“Oh… oh no,” Martin uttered as he looked up.
His skinwalker-enhanced eyes could see perfectly in the darkness of the ruined gymnazium. The roof had long caved in, exposing the sky. Martin's new eyes allowed him to see past the motes of dust that were fogging up the atmosphere. He somehow saw past the broiling supercell storm, as if it wasn’t there at all, as if it was just a layer that his mind could simply bypass. Martin realized that the little skinwalker in his brain was somehow now connected, becoming integrated into the greater network of other skinwalkers all around. He could see what they saw, feel what they felt and thus his horizon of understanding, of perception constantly expanded out and out.
Behind the storm he saw something he had never expected to witness - the ruin of the ring of Titanomachy. Remnants of a segment of the great SCA superstructure jotted out of the earth, looming high over the ruins of Saint Mary.
Alexa prodded him for more information with a comment he could barely hear. Oh, she was asking what was going on.
“I know ...what happened here. I know why everyone is dead,” Martin whispered, immersed in the ever-expanding consciousness. “Titanomachy… it fell from the sky.”
"WHAT?!" Ember barked. Her avatars looked up, mouths open wide in horror.
“Welp, there goes my wizard theory,” Alexa commented.
The ravaged segment of Titanomachy right above Martin was covered in leviathan, otherworldly things - spheres of white bone mesh with colossal black limbs stretching away from them.
Before, Martin saw skinwalkers as alien, dark things, but now he could feel life and energy pulsating within them, dots of silver stardust intertwined, interconnected with webs of colorless light. The nests were made from the same stuff as the skinwalkers. Martin also saw multitudes of smaller creatures crawling all around the ruined station. Beneath the dark exoskeleton they all looked like silver nebulae filled with glittering, shining stars. They acted akin to a million ants, laboring together with some great purpose.
The limbs in the sky were diligently moving back and forth, working without rest on building yet more similar spheres atop the shard of Titanomachy.
The more Martin saw, the better he understood, knew what they were, information flooding into his head translated from a deep, subconscious feeling that was emanating from the little skinwalker in his head. The skinwalker nests became bigger the higher they went, eventually becoming magnified a million times.
They were new life clinging to an otherwise dead planet!
His perspective expanded even further and suddenly flipped upside down. He was no longer standing on the ground, he now saw what the nests saw from up above - ruins of the ravaged planet. In the perception of the new, omnipresent life, he was but a tiny mote observed by something far greater than himself. Something terrible and vast that cared little for the tiny, insignificant speck of life inside Martin's head.
Through the uncountable number of eyes of this leviathan, interconnected organism Martin could see a globe shattered by the fallen rings of Titanomachy. The SCA station was made from materials reinforced again and again by the Supers. It was far tougher than anything found on Earth. When it had collided with the planet hundreds of years ago, it had carved it in twain, reduced mountains to dust, vaporized the oceans and boiled the atmosphere. Parts of the world were now completely gone, obliterated, flung out into space.
Some sections of the ravaged planet looked WRONG, were somehow stretched, twisted into some distant, incomprehensible beyond, connected to some elsewhere. These wrong, broken places terrified the skinwalkers, and they avoided them, refused to go there because truly dangerous things existed there, things that were a threat to the Terraforge GLM. Things that needed to be devoured, least they infest this planet with their wrongness.
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Some utterly microscopic, irrelevant bit of him was being bothered. Where was it? Martin’s consciousness was lost, diluted by the endless multitude of minds of the prodigious life that held the shattered planet in its grasp.
“Martin! Martin!” Alexa’s voice yelled at him. “What do you see? Tell me more, damn it!”
“The SCA has fallen… Titanomachy is no more? It can’t… I don’t...” Ember's voice trembled. “How?”
Martin blinked, disconnecting from the greater awareness of everything. “Huh?”
“What do they want?” Alexa shook Martin. “Tell me, damn it!!! Why do they keep murdering me?! Focus!”
[TERMINATE THREATS - CONSUME - UTILIZE - PROPAGATE]
A terrifying message, made not of words but of a scrambled, somewhat coherent idea poured into Spiderbro. Martin’s human mind interpreted it as a command, a demand that was resonating back and forth across all of the skinwalkers.
“They… uhh... it wants... me to kill, to infect you... to make more of itself. It… the skinwalkers… they’re not animals driven by instincts, they’re all connected, working together for a single goal, trying to protect the remnants of the Earth from... something? They’re all over the wreck of Titanomachy, all over the Earth! Multiply? Propagate? Why?!” Martin articulated the jumble of demands in his head.
“No wonder they keep finding and murdering me. I can’t compete with a goddamned planet-wide hivemind!” Alexa said.
[REPAIR - FIX - RENEW - REGENERATE - CONSUME - INTEGRATE - MULTIPLY]
The bits of the multitude nearest to him responded, returning to the same repeating track that demanded replication and murder.
“Repair? Regenerate? Consume? Multiply? Huh?” Martin rubbed his aching head, not understanding.
His awareness jumped all over the ruins, all over the choir of want and need, finally settling on the gargantuan spheres of bone and alien flesh. They were breathing! Breathing in the poisoned, irradiated atmosphere and spewing out clear air. They were the source of the unending, planet-wide supercell storm! They were the reason why the four humans could breathe here at all!
“They’re ...cleansing the atmosphere!” Martin proclaimed, heaving as he nearly lost himself once again.
He realized that he was now hastily trying to breathe in and out for purposes of recycling everything in the air, just like the billions of titanic, spherical lungs in the sky.
“Hrmmm… It sounds like they’re trying to terraform the Earth and see us as a renewable resource. Do you mind telling them that we’re cool and just wanna be friends?” Alexa elbowed Martin. “Think of friendship and magic or something. Positive first contact biz!”
Martin thought positive thoughts of friendship of humanity, of first contact, but he was ignored. His skinwalker shard was far too small, too insignificant, too unimportant. It was just an amoeba in an ocean of the great omnipresent super-consciousness.
[INFECT - CONSUME - MULTIPLY]
Spiderbro sang back. It no longer had a determinate personality. It was but an infinitesimal singer dragged into repeating the unceasing choir.
Spiderbro tried to wield Martin’s body to attack his friends, to claw out their eyes, to end them. They were just organic building blocks to be remade, recycled, cleansed alongside with the rest of bacteria that once inhabited and ruled the earth.
Terraforge did not see Martin of his friends as humans at all... for some reason, it failed to define Martin or the three girls beside him as people!
“Consume... Multiply...No. Stop that! Shut the hell up!” Martin snapped back, resisting the skinwalker shard, wielding control over it.
[REFUSAL? - BROKEN - FIND - TERMINATE / REINTEGRATE]
The voices of the choir nearest to Martin answered, skinwalkers around the city turning towards him. Several of the thousand-elbowed arms turned from their jobs in the sky, heading towards the ground to smite Martin.
“Shit, shit, shit!” Martin gasped. “They aren’t listening! They saw me, us! They’re coming to kill us all!”
“Oh well. First contact pancake got burned. We’ll try again next time... twice as hard!" Alexa sighed.
“Take us back! TAKE US BACK NOW!” Ember screamed at Alexa, grabbing at her.
“Noppers. It doesn't work like that. I don’t control the time jumps. Welcome to 2424. Try not to die!” Alexa winked at the golden-eyed hero.