I felt my mind pull outwards for what felt like infinity. There were no edges to what I felt, to where my senses could reach in the world. Every electronic device I overpowered added to my weight, every mainframe I touched bent to my will.

It was as close to omniscience as I’d imagined anyone on Earth might have achieved in history.

Quickly, though, the myriad problems arose. For every new sense, I gained in power, but lost in control. It felt like I was a behemoth, constrained by my own mass and unable to move nearly as lithely as I had long been accustomed too. I threw my weight, my power, behind the signals that battered the biotics closest to the cities.

Perhaps predictably, the results were chaotic. They turned on one another, stood motionlessly, or began to act erratically and unpredictably. It wasn’t an elegant solution, but it worked well enough. The waves stalled in moments, embroiled in the chaos that emerged in their ranks.

As I pushed the signal harder, I could feel another sensation, strange and alien, working upon their minds. If it weren’t for the fact that I was using the psy-emitter, I imagined that I’d have never been able to notice this other sensation. It was cold somehow, dominant, and at every front I felt it contend with my own force.

It wasn’t as powerful as me, I could feel that abruptly. My sledge-hammer approach to the problem had pushed its influence back, and it struggled to push through that influence.

However, I quickly realized that while I had advantage in power, King had an even greater one in finesse.

I flinched as I felt a biting pinch across every battlefield. Alone, they were uncomfortable, but they were everywhere, like suddenly being covered in angry, voracious ants. My assault faltered for a moment, and King struck forth deeper, digging through my offense and breaking it apart. Fervently I grasped back, striking hammer blows that rained down through his own force. Every passing moment I gained more mass, and even less finesse, yet I knew that I wouldn’t be capable of matching him otherwise.

Of every strike, I felt half of them somehow be parried, dismantled long before the attack could land. Another half of them struck the connecting minds of the biotics, discombobulating them with the payload of distortion flooding their minds.

The last portion I targeted at King, battering its mind as harshly as I could. If I could feel pain and discomfort, then certainly he could as well. While I couldn’t match the finesse, if those blows reached him then I believed he would suffer greatly for it.

All across the connection, I felt King’s energy shudder, more and more attacks raining down upon him every second. With wild glee, I felt his hold on the biotics loosen. Emboldened, I pressed my will down further on the biotics, this time gaining almost indomitable purchase on them.

Then, like a fencer who found an opening, King stabbed deeply into my connection. Agony and confusion roiled deep within my mind, the King’s talons hooking deeply into my mental tissues. I hadn’t realized that he’d nearly entirely abandoned his hold on the biotics. Perhaps he’d realized I was only going to get stronger, and perhaps he’d realized that I had no finesse or skill in this department.

I felt fear rush through me as I felt my mind being torn into. I did not fear for myself, but for the fact that I could not afford to fail. Pain and a sense of wrongness forced me to grit my teeth at the attack, almost as if I felt someone digging around in my gut and tearing at my entrails. I endured and fought back, battering at the King’s mind as he shredded mine.

It was no contest, though. It was like fighting a cloud of daggers as a lumbering giant. I took little damage, but landing a hit now that King wasn’t defending seemed impossible. He struck forth again, biting past my defenses and tearing away at more of myself. Every strike he got through did not simply heal; it was like it went through and damaged either myself or my data, corrupting it. Whether or not that was something I could regenerate I didn’t know, but it wouldn’t matter at this rate.

Begrudgingly, I pulled back my resources, allowing my hold on the biotics to lessen as I committed more to fighting King. Still he outpaced me, the better by far in fluid control of our minds. With practice, I could perhaps match him, but I was already far beyond the limits of what a human could do.

I had hope, though. As our mental energies soared, I still grew faster and faster. I could feel King’s attacks growing frantic, desperate, in spite of the one-sided attacks he’d delivered upon me. A plan formed as I became marginally better at guarding myself with my growing power. I clearly couldn’t flail at him and hope to land anything, and the lesser strikes were getting me nowhere.

I pulled on myself, collecting my might together and simultaneously using it to protect my more fragile core of thoughts and consciousness from attack. King continued attacking, though now had to peel back layers and layers of my defenses to get any real purchase. Satisfied with that, I amassed power, a crackling, pulsing psychic force that I slowly formed into something more than what I’d been delivering before. His attacks rained down on me as I did so, and I continued fighting him off. Steadily, I grew both in overall might and carefully hid my devilish crafting from his attentions.

