Hear The Edge's backstory... again.

Eva clears her throat. "It looks like it all began with a female demon called Khepri. She fell in love with Nikolaus, a human man. Together they chose to serve Demon King Muian up until their deaths. Before they died, however, they did have son, Sergar, who eventually met a woman named Risi. Then they had three sons named Paul, Geoffrey, and Eugene. Fortunately for them, their connection was separate enough from the demon Khepri and Muian himself that they were able to live a life far away, and because Risi was a wealthy noblewoman, it was a great life. Of all the sons, it was Eugene who rose to fame as a heroic adventurer. Though, that was before a tragic incident. The town they lived in was small, and far enough away from any major city to properly get help in time. It was raided by orcs, and everybody was slain. Everybody but Eugene."

He would have died if he wasn't found by Breiah. She took him in and nursed him back to health, and he came to almost see her as another mom. Elok Daven, maybe a dad. I don't really wanna think about that. But there's more. The rest of this doesn't talk much about Eugene. It goes on about Khepri instead. This is how he did it... At least, part of it. The secret ingredient to Demon King Muian's insectrin experiment. Khepri wasn't there when his lair was raided. She was long since dead, and it was Muian who did it. Her body was said to be unusual. She had power over insects, and had physical traits of all sorts of different bugs, like six limbs, multiple eyes, and a beetle-like shell. But if that was Eugene, and he still had some of Khepri's blood in his veins, then..."

You clear your throat. "Delphi, can you make me big again so that I can actually see what she's reading?"

"Ah. Of course." Before you can do anything else, she snaps her fingers.

"Wait, not--" The world stretches and shrinks around you. It's so disorienting that you hardly hear the tearing of Summer's dress. After flailing your arms, you fall to the ground on your stomach with a painful thump. "Ow."

"Oh no, I love this dress! It's all I wear!" Summer shouts.

You roll over and look up to see it completely torn down the middle, nearly to the bottom. Her harvest of bountiful melons nearly sprout all the way out the front. While visible for a brief moment, her bare nipples are concealed as she tugs the fabric together, but she looks down with a saddened face.

You finally stand back up, and before anything else, you lay your hands upon her torn attire. "Here. Let me help."

"Ooh. Okay." She immediately stretches her arms out. For a moment, her breasts pop free, but you tug the fabric back together.

"Can you be responsible for just a few minutes?!" Taiga grabs Summer's antenna. "You mustn't so shamelessly show our Demon King your body."

"Hasn't he seen everyone's body?" Summer asks.

Letting that dispute continue on its own, you speak the magic word, "Mend," before your mana floods into the fabric of her dress. Like a zipper, the tear starts to repair itself from the bottom, and after only a few seconds, the damage is completely fixed all the way to the top.

"Thanks, Kyle!" Summer shouts.

"No problem. Now, please keep going, Eva." You make your way over to the bunnyfolk, joining Niki in peering over her other shoulder.

"This is The Edge's original body," Eva says.

"What does that mean?" Niki asks.

"Eugene was experimented on by Breiah and Elok Daven because of his unique bloodline. If Khepri was the missing piece in Muian's recipe for insectrin, maybe The Edge was used for something too."

You step around Eva and walk over to the tube of liquid. You stare between it and the empty one adjacent. "So they cloned him?"

"It sounds like it. Maybe they thought he was too valuable to accidentally kill through experimentation."

"And I bet anything they learned from messing with his body was used at least partly for what they did to me and William. Maybe to you too, Delphi. Or this could have been for what Elok did to himself. Either way, yeah... Rival indeed. I can't really deny his backstory is tragic. Though if he still wants to serve them, maybe he doesn't know all the details. Either that, or he feels indebted regardless. Even worse, if he's a clone, maybe he's been designed not to remember everything as clearly as he should."

Of course he'd be a clone and maybe even have some kind of amnesia. The guy's a walking stereotype. Though looking at his original body... just floating there... it makes me feel bad for him. Has he even seen this before? And if this is just LAB #3, I wonder where the first two are, or how many were made after. This must be the one he used for experiments related to Muian. We gotta find the rest. Somewhere, there's the one where I was taken.

"Are you all right?" Niki asks.

"Yeah," you reply. "But this asshole has been playing the system for awhile. Guy got isekai'd and decided to manipulate everything around him, unnoticed all this time. I wonder how much was Breiah's idea and how much was his. Either way, we need to take everything we can from here. Then we'll see if we can get through that next door. It looks like that one has been used a lot more. Maybe it's newer. It could lead to another lab, so we best be on guard."

As the girls begin collecting papers or anything else of importance, Amara speaks up. "Ah. There's something else here."

"What did you find?" you ask.

"This Nikolaus, the husband of Khepri. Eugene's grandfather. There is more about him here, but the wording is strange. It speaks as if they considered him to be of... another world. A realm called Germany."