The Tales of the Legendary Mimic : Momo

Mission Acomplished

“So… what do we do now?” Sarah asked.

There was no monster in sight except the cocoons filled with fluids with people in them, but these changed the moment they got within less than a meter of the cocoons; something unseen rippled through the air. A wave that didn't give a sound or raise heat slid into their skulls like cold rims clouding their perceptions.

The world shifted, affecting their vision, and the chamber soon lacked all the gruesome entities. changing from a room filled with fleshy walls and hanging cocoons. It looked plain like any abandoned lab. 

The pods were gone. The veins on the walls had vanished. The pulsing flesh receded, revealing bare, unremarkable concrete. All there was was broken glass, leaking chemicals, and specimen samples in contact with most of it. There was even an eyeball that rolled away from its broken formalin jar and rested on a split brain.

According to the info Captain Jane had, this was a secret project used to study a wave a new VR-controlled military battle tool.

Max blinked hard. His instincts screamed, but his eye showed otherwise.

“Where did everything go?” Sarah whispered. Her voice sounded distant, like it was coming through water.

“Another weird phenomenon,” Garfield said quietly, his tone suddenly clinical. “Could it be our perception? Our perception changed.”

As a renowned scientist, he could easily decipher weird phenomena like this, at times, while experimenting with some chemicals that cause one to hallucinate or lose senses like taste or smell, or falsify them.

He adjusted his glasses, eyes narrowed in sharp, focused thought. “This shouldn't be a physical disappearance. We must be under an illusion, or more accurately, a mental distortion wave. The creature is attacking our senses directly, forcing our brains to overwrite what’s in front of us.”

Jane’s jaw clenched. She swept her rifle across the bare walls anyway. “So the core is here? Good only such could attract such a fearsome mutant, or maybe it birthed the monster instead...”

“Maybe, from my presumption, it should be the one causing the distortion,” Garfield said. “Its more used with capturing its victim off-guard, not the other way round, which explains it doesn’t want to be seen.”

Max tried to summon his gauntlet, but it failed.

He frowned, focusing on the familiar mental trigger, the one he’d used a hundred times before.

Still nothing.

“Come on,” he muttered under his breath. “What’s wrong? I could still summon it right before I evolved, right?”

He pushed harder. His mind strained, slamming against some invisible wall pressing in from all sides. The mimic bond felt muffled, like a voice under static.

Then, at the edge of his vision, something flickered.

A faint outline formed over his hand, his gauntlet mimic, but not in solid metal. It appeared as a ghostly construct, a spectral version of itself, its shape washed out to a dull, faded grey. The contours were there, but thin and unstable, as if the illusion field was draining the color and weight from it.

“Max?” Jane called from deeper in the chamber. “Is everything fine?”

“Give me a sec,” he answered tightly. 

Goo shivered against his side.

The mimic was already summoned, its presence clinging stubbornly to reality. In his mental view, the gauntlet was greyed out, Goo’s form wavered, its spectrum flickering like a bad hologram, but it held together. The field couldn’t fully push it out unless he actively unsummoned it.

“Hang in there, buddy,” Max whispered. “You’re all that’s actually solid right now,goodthing i didnt unsummon you earlier.”

Another shape surfaced in his mind’s eye, a different mimic signature he hadn’t fully understood before. It stretched longer, slimmer, settling into the outline of a rifle.

A sniper.

Only this one was wrong in the best possible way.

Along the main barrel, smaller barrels branched out in a neat row along the body, each one like a parasite weapon feeding off the core. It looked like something halfway between a railgun and an organ pipe from hell.

Max felt a grin tug at his mouth.

He reached toward the hovering spectral weapon. His hand phased through the illusion, then locked, as if gripping something cold and heavy that only he could feel. The mimic solidified just a fraction more beneath his touch.

“Come on,” he urged. 

He raised it, planted the phantom stock against his shoulder, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing.

Not a sound. Not a spark.

Just the oppressive silence of the fake, empty room pressing in on them.

“Figures,” Max hissed. "Let's try that again."

He closed his eyes, forcing everything else away: the fake walls, the empty floor, the missing cocoons. He focused only on the Gun in his hands, senses on the humming bowl in the ggun'sbutt, he felt a hunger coming from the bowl, so he acted, pulling stored power as mimic Energy flowed INTO THE MINUTE but insatiable bowl.

He felt it leave him in a steady pull, like a slow, deliberate exhale that never ended. The sniper drank it greedily, siphoning his strength along every ghost barrel and into the undefined core where a chamber should have been.

The Barrel brightened.

The spectral grey deepened toward solid. Faint lines sharpened into precise edges. The barrels etched themselves into focus, one by one, then they clicked and closed to expand the main barrel chnaging the sniper to a cannon, giving a dangerous aura in its hole.

