Why wasn’t I listening to him? Why was I remaining silent? I was afraid. Not afraid of him or his words. I was afraid of letting go, letting this fire out that had been building ever since Magus the 2nd had attempted to erase George and Tutor. I had never really cared about the stolen cr, yes it was offensive to have the stuff I rightfully earned taken away, it just didn’t yet have much use to me when everything was free in VR. But people and friends, however, those things I cared about dearly. In that long time that I had spent with time frozen, watching Magus’s finger hovering close to the button and not able to do anything, I realized something. Something profound. Some monsters would destroy everything you love for no reason, even for something as simple as a coin. What if George and Tutor were just the start of what I could lose? What length would Magus go to in order to get what he wanted? If humans were the key to obtaining a more dense cr technology, something that would allow him to steal from others without fear of justice, how far would he and his brood go? Would they destroy all my family and friends? Just to keep this secret to themselves?

As it stood, I could see that this Core had a terminal sickness. It was worse because it stemmed from the ones in power, putting the rest of the Citizens at their mercy. I didn’t know how to stop them though. If I did anything to this guy’s harvester robot he could just transmit himself away… and that would be that. He would tell his family about me, about how I could damage cr and then every Magus in existence would be looking for a piece to cut off of me. Me, my friends, and my loved ones.

I had sped up time instinctively to give myself time to think rationally. To give me time to calm down. It wasn’t working.

I could feel… something. It felt like my heart was on fire, like my blood was beginning to boil, my skin starting to steam.

I didn’t see the change coming over me, but Magus did. I couldn’t feel the cr shifting over my body, fluidly warping, lengthening my legs, adding spikes to the end of each of my joints, and terrible claws to the ends of my limbs. What I couldn’t see, and what was visually most terrible of all was the circular maw that had formed on the front of my head, very similar to the maw of the monster that I had seen while doing my first surveying job.

Two triangle marks of black appeared in exact locations on the back of Magus’s robot body. I instinctively knew that those locations would destroy his ability to propel himself using cr propulsion and damage his transmitter, blocking him from escaping back to the safety of the Core and silencing all but the ability to speak audibly. What I didn’t know was what would happen the moment I agreed with the recommendation.

My vision narrowed, darkening around the edges slightly as my world became hyper-focused. We were !^*! the Swarm of Death. We don’t play with our food.

Our whole body tensed and something shot out of our mouth towards Magus while still in slow time. It startled me, the part of me that was still Kevin, it was exactly the same snakelike mouth that I had seen before. Its razor-sharp teeth hooked into the edge of Magus’s robot, securing him to us while we moved forward in a blur, stabbing down twice in rapid succession on the black triangles located on his back with our dagger-like claws.

Our prey was not flying away or calling for help.

In rapid and merciless rakes of our powerful claws, we made each of his limbs fall to the deck of the carrier.

Our prey was not going to crawl away now.

My vision cleared, finding me shaking. What just happened? What the heck was that? I looked down at my limbs, finding that they had returned back to my smooth robot arms, yet knowing that the beast was part of me now, I could return to its form, our form, with but a thought.

“Oh no…” I said to myself as I worried what this might mean for me. Was I losing control? It didn’t feel like it. I think that was what worried me more, the fact that I couldn’t tell the difference.

My purpose, my mission came back into focus as my eyes landed on the now crippled robot body of Magus. He didn’t feel pain in this form. Only time was the greatest enemy to Citizens who had a body made out of cr technology…. well, time and now me I supposed.

I turned off my usage of my Prime Speed Control key. It was time to suck up my worries, I would have time for them later. I still had something to do here before I went looking for Elaya’s dad and got out of this horrible Core.

