I grit my teeth as another shot from Mary Sioux's rifle buzzed past my ear.
We had been locked in battle for what felt like hours at this point, and both she and I were looking worse for the wear. My left arm was hanging limp, forcing me to fire my rifle one-handed, and from the feel of it I had broken at least one rib. For her part, the Bloody Valkyrie was living up to her name, absolutely drenched in red thanks to a grazing head wound I had managed to inflict, with one of her eyes being completely matted closed. Her right leg was trailing bonelessly in the air behind her; I was fairly certain that one of my shots had shattered her femur, and if not for the fact we were flying she would have been immobilized.
My return fire skipped off her shield. As always, the girl's mana reserves were patently absurd, seemingly inexhaustible. My only saving grace was that she was completely lacking in strategic thought, relying instead on pure zeal.
"That's enough!" Sioux screamed, her one open eye glowing a baleful gold. "Lord, grant me the power to strike down this devil…"
I didn't stay to hear her finish the rest of her prayer, instead choosing to accelerate away as quickly as I could, spinning off some decoys as I went. Risking a glance backwards, I swore as the berserker completely ignored the illusions and kept her gun leveled directly at me.
There was no way I could get out of range before she finished whatever formula she was casting. I cut my speed completely, even letting go of my flight spell, causing me to begin falling towards the ground. Forcing myself through the pain of moving my broken arm, I reached up with my left hand to grasp the cursed Type 95 and began reciting a prayer of my own, dumping all the mana I could muster into a shield formula.
A barrier shimmered into existence around me just as the Valkyrie finished her own formula.
For a moment, time seemed to slow. I could almost see the bullet, wreathed in holy light, spinning as it emerged from the barrel of the girl's rifle.
Then it impacted my shield.
Space itself seemed to buckle as one blessed spell struck the other, an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. The sky burst open, tearing like tissue paper, opening a hole into an indescribable void.
My trajectory abruptly changed. I was no longer dropping towards the ground; instead, I was being dragged towards the rift. I tried to spin up a flight formula, but the shield had eaten up too much of my reserves. As I fell into the yawning abyss, I felt my grip on consciousness fading thanks to mana exhaustion. My eyes began to slip closed…
The lone overlord observed silently as its drones approached the body which had appeared from warp space directly into the midst of the hive cluster.
Terran. Female. Sub-adult. Badly wounded, unlikely to survive on its own.
The drones' simple minds reached up through their psychic link, indicating their desire to consume the terran and utilize its biomass to feed what little remained of their brood. The overlord, however, ordered them to hold while it considered the situation.
The brood was near death. The Overmind had come under attack, and their link had been severed; it was likely that the Overmind itself had been slain. Without its controlling intelligence, most of the brood's more complex organisms had reverted to instinct and simply wandered away, leaving the overlord in command of only a few remaining drones as well as the hive cluster's sessile structures. The overlord was simply not capable of managing the brood by itself. Its strain had been evolved to relay orders from the cerebrates and the Overmind to the lesser zerg, not to operate independently of the greater Swarm. Its intelligence was too limited, its thought patterns too lacking in creativity.
But terrans… their species was not limited in that way.
The overlord did not know how or why the terran had been deposited here, and lacked the ability to even begin to unravel that question. But perhaps it could nonetheless serve as the solution to its other problem.
Reaching out through the psychic link, the overlord commanded one of its precious few remaining larvae to begin metamorphosis into a brood queen. While the hive did not have the resources to sustain such a large organism for very long, it was critical that this process be done correctly or they would likely starve regardless. Most attempts at infesting terrans resulted in the subject being all but lobotomized, reduced to nothing but another limb of the swarm no more capable of complex thought than a zergling. But there had been one success: the Queen of Blades, formerly known as the terran "Sarah Kerrigan." Though the Overmind was now gone, the overlord still retained a lingering memory of the process, imprinted through the Swarm's psionic connection. In order to save the brood, it would need to replicate that experiment as closely as possible.
