So far so good! It had managed to latch onto a human, and that human had brought it the helmet to its armor before it even had access to the translator to ask about everything it was missing. In fact, before it had even got around to thinking about the things it lacked beyond contact with everything it had ever known, all of its power, and the absence of pain. Now, in this enclosure, it wasn't constantly being assaulted by the sensation of getting stabbed by tiny ephemeral knives like it had been since it had fallen off the mountain. Of the four problems it had identified this far, the human had solved one, identified another, made progress on the identified problem, and shown itself as willing to assist with what tasks might be required to figure out how to get back to the work.

The opening volley had barely started. With how undamaged it still was, there was no reason it couldn't still assist with the grand plot.

This human was still going through the settings on the helmet. Once they had familiarized itself with the functions, the experiment would direct it to use the active scanners to ping the other pieces of equipment, assumedly for the human to use. It didn't remember the specifications having anything standard that would allow for easy return to the ongoing battle, but at the very least it would be able to use the exosuit to combat the gravity around here.

If it could find its boots first, that would be ideal. With transportation assured and the locations found through the helmet sensors, it could put together the whole assembly in minutes. The suit may have a slight flaw in design wherein its incredible modularability rendered it susceptible to disarming, but it also allowed for ease of reassembly when the pieces were retrieved.

Hopefully the order for locating the individual components would be helmet, legs, torso, tail, arms. The legs it would be able to use on their own, without being weighed down by the other parts of the suit, and when it finds the torso the whole thing would be able to support its own weight, which would make every part found afterward immediately usable. This waiting around for the human to acclimate to the screens and sensors was getting boring though, and the hole from the translator implant and subsequent re-accessing had finished healing.

Picking its way past the few articles cluttering the room, the creature leaves the abode to explore the new area. It immediately regrets the decision, but decided to blame the sunk cost fallacy on its future actions. Regardless of how being outside the confines of the domicile felt, it would have to leave at some point to find the other segments. Having just met its human, it couldn't just ask it to do this menial task in its place. That was what its species was made for.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Plants. Plants everywhere. While it had access to the visor, it had checked the schematics on its biology, or whatever one would call its makeup, to see what the symptoms it was experiencing would be indicative of, and apparently while the flaw was somewhat inconsequential while in the depths of space, its passive energy harvesting had a particular type of feedback on living creatures. Most of those with a mind would shy away from the automatic discomfort caused by what would technically be an embodiment of the concept of entropy, but mindless pests like gnats, crickets, wasps and the like would fly into range and have their life force instantly drained. Lower forms of cellular life however, specifically the ones with rigid cell walls, would reproduce the absorption. As a result, the conflicting fields would cause a feedback loop of continuous damage to both sides until one was utterly destroyed. Estimates placed that as killing an ordinary human in a minimum of two minutes and a maximum of half an hour for the absolute pinnacle of typical human physical fitness if the person in question were not removed from the source of the feedback loop. On the other hand, the thirty first experimental group was built with enough redundancy that any kind of continuous damage was irrelevant to their continued functionality. As such, this kind of battle in attrition was one that any plant was doomed to fail.

“Muahahaha, foolish rice. I am more powerful than you can possibly imagine. This is a war you were destined to lose before it began, your efforts being a futile rage against an overwhelming force the likes of which a thousand fields of your kind could not hope to overcome. Make no mistake, the moment you attempted to take from me the power I was built to utterly command was the moment your downfall became inevitability.”

Raising a hand in the direction of the plants, palm forward with fingers tucked in, the creature focuses on the stones below it. Exactly one pebble rises from the ground, hovering in front of the outstretched hand. About two centimeters across, the rock rotates a few times, before the creature opens its hand and the chunk of stone flies into the wave of grain. Other than a slight bending of a few stalks, this has absolutely no effect on the plantlife.

There was apparently something over there though, judging from the exclamation of pain.