“Max, what is that?” Jane asked, sweat covering her forehead, one should know that such a weapon being summoned didnt her voice sharp. Even under the illusion, she could see the way the air around him warped, the way the not-quite-visible rifle distorted the fake room.

He opened one eye, a lopsided smirk breaking through the strain.

“Our ticket out of Dumb Town.”

He turned, not aiming at any creature; he still couldn’t see it, but at the weakest point in the lie itself.

Garfield had been muttering under his breath the whole time, calculating, tracing invisible patterns in the air.

“Look for inconsistencies,” the professor said quickly. “Illusions break where they fail to track reality perfectly. Sound delay, light angle, and shadow direction. There.” He pointed to a patch of ceiling and wall where the shadows didn’t quite match the angle of Jane’s flare lying on the floor.

Only, the flare wasn’t there.

Not in the illusion.

But Max remembered it.

“That spot?” Max asked, lining up the ghost sight of the  New Improved Golden Raven.

Garfield nodded once. “That fractured stitch in the pattern, yes. That’s where the field is thinnest.”

Max breathed out slowly, let the siphoned energy peak inside the mimic, and pulled the trigger again.

This time, reality answered.

The sniper fired without sound, but not without effect. A lance of compressed, colorless force tore through the air, not as a visible beam but as a violent ripple, like someone yanking a sheet out from under a fully set table.

The room shuddered.

The empty walls twisted, smeared, then cracked like glass hit by a hammer. The false concrete split open in jagged lines, chunks of fake reality peeling away to reveal what had always been there beneath it.

The nest.

The cocoons snapped back into view, swaying violently. The fleshy walls pulsed, veins bulging like overworked arteries. A wet, grinding shriek tore through everyone’s minds, bypassing their ears entirely.

Sarah dropped to one knee, clutching her head. Jane gritted her teeth, riding the pain. Lorne braced against the wall, rifle snapping up.

In the far corner, where the illusion had been thickest, something massive uncoiled from the ceiling.

It had always been there, wrapped around the chamber like a grotesque, living chandelier. Now, stripped of its mental camouflage, it revealed itself, a layered mass of tendrils and chitin, multiple eyes blinking open along a slick, armored skull. Its limbs clung to both walls and ceiling at once, jointed wrong, too many times.

“Contacts!” Jane shouted. “Center mass and eyes, light it up!”

The creature lashed out.

A wave of psychic pressure slammed into them, stronger than before, trying to shove the illusion back into place. The walls flickered. For a moment, the nest flickered away again, replaced by the dead lab, but this time it didn’t fully take.

Max’s Gun was still humming in his hands.

He fired again.

Each shot ripped at the creature’s control, punching holes in the illusion wherever the force passed.

Jane and Lorne didn’t wait for clearer visuals. They trusted the distortions and opened fire, rounds chewing into limbs whenever they saw the air warp around an invisible mass.

Goo surged out of its pouch at Max’s command, splashing onto the floor, then throwing itself up the wall like liquid muscle, anchoring their footing against the psychic vertigo.

“Sarah! Targets?” Jane shouted.

Sarah forced her eyes open, scanner shaking in her hands. “Center upper quadrant. It’s wrapped around the ceiling brace. There’s a dense cluster right above those three largest cocoons. That might be its brain, or something close to it.”

“Or its core,” Garfield murmured, fascinated despite the madness. “Remarkable.”

The creature shrieked again, tendrils lashing down. One slammed into the floor where Max had been a heartbeat ago, cracking concrete and splattering acid.

He rolled, came up on one knee, and aimed not at the beast itself, but just beside the largest cocoons.

“If you like messing with heads,” he growled, “try this headache.”

He poured more energy in, the sniper mimic drinking deep, every extra barrel along its body flaring in his mind’s eye.

Then he fired at the thinnest seam in reality’s fabric, right where the illusion and the creature’s physical mass overlapped the most.

The shot tore something loose.

The psychic field collapsed like a snapped cable. The room slammed into brutal clarity, the full nest, the smell, the pulsing meat, the terrible scale of the thing above them, all of it crashed into their senses at once.

The monster faltered, its limbs splaying wide as if suddenly too heavy. Several eyes burst, spraying dark fluid across the pods.

Jane didn’t hesitate.

“Concentrate fire on the central mass!” she barked.

Bullets, mimic shots, and Goo’s whipping tendrils converged. The creature convulsed, screeching in a sound that felt like shattered glass inside their skulls.

With a final, desperate thrash, it tried to retreat up and away, dragging its bulk toward a thicker cluster of organic growth in the ceiling, a hardened, crystalline lump embedded deep in the webbed tissue.

