The captain of Rainbow Unicorn Squad was laid out on a stack of pallets, completely still. Harsh, shallow breathing echoed through the speaker in the front of his armor.

“What happened?” Perry asked, his voice rendered deep and ominous through his suit.

“He just kinda locked up and stopped responding,” his squad member replied, shifting from foot to foot nervously. They couldn’t read Perry’s expression through the humorless façade of his armor.

Perry hit the captain’s suit with the signal to open, popping open the front of the armor.

Inside, Casey looked a bit worse for wear. Pale and sweaty, breathing rapidly, his eyes darting around the room, clearly panicked. Still not moving, though.

Perry leaned forward and scanned the captains body, turning his head to peer into the arm hole-

A neon blue and green mass whipped out towards his eyeballs from the arm of the suit, causing Perry to reel back just in time for a colorful keratin barb to fly past his face and embed itself int the wall.

“Well, there’s your problem right there,” Perry muttered, pointing to the amorphous neon blob retreating back into the arm of the suit like a snail into its shell.

“Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do,” Perry muttered. “I’m gonna tell Casey’s suit to pop the arm off. I’ll wrangle the thing, you guys grab Casey and get him clear. Understood?” He glanced around the dilapidated warehouse, spotting the nearest of the squad nod and brace themselves.

“Ready…” Perry muttered, entering the code to disassemble the armor. “Go.”

The Mk. 3 popped apart with a satisfying click, and Casey’s squad grabbed him and pulled.

Perry seized the disconnected arm and wrenched it away from Casey, bringing most of the strange slime with it.

Except for a few parts that seemed to be anchored into Casey’s arm.

Casey let out a pained scream, the first sound they’d heard out of him save for breathing.

The anchors seemed to be hooked into Casey’s muscle by the very same barbs the creature had fired at Perry’s face.

I think I recognize this… Perry thought to himself in the midst of the chaos. The illustration had been poorly drawn, in black and white, in a book on campaigning in Manita Perry had read out of idle curiousity when he was younger. It had illustrated a snail-like creature attached to a knight.

Perry remembered the picture because it had been so graphic, unlike the rest of the book which primarily dealt with things like hygiene and logistics.

“Pinch here, under this lump,” Perry said, motioning for the nearest squad member to pinch directly under a swollen nodule near the top of the tendon-like anchor connected to the barb embedded in Casey’s arm.

Now, what did they say about it? Rub Haleflower on the creature to induce it to let go?

They didn’t have any manitian plants available, but from what Perry remembered, Haleflower was a natural insect repellant. Whatever compound was in the plant probably irritated the thing into letting go.

Bug spray?

Areosolized.

Perry reached out and pulled a can of DEET out of the ether.

If this doesn’t convince it to let go, then I don’t know what would.

“Make sure you keep pinching,” Perry said as he leaned forward. “Any more venom gets through and it might stop his heart.” Now let’s make Casey taste bad.

SHHHHH

Perry sprayed Casey’s arm and a bit of the anchor with the stuff, and the reaction was instantaneous.

The barbs dimpling Casey’s skin from the inside receded, drawing back into the anchor as the creature withdrew, thrashing its appendage around and seemingly gagging on the nasty chemical.

It tucked itself deep into the arm of the suit, which Perry drop-kicked to the other side of the room before turning back to Casey, whose arm was bleeding from a puncture wound that his guys were already holding putting pressure on, but not much worse than that.

“Get Casey to the fish trap. They’ll know what to do with the arm,” Perry muttered, not taking his eyes off the seemingly empty piece of armor.

The squad grabbed their captain and took off, leaving the disassembled suit behind.

What the hell…is a manitian parasite that plagued travelling armies for centuries doing on Earth? Perry thought, glancing over at the barb stuck in the wall. Its base looked like it had previously been attached to blood vessels, with a bit of bleeding, but not much. Something that was meant to detach.

Like a kid losing a tooth.

Original manuscripts believed the creatures were spontaneously manifested by marching armies, but Perry, having a bit more of a science-based mindset, expected they most likely parasitized a native population of animals that travelling armies would come into contact with on a regular basis.

Perry checked the travel logs and saw that Rainbow Unicorn had been pushing far to the west, using their suit’s ability to fly to hunt far afield of Chicago.

Maybe a little further than was prudent, but a suit of power armor can make you overconfident.

PPP.EXE

(5/6) Remaining

Perry wrapped the Mk.3’s arm with the shiny black webbing and sucked the life out of the parasite before pulling it out.

The slug-like creature’s bright colors had faded in death, it’s feeding tube spilling out of the orifice designed to suck blood out of its prey.

I can’t jump to assumptions. It could be a mutated tick or something.

Perry pulled out his phone and snapped a pic, sending it to Gramma.

He didn’t have to wait long.

What are you doing with a Lockjaw Slime?

-Marigold Zauberer

Perry wrote back.

We didn’t bring any of these with us when we came to Earth did we?

A moment later:

Of course not! They were a scourge on our armed forces for centuries. We couldn’t even have brought them along by accident, since their primary hosts didn’t make the trip.

-Marigold Zauberer

U don’t have to sign your name on every text, gramma

Then how will you know who wrote it?

-Marigold Zauberer

Perry rolled his eyes and refocused on the question at hand.

Any chance you missed some of these things?

Gramma responded:

None at all, every population that arrived on Earth was thoroughly quarantined for quite some time. You’re lucky that you were born as late as you were, you know, because…

Perry stopped reading.

So Gramma doesn’t know where these things came from. She knew exactly what it was on sight, though, which makes it less likely that it’s a mutated tick or something of that nature.

