She was stunned, unable to figure out what had happened. Luckily, she wasn’t in control of her body, and The Colony made her throw herself to the ground.

Another boom rang out, resulting in a shower of dirt cascading into the air right next to her face. Her body was already moving, but before it left her vision she could see a shiny, oblong object sticking out of the ground.

A bullet, Sarah thought, remembering Emma’s description of guns and bullets. At that moment, she realized she had even lost control of her eyeballs. It seemed The Colony judged this attack important enough to take full manual control of her body.

Sarah didn’t have any more time to think about the implications as she found herself sprinting in the direction the bullet came from. She felt warmth surging in her legs, hundreds of times more powerful than the passive swirls she felt normally, and her body powered through the vegetation of the dense forest.

Immediately, several more shots were launched her way, but none of them could aim properly given her rapid speed. Soon enough, the goblin and human zombies sprinted after her, but took care to follow unusual paths to avoid getting shot.

How can mold react so effectively to a sniper attack? She thought. The Colony isn’t from this planet… it shouldn’t know about guns.

And then she realized- this was the first time she had encountered guns, but the same might not be so for other-Sarah. Other-Sarah always went farther away from the center of The Colony than she did, and actively fought in battles, so obviously other-Sarah would learn about guns before Sarah saw them.

At least, Sarah hoped that was the explanation. The alternative, that The Colony could read her memories, was much more terrifying. She hoped digging into her memories was significantly harder than just erasing them.

It was almost pitifully easy for super-speed Sarah to avoid getting shot, and in the blink of an eye she made eye contact with a human dressed in mottled green clothing and carrying a similarly colored, long object she assumed was the gun.

With a flick of her wrist, the soldier was blasted off his feet and into a tree.

“Crack!” Many bones broke from the impact, and the figure dropped limply at the bottom of the tree.

Sarah felt a surge of joy at winning. Quickly, that turned to horror, as she realized what was going to happen to the soldier.

Sarah was going to be responsible for the soldier suffering a fate worse than death.

She wanted to resist, but the ki in her body was silent, undetectable once again. Her body moved closer to the unconscious body, step by step. It was only after she picked him up that she realized that nothing would happen to him before they returned to the cave.

As she regrouped, she found that the squadron of zombies had captured two more soldiers, at the cost of ten goblin zombies dying. Interestingly enough to Sarah, no human zombies after the initial one were killed- Perhaps The Colony views goblins as disposable, or lower quality?

Inevitably, her train of thought moved back to the unconscious soldiers. She felt conflicted. She felt terrible that they would die- and would try to think of a way to save them. Yet, they had tried to kill her.

It hurt her that the soldiers had immediately assumed she was a zombie, even if she herself wasn’t sure if she counted as one yet. As the group started to head back, she passed by one of the goblin zombie corpses. There was a pool of blood spreading underneath its body, and looking at it showed Sarah her reflection for the first time she could remember.

Her hair was a red color with a tinge of brown- though accounting for the blood’s natural color, she didn’t know how red her hair actually was. Her eyes were similarly brownish, and overall, she’d be pretty proud of her natural looks.

Yet, she was horrified by her appearance. Just a bit below the corner of her left eye was a greenish patch of mold. If was puffy, fuzzy, and in every manner the same as the mold that was slowly covering the zombies’ faces with every passing day.

It must’ve been why the soldiers had shot her without hesitation. I’m already a zombie, she thought, and simultaneously teared up and gagged.

As if on cue, the soldier on her back twitched and at the same instant a searing hot pain enveloped her ear. Her brain went into shock, and then she passed out.

The mold re-activated manual control, and moved H143’s arm to pierce the chest of the human. A relocation of ki sealed off the blood flowing out of H143’s ear, and then the group restarted their march, with one more corpse, and one less captive.

***

Sarah was devastated. The right side of her head felt like someone was pressing a burning hot iron into it, and dried blood caked her cheek. Still, for most of what she remembered she was dealing with some injury or another, and the pain wasn’t to the point of being unbearable.