A gem.

It pulsed in time with the monster’s shrinking psychic scream, colors shifting in ways the human eye was never meant to process.

“The nest core!” Garfield shouted over the chaos. “That’s it. That’s the anchor.”

Max aimed one last time, then thought better of it.

“Jane! If that thing is what’s holding everyone in those cocoons together, we can’t just blow it apart blindly!” he yelled.

Jane’s teeth ground, but she gave a short nod. “Lorne, cover. Max, Garfield, you’re on the core. Sarah, status on the life signs?”

“Still there!” Sarah called back. “Weak, but stable. Whatever that gem is doing, it’s binding them to this thing, but it’s also keeping them alive.”

They fought their way forward as the creature’s body sagged and spasmed around them, tearing itself off the walls in chunks. Tendrils whipped weakly, acid spattering the floor.

Finally, they reached the central growth.

The nest core was a gem, pulsating with a strange energy that seemed to resonate with the very fabric of the lab. Max could feel its power, a force that mutated nearby creatures into higher versions of themselves, but at a terrible cost, their sanity.

As they prepared to leave, the chamber fell into a strained, uneasy silence, broken only by the faint, wet drip of dissolving biomass. The creature’s main body lay still, its psychic presence reduced to a background hiss.

They cut it loose. Though it was by a miracle they had survived, it could be said that the most recent evolution helped a little. they ranksaced the place to find the rest of the men napped by the mutant. Apart from an open cocoon and another enclosed one, the souless face pale face of Henrik bobbed, giving the whole team a fright .lorne tore open the cocoon while Sir Garfield took some samples.

"I see, due to its nature lacking a standard digestive system, it uses cocoons with food-breaking properties to reduce the complex meat to paste, easier to absorb, another wonder of nature," Sir Garfield exclaimed as they rescued Henrik and splashed a bottle of water on him, not sure of what they were doin but luckily....

"wheres rios? "Lorne asked

immediately henrik face fell. According to his words, the monster was about to embark on an evolution, so it needed a lot of food, as the crew was like having cooked turkey fall in one's lap. According to the mind signals it gave, it needed a host to rebirth that ought to be a woman, based on the mind image as being in a cocoon linked to the mutant makes on partly conjoined mentally. henrik wasnt sure it found its host, but it definitely had enough food to make a baby includingb rios there were at least twenty victims who had all been devoured.

"What about this cocoon that was torn open....did it share thoughts about this one?" Garfield asked,d but Henrik shook his head, said it was a blank page, and every time he tries probe memories close to deciphering it, aghh, Henrik grunted. "It stings me, I am sorry i cant remember... It's all my fault if i didnt go against conduct rios would still be alive. I await purnishment captain, please."

"You will definitely be purnished but that's for later." Ignoring his cries jane warned

that at this moment, when everyone was listening to Henrik's story,

his eyes were on the glimmering rainbow gem. No one noticed his movement.

in a swooping, quick motion

A small, precise cut. Just a fragment. A sliver of the gem broke free with a faint, wrong-sounding crack, like glass fracturing underwater.

He slipped the piece into the hollow of his pendant locket, snapping it shut in one smooth motion.

For a moment, his eyes gleamed with a sickly, unnatural light, an evil grin without a mouth, before the glow faded and his expression flattened back to normal.

While the others secured the area and double checked to see if there were more cocoons, Mark hung back by the gem, the light from it painting his face in twisted, shifting colors.

He glanced over his shoulder once.

Everyone’s attention was elsewhere: Jane coordinating extraction, Sarah checking to see if Henrik was ok, Lorne watching the corridor.

 Max was studying the core with narrowed eyes, and Goo pressed close to his leg.

Max frowned.

He stepped closer to the core still lodged in its fleshy cradle. A fine fracture line now marred its surface, spider webbing across a section that had been whole before.

“I’m sure this thing didn’t have a crack earlier,” he muttered.

Jane glanced over. “Damage from the fight?”

“Maybe,” Max said slowly. “Or maybe it’s just how it works, and we’ve never seen one before. Either way, we need to be careful.”

Goo trembled slightly, pressing closer to him. Max raised his hand at the mutant carcass, his pouch pounding as a whirlpool appeared and cleaned up all the blood and flesh, yet the pouch still felt hungry. It seemed that becoming a rank D meant a higher tank. The absorption wasnt shoking to any of them, they already saw Max do it in his previous battles. Though there was something else they ought to ask about, but it wasnt max.

 Mark’s pendant had gotten a little heavier against his chest.

No one saw the faint pulse of light beat once inside the locket, in perfect sync with the damaged core.

And none of them knew that whatever they had chosen to take home with them had already started to make them part of it.AT the end its a mission accomplished ei?