My eyes snapped open to the sound of my own gurgling breaths. I was back in the stone hall. The orbs had fallen to the floor beside me, their dim light all but faded.

In their place, a twisted silhouette now loomed over me, wrapped in ragged robes that hung loosely over chitin limbs and slithering protrusions, neither of which seemed able to find rest. It was an unnatural thing – out of balance with the universe – like a failed experiment someone had tried to fix with more experiments until they’d completely forgotten what their project was meant to look like.

Four eyes of fiery purple burned into my mind, displaced across a face that seemed pulled straight from the deepest and darkest oceans within the void. Cold and sticky claws dug into my neck as it raised me off the floor, the shifting and decaying figures of the Scourge shifting within in the shadows around us. They were twisted, too.

With the dwindling amount of fresh prey and new genetic material to consume, it’d began devouring itself ever since the fall, turning more and more malformed by the decade.

What’d once been an indominable force had almost torn itself apart.

The knowledge that they would eventually disappear after my death pulled a grin from my lips. This galaxy would soon be left in ashes where nothing could live anymore. Not even them.

The twisted figure before me didn’t seem half as amused as more eyes snapped open across its body — violets, reds, and greens burning into my own. Some of them seemed almost human, others bestial, but most were merely alien.

“What…” that first word came like the breathless whisper of a dying man, interlaced with chittering snarls and incomprehensible gurgles and growls, “…did…you…see?”

“A world without you ugly bastards in it,” I spat as the last syringes of my broken suit pierced my skin.

Burning heat rushed through my veins, my heart straining and fluctuating as every strength modification embedded within my genetic code sparked alight for one last time. My muscles, honed far beyond the limits of mankind over centuries of training, swelled as I dug my fingers into that arm holding me up.

In a single violent pull, I tore it apart.

Blood cascaded around us, gurgling cries filled the air, but my fists were already pummeling into the figure before me with reckless fury.

Even without my UI or overlay, I was still Yamien Silmund. Hundreds of thousands of endless repetition, desperately trying to bury the faces of every friend and comrade I’d outlived, had etched the Imperial Forms into my bones.

I slipped beneath the claw that came for my neck, slicing through the air like a scythe as I snapped forward, knuckles shattering what would’ve been the hip bone on any human; momentum carried my left fist in an uppercut, breaking apart something cold and slippery; buying just enough space for my right hand to bury itself into its center of gravity, sending it sliding over a dozen feet across the stone floor.

All of it, executed within the span of a heartbeat.

I’d been ready to follow up on the assault as well, but before I could spin around in a stone-shattering kick, the hall around me had erupted in chaos. A sea of claws, mandibles, teeth, and maws swarmed over me — slithering, crawling, hungering.

My palm broke a chitin clad face, only for a long limb to burst through my ribcage. I got my fingers into an open maw, tearing it apart as something lacerated my back. I dodged a spiked tongue, kneed a bulbous sack, and swung out with a spinning elbow. But the crush of bodies weighed me down endlessly. For every punch I threw, tentacles ripped my flesh apart. For every skull I crushed, my blood was greedily slurped from a hundred cuts I’d sustained.

My death came in a chittering, screaming, and violent cacophony. It came in glorious combat, ripping apart the bastards who’d doomed us all.

003…

002…

001…

Initializing ‘The Last Reality’…

Administrator(s) Found: &?.%!

Error…

Error…

Playing Parting Message:

“You’ve seen the end that must be prevented. Good luck, Administra&”¤% …”

Grand Simulation:

Terminating…

𐫰 𐫰 𐫰

It was a dream. I knew it instinctively — my life flashing before my eyes as death finally claimed me after all these years. Though, why it’d brought me back here of all places, I couldn’t tell.

Because this is where it’d all began?

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It was the first space ship I ever saw, that’s for sure. The first showing of the Star People, sent there by an Intergalactic Empire who supposedly ruled us all.

We were so naive back then.

I’d been in awe as the massive Brow/Wing Carrier, larger than our entire town, landed there upon the Silka fields, crushing the young crops. Then, I’d been afraid. They were there to take me away, after all.

It’d been a rainy day, the drops falling from the dark skies just like the tears of a thousand children, gathered from across the moon’s surface by callous soldiers. There were only some hundred towns like ours on the entirety of Ferada-1109, and the yearly quotas meant our population never really grew.

Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of moons and planets throughout the galaxy saw this same scene played out every year. I know that now. I didn’t back then.

I’d been crying as well. Weeping as they pulled me from underneath the bed where I’d hid, clutching at my books about space faring adventurers and intergalactic villains.

I was too young to become one of them. I was only eleven, but the soldiers didn’t care for my loud cries.

Gene mods have always been more effective if implemented before the teenage years. I’ve learned that now, too. Just how I’ve learned how much the Empire needed their brave soldiers.

Five years before that day, they’d taken both of my older sisters as well, as young as me back then. In a few years, maybe they’d come for my youngest sibling as well.

I never learned if that was the case. I never learned a lot about my family, only that Ferada-1109 was no longer there when I returned for them, far too late.