Okay, so either an early portal from Manita released a breeding pair into the wilderness…or we’ve got convergent evolution cause by Earth’s gradual exposure to the Tide and magic in general.

Or….there’s a new portal from Manita somewhere in the middle of North America? Or there was an unsupervised one.

Everything Perry knew about portals indicated that it would be very unlikely that one would form by itself, even more unlikely that it would be stable enough for organic life to cross over without being destroyed.

So what’s our most likely bet? Well, not everyone in Manita liked Gramma. She wasn’t the queen of the whole world, much as she likes to claim…just one of the bigger kingdoms. There’s no reason there couldn’t have been portals that were made by others that she didn’t know about.

The most likely bet was an old portal that nobody told Gramma about was used in a secretive place out in the wild, and it allowed some wildlife to come through some fifty years ago.

The alternative…was interesting.

They must’ve picked this thing up somewhere on their route. While they were out hunting. Most likely somewhere around where their path turns sharply and heads straight back to Chicago. Let’s find out where this thing came from.

Perry overlayed Rainbow unicorn squad’s route on his map and took off, blasting away from the dilapidated warehouse in an explosion of debris, heading west from the edge of Chicago.

Perry dialed up Heather’s sat phone as he flew, the audio connected to his helmet.

“What’s up?” She groaned, seemingly still in bed.

“Can you let Nat know I’ll be outside the city today? I got a line on a weird Manitian parasite called a Lockjaw Slime and I’m going to check it out. Just be aware in case a doppleganger shows up claiming to be me sometime in the next few hours or I disappear for an extended length of time. The usual precautions.”

Safety first. You never know what could happen when you go out into the wild.

“Shoot…on…sight,” Heather said, the delays in her speech indicative of someone writing. “got it!”

Two can play at this game.

“And thanks for the dinner last night, it was an incredible romantic gesture, and made Nat truly happy. We both appreciate it, and we couldn’t ask for a better mother for our children.”

“I…It wasn’t…I wanted…You suck.” Heather pouted over the phone. It was jarring for someone playing the jerk to be appreciated. Threw them off their game.

“Bye, Heather.”

Heather heaved a dramatic sigh. “Bye, Perry.”

Perry hung up and turned his attention to scanning the surrounding forests and grasslands.

Perry had reached the very tip of Rainbow Unicorn’s hunting trip for the day, and hadn’t seen anything that might reveal where a larger population of the strange parasite might be hiding.

There would’ve had to have been some kind of population of the things wherever Casey stopped to take a piss and got got. Things don’t exist by themselves. There had to have been a mommy and daddy parasite, along with brothers and sisters.

Perry was nearly five hundred miles away from Chicago and he was about to give up the search for the day, when he spotted a glint of sunlight off of something near the horizon.

Is that a car…in the middle of the great plains? Weirder things have happened, but that seems a little unusu-

In the middle of his musing, Perry spotted another glint, then another.

He zoomed in with his helmet and spotted hundreds of round, metallic shapes lumbering through the tall grass.

That’s something to go on.

Perry flew over and landed beside the shapes.

They had the look of snails about the size of an SUV, and that was where the comparison ended. Their shells weren’t one solid piece, but instead composed of dozens of interlocking metal plates that shifted and overlapped with every move the creature made.

The plates seemed to be metal, but had the striated look of something that had been grown, like a fingernail, or piece of wood.

They appeared to be grazing, but the grass behind them didn’t really get any shorter, it’d just been trampled down.

Perry crouched down and peered at the underside of the animals. Thankfully they ignored him, so he was able to get a decent view.

They must’ve been some kind of filter feeder, because they had thousands of tiny tendrils that drilled into the earth itself, each about half the size of a pencil. The sticky tendrils would get pulled back covered in dirt, disappearing deeper inside the creature before coming back out again, clean.

So it was a bit like an armadillo the size of a car with an eating strategy similar to a cross between an anteater and a blue whale, with a thousand tongues….

Perry stood back to his feet, and scanned the entire herd carefully, catching a flash of bright blue here and there coming from between the metallic plates.

I see. So this must be the lockjaw slime’s primary host… to a creature with rudimentary eyes, an army of humans marching might look pretty damn similar. A massive group of things outfitted in shiny metal, with juicy centers.

Perry went in closer to confirm.

The Mk. 3’s weren’t airtight because there hadn’t been any need for them to be. He wasn’t using them to fight other supers, just local megafauna and as a deterrant for local gangs. Perry didn’t need to make them any more sophisticated than that.

Perry’s suit on the other hand, was airtight and had a complete life-support suite, so there wasn’t any chance of the creature burrowing between plates and stinging him.

Perry walked up to one of the animals that looked bigger and older than all the rest, it’s metallic armor plates drifting further apart than others to reveal an infestation of the parasites.

Perry snaked a hand between the plates and tugged one of the bright blue lumps out, confirming his suspicion.

Yep, Lockjaw Slime, Perry thought, inspecting the sluglike creature. He tossed the parasite aside and looked up at the majestic ball of metal plates. I wonder if we could domesticate these things for their meat. They’re pretty docile and obviously built to stand up to a lot of punishment, especially if they survived the wilderness long enough to establish a breeding population. Could be an excellent source of ‘free range’ meat.

Sadly, Perry wasn’t the first ‘person’ to think of that.

A guttural roar shook the plains, and the armored creature in front of him darted away with surprising speed, revealing a hulking humanoid shape silhouetted by the evening sun, bearing down on him with an upraised tree.

“Shi-“