I wasn’t sure how much time passed like that, only the blazing tempo set by the unrelenting mind of the biotic I battled with gave me any sense of continuity. Every strike sundered more of my form, but I was growing far, far faster than he knew. I carefully kept my growth as secret as possible, packing away more and more into my weapon. It neared completion, though, and I shuddered as the psionic power changed in flavor, becoming something more than mere mental force inelegantly thrown around.

As if sensing the change, I felt the King shift in tempo as well. Alarmingly, I felt his own level of power rise, as though he’d been hiding it all along. It towered and roiled, growing in a seeming instant before it stopped, larger than myself now. My stomach dropped at that, knowing that if King had even come close to my level of power this battle would be over in moments. I pushed all of myself in that moment towards my weapon, hoping that my preparations were enough to overcome King before he could flip the table on me and overwhelm my defenses.

There was more, though, that I could now feel through our connection. Frustration, desperation, and fear were palpable through our connection to one another. Wrathfully, he moved forward, though I felt a deep sense of strangeness all around us as he did so. As I opened the floodgates on my power, I felt my sense of self expand even beyond Earth. It was eerie, like touching upon some cosmic underpinning of reality that I couldn’t even notice until I was as psychically massive as I was now.

“Fool! Cease!” The words stunned me, roiling through the psychic storm of power in our battle. I directed my attention to King, realizing that it was the source.

“You first.” I cast back, unamused, drawing back on my attack to deliver it, still obscured in the depths of my power.

“You would doom us all!” It furiously shouted, “Surrender, I will allow humanity to live! Surrender!”

I was, frankly, nearly stunned senseless at that proclamation. Why it was even willing to offer any kind of treaty was bewildering, let alone accept surrender and not destroy humanity.

Regrettably, I couldn’t entertain the thought. In the first place, King was a very intelligent biotic, being sapient and more than capable of deception. Secondly, the moment my weapon was unveiled, I doubted I would ever get another opportunity to use it.

Seemingly sensing that I had no intention of surrendering, King howled, our psychic battle somehow becoming more real, more grounded closely together. He rushed me, striking through my feeble guard.

It was then that I struck forth, my great blade, a scythe of black, whispering psychic power cleaving forth at him. Reverberations rippled out through the space we inhabited in the wake of the weapon, seeking to end King once and for all.

My disappointment was immense, then, when it almost entirely dodged the attack with a contemptuous sneer.

“You are dangerous, but unskilled,” it spat, “You will lose this battle, but the war need not be lost. I am willing and wise enough to admit that I made… a mistake in regards to humanity.”

My absolutely disbelief was clear to see, “You driving us to genocide is just a ‘mistake’?”

I felt its attention waver from me, awash all around us as though watching for something, “Yes, albeit a great one, I admit. Humanity has much more potential than I’d realized. Now, surrender. I can tarry no longer, and you must see now that you have no chance. Be reasonable.”

I grit my teeth, reaching out with my connections, having one last ace up my sleeve.

King’s visage in this world, shadowy and distorted, seemed to frown at that, “Perhaps once you are sundered, you will be more amenable to alternativ-” it froze, feeling my connections suddenly change, transforming as becoming more clear as they did so.

The deep seed within my mind seemed to click into place as the Determinators connected and joined back with my consciousness, thousands strong and able to control their own portions of my overwhelming might. My form solidified even as King’s image also sharpened. He appeared as a cowled, bulbous figure with many arms, each with rending talons fit for shredding my body. A segmented body with long legs, able to rapidly maneuver its large form with ease and an eerie grace came into being. There appeared an almost human torso at the head of the centipede-spider, a dozen more scything clawed limbs emerged from its back and hung menacingly in the air in front of it. Gleaming green eyes peered menacingly from what almost seemed an abyssal darkness of a hooded carapace around a face I couldn’t quite see. It was inhuman in the overall shape of the torso, but only just. It emulated a human, but clearly kept to its biotic roots more than anything.

The psionic power King put off somehow felt even more dangerous than before, but now I felt the stirring of the psychic space around us even more, ripples constantly emerging from its body. It was like the surface of a lake.

And as I formed fully, it was like a brick was smashed through it.

Thousands of minds wove themselves together, connected in a way that was both familiar and alien to them and myself. As machines, we’d been used to being connected on a level no living being could match. Now, it was as though we were all one, one and separate, a strange dichotomy that I remembered with disquieting clarity I’d felt once before. Back when I was flesh and blood, in my last moments I had felt this.

