity of what you were about to do. You needed to go with it and own it, not have doubts. She’d already done her thinking earlier, and this was the logical path forward…but it was still stupid, and she’d pay for it afterward, but her fitness was already trashed, even if it had been replaced by a more capable newb body.

Morgan understood the opportunities that afforded, but it also annoyed her that it happened without her permission. All her fitness that she’d built up over 150,000 years was mostly wrecked, and she was at a very vulnerable transition point, but this was a moment she needed to pass through…even if the others thought she was more crazy than normal, for they all liked the size upgrade now that they had it.

So she was deviating from the group, and while that was a bit of a regret…as well as bailing after less than a year…she wasn’t going back to Human. Just a smaller Furyan. Though she was bailing on so many psionics she had unlocked and accumulated over the years, and that was the most scary thing about this.

Aaron had removed his Ensek long ago to make more cranial room for his Ikrid, and Ensek was one on the list she was losing as well as the upgrades for it, but that didn’t affect her body from the neck down, and the hard choice eventually came to losing almost all her battlemeld abilities save for the first. That meant she also lost Jumatran and Jumabren,