Starscream was just relieved that the flesh artist had managed to punch him onto his own battery. He’d spent months getting it right, a complex nano lace structure that not only encoded messages, but mana. There was so much magic stuffed into his web battery that the entire room fairly crackled with it. That was more of a statement about the thermodynamic inefficiencies of the system than actual overwhelming power but when you were an alien machine trapped in a cultivator world you did the best that you could with the materials at hand.

His prehensile tail, a bundle of nerves wrapped in synthetic muscle fiber, extended a few filaments to connect with the web battery, completing a circuit that allowed mana to flow into Starscream’s tiny form. Golden aura blazed from the joints in its highly articulated limbs, so much power, draining all too quickly. That was the trouble with trying to reverse engineer cultivation without a quintessence organ, or for that matter, without a proper body.

The web was elastic, and in the spare second it took him to recharge it had rebounded from his impact and was popping him off again. Starscream turned the pop into a launch, kicking with his finger legs and flattening himself for the aerodynamics.

Dappo, holding his throat closed with one hand, readied the other to catch the flying spider, but he was disappointed. Starscream wasn’t attacking him, instead, he zipped across the chamber in a red-gold flash, his claws sinking into the stone beside Sunwhisper where he touched down.

He’d waited a long time for the second exploratory team to find him. They finally had, but they had only sent one kid. The new mechanoborg was wearing a skin sheath that looked convincing enough, at least the nearby cultivators seemed to have been fooled, but Starscream didn’t have eyes, so the disguise was moot.

The world was a dim gray approximation built out of electromagnetic signals. Starscream didn’t have a sense of taste or smell or sight. He had the sensory suite that had come with the hand he had shoved his consciousness inside to escape a cultivator ambush. That meant touch was all he had started with, along with one auditory receiver he’d tucked into his palm. That had been bootstrapped into a bit of echolocation, which coupled with electroreception and electrogenesis, meant he could perceive his local environment pretty well, but the range wasn’t great.

He’d picked out the baby mechanoborg as soon as he’d come into his lair. The prayer confirmed it, along with how he turned on the cultivators as soon as he’d read what Starscream had written into the webs.

The girl cultivator still didn’t get it. She’d run to the side of her fallen friend, and was actively trying to drag him away from what she perceived as a horrible beast trying to finish him. Maybe she hadn’t seen how the kid had stabbed the flesh artist, or maybe she thought it had been an accident. Either way, she wasn’t prepared for what was about to happen.

Starscream whipped her with his tail, opening one side of her face. If he had felt he had time to kill her he would have. Killing cultivators was good fun and good for you, but she wasn’t the threat at the moment. She just needed to back off.

A quick scuttle later and he was on top of the young mechanoborgs chest, ripping off a layer of skin paste looking for an access port to jab his tail into. Mechanoborgs were pretty modular, they could switch out most of their parts without too much trouble, and they had various ports for attachments like weapons upgrades and plugging into battlesuits.

He found one, re-extended the nerve filaments at the end of his tail, and made the connection.

(Wake up, kid, you’re about to get an upgrade.)

The kid’s mind was still in there, he had just been knocked into a cool-down mode. But Starscream didn’t have time for a reboot, so he gave him a little shock while downloading his specifications.

Sunwhisper, what a name.

Pretty basic stats, but the system was all wonky. There was no listed level or class specialization, just something called a Dao Rating. Most surprising of all, Sunwhisper had a fully functional quintessence organ. It looked like the second exploratory team had gotten some of their notes after all.

The kid was coming back online, becoming aware enough to realize he wasn’t alone in his own body anymore.

(Good, you’re up. Listen, this is gonna feel weird, but I need you to work with me on this one.)

Sunwhisper said one word.

"What?"

Starscream pumped him full of mana, everything his own body couldn’t hold without bleeding it all off in a matter of minutes. Sunwhisper had a quintessence organ, he had meridians, which meant he could be a fully functional cultivator, whereas Starscream was an engineer who’d had to figure out about a thousand workarounds just to mimic the kinds of things cultivators could do with mana.

The Hero System and the Cultivation System weren’t fundamentally incompatible. They could share skills, and while Starscream didn’t exactly know karate, or whatever they did in this world, he definitely knew how to fight.

(Get up!)

Sunwhisper got up. The influx of mana was already being used to repair the damage to his body. Starscream adjusted some of his own settings, and they started sharing senses as well as skills. It was so nice to be able to see again, even if all he had to look at was some gross flesh artist.

Dappo blinked.

"What is this?" he croaked. "What are you?" He slid forward, maintaining Ogre Stance despite his injury, but unwilling to press the attack until he could make sense of the scene before him. He’d almost been killed by something he thought of as a sacred beast cooperating with one of his tagalong baby cultivators. The confusion was understandable.

Poor guy, he probably could have killed them both in the seconds it had taken Starscream to make his connection and figure out the new controls, but now it was too late. There was fear in his eyes, always a pleasant thing to see in your prey.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Sunwhisper’s own eyes were glowing, pouring out golden light without end.

“What are you doing?” He asked, “what is this technique?”

(It’s called Xanthous Ascendancy, baby bird. Don’t worry about the mechanics right now. We can hash all that out later. Just enjoy it.)

"This cannot be," Dappo’s voice was barely a whisper, "you are not a two-star. You are not a cultivator at all."

"Apologies, elder," Sunwhisper said, standing slowly. "But I don’t know how I am doing this either."

Dappo took a deep breath, he had been channeling furiously to combat the injury to his throat, and though it was far from healed, the bleeding had stopped, and the danger of death had passed.

"My reward will be all the greater when I bring your body to the First Elder," he said. "Whatever pact Makoto has made with the demons from beyond the border, he will pay for it in blood and treasure.”