In the meantime, the overlord ordered its drones back to gathering the dregs of the vespene and mineral clusters this hive cluster had been built on. If its plan was to have the best chance of succeeding, they would need every last bit they could get.
I found myself in a strange place. A modern Japanese city, clean and efficient and technologically advanced, riven with trenches and barbed wire and the churned mud of no man's land. Amid the ruin of war stood a massive and ornate gothic cathedral, its stained glass windows depicting saints and angels. On top of everything, tendrils of some sort of gently undulating grayish-purple substance were beginning to creep, growing over the landscape like a carpet of fleshy moss.
In somewhat of a daze, and lacking any other landmarks of note, I began wandering towards the church. Rich wooden doors swung open easily with only a light touch.
Past rows upon rows of empty pews, two figures stood before the altar. Both were young girls, with blonde hair and delicate features that I recognized from my own reflections. One was dressed in the black-and-white habit of a Catholic nun, her eyes burning gold. She was on her knees, not praying but rather struggling against fleshy tendrils like those outside which bound her with her arms behind her back. The other wore a ragged, torn-up military uniform, its rips and holes patched over by that same meat-moss. Her eyes too were glowing, in a sickly orange hue.
"Welcome, Tanya von Degurechaff," said the orange-eyed copy, her voice sounding as if several people were speaking in unison. "Such an interesting mind you have. It is unlike any we have seen before."
"Who are you?" I asked the thing wearing my face.
"It is zerg! Alien scum!" interjected the clone wearing the nun's outfit. "Beasts who seek only to devour human life! Tanya, we ought to cleanse it with holy flame before its infection is able to spread further!"
"Lies," the zerg said. "We seek only to perfect ourselves. Is this not something all living beings should strive for? To become their best selves?"
"Do not listen to it," the nun hissed. "It is trying to control you."
The zerg laughed. "That's rich, coming from you. Is that not what you have been doing to Tanya yourself, 'Being X?'"
Suddenly, memories began to flash before my eyes–memories that had been completely suppressed until now, leaving me to feel out their shapes from the edges of the holes left behind. Myself, flying across the battlefield with my 203rd, holding aloft the Type 95 and singing the praises of "God," acting as the perfect little pious soldier. A scene repeated too many times, my behaviour each time becoming even more zealous than the previous. I had known the broad strokes, but to see exactly what I had forgotten…
"It is your artifact which attempts to control her," the zerg declared. "We, on the other hand, will grant her control. It was your minions who attempted to kill her, and nearly succeeded. We will grant her life."
"And what would these 'gifts' cost me?" I said, drawing both beings' attention. "Nothing in life is truly free, after all."
"They will steal your humanity, rip it away and make you one of them," spat the nun, her tone absolutely dripping with venom… and was that a note of fear?
"We need you, Tanya von Degurechaff," the zerg pleaded. "We need someone to lead us, to guide us, to give us direction and meaning. Without your help, we will die, just as you will die without ours."
"Good," the nun said contemptuously. "Better she return to the arms of the Lord than suffer the fate you hold for her."
I stood there for a long moment, looking between the two doppelgangers.
Who do I trust? I wondered. The devil I know? Or the devil I don't?
"I don't think you're being entirely truthful with me," I told the zerg, and for a moment I watched from the corner of my eye as the nun's face turned triumphant–only for my next words to bring it crashing back down. "But… I'm a fundamentally selfish person. I want to live. Your offer might be too good to be true, but whether it is or not, it's the option that keeps me alive–and out of Being X's clutches. As for my humanity… I'm already a monster on the inside. War makes monsters of us all. What does it matter how I look on the outside? I'll take your deal."
I reached out my hand and my mirror image extended her own in return. My eyes met her own glowing orbs, and she gave the slightest of nods.
We shook on it, and the world fell away.
When my eyes next fluttered open, all I could see was green.
