Chapter XXI: In the Shadow of Heat and Hunger
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I turned sixteen today. Sixteen solar cycles of adapting, surviving, and slowly integrating into this fever-dream of a planet. And for the first time since crashing into this world like a naked meteor of bad luck and bizarre blessings, I was finally leaving the subterranean safety of Crystal's inner sanctum.
No more training sims. No more coddling from psychic overmothers. No more learning to kill by watching dead things die on repeat.
Today, I was going to earn scars the honest way.
My emotions were at war — a gnawing duality of hunger and hesitation. Excitement buzzed like static under my skin, but anxiety coiled deep in my gut like a cold worm. Both were equally valid. Both felt like home.
I walked toward the surface flanked by two of the most dangerous creatures on the planet — Kimchi, armed in a combat form that looked like the evolutionary wet dream of a panther and a tank; and Crystal, who had finally deigned to bring one of her physical bodies into the open air. No telepresence. No proxy limbs. Just her — shimmering, serpentine, and solid.
The guards didn't try to stop her this time. They wouldn't dare. Whatever argument had happened behind the scenes, it was over now. Crystal was here. In person. And that meant shit was serious.
"Are you entirely certain you wish to accompany the assault on the yellow-prey?" Kimchi purred, her armored tail twitching like a loaded spring. "I would greatly prefer you stay in the nest and begin the mating process. I have...prepared."
She had, indeed, been bringing that up with increasing frequency ever since my birthday clocked over.
Sixteen. The age I'd declared as the cut-off for her romantic quarantine. And now that the line was crossed, her restraint was unraveling like a hungry serpent's jaw.
Don't get me wrong. I absolutely want to fuck her. There's no ambiguity on that front. I've seen what that tail can do.
But also — maybe not on the exact day I reach the arbitrary age limit we set while I was still mentally twelve and trying not to cry during telepathic dissections.
"I do want to be your mate," I said aloud, even as I reached back and gave her armor-plated ass a firm, unapologetic squeeze. "But there's a difference between consent and ritual deployment. You get too grabby and I will bonk you with a stick, understood?"
Kimchi's mandibles drooped ever so slightly in disappointment.
I took pity. "That said," I added, lowering my voice to a conspiratorial growl, "there's a human saying: combat gets us hot. Maybe, if this mission gets me bloody enough, I'll have no choice but to ravage you like a horny war-god when we return."
That perked her up.
Crystal, meanwhile, was quietly vibrating with that familiar pink aura — her emotional signature. Lust, curiosity, amusement. She was better at hiding it than Kimchi, but only barely. She radiated affection like a star bleeds heat.
We continued walking, the air around us thick with psychic tension and mutual horniness. Just another day in the hivemind.
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We reached the surface after several more minutes of flirtatious death threats and idle innuendo.
The sky was darker than I remembered. The system's three brown dwarfs glowered down from above, their ruddy, burnished light casting weird shadows across the alien terrain. The cold bit into my skin immediately, but my thermokinesis kicked in instinctively — a warm hum under my skin, like hugging a microwave from the inside.
The only reason the hive had ever flourished on this planet was the volcanic rage of its core. This world was ten times the mass of Jupiter — a molten leviathan of tectonic tantrums. Its bones were magma. Its blood was plasma. And the hive had carved a kingdom into that crucible like a tick in a furnace.
Crystal was looking around herself with wide, almost childlike wonder.
"Something on your mind, my glowy goddess?" I asked, looping behind her and sliding my arms around her waist. She flinched — not from fear, but surprise — and turned toward me, eyes gleaming.
"Oh, Irvine," she murmured, "I was just realizing — I have never seen this world through this body before. Only through the hive. The limbs. The lower forms. This is...different. Intimate. Strange."
I pulled her down gently and kissed her — soft, slow, grateful.
"Then don't analyze it," I said against her lips. "Just feel it."
We stood there for a while, quiet and connected. Letting the sky and the moment wash over us like ash.
Kimchi, ever the jealous warbride, huffed and stormed off to help the drones load the assault skiffs. She muttered something about "inefficient fondling duration" through the link.
Twenty minutes passed in silence.
Then Crystal's voice tickled my mind. "I have a surprise for you, my love. Turn around."
I obeyed.
Behind me, twenty-two new bioforms stood in perfect formation.
Twenty of them were massive — easily three meters tall. They resembled the standard warrior caste but with thickened frontal plates of overlapping, iridescent chitin. Living bulwarks. Each one a walking slab of armor and defiance.
"New variant?" I asked, cocking my head toward Crystal.
She nodded, proud. "With you taking part in direct combat, I designed a forward vanguard formation. These warriors can interlock their plates to form an organic phalanx — redirecting ballistic force and kinetic pressure across their exo-network."
At her command, the warriors linked — their bodies sliding together into a seamless, curved barricade of living metal and muscle.
I cracked my neck.
"Let's test that."
Gathering psionic pressure at my fingertips, I began crafting a bullet — not a real one, but the kind my agitator class specializes in. A psi-condensed projectile made of raw will and focused violence. It shimmered as I shaped it, layers of intention spiraling like threads in a storm.
When I fired, the energy slammed into the front-most warrior. The force rippled across the entire linked wall, dispersing the kinetic load like water across a dam.
I walked up, examined the impact site.
"No cracks. No stress lines. Not even a scuff." I gave the warrior a congratulatory pat. It tapped its four legs in a bizarre little happy-dance and skittered back into formation, pleased with itself.
Then — the twenty-first figure stepped forward.
It was...different.
Five meters tall. Digitigrade legs. Tan chitin armor. Four arms — two ending in obsidian-bladed weapons, two in clawed hands. A long, whip-thin tail. And a face more human than insect — smooth, angular, with mandibles that unfolded like flower petals and black eyes that drank in all light.
Tentacles spilled from its scalp like hair. And despite its monstrous build, there was a strange grace in its movements. Purpose. Precision.
"Stalker caste?" I asked, turning toward Crystal.
She nodded.
I let out a low whistle. "Well, shit. Aren't you just beautiful."
The stalker tilted its head and knelt before me, silently inviting inspection. I obliged.
Unlike other infiltrators, stalkers had no connection to the hivemind. No link. No leash. They were ghosts — immune to psionic detection, capable of reading minds, but never heard unless they wanted to be.
This one spoke.
"I experienced a psionic foresight," it said in a voice like honey over knives, "in which I engaged in combat with an entity my reproductive systems identified as a potential mate. Intrigued, I returned to the nearest hive fleet. Your image was etched into the memory of every bioform. I concluded you were the hive's singular chosen."
My jaw dropped. But it wasn't finished.
"In a secondary foresight, I appeared smaller. We were engaged in a different kind of combat — on what I believe you would call a bed. You were victorious. I was...receiving you. Enthusiastically. This perplexed me, so I came to investigate."
I forgot how to breathe for about six seconds.
If I'd had blood flow issues before, I certainly had circulation everywhere now.
But then.
A wave of malice so thick, so incandescent, so fucking loud, it nearly knocked me off my feet.
The air bent around me. Gravity twisted. I had to amp my gyrokinesis to stand upright.
From behind me, Kimchi roared:
"YOU DARE."