Zed was pleasantly surprised. He hadn’t expected to meet one of the natives of this world so soon. At least, not one that wasn’t aligned with the drones.

He had been going through K2 and K4’s data libraries as he made his way through the forest. The first thing he had accessed was the priority list of their targets. After all, the list could give him a pretty good idea about the important local factions and the hierarchy within them. Anyone on the hit list of the drones was a potential ally; and allies were what he needed the most. No one conquered the world solo. No one.

Zed had been making his way down the list in descending order of priority. He had yet to reach the article on native wildlife when he encountered Hess. If he had known, starting out, that there were sentient lifeforms in the forest, he would have sought them out from the very beginning instead of bumbling around like a headless chicken. After all, the locals were bound to have much greater knowledge of the terrain. Finding a hidey hole appropriate for him would be a cinch for them.

Fortunately, he met the snake before he wasted too much time.

‘Although,’ he mused. ‘I’m pretty sure the little guy thinks our encounter is anything but fortunate.’

“Relax,” he told the nervous snake. “I have no intention of harming you.”

The Universal Translator went to work, conveying both the meaning and emotion behind his words. Once again, Zed found himself appreciative of the official, System-created version of the program. Most third-party translation apps weren’t capable of dealing with the subtler parts of speech such as tonal variance and inflection. Their users would hear others as emotionless robots, and they would sound like ones too! Without the program conveying the sincerity in his tone, Zed was sure Hess would have been spooked into fleeing.

“In fact,” he continued, “if you do something for me, I’ll make it worth your while.”

Hess seemed torn between trying to flee and accepting his offer. At Zed’s mental command, with a soft whine of motors, K2 adjusted its gun to point directly at the serpent’s head. The good cop, bad cop routine finally tipped the scales in Zed’s favour and Hess’ posture slumped in defeat.

“Hess agrees,” he said dejectedly. “He will help the Burning-man. He just hopes that he will be set free after he does.”

“Don’t worry,” Zed assured him. “If that’s what you want when the time comes, that’s what I’ll do. For now, guide me to the closest cave or tunnel that’s large enough to fit me.”

Hess grew pensive for a moment, his tongue flickering out intermittently as he scoured his memories for a suitable spot. His eyes widened as it came to him. “Ah, yes!” he hissed. “I know the perfect place. Follow me!”

Zed kept a close watch with his field skills as Hess slithered down the trunk of the tree, took his bearings on the ground, then shot off in a certain direction with him and K2 trailing close behind. He mainly used the Force field to track Hess since the Thermal field was pretty helpless when it came to cold-blooded animals like snakes whose body temperature was the same as their surroundings. With how well Hess was blending into the layer of fallen leaves on the ground, Zed would have easily lost sight of him without the skill. All the while, he was aware that Hess was watching him closely, testing his response, hoping for a moment of inattention so he could run away.

After a while, the trees started becoming larger and packed closer together. The forest grew darker as the denser canopy let in less light. The undergrowth was sparser here, making it easier for Zed to move through it.

Suddenly, Zed’s Fields warned him of danger. Slamming his feet onto the ground, he skidded to an abrupt halt.

“Stop!” he barked out, pointing a burning fingertip at Hess.

The snake froze in place, muscles tense, ready to make an explosive dash for freedom.

“I wouldn't do that if I were you,” Zed warned softly. "I'm not feeling particularly merciful right now. It wasn't a very nice thing you just tried to do."

The snake slowly turned around. “Hess does not understand what the Burning-man is saying,” said the snake in a most aggrieved tone of voice. “Has Hess done something wrong?”

Zed sneered. “Oh, I’m pretty sure Hess does know what the Burning-man is saying. Hess is very clever after all. He is clever enough to lead people into a trap.” His tone grew hard. “Did you think I wouldn't realize that there’s a large pitfall directly in our path covered by just a thin layer of branches and dead leaves?”

Hess stiffened.

“It wasn’t a bad plan,” Zed continued. “You’re too light to trigger the trap, but I’m much heavier. If I stepped on it, especially running as fast as I was, I would have broken the branches and fallen through. Then you’d be free to escape, wouldn't you?” He shook his head. “Too bad, I didn’t fall for it.”

