Chapter XXVII: The Tangled Crown of Gore and Devotion
The Ker'min lay dead, neck bent like snapped rebar, limbs twitching from residual psionic feedback. I didn't savor the kill — not because it wasn't satisfying, but because there was still too much to do. Still too many moving parts. Still too many of us.
My trap had worked. The breach yawned like a second mouth in the battlefield's throat, and through it poured the swarm — radiant, ravenous, synchronized with a kind of brutal harmony no army born of flesh and ego could replicate. The hive swept wide, flanking what remained of the enemy's defensive line. Most of their elites had already bolted, scattering toward the rear-line artillery nests like rats spotting the shadow of a leviathan.
Temporarily satisfied that I wasn't going to be lasered into a smear, I spoke a soft command, and my armor began folding in on itself — chitin and alloy collapsing with a wet mechanical groan until only my right arm remained encased. I stepped free, boots slapping onto cracked stone, and dropped to my knees.
Then I vomited.
Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just raw, retching heaves that left strings of bile dangling from my teeth. The adrenaline had worn off like someone snatching a cloak from my shoulders mid-winter, and now I was cold, nauseous, and haunted by the Ker'min's final expression — those bulging, terrified eyes staring into a death they hadn't expected to arrive screaming through the skull.
I was, disturbingly, relieved by my own reaction. The fact that my body still recoiled from death meant I wasn't entirely fucked in the head yet. I could live with killing — in war, at least — but if I ever stopped feeling anything afterward? If I started enjoying it?
Then I'd have to have a long, unpleasant talk with myself. Possibly with a shovel and a mirror.
Wiping my mouth with the back of my sleeve, I staggered back to the psionically capable Ker'min — the one that Kiya had embedded herself into like a damn stake through a vampire's heart. I reached down to retrieve her, fingers brushing the hilt...
And paused.
Her fuller — the groove that ran down the blade's center — wasn't the usual ethereal psionic blue. It was marbled now, rippled with a veinlike hue of crimson, as though she'd been feeding on something. Some kind of energy or... essence. Not blood, exactly. Something deeper. Something vital.
I might be an idiot, but I'm not a complete idiot. Even I could hazard a guess: Kiya was feeding off the corpse.
We'd have words about that later.
Even as I yanked her from the Ker'min's ruined visor — a sickening squelch of steel parting from flesh and bone — she thrummed in my Mindspace like a purring cat soaked in triumph. Sated. Content.
The helmet came away with her, revealing the face of a now very ex-psionic. The damage was... extensive. That part of his skull was more crater than cranium. But from the shape of his jaw, the musculature of the neck, and the lack of breasts, I deduced — like a highly trained space-anthropologist — that this one was male. Ker'min females were typically more slender in the face. They also had tits. Easy science.
"I hope I didn't pulp the brain too badly," I muttered aloud, poking experimentally at the partially collapsed skull. "Would make for excellent research material. First psionically gifted enemy I've encountered who wasn't part of the hive — even if his output was baby-tier compared to me."
I straightened up and shouted at the top of my lungs, "KIMCHI!"
No link-hopping. No pinging the mental network. Too much noise from the battle. Besides — she always heard when I called. Always. It was almost unfair how tuned-in she was to anything involving me.
While I waited for the blood-drenched maniac I called a lover, I turned my attention to the Ker'min's arm — or rather, the weapon it was fused to. This thing had torn up my armor like it was made of wet cardboard, and I was curious.
The arm was heavy — but most of the weight came from the gun itself. The Ker'min armor it was mounted to was a thin alloy, clearly designed for agility rather than tanking hits. Not like my own walking tank suit, which was basically a mobile trauma ward built by sadists.
Unhooking the weapon, I began inspecting it. I wasn't a gun nut by any stretch, but I'd played enough sci-fi shooters in my old life to recognize magnetic induction coils. The weapon charged energy through these loops, then spat it out as concentrated plasma.
The barrel gleamed with heat-resistant alloys, but what caught my attention was the drum mounted beneath the core — and more specifically, what wasn't inside it anymore.
"Huh. That's weird. What's—HOLY FUCK, THAT'S COLD!"
I jerked my hand back as frost laced across my glove. Inside the drum was a rapidly evaporating pool of what I now recognized — belatedly — as liquid helium. Supercooled containment for superhot plasma. That made sense. Sort of.
