He turned away from the cave and looked at his arms.

The muscle beneath it was dense, well-distributed, built for power and endurance.

Good for a human body. Not enough for him.

Chain Drive moved in sync with his Reinforced Spring Joints. The speed was there.

But fast was different from overwhelming.

He needed pressure. No gaps. No chance to react.

Like a piston that never paused between cycles.

’The problem is my arm structure.’

He raised his hand and studied it.

Each punch followed the same pattern. Shoulder rotation. Elbow extension. Impact.

Efficient. But limited.

Rotation took time. And every punch needed a reset.

That gap should be eliminated.

’What if the shoulder didn’t rotate?’

The idea faded just as fast.

If the shoulder was rigid — locked in place like a fixed mount — then the arm had nowhere to draw power from.

That wouldn’t work.

But a shoulder built to compress and release. That changed things.

Like a coiled spring sitting behind every punch instead of a hinge.

’I’ll start with one shoulder.’

Parashift activated.

He widened the joint. Then reshaped the muscle into layered bands, stacked like coils. Each pullback would trigger the next strike.

Francis opened his eyes and extended his arm again.

The impact was normal at first glance. But when he pulled back, the rebound came faster. His fist was already returning before he told it to.

’Good.’

He repeated the process on the left shoulder. Same structure. Same layered arrangement.

Then he stood and faced the rock again.

Not hard at first. Just testing the rhythm.

Right. Left. Right. Left.

The punches came out flat and straight, no rotation behind them, no winding up. Just direct lines from his shoulder to the target.

He pushed faster.

The rebound from each retraction fed directly into the next extension.

The sound changed.

Individual impacts stopped being separate. They began to blur into a single continuous hammering, like a machine cycling without pause.

He pushed harder.

’Chain Drive.’

The speed climbed from there. Five percent per second, stacking on top of the new structure.

The rock had no time to settle.

BOOM!

BOOM!

BOOM!

Each punch landed before the vibration from the last one could even finish moving through the stone.

At fifty percent, the sound merged.

At eighty, dust lifted from the ground

At one hundred, his arms vanished. They were just motion. Rapid, continuous, without beginning or end.

The rock wall received all of it.

Then he stopped.

The cave looked deeper now, and his speed jumped by a full fifty percent after the transformation.

But something was bothering him.

The rate was there. The sound was there. The output was undeniable.

’The attack path is too narrow.’

Every punch moved in a straight line.

No deviation. No adjustment mid-extension. The locked wrist and rigid forearm made sure of that.

In ideal conditions, against a stationary target, it was devastating.

But a real opponent was not a rock face.

One step to the side, and everything missed.

And half an inch was all it took to let every single punch in that sequence pass through empty air.

That was the flaw living inside this technique.

He looked at his forearms.

The rigid column structure was in place. Dense, locked, efficient.

He did not want to undo it. The speed it produced was too valuable to throw away.

What he needed was a way to keep the rate while expanding what it could actually reach.

The obvious answer was to add lateral movement — let the arm sweep slightly between strikes, covering a wider zone.

But it came with a major drawback

Sweep and speed were pulling against each other.

He discarded that direction.

’What if the shoulder was the platform instead of the anchor?’

Not a joint that rotated to generate power. Not a compressed spring that loaded each punch from behind.

A wide, flat surface. Broad enough that the arm could slide along it laterally between strikes, shifting its firing position without interrupting the cycle.

Like a rail.

The arm would still fire straight. But the shoulder would shift its position between hits. Changing angles without slowing down.

Parashift activated again.

He widened the shoulder beyond its normal frame.

Then reshaped the socket into a long, shallow groove.

The arm settled into it like a track. Free to slide. Stable at every point. Ready to strike from anywhere along the line.

When the transformation finished, he straightened up and raised both arms.

The feeling was immediately different.

The shoulders sat wider now. Not uncomfortably so, but noticeably. There was a sense of surface beneath each arm, something to slide against rather than pivot from.

He extended his right arm and pushed it slowly to the left along the groove.

It traveled cleanly. No catch. No resistance. His forearm stayed fixed in place. The shoulder slid, adjusting the aim.

He brought it back to center.

Then to the right.

Same result. Same clean travel.

’This should work now.’

He faced the rock again.

Then he started.

The first few punches came out at normal speed, just to feel the new structure under load.

Each punch hit a different spot on the rock face, just as he planned.

He pushed the pace.

’Chain Drive’

The whooshing sound returned. That same rapid, laser-like shriek from before.

But this time it did not stay in one place.

The sound swept.

Left to right, right to left, the arm sliding along the shoulder platform between each extension while the mechanism behind it never stopped cycling.

The strikes moved across the rock face in a steady flow.

Each hit landed slightly ahead or behind the last, covering the whole surface. It did in microseconds what the old body would take time to drill into a single point.

At full speed, the sound stopped being a repeating shriek.

It became a sustained roar. A flat, sweeping tone, like something being discharged in one long burst.

He stopped.

Stepped back.

The rock face was gone.

’I’ll call this Gatling Mode.’