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“Why’s Jude been acting so weird lately?”
“He has?”
“Well, that’s how it seems to me.”
Tai kept digging through his shulker, pulling items out and sorting through them one by one. He didn’t seem particularly invested in the conversation, only giving short replies while barely paying attention.
Noob, on the other hand, seemed genuinely interested in the topic. His expression was thoughtful, almost oddly serious, as he leaned against a wooden pillar and stared off to the side.
“Seriously, he’s acting like a teenager who’s too scared to admit he has feelings for a girl.”
“Oh? That’s actually not like him. What’s next, you’re gonna tell me he hasn’t even been picking on anyone lately?” he said, while counting healing potions in his inventory.
“No, he hasn’t even activated a single trap in the past couple of days.”
One of Tai’s potions slipped from his fingers and shattered on the ground, instantly covering both of them in swirling regeneration particles.
“Shit. You serious? You don’t actually expect me to believe that, right? How can he just stop doing something he literally gets off on?”
It didn’t make any sense. Why would Jude suddenly start laying low like this?
Now that Tai thought about it, nobody had died in the past three days from being impaled on stalactites or crushed between hundreds of armor stands. And the more he tried to come up with explanations, the more often one particular thought kept appearing – maybe Jude had finally lost his mind.
“Alright… so what is he doing, then?”
Noob paused for a moment, thinking it over before finally sharing what he’d noticed.
“Basically… he was acting normal. Even calm. But that’s the point! Since when did he decide to play the nice guy?”
He began pacing slowly around Tai.
“You know he usually sticks around spawn. But I saw him in places he never goes. And he wasn’t doing anything. Just walking, looking around like he was checking if someone was there.”
That did sound strange. Jude didn’t like wandering far from his base, and when he did, he usually stayed in open areas.
“Anything else?”
“Oh, the main thing! That new guy you invited recently?”
“Sharpness? What about him?”
“I might be wrong, but it looked like Jude wanted to ask him something. He just… couldn’t bring himself to go up to him?”
Tai’s head snapped toward Noob as he paced nearby. He stared at him in disbelief, taking a second to process what he’d just heard. That definitely wasn’t the answer he’d expected.
“Jude? Afraid to approach someone? Our Jude? You sure you’re not mistaken?”
A few quiet laughs escaped him. Either Noob had completely lost it, or Jude had somehow been replaced, because there was no way Judelow would be afraid to talk to somebody. That just wasn’t who he was. He usually bulldozed straight through social boundaries, ignoring manners and etiquette if he felt like it, asking the most uncomfortable questions right to someone’s face with a completely deadpan expression.
“I swear! I saw him a few times, and he was acting weird. Like, really weird. Excited?”
Now Tai was genuinely interested. When was the last time he’d seen Jude act like that? Suddenly, sorting through shulkers didn’t seem important at all anymore.
But there was still one more thing on his mind.
“Back to Sharpness – have you met him yet?”
Noob waved a hand casually. “We didn’t really talk much, but I liked him right away. He’s strong, but also kinda friendly.”
Tai rested a finger against his lips for a moment. “So you’re saying Jude wanted to talk to him?”
“Think so.”
It wouldn’t have been strange for Jude to take an interest in a new person, if not for how oddly he’d apparently been acting, according to Noob. Why was he hesitating so much? Was he actually nervous around him? But Sharpness didn’t seem intimidating at all. Or maybe this was just another one of Jude’s shameless plans – trying to lure someone in by acting so harmless.
Tai’s thoughts kept circling from one theory to another, but without more information, none of it really meant anything.
“Alright, we’re not getting anywhere like this. I think we should ask Parker. He definitely knows something we don’t.”
__________________
Parker sat in front of them like he was being interrogated.
He was Jude’s closest friend, which meant he knew a lot. Honestly, probably too much. And even if he’d never admit it out loud, he was secretly pretty proud of that.
“I might know something,” he said mysteriously.
Not that he’d call it actual information. But when you spent most of your time around Jude, noticing changes like that was impossible to avoid, especially when Jude had spent the last few days talking nonstop about one specific thing with almost alarming enthusiasm.
The two pairs of eyes in front of him lit up immediately, full of curiosity and impatience.
Parker watched them for a moment, wondering if saying anything was really worth it. But his own curiosity eventually won.
“Alright. For information, I want one strength.”
Tai muttered something under his breath before pulling a red bottle from his ender chest and tossing it over. Parker caught it with a faint, satisfied smirk, rolling the bottle between his fingers before slipping it into his inventory.
