“Of course it contains Aether,” Lila said. “Aether is the natural energy of the stars. It suffuses the galaxy and courses through all living creatures. As a cultivator, you of all people should know that very well, Hiran.”

“I do.” Hiran released the breath he’d been holding. “Aether is everywhere and in everything, but for a non-cultivator, Aether flows through their bodies like a river. It is not the same for me, since I can hold and harness it with my Core. And… it’s not the same for whatever this creature is, too.”

“Is this alien organism a cultivator as well?” Lila asked, her brow twitching in evident surprise. “That would be a tremendous discovery, if that were the case. Starforged are incapable of cultivating, thanks to the nature of their Cores, and even in the Ghandarna System, the galactic region with the highest prevalence of mortal cultivators, they are only literally one in a hundred billion.”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying.” Hiran sighed, his thoughts rife with confusion and astonishment. “This creature isn’t cultivating, at least not in the way I understand it. But it is holding onto and cycling Aether through its… uh, whatever part this stuff stuck underneath the stairs is to the rest of its body.”

“Its exposure to sunlight is deliberate,” Lila pointed out. She extended several small mechanical limbs from her torso over the stairwell’s guardrail and toward the flesh. Most of them were tipped with needles, small cutting blades, and delicate pincers. One terminated in a metal tube capped with glass from which faint red light showed.

The Savant swept the light from the tube over the alien mass. Her crimson lens whirred and clicked for a few moments. “Preliminary visual and low-spectrum radiographic scan complete. The results tentatively suggest that this biomass beneath us is carrying out a process not too unlike photosynthesis, using solar energy to facilitate the breakdown of nutrients it has ingested.”

“I… I have a bad feeling about where those nutrients came from,” Hiran said, thinking about the missing residents of this habitation block. He drew his pistol and sword again. “But I have an even worse feeling about how it got those nutrients in the first place. Lila, we’ve got incoming.”

“Affirmative.” The Savant withdrew her smaller limbs and snapped her shotguns to readiness, sweeping their barrels over the empty space in the middle of the stairwell. “Visual scan inconclusive. Lifesign scan inconclusive. Where…?”

Hiran aimed his gun at a spot on the stairwell wall directly in front of him. As he watched, cracks cobwebbed over its synthcrete surface. A moment later, it burst apart, and a shrieking four-armed creature emerged.

It was as tall and as broad as Maxwell, and its hide was sheathed in chitin. A fang-filled maw dripping with viscous saliva filled the lower half of its face. Four beady red eyes sat beneath its heavy brow. The alien’s skin was slick with slime and the color of rotting meat. Its legs were vaguely humanoid in appearance, terminating in three-toed feet. Clusters of sharp claws tipped each of its arms.

Hiran shot it directly in the forehead, blowing open its skull and splattering the ruins of its brains across the ruptured wall behind it. He then pivoted on his heel, aimed over Lila’s right shoulder, and put two more bullets through the throat of a second alien that had burst from a section of the stairwell wall behind her.

That alien shrieked in agony and tumbled over the guardrail, before plummeting down the stairwell. Its cry was a sound Hiran had never heard before, and it chilled his blood.

Another two more of the creatures swarmed from the hole the first one had created. Lila raked them into shreds with buckshot from her shotguns. More aliens poured from the second hole. One of them reached for the Savant, but Hiran strode past her and hacked off its claw-tipped arm with a sweep of Azure Fang. He then shot it in the head and dropped its spasming body at the feet of its kin, tripping them up and foiling their attempt to pounce.

Cycling Aether into his Sun Circuits, Hiran waded into the midst of the aliens and sliced his sword through their necks and torsos. Grayish-green ichor spurted from the lethal wounds he carved into their bodies, filling the already stale air of the stairwell with a stench akin to rotten eggs and old vomit.

Lila’s shotguns thundered behind him, the sound of their fury punctuated by more cries of alien pain. Hiran beheaded a four-armed creature, before stamping down on another, utterly crushing its skull beneath the heel of his armored boot. He head-shot the last alien in front of him, before turning to check on Lila.

The Savant had killed all the foes in front of her as well. She glanced over her shoulder at him, while her mechanical limbs wove a dance of metal and lead as they reloaded both her shotguns at the same time.

“Analysis complete. There is no known match for these organisms in any bestiary throughout the known galaxy. We must conclude that these aliens, whatever they are, come from beyond our galaxy.”

“Then they’re definitely a long way from home,” Hiran said, flicking the ichor from Azure Fang’s length. “Anything else?”

“Heavy pheromone trails detected,” she continued, sweeping a small metal sphere through the air on one of her smaller limbs. “I believe that these aliens are controlled by a central intelligence… some kind of hive mind, if you will. However, I do not have the equipment needed to trace these pheromone trails back to the source of their origin.”

