“What the actual fuck?”

He stepped out of the elevator, and the door behind him disappeared. He didn’t see it happen, but from what he could gather the opening of the doors was like the opening of a portal into another place, and when they closed the portal disappeared without a trace. He was alone on a mountaintop, with the clouds dark and foreboding just a few hundred meters above his head. The snow was coming in thick flurries, mixed with a cold hail swept by the frigid sharp wind.

He was mildly annoyed by all this, but at the same time felt better than ever. And it wasn’t because the harsh climate was making him feel alive or anything, he thought with a thin smile, no. It was because in here he was powerful. Inside Axiom of Choice, and this place was still within the pervasive field, he noticed with his thin smile widening into a grin, he was much more powerful than outside. His reality bending, already empowered by the field but even more powerful now that the repairs phase one task was complete, meant that he could just think all the pain away in an instant. And so he did. In a matter of seconds he went from feeling cold and horrible to feeling none of that. Everywhere around him the environment was manipulated by his reality-bending field, making it a pleasant temperature with no wind.

He walked towards the edge of the small plateau he appeared in. There was a steep drop into a deep chasm on the side he was in, while on the other side the mountain went on for a while more until it ended in a sharp tip devoid of all snow. Edmund thought he had seen something, a dark shape on the top of the stone formation, but by the time he had tried to enhance the image with his power, it was gone. He expanded his senses, letting them passively collect data and alert him if anything was amiss. It was ridiculously cheap to do in here, even more so since he could basically repurpose Axiom to locally work as a sonar.

Speaking of power: I should begin replacing my weak flesh and blood body with the nanites that are flowing through it. He gave the command, and the microscopic machines began to replicate inside of his bloodstream. It was going to take a long time before they could replace every part of his body, methodically transforming it into a powerful and nigh indestructible machine of destruction. They would do so by taking the materials from the body itself and from the food he ate to replicate, until they were done. Then they would move on to his brain where they would do the same. As long as they replaced one neuron at a time, with guaranteed continuity of consciousness, he going to be fine. He had done it many times already, after all. One at a time, Praetor. It is imperative that continuity of consciousness is preserved. Got it?

He received an affirmative response through his link to the AI.

A noise shook him out of his reflexive state. Immediately, he turned around and held out his hand. Two explosions rocked the mountain. Gunshots, he realized. The bullets flew towards him but stopped dead just a few inches from the palm of his hand. He smirked.

He disappeared from where he was and reappeared just behind the man, who was hiding behind a boulder. His face turned to horror as he realized that his target had become the hunter, and that Edmund was right behind him.

“Did you think that—” Edmund tried to taunt the man, but couldn’t finish the sentence.

The man turned and tried to smack him in the face but was stopped dead by a superhumanly strong arm. With a gesture of his hand, Edmund lifted the man in the air and kept him immobilized there. He studied his appearance up and down, watching with pleasure as the man struggled to break free.

Zero Humes.

The suspended body fell to the ground, faceplanting into the snow. Before he could react, however, Edmund grabbed him and lifted him by the back of his head. He lifted him over his head, and plunged his fist into the man’s gut. It punched into and through his body with barely any resistance, spraying the snow behind with blood and guts. He then dislodged the arm from inside the still alive man and shook the blood away, and then turned the now limp body and lifted it up again. Its spine was severed above the waist, making the legs dangle uselessly while the upper body still flailed weakly.

The man could only watch in horror as Edmund’s face morphed into something sinister. Tentacles grew from his skin, slimy and wet. They were yellow, with tints of algae green, and atop them were two deep-set shiny blue eyes.

“Do you fear death?” he asked.

The man was pale. Edmund laughed, and dropped the illusion. Couple Humes well spent.

“Not a chatty one, eh?” he looked at the hole in the man’s chest and shrugged. “Blink if you want to live.”

Sweat was pooling on the cold, shivering pale man’s face. Two beady and bloodshot eyes blinked furiously between tears and gasps.

Edmund nodded. “Good choice.”

He plunged his hand into the man’s body, and a stream of thick, dark fluid flooded its veins. The hole in his chest closed immediately and was replaced with dark metal, while the ragged breaths became steady and even.

“Your name?” Edmund asked.

“Eduard.”

Edmund shook his head. “Don’t like it. Get up.”

The man got up to his feet in a fluid motion. His clothes were stained in blood and ripped where the fist went through his body, revealing the metal plate that made up his torso, encroached by sickly white skin like a cheap graft. From it the dark metal had spread into the rest of the body through the veins, marking them like computer pathways in dark and anoxic green visible through the pale skin.

“Your name is now Bucky the fucking winter soldier.” He said.

The man’s arm fell to the ground, detaching with no blood spilled. Bucky didn’t even flinch, looking at the now discarded arm like it wasn’t even his own. In its place grew a metallic prothesis, made of nanites that grew out in streams before solidifying in a hollow shell. It was gilded silver, hard and flexible, with circular joints running parallel to each other along the length.

Edmund smiled, nodding slowly.

“Makes sense, right? You are on a mountaintop in the snow, you attacked me and got captured. You were then brainwashed and transformed. Bucky. If you don’t like the arrangement, next time think twice before attacking a man who just emerged from a strange portal. Savvy?”

The man stared.

Edmund exhaled, shaking the feeling that he was talking to a dummy from his mind. It would take a while before Bucky would be operative anyway. He closed his eyes and only opened them back again one hour later, after having stood perfectly still and immobile the whole time. The nanites in his bloodstream allowed him to pass time like this, suspending his perception of time so he wouldn’t get bored while he regained some Humes before moving on. This was just a crude way to do it, but it was all he could do for now.