Hess’ slit-pupiled eyes flickered between Zed and K2, who had taken position on his right, bracketing him in.

“Hiss… well… hiss…” he tried to defend himself, his speech devolving into a nonsensical string of hisses from the stress. Reverting to his primal instincts, he reared up to his full height and bared his fangs threateningly, trying to scare Zed back.

Now this was making Zed feel bad!

‘Sheesh…’ he huffed internally. ‘It’s like I’m bullying a child.’

Whenever the System took over a new world, it granted System access to every single living creature above a certain threshold of sentience. Which meant that non-sentient lifeforms like bacteria, worms, or plants – that were alive but had no centralized form of consciousness – weren’t granted access to the System. While sentient creatures like snakes, were.

But, unless the creature was sapient – capable of independent logical thought – the System took it upon itself to distribute the initiation points as it saw fit. It invested 5 of the 6 free Authority points into the Assistance skill, raising the grade of the AI assistant all the way from G to F. The F grade AI then complemented the user’s thought processes, elevating them to sapience. The last free Authority point went to Appraise; the skill along with a free language adaptation patch helped the newly elevated users learn about the world around them and to frame their thoughts in the form of words.

After the System integration phase was over and the world was opened to the wider universe, these new System users would spread all over the galaxy and beyond, becoming part of the growing universal community. But, unless long years of natural evolution finally granted them sapience, their descendants would always be born without intelligence and the System would keep assigning their initiation points for them.

Seen from this perspective, Zed was in fact bullying a child.

A child with the memories of an adult brown tree snake and the intelligence of a fully grown human, sure, but a child nonetheless. And given that the Keeper candidates were brought into the world very soon after the System’s Advent, Hess couldn't be more than a couple of days old, at the most.

The snake was smart enough to make a plan to get rid of Zed’s oppression, but he wasn’t experienced enough to know what to do after the plan failed. That was why he had fallen back to his tried and tested instincts to deal with the dangerous situation. Instincts that were preparing him for fight or flight.

“It’s fine,” said Zed soothingly. “Calm down. I asked you to bring me to a cave or a tunnel that was my size. And you did. Not in the way I would have expected you to, but you still fulfilled your end of the deal.”

As he talked, he slowly made his way towards the hissing snake, keeping his posture as slack and non-threatening as he could manage. As he drew closer, the hissing grew louder and more insistent.

“I’ll keep my word,” he soothed. “I won’t harm you. You're free to go.”

With his last word, Zed stepped into range.

Hess struck! He flickered out from his coiled posture like a streak of brown lightning, his mouth wide, his fangs bared and dripping with venom.

Zed dropped the weight reduction he had been maintaining on K4 to balance his body. The sudden increase of the weight on his back jerked him backwards, and Hess’ jaws snapped shut in front of him, missing him by less than an inch. Zed's hand shot out and grabbed the snake by the throat.

Hess thrashed around ineffectually in his grasp, coiling his body around Zed’s arm and trying to twist around and sink his fangs into the hand grabbing him.

A sudden sizzling sound drew Zed’s attention and his eyes widened in consternation as he saw a drop of transparent yellow venom drip from one of Hess’ fangs onto his arm…and rapidly corrode a deep pit in it.

‘Ashes!’ he cursed. ‘The blasted thing must have invested heavily in the Molecular Field. Its venom has a disintegration enhancement on it.’

Tightening his hold on the neck of the thrashing snake, he used his other hand to catch its head and pinch its mouth shut. After a few minutes of ineffectual struggles, Hess finally calmed down and the intelligence slowly returned to his eyes. Realizing his situation after a moment of confusion, he looked pleadingly up at Zed.

Zed stared impassively back.

“Calmed down yet?” he asked flatly after the silence had stretched long enough to make Hess extremely nervous again. “Blink once for yes, twice for no.”

Hess blinked once.

“Are you going to attack me again if I let you go?”

Hess blinked twice, emphatically!

“Good. Then I’m going to let go of your mouth so you can talk.”

Once released, Hess opened and closed his jaws a few times to ensure everything was still working fine – even dislocating it and opening extra wide once for good measure.