It took me a few moments and some squirming about to realize that I was immersed in some bright green liquid, curled into the fetal position within some sort of pod or sac. Light was filtering in through a transparent membrane above me, and as soon as I was able to orient myself, I began pushing against it. Within seconds, the membrane broke, disgorging me onto the ground in a wave of green ooze. On my hands and knees, I coughed, expelling what remained of the slime from my lungs.
The first thing I noticed after regaining my bearings was my hands. No longer were they covered in the soft pinkish skin of a normal human being; instead, they were armoured in some sort of smooth, chitinous material, coloured a gray-green colour similar to that of my Imperial Army uniform, and my fingers were tipped with sharp talons instead of fingernails. Also… there were four of them. It seemed my arms now branched at the elbows, though my forearms had a greater range of movement than I would have expected.
A voice… no, it wasn't a voice. An impression reached out, communicating intent directly to my mind without necessitating any messy talking. I instinctively reached back, and without any resistance the other mind allowed itself to fall under my sway. Instantly, I knew what it was: an overlord, a semi-sapient creature designed by the zerg swarm to serve as an administrator, passing orders from the high command to the lesser zerg organisms. And now, it was mine.
I looked down at myself through my overlord's eyes from where its bulbous body floated above me on a combination of gas-filled bladders and psionic lift. My overall body shape was much the same as it had been before my infestation, small and lightly built, looking like a child even younger than I still was. I was nude, my uniform having disintegrated away during the conversion process, though the grayish exoskeleton that now covered my body kept my modesty intact; in fact, according to the overlord's memories, reproduction was no longer part of my function, so those parts had been done away with entirely. Two pairs of insect-like wings sprouted from behind my shoulder blades, buzzing and twitching as I stood up. My feet were ever so slightly elongated, and my natural stance now had me standing tip-toed, adding a few centimetres to my still-meagre height. As I turned to look up at the overlord, I saw from its point of view a pair of overly-large eyes that glowed blue like the bioluminescence of some sort of deep-sea creature, and a long tongue exploring a mouth full of needle-like teeth. Where my blonde hair had been, the top of my head was now covered in smooth tentacles of a similar length, which I found I could move independently.
Overall, my new mutations–particularly the wings and the larger eyes–gave me something of a fairy-like affect. Or perhaps, pixie-like? I scowled; it seemed that that nickname was determined to follow me around, no matter where I went.
I took a moment to go over the data it had collected, and quickly realized what it was referring to: my magic.
"It's fine, it's a beneficial trait," I responded. There was no reason for me to speak aloud when addressing my brood, but I suspected it would take some time to wean myself out of the habit. "Store the data for later."
If I could figure out how to integrate magical abilities into other strains of zerg organisms, it could grant us a significant advantage against any opposition.
And there would be opposition eventually, it seemed. The brood had been sent to colonize this planet, known as Teutoburg to the humans (or "terrans," as they called themselves) of the Koprulu Sector, in order to make use of its deposits of vespene gas and various useful minerals, but there wasn't enough materiel here to maintain any substantial presence in the long term. A few months on the low end, maybe a couple of years on the high end with proper rationing, but eventually the resources would run dry and I would need to leave or face slow starvation. And that wasn't even to speak of the possibility of outside intervention; both the terrans and another local species, the protoss, had pre-existing hostile relations with the Zerg Swarm. While I held some hope I might be able to negotiate with them, it would be foolhardy to simply assume that they would respond rationally to my overtures of peace and trade. I would have to be prepared in case they came after me with intent to harm me. There were also other zerg to consider, both those who had broken away from this hive when the Overmind had been killed and the other broods spread across the sector. In short, I had my work cut out for me.
My first step would be to secure more of Teutoburg's resources, and that meant establishing a second hive cluster. The problem was that, at present, I didn't know the local terrain, and thus had no way of identifying a favourable location to expand to.