“Let’s put it this way. Does that new guy have any… special traits?” he asked, carefully circling the question, trying to get more useful details for his side of the story. “Because that might explain a lot.”
Tai went quiet for a moment. His brows furrowed slightly. This was already the second person mentioning Sharpness in relation to Jude’s strange behavior. A hint of concern crept into his voice.
“He’s not causing any trouble, is he?”
“No! No, he’s fine,” Parker quickly reassured him. He hadn’t talked to Sharpness, but he seemed like a good guy.
“Okay… Um, he’s very tall? He has a cool accent? No? Not that? Uh…”
He couldn’t remember a single time Jude had wanted to talk to someone purely because they were attractive. But he did know Jude had a weakness for “pretty things.”
“Oh! Right, how could I forget?” Tai suddenly blurted out, as if he had just solved the mystery of the century, jumping out of his chair.
“He’s got some kind of fancy stuff installed in his body – like implants, I guess? I don’t really know much about it. Metal parts in his body, basically. That’s what he told me,” he said, looking extremely pleased with himself.
Parker went quiet for a moment, then suddenly burst out laughing, tears forming at the corners of his eyes. It looked like Tai had just given him exactly the answer he needed.
“Oh my god, that’s perfect,” he said between laughs. “Our boy has finally grown up.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Noob asked, grimacing.
“Guys, he’s obsessed with wires and implants. That’s literally the only thing he’s into besides traps. He can sit for hours working on new prototypes,” Parker said, clearly satisfied as he watched their reactions.
“Oh. Right.” Tai dropped back into his chair. “Right, right! Noob, he wants to ask him about his implants! That’s actually hilarious.”
“So what makes him so scared to talk to him?”
“We have to help him.”
__________________
Their plan was to keep the two of them close during the weekly game night they hosted. The idea was simple – give Jude a natural opportunity to approach Sharpness, the way he clearly wanted to but never actually did.
The evening went smoothly enough, but Jude still kept avoiding him.
He kept throwing quick, interested glances at Sharpness, only to immediately change his expression whenever someone noticed. His fake confidence didn’t even look convincing – probably not even to Sharpness, who barely knew him.
They had a plan… which completely fell apart the moment Sharpness himself walked up to Jude.
The three of them exchanged glances, silently wondering whether this still counted as a success if everything had gone slightly off track.
But at least they were talking, right?
Sharpness moved through the crowd of people he still wasn’t fully familiar with, heading straight toward one specific person.
He spotted him easily – a pair of ears that had been resting calmly suddenly shot upright the moment he got close.
“Hey,” he said warmly. “We haven’t really had a chance to talk yet. Sorry about that.”
His face carried a completely genuine, sweet smile. In his bright green eyes there was real curiosity – he actually wanted to get to know him.
Standing there in front of him so casually, the only thing Jude could manage was a stunned expression and slightly parted lips.
His ears stood straight up, as if someone had jumped out from behind a bush instead of simply walking up to greet him. He stood frozen, head tilted back just a little, staring directly into the eyes of the person he hadn’t been able to approach himself – someone who always seemed to slip out of reach whenever he tried to force himself to speak.
“You can’t just sneak up on people like that,” he finally said, forcing himself to break eye contact and look away as he slipped back into his usual mask of indifference and disinterest.
Sharpness clearly hadn’t expected such a cold response and hesitated for a second, but he calmly continued the conversation anyway.
“I heard you work with electronics and prosthetics. I saw your ears and wanted to take a closer look, do you mind?”
“Not sure… I’ve got something better than that,” Jude said with obvious self-satisfaction.
“Really? I would love to see what you’ve got.”
Jude never allowed anyone to study his ears closely, let alone touch them. Even if they were metal and not something he could truly feel, they still served their purpose.
So how had it ended up like this – him sitting deep inside his base, letting someone he’d only just met touch his metal body parts? When exactly had they reached the point of studying his prosthetics like this?
“This is so cool,” Sharpness murmured behind him, his hands carefully gliding over each metallic plate. His fingers gently bent and adjusted the segments of the mechanical ears.
“Can you feel them?”
“Kinda? Maybe it’s just instinct… like the body still thinks they’re real, even though they’ve been gone for a long time.”
Sharpness didn’t ask what had happened. He had his own story too – one that wasn’t so easy to share. Maybe someday.
He stayed quiet for a while, still gently testing the movement of the ears.
