It had gotten late in the day since the battalion had set up near the corpse. Since their encampment had been set up as a temporary site mostly intended to defend the sample, it hadn’t been built yet with ‘aroma dynamics’ in mind. Luckily for the entire battalion, the corpse had yet to smell, which was as puzzling as it was fortunate.

  Most of the soldiers were thanking their respective gods for this fact but some had their minds occupied with more secular matters.

  Like for instance, why new orders hadn’t been radioed into the camp since nearly midday.

  If that wasn’t strange enough, the medical tent had suddenly run out of supplies, and any soldier that so much as stubbed their toe or burned their hand on a piece of equipment was denied treatment.

  In a camp of more than one thousand men, word about the strange events got around quickly. Especially when everyone could see Doctor Meyers’ assistants walking through the camp. Who instead of treating the mildly injured or those who had gotten sick in the desert heat, were making treks over to the crater at the center of camp to chip away parts of the specimen.

  Those same parts were then carried back to the white medical tent, which didn’t make sense in anyone’s eyes seeing as the hulking corpse was more than three times the size of the tent itself. They’d surely run out of space before long.

  It got so out of hand, that rumors about what they were actually doing in the tent started to fly around until the guard in front of the tent was approached by a small group of soldiers.

  “Hey, Randall. What’s going on with the medics?”

  “Yeah, why can’t anyone go inside the tent?”

  The guard stationed there was their friend, or at least someone many of the soldiers gathered knew and felt they could talk casually with. They looked at him questioningly, not expecting him to stonewall them.

  “Haven't any of you worked on a blacksite before? You have your orders, go fulfill them.”

  But they were wrong. As when the soldier gave them a hard look and told them to go away, they felt like the man they had known had turned into a different person.

  “Private Randall?”

  Someone stepped out of the group, an officer if indicated by his uniform’s style, which put him ahead of Randall by a few years of experience at least.

  “Yes, officer?”

  Private Randall intoned politely, much to the confusion of others. The officer furrowed his brows. He wasn’t agitated or shocked by the man’s tone of voice, but confused.

  He hadn’t saluted or even said his name after his rank, something he had expected the private to do.

  After all, the officer was the one who directly oversaw Randall’s unit. He knew the young private better than most, though not quite as well as his squadmates, and was shocked to see his behavior.

  “Private Randall, under whose orders do you block the entry to our camp’s medical facility?”

  “Major Sark’s, sir.”

  This time the private did salute, but that’s what made it odd. He had just asked a question, and saluting during that was nowhere near the normal response. It was almost as if the Private was acting like a stranger to their military etiquette.

  Did he think he was supposed to salute when he spoke of someone of high rank, even if they weren’t present? That was a foreign idea to the officer.

  “Can you tell me exactly what he said, Private?”

  A faint wobble entered the officer’s voice. He was starting to feel unsure. It felt like something was off, could he be wrong? Where was the Major, anyway?

  “He said no man aside from Doctor Meyers and his medical crew, Captain Browne, and Captain Henderson are to be allowed inside.”

  “Just those two Captains? Did he say why?”

  To the officer’s knowledge those two Captains had no similarities in their assigned tasks, besides working under the Major from time to time. They led completely different companies, so what could they have to do with the medical tent? The officer wondered.

  “Apologies, sir. That’s all that I know.”

  “Hmm. Alright, carry on then, Private.”

  The officer began to walk away. Members of the squad underneath him catching up to him along the way.

  “Don’t you think there was something off back there, sir?”

  “Sir, there was definitely something creepy about that. I think they’re lying to Randall about whatever it is, though.”

  “I think Randall’s a part of it.”

  “Man, what would you know? You don’t know Randall like I do!”

  “Sabertooth Company, settle down!”

  The officer turned back to the arguing soldiers once they were a good distance away. He didn’t want to be overheard in case anything was really going on, so he had led them all the way across the camp, over by the comms tent.

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  “I don’t know what’s going on with Private Randall or Doctor Meyers’ men, but I do know that the Private was at least right in that you have your orders. All of you, go back to your positions and continue as normal, I don’t want to hear any more of this, you understand!”

  “““Yes, sir.”””

  …

  A few more hours had passed in the camp, and the sun had already set on the horizon. Justin’s main body was currently occupied in the medical tent where it hadn’t left yet, looking at the boxes of dark flesh being carried in by the Doctor’s assistants.

  The men in question had all been assimilated earlier, of course, which was made much easier by the fact that he had Meyer’s in his control, and knew somewhat how he acted. That had made collecting the assistants one by one without raising suspicion much easier.

  It was all around easier to assimilate a person he already knew well, he had realized. Browne, Randall, and even Henderson all had things about them that made them who they are, quirks of their personalities. Over the past few hours Justin had already run into countless awkward scenarios where it would have been easier to have learned what those were beforehand.

  ‘That’s why it’ll be so much nicer when everyone’s assimilated and I don’t have to stress about this anymore.’

  Justin sighed as he picked up a box of the dark flesh.

  Wait. Had he really just thought that?

  Justin frowned. He had surprised himself with how callous that thought just was. When he finally assimilated everyone? Wasn’t he only doing this because he needed to?

