Justin quickly thought about his next move while looking at the time. It was late, or rather very early in the morning, which meant that the reinforcements would be here at the earliest in a few hours. Accumulating the biomass of the dead and assimilating the rest of the survivors wouldn’t be a problem, but the rest of the Herald was impossible in the time he had.
[Stage Quest: Assimilate at least (2) hosts from distinct suitable species.]
[Time Left: 8:09:40:36]
[Progress: 1 / 2]
[Completion Reward: 5,000 Biomass]
[Punishment for Failure: Level Lock]
And the stage quest was still burning a hole in his side.
Justin began to come up with a plan. He had done all he needed to here in the camp, so his ticking quest took priority now. He would assimilate the rest of the survivors, and then move on toward the south where the majority of the country’s population was.
He had to cross the desert at some point anyway, and he doubted he was going to find any hosts suitable for the quest if he sat here waiting for the reinforcements.
Unfortunately, due to the operational secrecy of this battalion, they hadn’t arrived with maps or any digital items. Even if he could fly the helicopters, they’d draw too much attention and he wasn’t confident in navigating the landscape with them regardless. He could force the survivors to do so, but that seemed like a surefire way to die via murder-suicide.
That would mean he’d have to get to the Republic’s southern shore by foot. Crossing a mountain range in between as well. Luckily, he had the supplies. As the food from the camp could still be converted into biomass to fuel the hive, and there were plenty of weapons to take with him. He just needed to find a second host species sometime in the next eight days and nine hours.
Hundreds of feet started to march throughout the camp at once as he prepared the assimilation of the captives. Like a conveyor line, they made passing contact with his main body one at a time through the system of tentacles where a seedling was given to them to deposit into one of the captives.
Rapidly, hundreds more became under his influence before he ran into a massive issue.
‘AAHH!!’
Justin clutched his head after a strong mental pressure assaulted it, hitting him like his head had slammed into a solid object.
Looking at his system interface, Justin found the source of the problem.
[Level: 8]
[Grade: E-]
[Status Effects: Enervation]
[Race: Scourge Progenitor (Larva)]
[Attributes: 12 STR, 6 DEX, 1 END, 3 PER, 1 INT, 0 CHA, 0 MYS]
[Free Attribute Points: 0]
[Health: 10 / 10]
[Stamina: 110 / 110]
[CEL: 2 / 2]
[Biomass: 742]
[Alpha Hive Capacity: 500 / 500]
[Skills: Assimilate (E-), Consume (E-)]
There was a capacity to the number of individuals he could subsume in the hive. It was natural that such an ability had limits, but that didn’t change the fact that it put a huge damper on his plans. If he had a limiter on his capacity, how was he supposed to find a second host species?
Of course, he could sacrifice parts of the hive into biomass or release them from the assimilation by ordering the death of their seeds, but would he have to keep doing that forever?
Justin knew from experience that while the stage quests grew in difficulty overtime, they always revolved around consistent subjects: the three tenants of strength. As a pugilist swordsman, he had thought of them as Foundation, Diversification, and Reinforcement. As the parasite was still at the bottom of the E Grade, his Stage Quest followed the rule of Foundation.
All of that meant that the likelihood he would have to do something similar come the D Grade wasn’t small, so Justin needed to learn how to increase his hive capacity before that happened.
He had a few ideas in regards to that.
‘…change of plans, I’ll take what little of the herald I can cut off in time, and drag the survivors behind me. I can’t afford to feed them for long but it’ll be better to have backups to replenish the hive than to turn them into biomass. I’ve got to leave within the next hour.’
…
At the same time, in Justin’s ship that was close to approaching the Lemus System Observation Base.
A morose silence had choked the atmosphere aboard the Terse Resignation ever since the field team had come back from the mission.
The shock on Harriet and Gary’s faces as they had come walking up the ramp, a few less in number than had left, had almost immediately turned to disbelief and anger.
The Guild’s esper specialized in healing, Harriet, had thrown several parts from around the ship at Markus’ head as he tried to take off his mechanical suit and explain. His helmet after taking it off was thrown right back at him only to harmlessly reflect off of his head.
At first, everyone had tried to comfort Harriet and Elrissa, the two who had clearly been hit by the losses the hardest, but it became apparent that the healer didn’t have the Technical’s same battle-hardened mentality. They had left her to cope in peace after a few hours of trying in vain.
Markus waved his hand, rubbing the creases along his forehead.
“Let her leave. She needs to grieve in peace.”
“Does she, Markus?! Who are you to say what she needs? I don’t think any of us can afford to be alone right now!”
Gary spat back angrily within their meeting on the ship’s deck. The space that had once felt so big was now vacant and empty.
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“Gary, he’s trying the best he can. We all are. If you want to spend time alone as well…”
“Well I don’t, Jade, and I think if any of you knew Harriet as much as you claimed…you would realize she doesn’t want to be left alone either!”
Gary slammed his fists against the table, glaring at the perpetrators.
His gentle eyes stained with a special kind of fury, hatred on behalf of another, betrayed the years of his life he had spent aboard the small guild’s ship growing close to the healer.
He knew her ways the rest of them would never understand, he suddenly realized. Gary felt bitter, seeing Markus and Jade apparently so eager to move on from the mission and debrief at the Council’s observation base.
But Gary wouldn’t allow their cold attitudes to prevail. Even if he was starting to see them differently, there was someone who still needed his friendship right now.
Gary stood up, knocking over the chair behind him in the process.
“If you’ll excuse me, Captain, I’m going to comfort our mourning friend like I’m the only human being aboard this ship.”
Markus shook his head sadly and waved him out. Once he was off the bridge, Elrissa stood up as well, silently nodding at the two of them.
