Nadia felt like she was pulling away from reality, retreating down a narrow tube behind her eyes, rising above the world and the sensations of her body, floating in the clouds, completely happy, completely at peace, while her body did as it wished.

It was blissful surrender, it was a gentle and loving sensation of being engulfed by the entire world, and yet being a part of it. She was one with the universe, and all living things rested on the same vibration that she was a part of, their limbs dangling into the infinite.

Nadia hated it.

If there was one constant in her life, it was that happiness and contentment immediately preceded extreme suck, until she’d begun to strongly associate those two in her mind.

Only in violence could she find peace.

Rage against the dying of the light.

Nadia turned to George, her body moving like a marionette. She felt like a stranger who had taken control of Nadia Ilestar’s body. Like it didn’t belong to her.

Fuck that.

“George,” she heard herself say. “I’m going to need you to do me...a favor.”

***Contingency One, Undead Bioweapon***

One felt his roots extending through the population of the continent, like trickling water against his skin, he could feel every slip and slide tingle against his awareness as men and women took Unity to escape their circumstances and worries.

The drug subtly reformatted their brain, making them sleeper agents of One, allowing him to connect and disconnect them from One at will.

One wasn’t just a single creature anymore. He existed across the face of the planet, stretching from one end of the continent to the next.

He existed in every energy-farm, where massive fronds captured sunlight and converted it directly and efficiently into sugary nutrients for his meat-drones, who delivered themselves to the mouths of his waiting army.

He was the fronds, he was the drones, he was the army, he was the land, he devoured himself, He was One, and he only had one goal:

Wipe out the Harbinger threat.

The sounds of industry rang from coast to coast as Knick-knacks built One his commissions.

Not long now.

In the trickle of information of new contacts, he felt a dim sensation begin to come online, bringing him to awareness of a Person of Interest.

A mind of passing familiarity, having been in her corpse once before.

The princess with a vendetta against the Origin’s Host.

One’s mind focused on the sensation, narrowing in on it in a mater of nanoseconds. Northwest side of the Bal continent: Iletha: Brenneth: Three hundred twenty feet from Jerry’s bait shop opposite the coast, twenty-four feet belowground.

Why are you here? One thought, examining the unusual thing with more of its attention than it dedicated to most drones. Last One had seen the female, One had been using her body to host Blackworms.

Naturally, she didn’t survive.

One collated data and memories from all the drones in the area, feeling them shudder in pleasure and disgust as he momentarily wrenched their thoughts away from their stream of consciousness, giving them orgasmic ego-death ever-so-momentarily.

It seemed that the princess had come back from the dead. How interesting. And it was suspected to have something to do with the host.

As he searched more memories across the continent, He spotted the princess beside Origin’s Host on more than one occasion.

One upgraded the princess from a Person of Interest to a Target of Opportunity. He channeled his intent, crashing into her brain like a wave.

Normally, one dose of unity wasn’t enough to take control of a human’s body. It required several doses and a period of adjustment while the enzymes did their work for a human to become a psychic antennae: an easy access point to enact plans or gather information.

In this girl’s case, the first dose and no adjustment period had done little more than shown him the door. The door was still locked and bolted. Usually this would make it not worth the effort, but a Target of Opportunity couldn’t be passed.

One hit the door with the mental equivilant of a ten-ton tractor, plowing the flimsy mental resistance out of the way.

Behind the door was…nothing. As though he had been staring at an optical illusion, eight more doors popped out of thin air.

Of course. Ilethan mind magic would make this a more complicated endeavor, One thought as he examined the doors for a split second. He plucked the tiny fraction of Nadia’s brain that had been compromised, like the string of a guitar.

One of the doors shifted onto the same frequency, and One plowed through it, landing in Nadia’s body.

As he entered the body, he immediately could tell something was off. The female’s body could not be considered human by the strictest definition. Someone had mucked around in her genetic code in order to permanently incorporate Warped abilities…in fact…

One gasped with the female’s lungs.

The telltale signs of Origin’s handywork were clear. She was a creation of his maker. One could tell by the choices Origin made. His creator had self-invented genetic templates for various organs and processes that he liked to use, because they allowed a great deal of customization, stability, and resilience when creating monstrosities on the fly.