  Yes, that was right, he was forced to assimilate everyone in the camp, he didn’t want to. Not by any means.

  Justin looked down at the box. Over the past few hours he had been intercepting the radio transmission to the camp, and according to the government official on the other line, they were preparing to send reinforcements to assist in the study of the ‘high-value biological asset’.

  Code for the Herald’s corpse. Though they obviously didn’t know that’s what it was. Satellites had yet to come online to make visuals, thankfully.

  So Justin had steered the conversation between the radio operator he had assimilated and the government official away from the immediate reinforcement of the area. By stating that they had incurred no casualties or interference upon landing, he had given high command the confidence to send the research team among the next batch of reinforcements as well.

  That would delay their arrival time until tomorrow, but in their eyes it would theoretically speed up the overall project by a lot. By skipping what could be a week or more of preparations for the science team’s arrival, they could get to work sooner.

  Unfortunately to accomplish all of this, Justin had been forced to interact in a confident and assured manner over the radio, which had limited his ability to glean more intelligence about the country he was in, and all he learned was a little bit about the desert he was in, plus the names of a bunch of organizations that were just acronyms and hadn’t made any sense.

  But this desert, the Jejune, was a diverse landscape not in biome but fauna. Apparently across the whole of Lemus there were a variety of strange creatures that existed outside the bounds of civilization, boasting capabilities similar to their small-to-medium weapons. The Jejune was apparently one such location for these mutant beasts to roam, which was why a whole battalion had been sent in when the scientific importance of the specimen still had yet to be determined.

  The description of the beasts had been brief over the comms, but reminded Justin of the racial abilities that daemons had, obviously without access to the system though.

  Perhaps similar in idea, though without the system they were undoubtedly far less lethal. Otherwise the ruling population of this planet would have been them.

  Justin had yet to come to a conclusion on what to make of the new information, before he decided to cut the rest of the camp from the radio and start to crate away pieces of the Herald for himself.

  What he did need to understand quickly was any possible benefits this new biomass concept held for him.

  Half a dozen grey tentacles erupted from the sides of Justin’s arms and his wrist as he held the ball of the Herald’s flesh in front of him.

  He had found the daemon’s corpse to be far more efficient for breaking down into biomass than the native’s bodies were, even though it was much, much tougher.

  To compensate, he had dumped the free points from his recent levels into strength and dexterity again, and had used his newest skill to spurn more tendrils from wounds in his arms.

  The Herald was a Grade C+ daemon, which meant that its cellular energy level, or CEL, was extremely high compared to Justin’s own. CEL itself was the measured energy content of an organism’s cells, usually expressed as a parts-per-million number by the system.

  Justin had a CEL of just under four hundred before his death, leaving him close to the boundary between stages within the upper C grade. With his team at a comparable level to him, they had together been able to jump levels multiple times against opponents in the higher stage.

  Each system user was graded in the same way, even daemons. With CEL as a basis, they went from the bottom of the E grade, all the way to D, C, B, and A. Though C grade was the middle of the pack, the number of voltas who were in the grade were far fewer than those in D and E. Still, strength couldn’t be overcome purely by numbers.

  To a civilian, a C-grade volta was a titan among men, but compared to the true hegemons they could be considered as influential as an ant.

  These deviations of strength grew precipitously as one ascended the ladder of grades, eventually becoming exponential. Yet still, even across the three stages of each grade they were noticeable. The Herald’s physical body for instance, was much tougher than Justin’s ever was, while it had only been a stage higher. That had been the case even when its species hadn't specialized in physical defense.

  Anything in the C grades was immune to most conventional weaponry, like bullets or blades, so for Justin to collect biomass from the corpse he had to get creative.

  If the Herald were still alive and its cell structure active, Justin wouldn’t have been able to breach its hide even if he were to spend the next dozen levels dumping his stats into strength. Yet because it was dead, and there seemed to be some kind of connection between his parasitic tendrils and the corpse of the Herald, he was able to absorb it into himself with a great deal of effort.

  It took Justin several minutes just to get through the chunks he could hold in his hands, but the rewards were high.

  [Level: 5]

  [Grade: E-]

  [Status Effects: N/A]

  [Race: Scourge Progenitor (Larva)]

  [Attributes: 5 STR, 6 DEX, 1 END, 1 PER, 1 INT, 0 CHA, 0 MYS]

  [Free Attribute Points: 0]

  [Health: 10 / 10]

  [Stamina: 110 / 110]

  [CEL: 1 / 1]

  [Biomass: 403]

  [Skills: Assimilate (E-), Consume (E-)]

  The reward in terms of biomass was incredible. The equivalent of several hundred adult corpses from just a few crates of flesh.

  Of course, he hadn’t just been sitting on his hands for the last few hours. Among screwing with the radio operators, assimilating more people had jumped up his level. But the exchange was no longer one-to-one.

  No, his most recent levels had required him to assimilate more than just one person to increase, so his rate of expansion had slowed down precipitously. Still though, he was climbing far higher and quicker than he had ever before.

  It was only the very beginning of the E grade, but Justin had never heard of a system being leveled so fast by anyone, user or daemon.

  In spite of his own situation, Justin wondered with some excitement what level he could get to by the end of the night.