Looking around, I noticed several nearby crates marked with hazard sigils and alien glyphs, some of them hissing softly as they leaked. Yeah. That tracks. They were using cryogenic helium to keep the plasma stable until firing.
Fascinating. Terrifying. Stealable.
I reactivated my armor, commanded the psionic cortex to open a construction sequence, and attempted to mount the weapon onto my left arm. The system tried — bless its non-sentient heart — but didn't quite get the concept.
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted the severed arm again. Lightbulb moment.
I picked it up, held it to the psionic conversion vents on my chest — and watched the hive tech devour it like it was a sugar cube. Flesh. Bone. Metal. Gone. Converted. Repurposed.
Within moments, the suit's damage was healed, and a new mounting bracket — made from a blend of the alloy and organic chitin — extended from my forearm like a siege weapon being birthed.
I affixed the minigun and aimed at a nearby wall that had done absolutely nothing wrong.
Charge-up was minimal. Then: brrrrahhht.
The gun purred like a war-god with a cough. No recoil. No mercy. Just a stream of hyper-condensed plasma bolts eviscerating whatever I pointed at. The wall evaporated under the onslaught — not collapsed, not shattered. Gone. Like it had never been there to begin with.
And then... a head popped up from behind the rubble.
A warrior caste. One of mine. Its head tilted sideways in pure canine confusion.
"Oh shit—hey, baby! Did I almost tag you? Sorry, sweet thing, I got a little excited."
I stepped fully out of the armor again — better to show I meant no harm. I was, after all, surrounded by mates. I really ought to be more careful about how I flailed my new toys.
The warrior needed no coaxing. It clambered over the debris and into my arms, chittering softly, antennae brushing affectionately against my jaw. I knelt, scratched behind its plating, and murmured apologies until it practically melted from joy.
Ten minutes of petting later, Kimchi finally arrived.
And what an entrance.
She emerged from behind a shattered wall like a banshee covered in entrails — every inch of her was slick with blood. Her once-purple hair had darkened to a violent, clotted magenta. Her twin swords glistened with viscera, bits of flesh still stuck between the serrated ridges. Her grin was pure predation.
Then she skipped toward me.
Yes. Skipped. Like a girl on her way to a picnic. A picnic made of organs.
The warrior beside me twitched and glanced up at her like a dog spotting an incoming hurricane.
"You might wanna make yourself scarce, cupcake," I said, grinning. "You know how she gets."
The warrior scattered like it owed her money. Kimchi arrived in my personal space like a bloodstained comet, eyes glowing, breath fast. She looked like she wanted to climb inside me and live there.
I obliged her by cupping her chin and kissing her deeply.
The blood. Gods, the blood. Her mouth was a winepress of gore. I pulled away after a few seconds, coughing, and spat onto the ground.
"Fucking gross," I muttered.
But — and this is important — if you're not willing to get a little gross for the people you love, you're not really loving them.
She dropped her sword — it embedded into the ground like Excalibur being parked — and rested her head against my chest, hands curled into the armor plates. She was trembling.
"Oh, Irvine-mate," she murmured. "You cannot fathom how much I needed this."
And I believed her.
There was something animal, something ancient, baked into the bones of this body she now wore — instincts from before she ever transferred into flesh. The moment we entered this planet's atmosphere, I could feel her buzzing like a wasp in a jar. An itch under the skin. She needed to hunt. She needed to kill. And now, with the gore still clinging to her hair, she was calm. Fulfilled.
I stroked her hair — sticky, matted, tangled with gods-knew-what — and pulled her closer.
"I'm glad," I said softly. "Truly. I don't want to be the only one who benefits from this madness. If slaughtering your way across alien soil is what makes you feel like this — this happy, this relaxed — then I'll find us planets to conquer by the dozen. You, Crystal, the hive... I'll do whatever it takes to keep you all happy."
In the back of my mind, the Ker'min's face flashed again — eyes wide with fear, mouth frozen in a scream. I tasted guilt. Real, bitter, acid-black guilt.
But I also held Kimchi in my arms. And that warmth?
That warmth drowned it.
My love for her. My love for Crystal. My love for the hive — even in all its invasive, overbearing glory — made the horror manageable. Not erased. Not forgotten. Just... compartmentalized.
Apparently, I'd accidentally broadcast all of that through the link, because when I looked down, Kimchi's eyes were almost vibrating with mania. Her gaze said one thing:
I'm going to fuck you so hard we make a new caste.
Welp. Guess the wall wasn't the only thing getting vaporized today.