The girl was riddled with them. She could be nothing other than the work of his maker.

That should make this easier.

One began looking for Origin’s back door. His creator was not the kind of man who would simply send something out into the wild without a failsafe, or a way to hop bodies.

But….there was nothing. No mind-jack, no Failsafe, no tether…nothing.

What madness is this?

“I don’t think I can do this.” A male human’s voice came from in front of One, drawing his attention even as he continued searching for a backdoor.

His Gaze met the grey eyes of a male human. Middle age: Good physical fitness: Face unknown.

One searched his drones for information.

They didn’t know who he was either. They only knew him as a stranger that had recently come into town, one of dozens.

“Do what?” One asked, hoping the man would clarify.

Something in the man’s expression changed, registering horror and disbelief, before the man brought up a steel sword and swung it down at One’s head.

One moved to deflect the attack, as preserving the target of opportunity would be the best course of action, at least until he’d achieved some tangible benefit from possessing it.

The muscles in One’s arm froze momentarily, just long enough to watch the blade come down right between the two horns, crunch through several layers of bio-armor, penetrate the kevlar brain-sac, and mangle the grey matter inside.

***George Fuller***

George’s skin crawled, as the lovely princess’s features were bisected by an Abyssal steel blade.

George, I can feel something knocking at my back door, it’s not gonna hold tight very long. I need you to kill me. First you gotta destroy my brain, She’d said. Then both my hearts, or I’ll come back to life. Don’t be shy, really get deep inside me and mess me up.

Gods, this isn’t how I wanted the day to turn out, George thought, wrenching the blade out of the unbelieveably tough skull that had nearly stopped his strike.

“Ooohh…” Nadia moaned, writhing on the floor as her skull began reforming. George could see grey matter piecing itself together. Nadia let out something that almost sounded like a word.

Gods!

Nadia put a shaky hand under herself with deliberate motion.

“Fuck!” George shouted, taking a step back. He’d been barely willing to put her out of her misery, even if it meant he would most likely be executed, but he hadn’t for a second believed that scrambling the princess’s brain wouldn’t kill her.

Something inside George snapped as his adrenaline peaked.

“Stop. Talking. In. INNUENDO!” George shouted, wielding the sword with both hands as he brought it down on her skull over and over with each word. “I’m. NOT. INTERESTED!”

Once her skull was a fine mush, George stood over her back and plunged the blade into her heart. Or, he tried. Beneath Nadia’s unnaturally soft and supple skin was a membrane that acted as flexible armor draped across her bones and musculature. It caught the first strike and even with his full weight behind it, he wasn’t able to push the point through.

Damnit!

It was a simple problem: He needed more force per square inch than he could deliver than by just standing on the blade.

Okay, I can do this.

George flipped the empty-headed corpse over and put the tip of the sword against its chest, then jumped up, and at the perfect moment, unleashed all his strength and momentum. The membrane parted, clinging to the blade and slowing it as it burrowed deeper into Nadia’s chest cavity.

Around the heart was…another armored membrane, allowing the organ to slide out of the way of George’s slowed blade, inflicting no damage on it.

“Son of a bitch! What kind of monster are you!?” George demanded, pulling back and sawing through the outer membrane. He needed direct access or else the heart was always just going to slip off the tip of his blade.

Both my hearts, or I’ll come back to life.

“You gotta be kidding me,” George gasped, panting with exertion as he desperately tried to widen the self-healing breach in the creature’s chest. It was extremely tough, and her body was rather light, so she kept trying to slide across the floor as he worked, losing him valuable time and –

“Uuugh,” Nadia groaned, her arms beginning to twitch again as her brain rebuilt itself.

And the brain’s coming back! Again! Damnit!

George was in the middle of hacking through the brain again when the local nobility converged on him like a swarm of ants, their eyes white all the way around the edges, their movements slightly jerky and uncoordinated to George’s enhanced senses.

“Shit!”

Invisibility.

22/30 Bent remaining.

George was not a fighter, which was why he had to seek every advantage for himself in order to win. He’d originally been a logistics scribe who’d gotten lost on a battlefield, desperately trying not to get a sword through him.

The first noble through the door tracked his movements and somehow managed to follow him despite being invisible.