“Just so you know, I don’t actually know much about this stuff,” he said eventually, moving from the ears to the neck prosthetic. “I’m just curious about other people’s implants.”
“It’s fine. Tell me about yours.”
This was his chance.
“You saw them, right?”
“Though I was imagining it, but cool that it’s real. Besides me, there’s basically no one here with them.”
He tried to keep his expression steady, but the excitement kept slipping into his voice. He wanted to ask about every single metal part in Sharpness’s body. He barely even noticed that Sharpness was still carefully exploring his own prosthetics anymore. The urge to see his implants drowned out everything else.
But he couldn’t push it too far. If he did, he might end up looking like some obsessed ripper, and then there’d be no chance at all of finding out what kind of metal his plates were made of.
He had once offered Honey implants – even planned to build them himself for her, but she had simply decided it wasn’t necessary and kindly refused. It was easier for her to hold rotten flesh together with surgical staples.
He had also offered Godis a speech communicator, only to be met with a quiet refusal.
So actually seeing someone with real, fully installed prosthetics was an incredible opportunity.
“You can look.”
It felt like his heart had stopped. Maybe he should replace it with a metal one so this wouldn’t happen again.
He nearly swung one of his mechanical ears straight into Sharpness’s face while the other man was still sitting behind him. There was no way he was doing all this unintentionally.
“Sure, if you’ve got something to show,” Jude said flatly, while internally burning with curiosity. Pretending was becoming unbearable with every passing minute.
The fingers that had been brushing over the metal vertebrae along his neck suddenly shifted, touching real, living skin instead, before instantly pulling away again. A sharp jolt ran through him.
“With pleasure,” Sharpness said softly. “There’s something broken I guess. You can check.”
It sounded almost like an invitation – offering more than Jude had ever expected. Maybe something had short-circuited in his head and none of this was actually real.
Jude stepped into the next room – his workshop. Though, in truth, the entire house was his workshop, scattered with screws, tools, and fragments of metal plating.
He returned carrying an entire set of tools, each instrument a different shape and size.
“Listen, I don’t know what kind of plating you’ve got, so I brought ev–”
The sight in front of him felt like something meant to be etched into his memory forever.
Sharpness was sitting on the couch, the front of his bodysuit unzipped. The zipper had been pulled down to his lower abdomen, the sleeves hanging loosely at his sides, revealing something that almost brought Jude to his knees.
There was no ribcage.
The metal framework only mimicked its shape. In place of ribs was a matte titanium structure. Whenever Sharpness moved, the plates along his torso shifted slightly, adjusting naturally with each breath and motion.
“Ah, you won’t need those. It opens without tools, look,”
And Jude moved closer before he even realized it, openly staring at Sharpness’s torso. It somehow felt more intimate than seeing a naked body. At least to him.
“Come here.”
And he did. He sat down beside him on the couch, his gaze moving between the exposed metal components in front of him. At this point, there was no way he could keep pretending to be casually uninterested anymore. His actual personality – the complete genius freak obsessed with this kind of stuff had fully taken over.
“Put your finger here.”
His hand lifted automatically. Honestly, since it was mechanical, it almost felt like it had moved on its own.
“May I?..” he asked quietly.
Sharpness smirked slightly and gently took him by the wrist. For a moment, Jude couldn’t help thinking how unfortunate it was that he couldn’t properly feel warmth through metal.
Maybe he should improve his implants after all.
Sharpness guided his hand closer to his torso, right between where a normal person’s ribs should have been.
But he wasn’t a normal person.
“Here, slide your finger down from the top. Don’t worry, it won’t break,” Sharpness murmured softly, his voice calm and reassuring.
Finally, he touched it.
His finger slowly moved lower, and with each movement the plates shifted apart, folding away neatly to reveal the insides of Sharpness’s mechanical torso – if it could even be called “insides” anymore.
The artificial heart worked silently. Every now and then, a quiet valve click echoed from somewhere deeper within.
Where lungs and organs should have been, there were filtration systems, cables, and semi-transparent containers filled with cooling fluid. Expensive chrome components sat alongside rough industrial inserts he recognized instantly.
From that moment on, he was unstoppable.
“You’re not using standard ventilation,” he started saying quickly, leaning in closer without even noticing. “Your pressure system works differently. And the sound… those servo valves aren’t running on a factory cycle. Who built this for you?”
Completely forgetting about manners, he finally stopped pretending and slipped fully into himself again – completely absorbed in the system in front of him, unable to focus on anything else.