Her consciousness, however, was making her situation miserable.

You should’ve saved him, it said.

There was nothing I could do, she responded.

You murdered him, it went on, not listening to her complaints.

Her emotional side was using morals from her past self to bash away her logical arguments. With her memories wiped, but morals still remaining, Sarah was left with a problem where there was a discord between her moral conscious and her rationality.

Or maybe I’m just not good enough at dealing with irrational emotions. She grimaced at another spike of pain lancing across her skull. Her torn apart ear certainly didn’t help her settle her inner turmoil.

In an effort to distract herself from her conscious, and the newly made soldier-zombie now inhabiting the cave with her, Sarah tried to feel out her ki situation.

Immediately, she felt a stream of warmth channeling from every part of her body below the neck into where her injury was. The ki was combining into thicker strands as it came closer to her injury, reminding her of a chart of blood vessels in the body she had seen… somewhere.

As she focused closer, she realized that there were smaller strands of ki going in the reverse direction, forming a cycle. Ki was somehow being produced across her body, preventing the cycle from drying up.

Her entire body below her neck was paralyzed, but she could detect her ki, unlike her previous attempts. The only possibility she could think of was that moving ki was easier to feel.

For Sarah, this was a valuable opportunity to study how The Colony manipulated ki. By herself, even when she concentrated her hardest, her inner ki merely smudged around trivially. What she saw now gave her a clue: perhaps ki was easier to move when going in a cycle.

She promptly focused on a small section in her chin (one of the few places she had control over her ki). Since she still couldn’t detect ki that wasn’t moving, Sarah chose to try and redirect some of the natural ki swirls to combine into a bigger cycle.

It was hard, and the swirls she was manipulating would fade into eddies before she could combine them. But, eventually, she had managed to combine two swirls into a thicker swirl of ki.

Sarah smiled, even though the cycle fizzled out. Although she couldn’t replicate The Colony’s ability to drag stable ki into motion, she was sure that eventually she’d be able to do so, letting her maintain ki cycles indefinitely.

She was still a bit concerned about why her ki cycles kept losing energy. If they didn’t do anything, she theoretically shouldn’t need to add any energy input, at least if conservation of energy was still a thing. She hoped it was, since she wanted The Colony and other alien invasions to be as understandable as possible.

She looked to the ki network The Colony had constructed. Its intent was most likely to heal her wound, so it was no wonder that less ki was leaving her ear than was entering, and that also explained the warm feeling she felt there. Still, as she looked deeper, she realized that she was feeling a miniscule bit of that same warm feeling throughout the rest of her body, wherever ki was being drawn from.

She had long since associated the warm, restless sensation as the feeling of ki moving through her body. Maybe, the warm feeling was merely what she felt when ki was used up inefficiently.

That would match the physics knowledge she still retained- machines always lost energy to heat, as no process was a hundred percent efficient, including moving energy.

So, Sarah thought. That warm feeling isn’t ki, but just a wastage of it.

Sarah didn’t quite know how to stop her ki from generating heat, so she pushed it into the back of her mind. She instead returned to meditating, alternating between studying the ki network paths in her body, trying to form larger ki cycles, and examining The Colony’s method of healing her ear.

***

After around an hour, Emma was walked back into the cave, and made to sit down next to Sarah. Emma’s originally black hair was coated in a layer of dark-red dried blood, and she had a hole in her jeans’ upper thigh revealing a bullet wound.

“I don’t know how I got shot.” She whispered, trembling.

“Is it painful?” Sarah knew her own ear was in massive amounts of pain, and Emma by all rights should’ve been knocked unconscious.

“My legs are paralyzed. I’m... I’m fine.”

Sarah dragged herself a couple feet across the floor to get to Emma, and then pulled her into a hug.

“It’ll be okay,” Sarah whispered. “I’ll get us out of here. For sure.”

Sarah tried her best to smile, but the blood streaming down the side of her face didn’t help either of the two girls’ confidence.