“I still don’t understand,” Sunwhisper said.

"You do not need to understand," Dappo said, stomping a small crater into the stone floor of the cavern. "You only need to die."

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

Dappo charged.

White mist met a golden glare, and Sunwhisper’s body moved in ways it had never been taught. The sound of their limbs meeting became a staccato rhythm, almost predictable, as two masters tested each other, and learned to appreciate the nuances of their opposing styles.

“You are no artist,” Dappo snarled.

Starscream’s combat protocols were effective, but inelegant. He was more of a brawler than a martial artist, and his combat techniques weren’t well suited to the kind of channeling cultivators did while fighting. He was, however, very high level. He could tell Sunwhisper was trying to check out their shared status screen, but he couldn’t quite spare the attention from combat to do so.

Their rhythm found discordance here and there, a slip, a nudge, a fist smashing through a stalagmite. The beats became more insistent, the drums deeper, punctuated by the crash of stone as the chamber disintegrated around them. A column fell, and Dappo floated over its path to avoid being tangled in the web. He was having to deal with a suddenly empowered cultivator and the Red Spider at the same time, and it was proving too much for him.

Sunwhisper flipped up to the ceiling and kicked off of it with his spear in his hand. Dappo had pulled the weapon out of his own back and tossed it aside, giving Starscream the opportunity to retrieve it with a well placed web line. Now the point of the spear was angling for Dappo’s heart.

"My most advanced technique." The flesh artist declared. "You are honored to be defeated by what I have shown no one else.”

In Starscream’s experience, this was the sort of talk you got when a cultivator knew he was about to die. You just had to endure it.

“Ghostly Riposte of the Seven Blasphemies!"

White mana was all things to all people, the color of illusions, of lightness, of freedom. It made promises out of dreams, and dreams out of raw desire. Dappo’s technique touched the mind of his opponent, and showed them what they wanted to see, only to turn their power fatally back upon them in the final instant. It was a potentially game changing technique, one that could touch even the alien mind of a mechanoborg. It relied heavily on visual components, however, creating a Dappo duplicate to distract an opponent while the real one rushed invisibly to attack from the rear.

Starscream never lost track of Dappo, so neither did Sunwhisper. His electronic brain processed response scenarios in fractions of a fraction of a second. The spear was pointed on both ends. Sunwhisper pulled it in with both hands, jabbing the rear point under his arm.

They passed through the first Dappo, an illusion that burst into a white mist when it was violated, as the real cultivator took the spear to his stomach behind them. He aborted his attack, grabbed the shaft of the spear where it protruded from his belly, and pushed himself off.

The antagonists landed on opposite sides of the wreckage strewn chamber. Mana was still flowing in Sunwhisper’s meridians, stretching his core nearly to the bursting point, but Starscream’s Ascendancy technique was keeping his body from rupturing at the seems.

(Pretty basic.)

“What is?” Sunwhisper asked.

(The illusion. Using his Cloud Foot technique to get behind us. It’s like, episode one stuff.)

Dappo panted, his hands and feet jerking through the steps of yet another flesh stance. Cultivators who had an affinity for that element could modify their bodies in a variety of ways, and he was changing physically again to match his new style.

His fists returned to normal proportions as bone knives protruded from his wrists, and his legs elongated as his shoulders slimmed. Less an ogre now than a locust. The wound to his stomach, deep and weeping, closed.

(Wait for it.)

"What am I waiting for?"

"Death!" Dappo cried, taking a single step forward. His leg wobbled, and he went down to one knee. The pale aura around his limbs thinned to nothing.

(Healing is exorbitantly mana intensive.)

Sunwhisper had already increased the density of his weapon several times over, and he still had energy to burn. He took his time aiming. Dappo was clearly channeling, but most of the ambient mana in the room had already been used up.

The magnetic field of Impurities Rejection pulsed once, stronger than it had ever been, and the spear leapt from his hand like a predator eager to take its prey. Dappo threw himself to one side, but Sunwhisper was already there, his foot coming down to stomp the elder cultivator’s head into the stone floor.

Rock dust plumed, and Dappo was still.

(Good, now deal with the girl.)

"Janna?"

(I don’t know their names, man. Just don’t let her tell people about us.)

"I don’t want to hurt her."

What was with this kid? Making friends with the natives, did he not understand his mission at all?

(Fine. Whatever. Just stop her.)

Sunwhisper ran, yellow light flashing at his every step as he ignored the bandits that were lost or cowering in alcoves along the way. He was his own light source, whereas Janna had none, and he found her tracing her path with one hand on the cave wall.

"Janna," he called, "stop."

She turned to face him, anger plain upon her face.

"You are not who you say you are!"

"That is accurate." They were paces apart, but Sunwhisper did not approach closer. Starscream was clinging to his chest like a fiendishly inspired breastplate.

"You are a demon! You deceived my family. Deceived me! You wanted to come here all along, so you could find the spider and be one with him. What are you, lovers?"

(This chick is pretty weird, just kill her.)

"I did deceive you,” Sunwhisper said, ignoring his passenger, “but it was necessary. You could not be trusted with the truth before, but I will try to trust you with it now, because that is preferable to killing you."

Janna considered this. She knew an ultimatum when she heard one.

"Very well, demon." She dropped onto her heels like a girl ready for her first meditation lessons. "Explain."

Starscream was running out of juice, he’d given it all to Sunwhisper. Now that he was attached, however, he was essentially an extension of the kid’s body. He could survive as an appendage, instead of constantly having to recharge the barely functioning excuse of a quintessence organ he’d made for himself. This wasn’t what he’d been expecting from the second exploration team, but it could work. He was so caught up in thinking about next moves that what the kid said next didn’t immediately register with him.

"Have you ever heard of the term ‘system apocalypse’?"