And honestly… as beautiful as the prosthetic system in front of him was, it still somehow lost to the person wearing it. Jude would admit that. It suited Sharpness perfectly.
“So it’s not just a support frame? Those are adaptive stabilizers, right? And wait– your heart is synced directly to the spinal port?”
Sharpness stayed silent for a few seconds, watching the expression on Jude’s face that looked dangerously close to wanting to climb directly into his torso.
“You really know your way around implants.”
“Know them?” Jude finally looked up at him. “I live for them,” he said, before immediately diving back.
His hands moved toward the inner plates. They had all been shaped with impossible precision, faint symbols etched into the matte surfaces. As his own metal fingers traced over them, he found himself longing more than ever for the ability to truly feel again.
They stayed like that for what felt like several hours. Jude kept running off into different rooms for notebooks, tools, and unfinished prototypes, trying to immediately write down ideas before they disappeared from his head.
Somewhere along the way, he ended up shirtless.
“Our spinal prosthetics are similar. Mine just extends lower.”
Sharpness’s hand moved slowly along Jude’s back, fingers carefully counting every vertebra, studying how everything connected together. After a while, his fingertips began absentmindedly tracing faint patterns against warm living skin instead.
And somehow, it felt completely natural.
From the very beginning, there had been this strange silent understanding between them, allowing them to study each other’s modified bodies without any awkwardness.
For research purposes, of course.
The hand wandering lower across his back suddenly stopped after brushing against something soft.
Sharpness pulled away immediately, but then he leaned in closer, curiosity flickering across his face.
A tail.
Jude’s tail. Real. Living. Not mechanical.
The last remaining living part of his hybrid body.
“May I touch?” Sharpness asked, leaning over Jude’s shoulder while the other sat with his back turned, aggressively writing in a notebook, crossing things out and adding new notes so fast he probably didn’t even realize he’d been touched.
The only response he got was a distracted hum, like Jude hadn’t actually heard the question at all.
Taking that as permission, Sharpness reached out and touched the small puff of fur. Unlike Jude, his hands weren’t mechanical, so he could actually feel how ridiculously soft it was.
Unfortunately, before he could properly enjoy it, a metal elbow collided directly with his forehead. The impact landed perfectly in the center. Stars exploded across his vision as he grabbed his forehead with a groan.
“Ow…”
“I’m sorry! I just wasn’t expecting you to touch it and–!”
“But you said yes…” he complained quietly, rubbing his forehead.
“Since when? Do you even realize how sensitive places like that are?”
“I didn’t interrupt you while you were touching my insides.”
Green eyes peeked at him from behind his hand. The silence that followed suddenly felt very loud.
“Wait… you can feel them?”
Sharpness didn’t say anything. He didn’t nod either, just watched Jude’s expression slowly grow redder with every passing second. And then, realization finally hit.
Jude immediately wanted to disappear into the ground – become an actual bunny and live in a hole forever.
It was beyond embarrassing. So he had basically been poking around inside someone’s organs…
Before the panic could fully take over, Sharpness suddenly laughed – bright and effortless, like the hit to his head had already been forgotten. Maybe it hadn’t been that bad, but getting smacked with metal still hurt.
He reached over and ruffled Jude’s hair.
“Don’t worry. It doesn’t feel as bad as it would if you actually crawled into my guts,” he said, giving him a playful wink.
Jude only managed a tense, uncertain smile.
Sharpness stood up from the couch and closed the prosthetic panel, zipping his suit back into place.
Jude followed the movement with his eyes one last time, tracing the titanium surface of his torso, then turned away with a disappointed sigh.
“Wanna see another one of my prosthetics tomorrow?” Sharpness suddenly asked.
Jude turned back so fast he nearly knocked things off his lap. Another prosthetic? He nodded eagerly, waiting for at least some details, but Sharpness only smiled at his reaction and headed toward the exit.
“Hey! You’re not gonna tell me where it is? Seriously?” Jude called after him.
“Nope. You’ll find out tomorrow,” Sharpness answered playfully, leaving him hanging.
He was already a few steps up the stairs when Jude stopped him again.
“Wait, you said something was broken earlier. Shouldn’t we check it?”
Sharpness paused, turning back with a confused look. Then his expression softened into a smile as he tilted his head.
“It’s fine. I think I got it wrong.”
“You’re sure?”
“Mhm.”
And with that, he disappeared out of the base.