When he lunged forward, the noble skewered himself on the blade, all the while scratching desperately at George’s face and arms.

“Gah!” George dropped the sword and took out one of his F.U.B.A.R. grenades, covering his mouth.

He tossed the fist-sized smoke bomb into the hallway that he heard the screaming horde of crazed nobles coming from.

Something bigger than them is puppeteering them. it must know what’s happening to Nadia and be trying to stop it. The puppet master’s got some kind of bird’s eye view of the whole situation.

Drawing from what he knew about Ilethan mind-magic, the puppetmaster should only be able to see what was happening in the immediate vicinity of those he was controlling.

That mean George needed to escape and bring Nadia’s corpse into the forest, where there were no puppets to interfere.

Boom!

The grenade exploded, filling the entire hall with choking smoke that began to drift into the gore-spattered room.

Passwall

21/30 Bent remaining.

Rather than charge out the door like they expected, George hoisted Nadia’s body over his shoulder and ran straight through the wall on the opposite side, landing in another tunnel entirely.

He brought up his internal map of the facility that he’d scouted out previously, then started running like a madman, the brainless body flopping over his shoulder.

George ran until he couldn’t possibly run any more, stopping every once in a while to make sure the brain wasn’t coming back.

Why the Abyss am I doing this? he asked himself. Going so far out of my way to kill a crown princess, the only consequence of which is a life of exile from my home country or a public execution…

Because she’s been compromised, and she would rather die than let an enemy of the state steer the body of a princess of Iletha around like a placid Guar.

It wasn’t that George didn’t have pride in his country, it was just buried deep under years of jaded cynicism. Somehow the circumstances and the girl’s sacrifice had managed to reach it.

Once he got out of the underground, George was able to focus solely on losing pursuit.

He might not be a great fighter, but he was damn good at losing a tail.

Masked presence

Diverging trail

Invisibility

Formless Step

Confounding distractions.

He turned invisible, speed raised drastically while little autonomous packets of Bent created his footsteps going in completely different directions, and other packets of mental energy waited in the air, ready to latch on and subtly force a pursuer to focus on the wrong trail.

In a matter of minutes, they arrived in the forest, seemingly free from interference. George dropped the princess off his aching back and caught his breath for a moment before giving the princess a glare.

You could have just NOT drank the godsdamned unknown fluids, you crazy bitch!

“Alright,” George sighed, drawing his knife and eyeing the regenerating body. “Let’s get this done.”

It was going to take a long time, and a lot of elbow grease, but George had patience.

Moving the corpse of a princess across state lines was going to be the truly hard part.

***Contingency One, Undead Bioweapon***

Oh well, One thought as he was jettisoned out of the corpse. Without special preparation in the form of blackworms, he couldn’t ride a corpse around.

It seemed as though at the first sign of usurpation, the female had instructed the male with her to destroy her brain.

Interesting. A statistical anomaly. The number of people who could conceive and carry out their own murder without a moment’s hesitation at the slightest sense of trouble could be counted on one finger.

Hmm… if a human is nearly incapable of killing themselves at the drop of a hat, this one must have had mitigating factors that made killing themselves a tolerable condition.

Normally death isn’t a ‘tolerable condition’

One collated more data about this princess and her family in general, looking for some hint as to why she was so eager to give up her meat-suit.

Mind-slaves. Jumping.

In the hushed whispers, and the corners of his drone’s minds that they actively tried not to think about, One uncovered a plausible reason for the female’s decisive assisted suicide.

As it turned out, the aristocracy of Iletha had a bad habit of diving into their relative’s bodies, likely a variant of Mind-slavery. None of his drones had first hand information on the technique, it was only rumored to exist.

He hadn’t acquired any drones from the Ilethan royal family, after all.

Still, this was enough to build the hypothesis that perhaps the female wasn’t as dead as she appeared. It was possible she had traversed the powerful connection between him and her body to migrate her consciousness.

One then turned his attention to sweeping his own hive-mind for inconsistencies. As one, every single part of One did a self-sweep, pinging the greater hive-mind.

A single solitary drone resting under the leaves of a solar collector was just a moment behind the others. A negligible fraction of a second.

But it was the only drone with any sort of delay at all.

Found you, One thought, emotionlessly directing his titanic will at the tiny creature.