Two shots flew from my gun. One struck the creature, but the bullet pinged off like before. Its flesh was obviously immune to such mundane weapons.
“Ae-!” I began to chant the magic word, but the creature reached my skull before I could finish casting the spell.
It latched onto my skull and began to search for an opening with its broken bones and torn muscles. I gripped it with both hands, allowing my gun to fall to the side, but I could do nothing to detach the entity or crush its tendrils. Despite its small size, it was far stronger than me.
Terror filled my mind as I saw a tendril approach my left eye. There was nothing I could do as it slowly moved closer to my eye and then began to burrow into it. An apocalyptic pain wracked my body as it reached the soft flesh of my eyeball and continued burrowing as if it wasn’t there.
I fell to the ground, screaming in pain like the deer a moment before. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the destroyed husk of the buck and knew that the same would happen to me within seconds.
Through it all, I experienced more than just pain. Once the creature was beyond my eye, my brain began to be assailed with images and barely-decipherable information. It was as if my mind was melding with the creature.
I could see the creature’s birth in the void between the furthest stars. It was borne of an entity that even it did not fully understand, an entity that could only be described as a god. The creature was tasked with hunting down and exterminating a group of lesser beings. The lesser beings had been fleeing from the elders for so long that even they were starting to become angry.
The creature was the fifth of its kind to be sent on the mission to attack and destroy a planet that I recognized as Earth. The elders had a name for the creature, and the closest approximation we have would be Epsilon, the fifth child.
Its mission was to take control of some entity on Earth and use the nascent System to kill those lesser beings. Epsilon was quite pleased that it had found a host with such a developed brain. All that extra gray matter would help it figure out the body’s locomotion even faster.
My remaining eye shifted slightly, and I saw my handgun lying just a few inches away from my head. There was only one thing to do. I couldn’t harm the entity, but I could harm its host.
Gripping my pistol with enough force that my knuckles turned white, I placed the barrel against the side of my head. I had promised myself a long time ago that I would never allow my brain to die while my body lived. It was far better to die fully intact than to live on as a shambling zombie.
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I screamed as I resolved myself to death. My finger curled around the trigger. I only had a few more seconds. I felt my brain begin to darken and my sense of self weaken. Three breaths, then I would die as a human.
Such a close-range shot would pop my skull like a grape. Nothing would be left for the creature to integrate. Good luck living with a new sunroof, fucker.
One breath, two breaths. I began to squeeze the trigger.
The pain stopped, and the darkness on the edge of my consciousness began to disappear. The fuzzy feeling that had begun to pervade all of my senses disappeared immediately, and I could feel the creature retreating.
“Give it back!” I shouted at Epsilon as I rose to my feet with my gun still pointed at my head. Epsilon was still linked with my brain, so I knew it could understand me. “Give it all back, or I swear I’ll do it!”
I pulled back the hammer of my pistol to punctuate my point. Epsilon retreated further, and I could feel as all of my faculties were returned. Another significant change was that the images of cosmic elders and the void between the stars stopped being projected into my mind.
“System. Has my brain suffered any noticeable damage?”
[BEYOND THE PRE-EXISTING DAMAGE, I CANNOT FIND ANYTHING PRESENTLY]
“Okay,” I said, letting out a sigh of relief. Somehow, Epsilon put everything back the way it was. Well, that wasn’t exactly the case. I still couldn’t see out of my left eye.
“Now, return sight to my left eye.” Though I tried to speak this demand with equivalent vitriol, the anger had left my voice.
Sight did not return to my eye. “Do it!”
Nothing changed. I sighed and removed the gun from my head. Epsilon had seen into my mind. It knew that I cared far more about my mental capacity than the sight of one eye. The loss of depth perception wasn’t worth dying over.
In an instant, the pain and terror of the situation caught up to me. I fell onto my hands and knees and vomited violently upon the ground. Almost being infected by a Star Spawn was not a pleasant experience.
With my hand pointedly still gripping my gun, I sat against a nearby tree and took my phone out of my pocket. The area around my left eye was the same pure black color as the deer’s head, like I had suffered the world’s worst black eye. Something approximating an eyeball sat within my eye socket, but it was just a black orb.
I scanned the images that I witnessed when my mind connected with Epsilon. It took a few seconds, but I was able to parse the basics of how the creature’s biology worked. The octopus I had seen wasn’t Epsilon’s true body; it was just another host. The octopus was meant to decay in a few minutes while the Star Spawn looked for a new host. Epsilon’s true form was a parasite about the size of a thumbnail.
A terrible question formed in my brain. Where had the octopus gone? There was no way it was still in my head. I would have felt it if that sinewy mush of shattered bone were still in my brain. Surely.
I looked around and saw the inert form of the octopus lying on the ground. Good, Epsilon must have ejected that host body out through my eye socket when it realized that it wouldn’t have enough space in my head.
[NEW CLASS ACQUIRED: ELDRITCH ALCHEMIST]
[NEW SKILL ACQUIRED: BYPASS LIMITATION]