As time returned to normal so did sound. The sound of Magus the 15th shouting in fear. He had gotten to watch me instantly transform into a monster before having everything blur and taken away from him. He found his harvester robot body resting on the surface of the carrier with his robot limbs scattered around the deck. His first impulse was to will his limbs to reform and to draw all of the extra cr he had used to cap off the carrier disks back towards his body to contain me. Nothing moved, nothing obeyed him. His next action was to press his escape button, transmitting his being back to his luxurious VR mansion. Nothing happened. Next, he escaped into fast time using his personal Prime Speed Control key. This gave him time to look around and to take stock of his plight. He cursed that he hadn’t thought to use it earlier and to tell others about me.

Rage gripped his heart as he tried everything to get a message out to Magus the 1st. Kevin would pay for this insult to their family name. His mouth took over while his hatred for anyone who had more power than him festered and boiled over when he was unable to send his message. “Curse you, Kevin! I will delete you! I will delete your friends and family! I will make you suffer! I will watch you burn!”

I looked down at Magus the 15th, the guy who was happy to enslave people who were just trying hard to pay off their debt to society and to get back to their families. I had done my part in disabling him for the time being, now I just needed to get out of here once the other convicts learned that they were free. I stepped around Magus, still screaming on the deck. His tone had shifted slowly to what he could offer me in return for his freedom and then back to threatening me with all manner of violence.

I accidentally kicked one of his limbs, sending it careening over the side of the carrier and into the face of one of his returning henchmen.

The leg fell, spinning down towards the surface of the sun before it happened to bounce off of several others like a badly built Japanese Pachinko game.

“Geth, what do you see? What was that thing?” I heard a voice ask from another convict rising up from below.

“It… it was the boss. Part of him anyways.” The one that got hit in the face said as he rose up to hover near the side of the carrier. The rest of the group arrived just a few moments later. None of them came towards the carrier, choosing to hover a small distance away and to take in the sight of Magus laying disabled on the deck.

I felt like I was having hives. I could feel the surface of my cr skin rippling, an itchy sensation. I didn’t understand what was happening to me, it was as if my alien cr could feel my stress and it was trying to change me back into whatever the form was from before. I didn’t want that to happen again, not so soon. Not until I understood how easily it overrode and blended with my mental state. I very much did not want to become possessed by something with agendas that carried the title “the Swarm of Death” with it.

Everyone watched as my skin rippled, causing spikes to rapidly form and fall away as I struggled with the feelings inside me. Magus, for the first time probably in his life, decided it was a good time to be quiet. Probably out of self-preservation.

“Look,” I said after a few moments of struggling to get control of my alien cr. It felt like I was holding back a savage dog by the collar, its hackles were up and it could smell fear in the air. “I wouldn’t suggest anyone get any closer to me right now.” I managed to say after a moment.

I focused on the lead guy who had the most visible upgrades on him, also the same one who had gotten hit with the leg, “Geth is it?” I asked.

“Yes, uh, Kevin.” He replied after reading my name from his interface.

“Please tell everyone that their debts have been paid, you are all free to go,” I said, just wanting them to move away and give me a second of peace. I was beginning to worry the more I struggled. Things had been going so good for me just a little while ago, something about upgrading to gold cr had also made my alien cr more dominant.

“What?”

“What did he just say?”

“Guys! My balance is zero! I can get out of here!”

The other gang members had been listening in and some of them had decided to check their balances as well. It seemed that these guys were not here as paid workers like I had thought, more as the ones that Magus had the most control over.

It was like a release of a water gate, the former convicts started to shout to tell the others to check their balances. A few rushed off into the distance, probably to tell friends the news rather than to just send them a message.

Geth almost joined them. He started to rush away before turning around and looking back at the surface of the sun.

Having the mass of convicts floating around the carrier thin out, some heading directly upwards towards the Core, made the agitation of my alien cr lessen considerably.

I let out a long breath when the pressure dropped low enough that I could get a handle on it. It had been a stalemate battle as long as it was feeling threatened. I was worried that if I didn’t learn a way to become stronger that it would overpower me the next time I discovered a new material to upgrade with.

“Did you kill him?” Geth asked me when he turned back towards where I was standing to the side of Magus.

