As usual, Captain Adarin came back from being dead with a pounding headache. His mind felt slow, grumbling with grogginess as thoughts reached for subroutines that hadn't yet been activated from long-term storage.
Fucking hell, he groaned, his voice nothing but pure meaning in the void. The memories of the last mission came back unbidden. The running battle to the streets of the dying habitat, how they had been hounded by the system-infected. Crowds of hundreds throwing high-technology disguised as magic at them. How they had torn apart Gisara and Merric. How the unit had escaped mere minutes before the Navy had unleashed antimatter fire on the world that had once housed two hundred million. A single white flash turning a green garden into a scorched tin can.
The memories were present and clean, but Adarin frowned. So why the hell am I dead? I should be on the troop carrier right now.
Slowly his senses returned. Darkness pressed on him, infinite yet suffocating. A single bright line stretched away into the void, and he clung to it, hauling himself upward through memory. There was a distant sensation of proprioception… no, of touch. Something rough? An image of a wrist bound in rope flashed in his memories. Panic and determination washed over him alongside a woman's voice.
‘I hope the brain cancer gets him before he tries to rape me.’
Adrian's thoughts came to a halt. What the…
He ground his teeth and went through a visualization routine, creating an avatar for himself in the mind-space. Soon, he no longer sensed but saw. He felt the whiteness of the rope as he climbed along it. Enjoyed the strain of the imagined muscles. And basked in the cold non-temperature of the space all around him. He inhaled the nothingness, imagining it flavored with spicy hydrogen and cool helium—the spectrum of the sun itself.
Carefully, mindful of the strange impression he had gotten, Adarin reached out for external sensory feeds. He braced himself for the inevitable whincing with anticipatory pain. But all his efforts were futile, as he was overwhelmed like a sandcastle by a tsunami.
Bright light, sharp sounds, and rough sensations burned themselves into his mind. He heard a scream—his own—and felt a distant foreign wave of emotions: fear, confusion, worry washing over him. He pounced on them like onto a lifeline, shutting down emotions was something familiar. They died like dissidents in a night raid, and Adarin kept his eyes pressed shut. Taking deep breaths, he tried to regain control of his senses.
He focused first on smell. Smell—the reptilian sense, the oldest part of the brain. He imagined taking a long breath in and sorted through the sensory input. Three key olfactory notes hit him hard: blood, sweat, and smoke. Then, more softly, dried urine, cured animal hide, and medical alcohol. He took a shuddering breath with his avatar’s imaginary lungs, using the meditative sensation to recenter himself.
Good. Audio next.
Raucous laughter, whining whispers, and the distant sounds of battle. Discharging guns, clashing steel. He grinned, showing his canines. Well, a battlefield. This is familiar.
Next he let the visual and tactile feeds wash over him. Impressions rained in on him. A female body, fragile, lacking the careful balance decades of combat training had granted him. Wrists rubbed raw from ropes she was fighting against, trying to work the bindings loose. A leash binding her to a tall green-skinned warrior wearing the armor of someone reenacting an ancient war. The man's face was decorated with tribal tattoos and a viciously large axe lay on his shoulder.
What sort of clown show am I in?
He heard his body whisper something that was clearly a prayer.
“Mother Ishna, preserve me. Preserve me from what is about to happen. Preserve me from those evil thoughts overcoming my mind….”
The prayer continued, but he blocked it out. Amazing. I am not alone in this body. And the other entity has religious delusions.
He tried moving the head, moving the eyes, but noticed that none of his control signals connected to anything. Luckily, the young woman turned her head soon and Adarin studied the street: strewn with rubble and broken barricades and a few recently deceased corpses. Two dozen of the green-skinned barbarians, dragging a dozen disheveled and bloodied girls in what had once been white robes along the street.
The mood among the warriors left little doubt as to what fate awaited the girls in their near future. Hot anger boiled in Adarin’s avatar’s stomach. Primitives and their ways of war. He froze as he noticed the heat of the emotion lingering.
Why aren’t the emotional regulators kicking in?
He queried the protocols and got no response.
They… He paused, swallowing hard. They’re gone.
His avatar's heart began beating faster, almost in tune with the bodies. He dove into his own mind’s architecture. Let's see how I’m implemented in this body. The soldier found the expected Imperial Cybernetics. Nine computronium cores, a dense network of sensors and cables lacing alongside the body’s nervous system.