Markus wordlessly mouthed ‘of course’, seeing that she wanted to leave as well. After all they had heard from Gary over the past couple hours, he had almost forgotten that Elrissa had lost someone close to her as well.
Heinrich had been her husband for years. They had even gotten married on this ship. It shocked him how belatedly he realized the woman had been so quiet this whole time.
Seeing her walking away, leaving only him and the Courser on the darkened bridge, it finally dawned just how much they had lost in one mission.
Markus felt a pain he couldn’t describe. He looked at the empty space where Heinrich had once sat, then at his own chair that he had sat in every day for several years. Like the others it bore his unique guild association insignia on its back.
As for Justin’s chair, he of course couldn’t look at it properly, because he didn’t have eyes in the back of his head.
Because as soon as their somber meeting had started, at first with trying to console Harriet, Markus had sat himself down in the late guild leader’s chair.
After all, he was their leader now, wasn’t he?
…
In one of the ship’s corridors, Gary stood with his hand raised before the control pad of a sliding door.
If he were a grade or so lower, he might have felt out of breath at that moment from all the running he had just done. Searching throughout the ship for Harriet’s whereabouts after she had been dismissed from their meeting by Markus had taken a while to do.
Gary’s face strained.
But the Esper hadn’t been at her residence, the lounge, the training bay, or gone back to the bridge. Which meant she was undoubtedly in the room on the other side of the door. The medical bay, the place where she conducted the other half of her work aside from mission prep.
Gary sighed as he lightly punched on the door pad and it slid open in front of him. Stepping in, a solemn atmosphere instantly pressed down onto him. He couldn’t immediately see the form of the woman within the room, but past the rows of curtains around medical cots he could hear her grieving cries.
Gary slowly walked down the row of curtains before stopping at the last. With a measured movement he opened the blind to the figure of a red-haired woman curled up on top of the cot, tears streaming down her face as she laid in a fetal position.
“Oh, Harriet...”
He gently knelt down to the side of the cot by her shut eyes. As her body trembled with sobs, he reached out a hand around her own, eliciting a shiver from the catatonic Volta. Despite that, she didn’t say a word or throw his hand away like one might expect.
Instead, the woman simply squeezed his hand, knowing who it was.
Harriet wailed loudly for the first time since he had entered. Gary didn’t say anything, as he felt powerless to muster anything up at that moment. He was not sure if he should, even if he had thought of something.
Maybe with silence, he could help her through this.
He could help her move past Justin.
…
At the other end of the ship within an enclosed residential suite, Elrissa was lying asymmetrically across the surface of her bed after a few hours had passed. The tears around her eyes had long since dried.
Her hands were raised, covering both of her eyes, as she thought in silence for several minutes. No one had come to her room in the hours that had passed, of course. She did not have the work-wife relationship that Harriet had with Gary, nor the ideological comradery that Markus had with Jade, she spitefully thought.
No, she was mourning the loss of the single person in this galaxy who would have been there to comfort her, the man who should have made it back.
“Ahh! Fuck!”
Elrissa jumped up from her bed and whipped her hand across the surface of her desk. In a blur, all of the machinery and projects she had been tinkering with for the past year were deformed and reduced to metallic clumps as they flew into the far wall of the room.
Her fists didn’t stop however, as wisps of energy collected in the air around her and burned thick scorch marks throughout the room. From the hanging lights to her bed, countless little things were severed apart or withered to burning cinders.
Her abilities as a Technical specialized in long-ranged weaponry didn’t mean much up close, but her angry spasms at this moment were enough to wreck her living space just by virtue of her raw cellular energy as a C-Grade.
“FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! Fuck all of this!”
Energy emblazoned around her body like a coating, making her blonde hair sharpen with a fluorescent shine. Her wrath was just about to cause her to take out her actual weapon, when a ding from her communicator brought it all back down.
Bzzrt.
“You have (1) new message(s).”
Heaving in anger, the volta took out the tablet attached to her side before swiping across the screen. There she found a message with a familiar tone from an anonymous source.
Elrissa Karthart, we are pleased to have been informed of your completion of the contract we discussed. The compensatory amount will be transferred to you in the coming sols via a dispersal across your accounts. We are appreciative of your discretion in this matter.
However, the terms of the second discussion have been voided by the unfortunate loss of one of your guild’s special assets. Without an Augur, our firm simply has too many other offers to consider aside from yours. As compensation for these regrettable circumstances, note that we will remain open to future offers from your guild should your membership stabilize back to acceptable conditions.
Best of luck in your future endeavors.
Like a torrent of winds rushing from a hurricane, Elrissa felt a rage envelope her as she finished reading the message. Instantly, the room around her was re-bathed in light as she exploded into a rage once again.
After all she had sacrificed, they were the ones not willing to commit?
“F-f-fucking bankers!”
The heat her body was expelling literally ate at the metal of the tools around her. Elrissa refused to accept it.
How difficult had it been? How much had she struggled to keep the plan from Heinrich, and how much had she lost when he had died regardless? The deal was supposed to set them up, not tear them apart.
And now they wanted to renege on the deal?
No.
She wouldn't have it. Not now that Heinrich had been killed. Not now that she was in so deep.
Elrissa knew exactly what would happen if the others found out, but she also knew what she would do. She knew exactly how resourceful she could be, when back into a corner.
And this was a corner, if ever there was one.
She would find some other way to get what she wanted, what she was owed.
Whether she had to bow to another backer, or step over the corpse of another comrade she would...no. Actually…scratch that.
She would never bow again.
A cold glint flashed through Elrissa’s eyes. If she had been willing to get her hands dirty in killing Justin, then she was willing to get a little dirtier before it was done.
She was back to being alone now, but there was also one less person that knew about her condition. What she had been trying to break through for years: Level Lock.