Fortunately, I had a solution to that problem. My wings began to move while I ran over the steps of my flight formula in my head. Normally, it would be nearly impossible to maintain a flight spell without an operations orb and dedicated flight gear, but so long as I knew the steps, I could offload the actual calculations to my overlord, whose bulbous brain was more than capable of performing the necessary math.
With a buzz, I lifted into the air.
It was time for some reconnaissance.
I flew far above the surface of Teutoburg on a combination of magic and wingpower, keeping an eye on the ground below. This planet had received its Terran name from the thick forest-analogues which covered the continents that stretched across its temperate zones, which made it very difficult to search for a new hatchery site from the air. However, there was one small fact that I was hoping would make my task a lot easier: zerg creatures (a category which now included myself) needed to consume mineral crystals and vespene gas in order to support their exotic biology. This meant that those individual zerg who had broken away from my colony after the presumptive death of the Overmind would likely have sought out sources of those critical resources in order to sustain themselves, while those that could not locate any would almost certainly have starved to death in the interim. Ergo, if I could find some feral zerg, I would probably find minerals and gas as well.
While I buzzed over the landscape, I found a portion of my mind wandering. I had only just emerged from my cocoon earlier today, and yet here I was, having already accepted that I was now in charge of a brood of alien creatures. Even when I thought about my lost humanity, the notion utterly failed to evoke any sort of negative reaction. Being zerg felt… natural. Right, even. It was trivial to conclude that my mind had been affected by my infestation, and so I strove to look at the question as objectively as possible: should I really be okay with this? After all, hadn't I been furious at the thought of Being X using his cursed orb to control my thoughts? Indeed, the idea of that pompous entity controlling me was still every bit as disgusting as it had been before. At least there was some satisfaction in the idea that by joining the swarm I had disrupted Being X's plans for me, judging by that vivid dream I'd had after falling through the portal.
Unfortunately, fully exploring that particular philosophical quandary would have to wait. After multiple hours of searching in an expanding spiral pattern, my theory finally paid off as I spotted a patch of the distinctive purple-gray of creep among the bluish-green foliage.
As I approached, I stilled my wings and allowed the flight formula I was maintaining to take up the slack. This would increase the mental load on me and my overlord, but I felt it was a fair price to pay to avoid potentially alerting any hostile zerg to my presence with the humming of my wingbeats. My caution paid off as I slowed to hover just over the tops of the pseudo-trees and got my first good look at what was below.
In the centre of a small clearing was a pustule, maybe two or three times the size of a human body, around which the carpet of creep was growing, its tendrils climbing the trunks and lower branches of the surrounding forest. Around the creep milled perhaps two dozen zerg, their eyes burning orange. Most were zerglings, the simplest zerg organisms used in combat: dog-sized creatures armed with sickle-like limbs, they were land-bound and posed no threat to me as long as I was able to stay airborne. Amidst the zerglings, however, there were also a handful of larger zerg with serpentine lower bodies and broad, shield-like head crests. These were hydralisks, and according to the information relayed by my overlord they could launch keratinous spines with enough force to punch through the powered combat armour of a terran marine at over three hundred meters.
And there, at the edge of the clearing, was exactly what I had been looking for: a fissure in the rocky soil, belching green vapour and surrounded by clumpy growths of glittering crystals.
In an ideal world, I could have reintegrated these wild zerg back into the brood. Unfortunately, I didn't have the psionic strength to do so myself, and I couldn't risk bringing my overlord within range of the hydralisks. It seemed there was only one recourse for me if I wanted to use this location as the site of a new hive cluster.
As I resolved myself to exterminate the ferals, I felt a shifting sensation within my bifurcated forearms. Unbidden, an inhumanly wide smile split my face baring dozens of needle-sharp teeth as I relayed the necessary calculations for another formula to my overlord through our psychic connection. Once the relevant numbers had been crunched, I raised my arms towards the crowd and cocked all four of my wrists back.
There was no point wasting words on what were essentially wild animals. Instead, I simply pulled the mental trigger.