Adarin pinged the cores. I’m hosted on two of them with redundant routines. Good. Five of them seemed just empty. The other two responded to him with angry access denied messages.
Adarin frowned, noting that almost no traffic left those cores. Then he focused on the interfaces. Neural connectors, where most of the sensory inputs were coming from.
She… the praying girl isn’t in the remaining cores. She’s actually implemented in wetware. What in all that’s holy under the Light of the Truth is going on?
Adarin felt nervousness rise up, tingling the spine of his avatar. Okay, information first. He dove into his mind’s databases and found what he was looking for: Data hounds. Mind-to-mind warfare tools. Sentient intrusion viruses. He grabbed a dozen and threw them into the system of implants with instructions to hunt about in the wetware.
Adarin clicked his avatar’s tongue. Done. Might as well see what happens if I prick her surface thoughts. He threw a dozen different standard contact protocols at the girl’s mind. She stumbled and froze, only to be yanked into step again by the green-skinned warrior after a curt cutting remark. For three seconds there was silence as he monitored the progress of the data hounds. Then the girl responded in her thoughts.
‘Hello?’
Adarin ground his teeth. Hello? Hello isn’t how you respond to standard contact protocols, you dipshit! He considered a cutting reply, then paused. If she doesn’t know, doesn’t recognize standard contact protocols… A number of worrying hypotheses bloomed in his head, and he went still, evaluating the situation.
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Then one by one the data hounds returned, and things got worse. Memories and context bloomed.
The warriors. The green-skinned warriors. Orcs. A sickening feeling settled in Adarin’s avatar’s gut.
The girls: priestesses, healers.
The girl herself: flickers of life growing up in the rural region of a primitivist world lacking all technology. His mind intuitively shied away from the conclusion. But then the physiological report came back.
There was a second system of cybernetics in the body. And it was all too familiar. He looked at the readout:
Partial cyborg. Imperial as well as [ERROR] cybernetics.
Computronium cores: 9
Number of mindspace entities: 3
Adarin’s breath quickened as the outline of the body bloomed before him. Arcane Core Layout, it said, but again he only half registered it. Abjuration, Divination, Illusion, Conjuration, Invocation, Evocation were all around 100% efficiency. But the Alteration and Necromantic cores at 987% and 1173% efficiency, respectively.
Adarin heard a scream—heard himself screaming. Anger. Frustration. Panic. He distantly felt the girl’s body stiffen, and being yanked forward again.
I am caught in the body of someone infected by the system. I have been trapped by the enemy. Oh my fucking God.
Then his mind snapped back into laser focus. He jumped down into the contingency protocol database, entered several verifications and validation codes. I’m captured. I’m an intelligence risk. I need to— He froze. Where there should have been the logic bombs of the default suicide code, there was just emptiness. Nothing. The protocols, all their connections, were just gone.
Adarin shivered. This… This is catastrophic.
His presence here—he might have just been uploaded by amateurs. But no. Someone had manipulated the deepest layers of Imperial mind code. If someone has changed this… what else? He went through various integrity check routines, but all the checksums came back internally coherent.
That’s good. Or very fucking bad. If someone edited me on a level that the checksums became coherent again—that… He shuddered at the implications.
Very well. I’m still an intelligence risk. Still need to fix that.
He focused outwards again at the girl, whose struggles had grown almost frantic enough to be noticed by the green-skinned warriors, yet not quite. She was praying out loud now, until the warrior turned around and hissed at her. Her murmurs grew quieter.
Adarin smiled to himself. If I can’t kill myself in my mind, it’ll have to be suicide by prisoner guard. This time he wasn’t playing around. He unleashed hard override protocols, containing detailed rapid motor instructions through the implants. The plan was simple: take control of the girl’s body. Have her pummel the warrior, get him mad enough to use the big axe on her body, be carved into pieces, and die in this dirty street.
But nothing happened. The girl didn’t even shudder. Error messages were the only returns his most aggressive attack code got. Adarin hissed in frustration and sank to his knees in his mind space.
Okay. Think, think, think, think. I can’t kill myself. In that case, this is a novel enemy technique. The new priorities became clear as glass. Survive. Gather intel. Contact the chain of command.
Just as he came to the resolution, screams erupted behind the girl in the group, and both girl and warrior turned around. One of the healer-priestesses, a tall one, was being beaten savagely by a young warrior, her tunic half torn off.