Hiran took a closer look at the heap of corpses piled at his feet. Even in death, they glowed with Aether, something which Hiran had learned how to sense early in his apprenticeship under Master Vikram.

That was how he’d sensed them coming in the first place. That was also how he knew he could track them to their nest, lair, birthing chamber, or whatever den from which they’d emerged.

“Lila, I don’t think we should waste any time sweeping the building for any survivors,” he said. “If anyone has managed to stay away from these aliens up till now, they can hide a bit longer. You said that they’re controlled by some kind of hive mind, right? If we kill this hive mind, then all these aliens will die, right?”

“I do not have enough data to make such a conclusion. However, if we attack the hive mind directly, we can be fairly certain it will do its utmost to defend itself, which means that it will pull every single one of its combat organisms back and away from any mortals that yet survive… though the prospects of there being any are low, to say the least.”

“They are,” Hiran agreed, taking note of the aliens’ claws and their musclebound limbs. The creatures were swift, strong, and ferocious, and on top of that, they were able to burrow through solid synthcrete as if it were loosely packed sand.

Fully armed mortal warriors and even a group of Starforged Enforcers would have a tough time against them. Poorly armed civilians didn’t stand a chance. Hiran didn’t doubt that every last resident in this habitation block had been slaughtered and consumed by the aliens.

He nodded to Lila. “Alright, let’s go attack the hive mind right now.”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“That is a viable strategy. But as I mentioned, I cannot determine the location of—”

“I can.” Hiran tightened his grip on his sword. “These aliens, the stuff beneath the stairs and these four-armed freaks, are spread out everywhere across this building. I can sense the Aether in them, and I know where they all come from. We just need to get there and kill it.”

“Affirmative.” Lila blinked her black eye, and a three-dimensional map of the habitation block appeared in the corner of Hiran’s vision. “If you activate your Empyrean Circuits of the Moon, I believe you should be able to plot a path to our destination in under a minute.”

Hiran cycled Aether from his Core into his Moon Circuits and tuned out his Void Sight, focusing instead on his thoughts. His mind felt clearer right away, and his idle ruminations and distracting doubts slunk into the deepest reaches of his consciousness. He studied the map and superimposed his own diagram of the web of Aether permeating the building upon it.

Lila made a low mechanical sound in her throat. Hiran hadn’t heard it often during the time he’d come to know her, but he was able to recognize it as a sound of approval.

“That is an adroit use of your Ajna Interface, Hiran,” she said. “Well done. With that said, this is most extraordinary. You have charted and diagramed the entire body of this organism, of which these combat-capable specimens are but an extension, as are these photosynthesis pads, and it resembles a nervous system, one spread across the entirety of the habitation block as if the building were a body.”

“It looks more like a parasite taking over and feeding on its host than anything else to me.”

He focused on the map again and marked out a spot on the Aether web with a flashing blue circle. That was where the strongest concentration of Aether was, as far as he could tell.

Hiran frowned and thought about what he’d just said, before shaking his head. “No, that’s not right. Lila, you mentioned how the lifesign scans from outside make it seem like there’s a single gigantic living creature here, right? I think your description is far more accurate, because this alien is just that: a massive entity, and everything else is just part of its body, even if some of them aren’t physically connected to the main section.”

“Killing the heart or the brain of any singular body will result in the deaths of its appendages, too,” Lila said. Hiran felt her focus on the map. “You’ve identified our destination. Now, can you navigate a course through the building there?”

Hiran nodded. A blue line emerged from their current location on the map and wound its way through the building, moving past corridors, over lobbies, and down more flights of stairs until it reached the ground floor. There, it pushed past the entrance to the basement levels and into another series of lobbies, hallways, and stairwells, before arriving at a massive elevator shaft.

“That’s not an elevator shaft,” Lila corrected him. “That’s the building’s central ventilation chute. It circulates fresh air all the way down to the lowest subterranean floors. We will not have any elevator to make the descent with, but there should be maintenance ladders present. However, it will be difficult to fight while climbing down a ladder.”

“We’ll figure that out when we have to.” Hiran directed his attention to the blue circle. “Meanwhile, we should get moving. The creatures that attacked us were just a test. Now that this big alien has figured out that we’re a much greater threat than it first thought we were, it’s going to attack again, and far more viciously this time.”

“Affirmative.” Lila looked at the dead aliens around the first hole again. “It seems to me that these will not be the only foes we face. This alien organism is capable of multiform biomorphic materializations, I believe. The next batch of creatures attacking us will be more formidable.”