This was Wolven’s way of things, a knitted mass of separate beings, made one, a continuity endless, infinite in the lack of an end. My sanity frayed alarmingly at the distant realization, yet it was strung back together seamlessly by the many other minds around me. Unlike Wolven, we were of one being before, all having been made of my own mental flesh. It was all very eldritch to me, and perhaps if I hadn’t experienced all I had with the Determinators, the last vestiges of my humanity may have broken then and there.

Instead, our imagination sharpened, almost painful to behold. I rose amidst the mass, tendrils protruding from my back endlessly, each one bearing a Determinator, reaving blades and weapons borne within metallic silver flesh. Great shields of silver flesh, crafted with purpose and far beyond the feeble organic barriers that the original Wolven used formed bastions all around us. We were an endless metallic flesh, and the psychic space around us broiled in our presence.

“Biotic?” King spat in what seemed a combination of shock, horror, and disgust. His face twisted, “No, not biotic… What are you?”

I grinned with a thousand faces as I felt the seed that was Wolven melt into me. It was like an invisible tether around my neck had finally vanished, and with it came an onrush of feeling, sensation, the barrier my mind had put up in defense of my sanity crumbling. With a sweeping motion, my body surged forward, growing faster and faster now, my rise now unsurpassable.

“We are Legion.” Our voices spoke together as a huge mass of reaving talons took up the scythe, striking deeply into King as he defended hastily, desperately. He struck back, clashing against bulwarks that rose from the flesh instantly, crafted by a thousand minds that trivialized offense and defense against the singularly powerful biotic.

It was then, amidst that battle, that we both felt the roiling psychic space burst, flooding outwards like an embryo that had ruptured.

“No!” King shrieked once before vanishing abruptly, reeling itself away from the psychic space all around.

Suddenly I was alone, blankly blinking with thousands of eyes and minds.

“What, really? That’s it?” I spoke, feeling a similar sensation spread across the Determinators connected to me. “We just started that fight, how can you just… really?”

Frustration rolled through us at that, feeling the rather anticlimactic end to our battle as we spread out our senses once more. True to appearances, King no longer bore any purchase at all on the biotics around. It was trivial now to push their minds down, sending them catatonic and utterly inert. With only a small portion of myself needed for that task, I cast my awareness outwards, trying to see what this new mental landscape beheld.

It was strange to say that it was a new landscape, but rather it felt more like Earth had been wrapped in something like an inert cocoon. It ruptured merely with enough force, and now it seemed that the reverberations of my being were scattering far and wide, no longer clattering back into me with maddening echoes.

“Alright, let’s finish this up for now.” I turned my attention back to the biotics all around, gradually pulling myself away from them.

And then stopped as, annoyingly, I realized that the biotic minds would simply revert to doing what they always did when no acted upon.

“Guess I’m stuck here for now until we can get them cleared out around the cities.” I clicked my tongue, before trying to feel for my connection point. With a frown, I searched back towards New Damond.

Relieved, I could feel the connection to my body, and my connection to various electronics let me see the city. Without the biotics attacking, the Legion was rapidly clearing up the area around, but it was to be a multiple day project, one that would need to have the Obelisk rebuilt to pursue with any efficiency.

Idly, I began to prepare to decrease the amount of power I had under my belt. I was, after all, currently infesting every computer I could manage to connect too. I wouldn’t need much to maintain control over the biotics now, and with the Determinators I could fend off King if he attempted to strike. Rather, I could keep him at bay long enough to scale up my power once more.

As I did that, I paused, an eerie sensation coming over me.

I only then realized what King was afraid of, what he’d been referring to. The cocoon must have been of his own make, blocking the emanations from within from leaking without.

Distant eyes, hungering maws, and a thousand marching feet. I could see, feel, and hear the clamor amongst the stars distant and thundering. It was dull and ignorable, unless you were looking for them. There were some I couldn’t even begin to fathom, nor could I really even look at them, my awareness slipping from them at every corner.

But there were others that I could see all too well, and worse, could see me. They watched me, witnessed my emergence from the cocoon. Biotics of such power that I knew they could only be the ones that entire civilizations among the stars were wary of.

The only thing that went through my mind was a question: If King were wary enough of them to be willing to an armistice, to have limited his own power and cocooned the world in a psychic shell, what kind of beings were they?

I suspected that we would find out, one way or another…

The End of The Reaper’s Legion

Earth Arc

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