Liora—for that was the name the data hounds had found for the body he was in—redoubled her efforts at loosening the binds. Adarin assessed the situation with one look. If I had control, I could escape them easily. The protocols he had learned during conduct-after-capture and counter-intelligence courses were still fresh in his mind as the day they had been uploaded. But I can’t take her body over. Still… she has reacted to me. So maybe—
He looked around the street and found a sharp shard of glass glinting in another wave of thunder and lightning washing over the sky. While the girls cringed back, and the warriors began cheering, he focussed on it.
The one kicking the tall girl on the ground laughed and gestured widely—Liora swallowed. ‘I’m so sorry, Annie. But I need to get free.’ She seemed to resent herself, and that was when Adarin focused all his attention on the shard of glass.
He broadcast its existence and spoke in soft tones. ‘The glass shard. Fall to the ground. Pick it up. The glass shard. Fall to the ground. Pick it up.’
The girl gasped, froze, and then tilted her head. Now her attention was on the shard of glass as well. Good, she is accepting my input instead of asking stupid questions.
The big warrior holding her leash didn’t even seem to notice, too absorbed in studying the developing situation with a frown. Just as Liora’s muscles tensed, ready to scoop up the shard, the warrior took a step forward.
To Adarin’s surprise, she rolled with the punch and let herself fall to the ground, off-balance. The warrior stumbled and pulled her leash, but Liora’s hands closed on the shard of glass. Mission success.
Liora howled convincingly as the warrior stepped back and gave her a savage kick to the side, mirroring the younger warrior. The warband roared, and several warriors punched or kicked at their girls as well. Just as Liora began twisting her fingers and using rhythmic sawing motions on the bindings, the lead warrior raised his vicious axe and barked a few orders. The other warriors, clearly his subordinates, stopped abusing the girls—except for the one who had pushed the tall girl to the ground. He kept kicking, and Adarin was only half observing it until another dragged a short girl to the front, punched the kicking warrior hard, and forced the short girl’s hand onto the tall one, who was nursing a clearly broken leg on the ground.
Adarin’s breath caught, even though he had already known it. The short girl’s hand glowed with the green of system magic—that technological infection that liked to act as if it were a mystical gift of the invading god. The girl on the ground screamed as the muscles in her leg twisted and regrew, bone realigning with visible speed. The two girls hugged briefly, and Adarin noticed a flare of envy in Liora. Gingerly the tall girl got to her feet and found her balance again—only to be yanked forward by her abuser. She scrambled back as far as the leash allowed, and with a sadistic smile the warrior reeled her in.
Those fucking bastards. Who the fuck is in control here? Degenerate system-infected—
He picked up words written on her arm with a peripheral glance
Level: - (G)
Class: Healer
Classes, levels, ranks going from G up to S. It had all been in the intelligence reports. I just never thought I would see it any more closely than through the scope of a sniper drone. Fuck.
Then something cold touched the back of Adarin’s spine, and he and the girl shivered, their bodies sensing the alien feeling in unison. A voice washed over Adarin’s mind, cold, strangely familiar, like a shark skimming the surface.
‘Patience,’ it whispered. ‘Soon… all will be clear.’
With an eerie chuckle, the presence retreated.
The big orcish warband leader—Adarin noticed his tattoo as well.
Level: 10 (F)
Class: Warrior, Warchief.
He barked the troop into order, and they marched off towards an encampment.
Liora’s prayers intensified in her mind, and Adarin felt memories boiling up, jumping from her mind to his.
A young girl, rotting corpses in a farming cottage. Her family.
Pigtailed Liora, maybe seven years old, kneeling and crying, trying to make her mother move again.
As the last bands of the binding gave way, a sharp thought cut over the connection.
‘I will not allow this to happen. Holy Mother, forgive my sins, but I must save my sisters. I must save myself.’
Her heartbeat quickened to a staccato alongside her breathing. He rolled his avatars eyes. Great, she's visibly psyching herself up for whatever stupid thing she wants to do. Probably use system magic or some other nonsense.
He reached out to her, not with words but again with focus. Calm, steadiness, readiness.
Her breath settled into a normal rhythm. Her eyes focused on her captor. She grew cold and ready.
Soon, they walked towards what was clearly a forward operating base, and a cold smile settled on Liora’s face. Then a final thought jumped from her mind to Adarin’s, laced with killing intent.
‘I hope you are ready for my kiss.’
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