Hiran minimized the map in his vision and strode down the stairwell, with Lila following closely behind. No sooner had they made it to the next landing when a fresh batch of aliens burst from the surrounding walls, screeching and ravening. The bodies of some of these new ones were sleeker and longer, and their forelimbs terminated in sharp hooks instead of claws. Stinger-tipped tails protruded from the base of their spines.

The first alien to reach Hiran died, cut in half from head to crotch by a single sweep of Azure Fang. He raised his pistol and fired rapidly, emptying the magazine and putting every remaining heavy caliber shell into an alien’s face, neck, or chest, before holstering it and taking up his sword in a two-handed grip.

Hiran used a basic single-blade technique called Warding Veil from [Twinned Songs], turning Azure Fang’s glowing blade into a whirling disc of Aetheric steel. Alien stingers bounced off its surface, thwarted from plunging their dripping tips home into Lila’s neck.

The Savant swept her shotguns out and blasted three aliens apart, sending their mangled bodies hurtling out into the open space in the middle of the winding stairwell. She extended a limb tipped with a circular saw and beheaded another alien that pounced on her from above.

Hiran danced a circle around the Savant, Azure Fang flicking out to dismember, decapitate, and eviscerate every single alien that came within reach.

A stinger-tipped tail struck him on his left shoulder guard, only to bounce harmlessly off its khigar-scale surface. Hiran responded by driving a Contemptuous Comet technique directly through the face of the alien who’d managed to land a hit, glancing as it was. The creature’s head exploded beneath the impact.

“This way,” he said to Lila, rushing across the landing and to the synthsteel door leading into the forty-second floor of the habitation block. He shoulder-barged it open, strode through, then stepped aside to allow the Savant to rush past him.

Hiran slammed the door shut, crushing the skull of an alien that had lunged after her. Organic hooks sliced through the synthsteel surface of the door a moment later and ripped it apart.

Three more aliens flooded in. Hiran cut them down with Azure Fang, picked up one of their corpses with his free hand, and hurled it into the midst of another two aliens behind the trio he’d just killed, bowling them over.

Lila turned and ripped them into pieces with salvos from her shotguns, before casting a sidelong glance Hiran’s way. “Reloading.”

“Go ahead,” he said, twirling Azure Fang to readiness.

Alien hooks punched through the low-hanging ceiling above his head, but Hiran had already sensed the creatures’ presence a few moments ago. He sidestepped their whistling arcs, before cutting the aliens apart as they dropped through the breach they’d just created.

Lila finished reloading her weapons. She strode down the corridor, scything down the mass of aliens that swarmed down its length toward her. Hiran followed in her wake, reloading his pistol as he did so.

The aliens Lila was currently reaping with her shotguns had grasping claws. They were the same as the first batch that had attacked them, but in their midst, Hiran spotted a different kind of creature.

It was much smaller than its kin, standing only three feet tall on two stumpy legs. A single massive eye sat in the middle of its otherwise featureless face, and the skin of its scalp was stretched tight against its bulging skull. The alien turned the blue iris of its eye directly upon Hiran. Bright green veins filled its sclera. Aether emanated from its body in waves much stronger than those radiating from the more warlike aliens.

Hiran threaded a bullet through the mass of the clawed aliens and into its eye, exploding its misshapen skull with a single heavy caliber round. Lila’s shotguns clicked emptily.

“Reloading,” she announced, as Hiran strode past her and cut down the scant few clawed aliens that had survived her gunfire. Flicking the ichor from his blade, he spun around and head-shot a hooked alien that had crawled through the wall next to Lila.

The death of the latest alien signaled a change in the hive mind’s strategy. Hiran sensed it pulling the rest of its creatures away. He lowered his pistol and waited for Lila to finish reloading her weapons, before beckoning her over to take a look at the corpse of the small creature with the single eye and stumpy legs.

“I took a quick visual recording of this lifeform before you killed it,” she said. “Judging by the size of its cranium, I would say that its functions were largely cerebral. Fortunately for us, it perished before it could carry them out.”

“It also had that huge eye,” Hiran said. “Could it also have been observing us and feeding information to the hive mind so that it can better figure out how to deal with us?”

“That is very possible.” Lila nodded. Her crimson lens whirred. “Wait.”

She bent down and extended two small limbs and began sifting through the alien’s ruined remains.

“Uh…” Hiran coughed into his armored fist. “What… what are you doing?”

“This is fascinating,” the Savant said, ripping free a cluster of brightly colored vein-like cords. She stuffed it somewhere within her frock, before looking up to meet Hiran’s gaze. “This organism’s brain contains organic cables optimal for neuro-connectivity. If I can gather enough of these cables, I might be able to process them with the Hallowed Forge and upgrade your Empyrean Circuits of the Moon to G-Grade.”