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Nyx's words left Harry stunned for a moment as he tried to process what the symbiote was saying, 'So then why did my mutation nearly kill me?'
'From what I gleaned by repairing your body it seemed as if your cells were incapable of efficiently channeling this energy and were constantly mutating as a result. But without a conscious effort guiding the change, it turned into a game of chance whether you would develop a mutation before the strain killed you. And the odds were not in your favor.'
'Well…I'm glad that you intervened before that happened,' Harry graciously replied and he could feel the joy his appreciation inspired inside Nyx, 'But just how powerful is this mutation of mine?'
'Very powerful, like I said your powers are practically a form of magic. I believe that there is no limit to what you can accomplish, and that's before we merged.' Nyx stated confidently, 'Before you would have been limited to manipulating your own limited biomass and editing your genome piece by piece to grow stronger. However, I can assimilate and incorporate any genetic information I consume into a collective gene pool. Similarly, I can convert any organic matter into biomass, a form of universal building block that you can use at will to create whatever you desire. But ultimately my powers are yours and your powers are mine. Together given enough time we will be unstoppable, an ever-evolving being that can adapt to any situation.'
Harry smiled at the picture Nyx painted, one where he would never lose control, one where he could always trust his own power, 'Then if all we need is time, we need to plan our next steps carefully. We are at our most vulnerable right now, and I still have no idea how to use my powers.'
Nyx hummed in agreement, 'Caution is good, but you are not completely powerless.'
Nyx demonstrated her point by wrapping Harry's right arm in dark purple slime that hardened into powerful muscles before sprouting golden spikes that ran down the edge of his forearm and turning his fingers into curved talons.
Harry gazed in wonder at his symbiote arm flexing the powerful muscles and moving his individual talons like he was playing the piano, 'Nyx this is wonderful…thank you for sharing your gift with me.'
'Like I said we are one, however, I do have one more gift to share with you. One that will help you immensely as you learn to master your powers,' Nyx advertised as Harry felt something enter his mind, 'Another ability of mine is that I can inherit the memories of other beings if I consume their brain. After we merged your father fed me what I believed was the lead biologist for his company so I could convert him into biomass and repair your body. I have skimmed through his memories and selected the ones related to his field of expertise. If you are willing you can assimilate his knowledge in a mere fraction of the time it would take for you to learn everything on your own.'
'You gain his memories by eating his brains.' Harry clarified.
'Yes…does that bother you?' Nyx asked though Harry was confident the symbiote already knew the answer
'Regardless there's no point in concerning myself with someone who's already dead,' Harry answered before mentally accepting the bundle of memories Nyx had so kindly prepared for him. A dull pressure filled the back of Harry's mind as the memories settled into place, it wasn't unpleasant however just enough to remind him of its presence.
'It's going to take some time for your brain to form the correct neural pathways, but you can speed up the process by learning on your own.'
'That's something I can work on in my downtime, but right now we need a concrete first step, what do we need to establish a solid foundation?' Harry asked as he got out of bed and started to walk around the large unfamiliar room he had awoken in.
'A steady supply of Biomass,' Nyx answered without hesitation, 'Not only will it have immediate payoffs by making you stronger it will also allow you to experiment with our first generation of drones.'
Harry paused as he opened a set of doors revealing a private bathroom with a large walk-in shower and bathtub big enough to fit several people, 'Drones, like bees and worker ants?'
'Indeed, and I believe that we would have the most success if we adopt a similar hierarchical system when creating our species.'
'Worker drones that handle the grunt work, soldiers responsible for defending hives and securing biomass, and perhaps some kind of commander class that handles logistics and could possibly establish new hives,' Harry summarized his fondness for Nyx's vision growing with each passing moment, 'That would be a formidable force.'
'I'm glad we agree,' Nyx hummed, 'So much to do, but where to start?'
Stopping in the middle of the room Harry looked out through the floor-to-ceiling windows and gazed out upon the New York City skyline, shining bright despite it being the dead of night. The view alone was worth millions of dollars in real estate, but Harry had seen better, after all, he was the heir to one of the largest tech and pharmaceutical companies in the world.
'I need to catch up on everything that I've missed over the last three years…fortunately I have a rich guilt-ridden father who would do anything to please me.'
—
Harry had been right to believe that Norman would do anything and everything out of a sense of warped responsibility mainly driven by his guilt at being unable to save three years of Harry's life. Still, Harry had made sure that none of his requests were too outlandish or ran the risk of alerting his father to just how much he had changed due to the alien permanently bonded to his genetic code.
With those guidelines in place the first thing Harry asked of his father was to hire the best private tutors money could buy under the guise of learning everything he had missed in his first three years of high school. It may have seemed like a lofty goal, but before falling sick Harry had been proven to be a genius, with several tests confirming he had an IQ above 150.
So even after three years without learning Harry absorbed everything his tutors taught him like a sponge and that was before he began to use his newfound powers. While Nyx had claimed again and again that Harry's mutation was practically magic, he hadn't assumed the symbiote meant it quite so literally.
After the first week of his rebirth and tutoring, Harry started to feel a strange tingling sensation inside his skull whenever he was being taught, doing assignments, or anything else that required some modicum of skill. When Harry was confident the sensation wasn't a figment of his imagination he brought it up to Nyx who confirmed that the tingling feeling coincided with his brain forming new neural pathways, the biological process responsible for storing information related to movement, learning, and memory.
Harry could quite literally feel himself getting smarter, learning new skills, and after a bit of experimenting, Harry realized he could greatly accelerate the rate at which his brain formed these pathways at will by burning what he simply called Bioenergy.
It was a catch-all term for the strange energy that Nyx identified as being able to manipulate life and organic matter in ways that shouldn't be possible. Harry's mutation passively produced bioenergy and stored it within his cells; there seemed to be no limit to how much he could accumulate at one time, however, the energy regenerated quite slowly. In order to find out just how slowly, Harry burned all of his reserves overclocking his brain which had two effects.
The first was that Harry managed to assimilate the decades' worth of knowledge from the biologist's memories in a single afternoon becoming an expert in the field. The second however wasn't nearly as positive.
It turned out that Harry's body needed the bioenergy to sustain itself and burning it all, caused him to enter a similar state as to when his mutation had first awakened, pain included. Though instead of falling into a coma Harry had the exact opposite reaction. He went feral, his sense of control and reservation quickly falling away in the face of his body's desperation to sustain itself.
Faced with the primal motivation of survival, Harry underwent a sudden mutation, his formally brown eyes shifting color until they were a startling golden amber. But the change wasn't purely cosmetic, because as Harry looked down at the floor of the bedroom sat at the top of Oscorp towers his vision pierced straight through the entire building locking onto the numerous golden blobs of bioenergy.
In his feral state, it took Harry a moment to realize that blobs of energy were in fact, people. Some had more than others but none of them came close to even a fraction of what Harry had accumulated over the week. But even the smallest spark awakened a deep-seated hunger inside of Harry, the instincts of an apex predator to hunt and feast.
However before Harry could lose himself completely, Nyx's slime covered his body, restraining his body while her psychic presence congealed around his mind acting as a barrier from the pain and hunger.
It took an hour for Harry's feral rage to subside and his reserves of bioenergy to replenish to the bare minimum, but even then Harry didn't want to distance himself from Nyx's warm embrace.