All I can remember was how none of them raised a voice as their only son was dragged away. Their stiff faces, following me as I was pulled away, so fresh it seemed it’d happened just yesterday…

𐫰 𐫰 𐫰

It was to a wave of sickness I rolled out of bed, and I hit the metal floor with limbs so scrawny they seemed they’d snap apart from the impact.

My stomach turned and I vomited, head spinning beyond control — beyond where my mental enhancements could even begin to relieve it.

A red light sprung to life somewhere above me, too out of view to be my overlay, beeping ominously as a voice filled the room.

“Safe stress levels exceeded. Suspected panic attack from first star voyage. Doctor will be arriving shortly…”

I pushed myself off the floor, barely getting half as high as I’d expected. My arms have not only become thinner, but shorter as well?

“What the hell is going on,” I wheezed with a voice that wasn’t my own. It was too bright. Too innocent.

The vertigo struck me like a force blaster. It was only thanks to the stiff bed behind me that I avoided smashing my skull into something more unyielding.

It felt as if I’d been downing barrels of black-star liquor all at once and scraping my mind for the augments meant to alleviate such things, I found nothing at all.

They were gone, and so was everything else. I couldn’t even sense the botched strength and accuracy enhancements I’d gotten when I was still a teen.

My insides were squeaky clean, seemingly reset to the time I was still human.

A procedure that should’ve killed me…

Another wave of nausea, and I clutched my head to keep it stable. No matter how deeply I breathed, however, or how many times I blinked, my vision remained blurry.

The realization had barely hit me as I, per a reflex I hadn’t possessed in centuries, reached for the glasses that lay there on the bedside table.

With my sight restored, the feel of those thick lenses now rested on my nose alien yet unsettlingly familiar — as if barely a day had passed since I last wore them — I tried taking stock of my surroundings. Emphasis on tried. Nothing I saw made any sense.

Mere moments ago, I’d been getting torn apart within the alien tombs of a barren planet. Yet now, here I was, within the small cell of…

Another spiking headache made me curl up into a ball, far smaller than any adult man should’ve ever been able to form.

By all means, all of my surroundings were off in size. The bed was too big and tall, the single door leading inside seemed scaled for giants, and that screen – still blinking bright red – was placed impractically high up on the wall.

Just like how my hands had become impractically small, my limbs too short and thin. Just like those of a child…

What in the Void happened to me?

“Please stand by. Doctor will be arriving shortly…”

I glanced towards that screen, frowning.

And who would ever bother using such third-gen tech anymore?

𐫰 𐫰 𐫰

By the time I could hear hurried steps echo outside my cell, my old instincts had taken over.

I didn’t know what was going on, but that didn’t mean I’d let confusion control me.

With the stripped pillow case from my bed wrapped around my hands, I’d taken a quiet position beside the door. It wasn’t the most efficient garrote I’d ever used, but it would get the job done.

I’d made do with worse before, and my hands felt too weak to even strangle a Cheru in their current state.

Even my heart was beating uncannily fast as the lamp besides the door switched to green, hissing open as a lanky figure hurriedly stepped inside. Too. Damned. Tall!

Not that it mattered. All it took was a firm kick to the back of their knee for their legs to buckle.

Although my legs were vexingly short and weak, I’d hit them mid stride; they’d been off balance and unprepared; and even a veteran soldier would’ve struggled to prevent it. This woman was not. I could tell from the gasp she drew as she hit the floor.

A second later, her shock had turned into stiff panic as I’d wrapped the pillow case around their throat. I even locked my legs around her midriff to ensure she wouldn’t get away, clinging to her back like a beetle as I kept my garrote tight.

“Where is this pl—” I began only for a barking order to cut me short.

“Stand down, recruit, or we’ll shoot!”

I’d barely glimpsed the guards standing outside as I forcefully twisted my body around, causing my light-weight hostage to land on top of me as we both fell.

With an effective barrier of flesh between us, I stared at the guns that were currently aimed straight towards me. More than the firearms, however, what pissed me off were the ones wielding them.

Their resemblance to humans was unsettling.

Scourge fuckers. How dare they…

“Where is this place?” I yelled in a voice that, once more, was far too bright. It caused my barked command to sound more like a yelp.

These sickos haven’t neutered me, have they?

I tightened my noose to pull another startled gurgle from my hostage. “What the fuck is going on here?”

More than the brightness of my voice, there’d been a strange tremble to my last few words just then. Glancing down, I even found that my hands were shaking.

I’m not afraid, am I?

The notion confused me. I couldn’t even remember the last time I felt fear.

No, that wasn’t true, was it? I was afraid yesterday, as they came to take me away from…

Another spiking migraine shot through my skull, causing me to wince. My hands must’ve slipped just then as, the moment my hostage drew a gasping breath, both guards stormed inside.

Before I could reaffirm my grip, the metallic pegs of two CCD had embedded themselves deep into my neck, and a second later, my own shrill cries filled the cell as the full current of the stun guns coursed through my body.

Yesterday, I would’ve shrugged them off like tickles.

Now, they knocked me out cold to excruciating pain.

Synchronization Underway…

May Cause Feeling of Displacement or Nausea

Please, Stand By…