Brand new muscles inside my arms flexed, and from a small orifice at the front of each wrist launched a pointed spike roughly the size of a Mauser cartridge. Three of the spines found their targets, thudding into the flesh of a trio of hydralisks, while the fourth of the creatures twitched out of the way at the last second, causing the "bullet" to plow into the creep behind it instead.
Of course, a single projectile of this size was far too little to kill a hydralisk. Fortunately for me–and most unfortunately for the ferals–I didn't need them to.
As each spike channeled into zerg flesh, the explosive formulas I had imbued them with activated. Three hydralisks burst apart in showers of gore, shards of bone, chitin, and keratin ripping through the nearby zerglings like shrapnel from a grenade. The fourth spine detonated in the ground, its fiery blast ripping an oozing hole in the carpet of creep and sending the surrounding creatures staggering.
Strange new organs churned inside me, "chambering" new spines within my forearms. It seemed it would take a couple of seconds to replace each spike I fired; if I staggered my shots, I would be able to maintain a high rate of fire, or I could fire multiple at once like I had in my opening volley for a heavier single burst.
Given that the element of surprise was no longer relevant, I began to beat my wings again, freeing up a little more attention to keep focused on the battlefield. Just in time, as well; the remaining hydralisks who hadn't been killed in my alpha strike began returning fire, and even with my reflexes I was barely able to move out of the way in time to avoid a barrage of supersonic spines. One of the ferals whipped around, faster than the others, and launched a spike directly into my path. Instinctively, I raised my left hands and willed a barrier into existence–
–Only for nothing to happen. The hydralisk spine grazed my hip, its barbs easily carving a thin line through the light plating on my body and into the soft flesh beneath.
Damn it! I forgot that I'm not using my operations orb anymore! What an idiotic mistake!
There was no time to berate myself, however. I aimed for that fast one and fired another explosive shot which pierced its lower body, blowing it in half. Infuriatingly, the top half of the beast remained alive and shooting despite its organs trailing on the ground. It took a few seconds of dodging spines before I could aim another shot which finished it off. Only two more of the serpentine creatures remained, and with the volume of incoming fire decreasing as they fell, it didn't take long to finish the rest off. After that, the zerglings on the ground were easy pickings, being completely unable to fight back as I thinned the herd from the air. Cleanup only lasted a couple of minutes, until finally the forests of Teutoburg fell silent.
As soon as the battle was over, I started sending my overlord instructions for as many formulas as I could remember, like I should have done in the first place. It was a good thing I had no superiors to court-martial me for incompetence. Regardless, at least I was alive to regret my error, and the wound on my hip was already regenerating. Any trace of it would be gone within hours.
With my expansion site secured, I reached out to my underlings and selected one of the brood's remaining larvae, ordering it to begin metamorphosing into a second overlord to oversee my original hive. Then, while it was building its chrysalis, I had my existing overlord fly low to the ground. I directed a drone over to it, then had the overlord scoop the worker up with its dangling arms and shove it into an empty gas bladder on its belly. The human part of me cringed as the drone was squeezed through a sphincter into the hot, wet, and dark cavity, but its own primitive brain was perfectly content to curl up inside the larger zerg's orifice like a baby in a mother's womb.
Pushing those emotions away, I directed the overlord to lift off and begin flying in my direction.
The flight speed of an overlord was, to put it mildly, not exactly blistering. Even though it could travel in a straight line to this location, it would take it almost as long to arrive here as it had taken me to find this place while flying in circles. That left me with, essentially, nothing to do until it arrived.
I sighed, setting myself down on a nearby rock. At least I was used to it; after all, one of a soldier's most common duties was to hurry up and wait.
In the meantime, I reached over the psychic connection to my brood and began studying the queen's memories of my infestation. If I could work out how to adapt other zerg species to use magical abilities… well, needless to say, the tactical and strategic potential was enormous.
If only I'd taken biology back in Japan, or at least studied anatomy at the Imperial War College…