SUBJECT 47: AWAKENING

Conduit of Chaos

They don’t fight like individuals.

They fight like thoughts—coordinated, simultaneous, recursive. One moves, another adapts, the third calculates your next breath.

Blades shift mid-swing into tendrils, fists, spears. Liquid metal reshapes before contact, cutting from angles I can’t track. I land hits, two, maybe three, but they heal before my sword finishes its arc.

They’re learning faster than I can bleed.

“Three of them,” I pant between clashes. “Sharing everything they learn.”

“Integration is spiking beyond readable thresholds!” Kira’s voice, taut with panic. “Devon, his neural patterns are… they’re lighting up like a reactor core.”

“Each hunter is compiling shared data,” Dr. Aveline says.

“He’s not fighting three opponents. He’s fighting the sum of their species’ memory.”

“Wonderful,” I mutter, rolling under a slash and swinging upward. The plasma blade carves a line through one torso, blue fire against molten black, but the alien recoheres in a blink.

“He’s bleeding too fast,” Devon says.

“How is he still conscious?”

“Enhanced physiology,” Aveline answers, clipped.

“But even that has limits.”

The air fractures with sonic pressure. One alien reshapes its arm into a club and crashes down. I parry high, too slow.

The impact slams through my bones like a wrecking ball. Another wraps tendrils around my ankles.

The third approaches with surgical calm, arm crystallizing into a three-meter spear.

I know what’s coming.

I twist, but not far enough.

Pain punches through my spine as the spear drives between my shoulder blades. Not a stab. A sinking.

The barbed end blooms inside me, anchoring into flesh and nerve.

“Devon,” I gasp, vision flashing white, “the spear, it’s not just a weapon. It’s doing something to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s inside my mind.”

The aliens stop attacking.

They don’t need to. I’m face-down on the shimmering surface of this nowhere-world, ribs cracked, blood pooling beneath me.

The spear pulses inside my body like a heartbeat I don’t recognize.

And suddenly…

I see everything.

It’s not metaphorical. It’s not emotional.

I see them.

Not just the three standing over me.

The fleet.

Light-years away.

Vast minds in planetary hulls.

Beings that do not know fear, pain, or doubt.

Until now.

“Something’s wrong,” Kira whispers.

“His vitals just flatlined for three seconds, then spiked beyond survivable levels.”

“Integration is at critical levels,” Aveline snaps.

“We’re losing him.”

But they’re not losing me.

I’m spreading.

The spear was a conduit. It gave them access. But now it flows both ways. My thoughts rush backward through the tether like a virus of self. Rage. Fear. Memory. Individuality.

And the Devourers…

They don’t have a firewall for that.

Screams, not sound, not language, frequency. Their liquid-metal forms convulse, glitching between shapes. Purple eyes flare too bright. Their movements lose unity.

“What the hell is happening?” Devon shouts. “Something’s hitting the deep-space monitors!”

“The fleet’s breaking formation,” Kira says, breathless.

“Ships the size of cities are turning off-course.”

“They feel him,” Aveline murmurs.

“Through the link. Through the spear.”

I can feel them too, each massive consciousness recoiling as my mind brushes theirs. Like plunging a needle into an exposed nerve.

They’ve never felt pain. Not like this.

And they don’t know what to do with it.

One of the hunters twitches, stutters backward. Another shudders, their shape collapsing in on itself. Purple fire dims.

The simulation can’t hold.

The world flickers like a corrupt file. Terrain pixelates, alien forms breaking into static.

Reality tears.

***

I collapse into the pod with a wet, sucking sound as the neural cable disengages from my spine.

My chest is slick with blood, body limp. Breathing is an act of war.

Red warning lights pulse across the facility like a heartbeat. The air reeks of ozone and scorched metal.

“Vitals stabilizing,” Kira says, still hunched over the console.

“I think… I think we got him back.”

“Not all of him,” Devon mutters.

Onscreen: neural maps fractal across black. Not just data, architecture. Living circuits evolving in real time. Shapes no human brain should be able to form.

“The spear didn’t just hurt him,” Kira whispers.

“It restructured him.”

“Show me the adaptations,” Aveline says sharply.

Kira routes the data through a visual filter. Alien glyphs slide into legible form:

▸ COMBAT PRECOGNITION – LVL 5

▸ ENHANCED REFLEXES – LVL 7

▸ MIND REACH – LVL 2

▸ CHAOS PULSE – LVL 1

There’s a fifth designation.

No level. No name. Just a locked icon.

“I didn’t write those classifications,” Kira says.

“They’re theirs. That’s how they tag existential threats.”

“So what does it mean?” I rasp.

“It means,” Devon says slowly,

“they consider you dangerous.”

“Seventeen subjects died,” Aveline adds.

“None of them made it past first contact. But you…”

“You changed them,” Kira says.

“You infected their thinking.”

On the tactical readouts, the fleet drifts in uncertainty. Ships that once moved with quiet inevitability now circle Earth’s orbit like wolves who tasted fire.

“They’re afraid,” I whisper.

Aveline leans closer, her expression unreadable. “Yes. For the first time in ten million years of perfect conquest… they’re hesitating.”

“They’ll adapt,” I murmur. “They always do.”

“Which is why we need to adapt faster,” Devon says.

“Because now they know you exist. They’ll come for you.”

The crimson emergency lights flash over fractured data streams, neural maps that no longer belong to a human mind.

And through the quantum static still clinging to my thoughts, I feel the fleet’s signal weaken. Waver.

The predators have tasted fear.

But that might not be enough.