My heart thundered in my ears. My breaths came quick and ragged. 

What the hell had happened to me?

What the hell had I become?

Metal fingers slid across metal skin, screeching against one another but leaving no marks. 

I had been turned into some kind of mechanical monster. Some alien… thing… had absorbed my body and made me part of itself. 

Was I going to be digested?

Was this just the first stage in-

“Oh, would you please shut up for five seconds?” a voice rang out in my mind, “Digest you? What do you think I am, an organic? Utterly disgusting.” 

Of all the things I had expected to happen, being told off by a voice in my own head was probably the lowest thing down on my list of possibilities. 

“I uh… what?” I asked lamely, only then realising that down in the bottom right of the heads up display the words ‘Mecha System Now Online’ had flashed up to being visible. 

“I mean come on,” The voice continued, “A mech suit of unlimited potential power bonds with you and the first thing you think is that it’s eating you? Just my luck.” 

I was shocked and stunned. 

Wasn’t this the sort of thing that only happened in webnovels or anime? 

“Oh, none of those are realistic in the slightest!” The voice chimed in my head, throwing me for a loop once again. 

All I needed to do was wake up, that was it. I had probably fallen asleep at my desk. I was probably slumped over with my head resting on the keyboard or something like that. 

“Oh no, you’re awake. You also very nearly died, so uh, a thanks for saving your life would be nice,” the voice, which could at this point only be the AI that ran the so-called mecha suit that I was now in, snarked. 

I was… not handling this well. 

If anything, I just wanted the… mecha suit… to go away so that I could get on with my life. It was boring, but at least it wasn’t as weird as whatever this evening had become. 

Almost as soon as I’d had the thought, the chilling cold that I’d been experiencing ever since the weird alien metal had wrapped itself around me started to recede. 

It started at my hands, the silvery liquid sort of just shimmered away, disappearing to… well, I wasn’t exactly sure where it was disappearing to, but it was disappearing and that was the main thing. 

Before long the metal had receded from every part of my body and I was left alone again, feeling the warmth from the smouldering wreck of the vessel in front of me. 

I patted my chest, looking for any sign of an injury there from what I had experienced with the tree, but the only thing to suggest that I’d ever been injured was the hole in my shirt. 

“Yeah, I have to admit, that was some pretty good work of mine,” the voice in my head chimed up again. 

“God damn it!” I yelled out loud, practically jumping a foot in the air. 

I’d told the mecha suit to go away, I figured that would have meant that the AI would have gone away as well. 

“Well yeah, you told the suit to go away, but all it did was return to its standby mode around your heart,” The mecha AI said with the equivalent of a mental shrug. 

Around… my heart? Now that he mentioned it, the spot where my heart was did feel a little bit colder than usual, just by a small amount.

 Did that mean my most vital organ was being enclosed by a wrapping of alien liquid metal? 

“Yup pretty much!” The voice said. 

The thought was as chilling as the sensation. 

On the other hand… if I could make the mecha suit go away with nothing more than a thought, the chances were that I could make the mecha suit return with nothing more than a thought as well. 

I felt a surge of static electricity flare up around me. The type that makes the hairs on your arm stand up on end. 

And then, all of a sudden, the mecha suit was wrapped around me once again, my body chilled by its cooling embrace. 

I also felt… stronger. Stronger than I’d ever felt before. I felt like if I wanted to I could probably put my fist right through a tree. 

I swung my arm around in a wide arc, and much as I had anticipated my fist reduced the trunk of the tree to splinters. The rest of the tree teetered backwards, collapsing into the rest of the small woodland area. 

I was… really strong. I couldn’t help but wonder what else this mecha suit could actually do. 

“Oh, you’re capable of all sorts with this suit equipped. Top of the line model. Though, it won’t really become effective until you link up with the rest of your crew,” The AI said, as if it were reading straight from some kind of manual or handbook. 

I didn’t have a crew, but then I didn’t really need to become any more effective than being able to destroy an entire tree. 

What was I even going to do with power like that?

What had this suit even been designed for?

“The conquering and destruction of other sentient species, of course,” The AI reported. 

That wasn’t at all concerning. 

It looked as if the… spaceship… this thing had arrived in had crashed for some reason. There was a high chance that whoever had created it would be looking for the downed spacecraft. 

If they were a warmongering alien race that wanted nothing more than death and destruction for other sentient life forms in the galaxy… well, that wouldn’t exactly be very good for the people of Earth. 

We didn’t have any advanced technologies or protections against extraterrestrial threats. 

Hell, most people didn’t even believe such things existed. 

The only thing Earth had now… was me.