39 Humes. I’ll have to make do.

He began to make his way down the mountain, but it wasn’t long before he stopped dead in his tracks. He blinked a couple of times, staring apparently into nothingness for a long time before letting go of a breath he was holding without even noticing.

He felt Bucky’s curious stare, like that of a child. His lips went up ever so slightly, a smile that almost surfaced before it was drowned back down again, until it bloomed under a different guise and for a different meaning.

“No, no, there’s no doubt.” Edmund said. “That’s Hume energy I’m sensing.”

***

The expedition leader, Martoff, violently kicked the flap of the tent open, sending a flurry of compacted snow flying right into the burning fireplace. The snow sizzled and evaporated, but none of the men sitting around the fire said a word.

“Where the fuck is Eduard?” the leader roared, slamming a fist on a crate. “I swear to god if that motherfucker got lost—”

“Maybe he found something.” One of the men said.

Martoff shot him a glare, colder than the wind that was sweeping across the camp, and all the men immediately tensed up reflexively. It was only when he huffed and grumbled, turning back to the tent, that they allowed themselves to relax just a tiny bit. They knew something was coming, and were preparing for it by trying to savour their last moments of peace as best they could. Just as they thought, Martoff emerged from his snow covered tent barely a minute later, holding his lantern up.

“You two,” he pointed, and the men felt their heart in their throats. “Go look for him. We need him.”

Martoff then turned to the last man resting around the fire. Terry was already up on his feet and waiting for orders, looking tense and pale, almost as if shivering. He gulped when Martoff squared him up and down, praying that the leader wouldn’t say anything about his condition and would just let go. If he performed as normal, he thought, then maybe he could avoid punishment.

“You, with me.” Martoff said.

“Yes, sir.” Terry echoed what the other two companions of misadventures said just a moment ago.

He got up and followed Martoff around camp. They stopped at where they had stored their weapons, in a crate that was now more than half covered with snow on the two sides where the wind pushed it. He was handed a handgun, two grenades and a rifle. Martoff took the same things, but instead of the rifle being an automatic assault rifle, it was a sniper rifle. Very high caliber, Terry noted, wondering if he could even shoot it. His trembling hands, shivering he didn’t know if more because of the cold or his fever, told him that he could probably not even lift it.

He was motioned to move, and he followed Martoff without a word. He had learned, along with the other members of the expedition, his lesson on the first day. There were fifteen of them, barely a week ago. Now they were four. Five, if you counted Eduard, who in Terry’s mind was now as good as dead. It the cold hadn’t gotten it, then the fever did. And if not that… maybe something else.

He found himself wondering if Martoff had it too, the fever, but soon banished these thoughts from his head. They were on the move.

“Keep your eyes peeled and see that you cover my back properly, am I clear?”

Terry nodded. “S-sir,” he blurted out. “Are we going there? What about Eduard?”

Martoff turned around all of a sudden, and Terry saw a finger pressed right between his eyes before he even understood what was happening. Martoff pressed the finger hard, and its icy, cold and hard presence was burning through Terry’s boiling skin like acid. He stared at it, slowly uncrossing his eyes to focus on the bearded, angular face just a few inches from him own. It was snarling, teeth clenched, but there was no steam coming from the mouth.

“You don’t question me. You do what I ask. Am I clear?”

Terry nodded, sweating profusely. The wind crept up his clothes and robbed him of all his body heat, leaving his shivering uncontrollably.

“Talk again, and I shoot you right between the eyes.” Martoff pressed the finger one last time, then turned around and walked away.

Terry massaged his forehead for a moment before hurrying after the leader. He passed his fingers maniacally where the man had pressed his own finger, but couldn’t feel anything out of the ordinary with what little feeling he had left in his digits. His mind kept telling him that the man had done something to him, and that he wasn’t feeling the hole just because his hands were too cold and useless now to feel it. But maybe it was just a delusion.

He scuttled along the mountain, on a path dug by Martoff’s broad legs as they ploughed through the snow like a machine. He was led towards a cave entrance, leading deep into the mountain, entombed in snow and dark blue ice. There was an eerie feel in the air, and it seemed to originate from within the cave. There also was a faint light there, pulsing in the distance.

Martoff turned and grabbed Terry by his coat, shoving him into the cave with tremendous force. He thanked the gods he managed to stay on his feet, or who knows what would have happened to him.

“Walk.”

He walked inside.

***

Lisa paced around the room, sometimes stopping to touch this or that console that Edmund had used before disappearing on them. She was disappointed but not surprised to see that none of them responded to her touch like they did to Edmund’s.

“When is he coming back?”

“I don’t know.” Toora said, in a tone of someone who had answered that question many times already.

“We can’t stay here.”

The mage sighed. “We will wait here.”

“But how long?” Lisa asked, pulling a lever.

“Silence. However long it will take. Make use of this time to train and meditate.”

Toora’s sharp reply made Lisa hesitate for a moment, but the boredom eventually proved to be victorious. In an overstep of bounds that surprised even herself, she kept asking questions.

“What if he forgot about us?”

“Don’t say stupid things.”

“Maybe he abandoned us.”

Toora got up, finally opening her eyes. “Why would he? It makes no sense.”

“So you’re sure he’s coming back”

“Yes. I don’t know when but we will wait for him here. We can conjure food and water with my magic. We are fine.”

Her tone was soft, Lisa noted fondly.