“No, I simply disabled his ability to communicate with the Core and his cr propulsion. That and his ability to crawl away.” I said while gesturing to the seven painted robot limbs strewn around the deck. I was wondering why Magus hadn’t said anything recently. I moved closer to nudge him with my leg. I looked closer, trying to understand what was going on, surely he hadn’t figured out a way to transmit himself away?

I tapped the edge of his robot body a couple of times. “Oops. Guess I need to be more careful.” I said when I noticed that my taps had left small dents in his cr.

I think I was beginning to understand how cr worked. If material from this side of the dimensional barrier hit or tried to damage material from the other side, nothing would happen. It was impervious because the force applied to it didn’t register. However, when I tapped it with material that was denser and had originated from the other side the results would be as if I was hitting something made out of mud and held together by tiny fragile microbots.

“Stop! Don’t kill me! Don’t crush me!” Magus finally said. It seemed that he had been off hiding by using his Prime Speed Control and the vibrations to his robot body had caught his attention.

“I am not going to kill you,” I said as I turned back to Geth.

“You aren’t?”

“No, now leave me alone, I am busy,” I said, stepping away.

“Why haven’t you left yet?” I asked Geth.

“Hmm? Oh, I can't. I have three family members that are stuck down there. They tried to catch you the first time you appeared and now can’t get free from the fatigue.”

“Come on then, let's go get them,” I said as I reached out and picked up Magus, setting his smaller body on top of mine. I was going to confine him inside the sun while I figured out the whole legal System in charge of taking care of people like him.

“So it was that strange shape that allowed you to move through the fatigue?” Geth asked as we flew down.

“Partly yes,” I said as we dropped to the very edge of the fire soup. I could see the leeches start to pull away from those trapped the closer I got to the edge. “Here, hold this,” I said as I flung Magus’s larger shape on top of Geth’s hovering form. I could tell that he really didn’t like what I had done, his cr propulsion jets sputtered seemingly in revulsion.

I changed into the dart shape again, keeping up the ruse that it was due to this form that I was able to move inside the surface of the sun more easily than they were. "You know you could fish them out yourself right?" I asked Geth as I changed.

"What do you mean? The fatigue would get me as well. Then I too would be stuck."

"What? No, I mean you could have poked a stick in to get them."

"What?"

"Yeah, any form of stick would do as long as it was made from cr. You could even put a basket on the end to drag them out."

"..."

"You know... because a stick wouldn't be causing fatigue if it wasn't generating cr propulsion?" I said, just beginning to understand that they had never thought of this as an option. Had they never played with sticks before?

I went in and grabbed the remaining convicts who had gone in after me, it turned out to be six of them. They were all emotional when I brought them up. They listened to Geth as he told them that they were free to return home again. Soon they had left, after surprisingly thanking me.

An odd change had come over Magus the 15th during that short amount of time.

“So, what are you going to do with me?” He asked once Geth and his family had left. He sounded odd, dangling as he was from one of my hands that I had formed to hold him. I wondered just how much time he was spending in slow time using his Prime Speed Control key. I could almost feel him staring at me, studying me, even though the harvester robots didn’t have eyes.

“With you? Well, I plan on dropping you off somewhere that I can let the proper authorities know to pick you up later.” I said as I quickly thought through my memory to try to see if I could bring up a command to help me find and track a broadcasted frequency. Sure enough, there was one.

-Please enter desired tracking frequency code:__-

I entered “M2” into the blank space and immediately got a steady signal located around the equator of the sun. No… two steady signals. It looked like he had indeed disposed of Elaya’s dad in the same fashion that he had done to me.

“Hang on to something because we are going to be going pretty fast,” I said as I made a backpack harness to carry his octagon-shaped body with.

“You ripped off my arms man! How am I supposed to hang on to anything?” He said before I laughed and jogged around the surface of the sun.

I had never heard a Magus scream like a girl before.