“Hiss… The Burning-man is very fast,” he flattered. “Hess has hunted much prey, but none of them have managed to dodge his strike before. The Burning-man is also very strong. No matter how hard he tried, Hess could not break free of his grasp. But most of all, the Burning-man keeps his word.”

Zed gave the snake an amused stare.

“Stow it, Hess. Flattery will get you nowhere. Not right after you tried to kill me. Relax, though. I am a man of my word. I’ll let you go as soon as you answer two of my questions. Alright?”

Hess blinked, once.

Zed stared for a moment before bursting into chuckles.

“You can say yes or no now, you goof,” he said, his flames flickering merrily on top of his head as he laughed.

He felt the tension draining out of his body. ‘I needed that,’ he realized. He had only been on this planet for a scant few hours, but during that time, he’d just gone from one stressful situation to the next. The pressure had been building. It felt good to let it out.

After reining in his mirth, he continued in a much better mood. “So first, how did you know this hole was here…and how did you come up with this idea to trap me?”

Having a high intelligence or being naturally cunning was one thing, leading someone into a trap was another. There was no way a two-day-old initiate to sapience could figure out the craft of trap setting all on his own. It just wasn’t possible. Let alone, a trap had to be set beforehand. It was amply clear that the pitfall wasn’t the snake’s handiwork.

“Hess saw a short-furred-man capture a bristle-boar using this pit once.”

“Short-furred-man? Bristle-boar?” asked Zed.

“The short-fur looks a lot like the Burning-man,” replied Hess. “Except that hair covers his head instead of fire. Sometimes the hair is dark, and sometimes it is light.” He paused. “Unlike the short-fur, the boar walks on four legs instead of two. It has hair too. But its hair covers its entire body and is rough enough to leave scratches on the bark of trees. The scratched bark is perfect when Hess has to shed his skin.”

Matching the descriptions with the data in the drone’s libraries, Zed found the entry on the bristle-boar. Another threat level ‘zero’ and priority level ‘null’…just like the snakes. The short-furs, on the other hand, were a lot more interesting. They were a bi-pedal race called humans. And what was more, they were sapient! Their priority level reflected that: ‘Alpha’, the highest possible rank. But, the assessment of their threat level was oddly ‘low’.

‘Hmm… Does that mean that there’s yet another sapient race on this planet? One that has thoroughly beaten the humans into submission and de-fanged them, making them so harmless? Is that race the one who runs the organization behind the drones? Seems promising. Needs more study.”

Zed was impressed. Carbon-based lifeforms were always famed for their diversity. But two sapient species within such a small area, with apparently thousands of sentient species remaining on the list? This was on the extreme end of the spectrum! Silicon-based life was much more unitary. In fact, there were only six distinct species that could be found on the entirety of Pyrrhus. The Pyrrheans were the only sapient species among them.

Hess continued with his recounting.

“The short-fur enraged the boar and ran with it chasing behind. He leapt over the pit while the boar charged blindly and dropped into it when the ground caved beneath its feet. Hess was basking high up on a nearby tree then; he was woken by the commotion, but after seeing that it had nothing to do with him, he went back to sleep. A few days later, Hess noticed that the pit had disappeared. Of course, he wasn’t really Hess back then, just another snake. He did not understand what the sudden disappearance of the pit meant. But when the Burning-man asked Hess to show him a burrow or a cave he could enter, Hess remembered about it again. He was smarter now. He connected the clues and realized what the short-fur had done.”

“Then decided to try it out on me,” teased Zed.

Hess shrank his neck.

“Don’t worry about it,” Zed comforted him. “I’m not mad about it anymore. In fact, I’m quite impressed you managed to figure all that out by yourself in the heat of the moment. That brings me to my final question for you. Will you join me as my subordinate?”

Zed locked eyes with the snake. “If you choose to do so, you will have to follow all my orders, to the letter, unquestioningly. In return, you will never lack for anything. Food, safety, mates, you want them, you’ll have them. I give you my word.”

Bending down, Zed placed Hess onto the ground and released his neck. Straightening up, he walked backwards, away from the snake. When he was two metres away, he stopped and summoned K2 back to his side. All the while, he never broke eye-contact.

“As you said yourself:” Zed spread out his empty palms, showing Hess that he was free to go. “The Burning-man keeps his word.”