Alik tumbled forward on the crackling dirt for several meters until his movement was forcibly stopped by a large tree. He used his right arm to adjust himself into a sitting position with a soft groan.

His vision was blurry and unfocused. He could only see small orange flickers here and there, surrounded by darkness. His hearing was impaired and obstructed by a loud ringing. His nose worked mostly as usual, however.

Log to mission report. Smoke exposure. Using Oxy-Mask.

He tried reaching for his oxy-mask, but failed with a grunting grimace.

Add comminute fractures to the left arm's humerus, ulna, and radius to injury report. Respective hand mostly unresponsive. The nanites will take care of it. Short term operation might be inhibited.

Using his relatively intact right arm, Alik reached for the mask loosely wrapped around his neck and pulled the front up to his nose. From the still present scent coming through the filter he could tell that it wasn't performing as well as it should.

Status report. He thought, concerned at the lack of feedback to his previous mental statements.

Only silence.

His breathing picked up slightly. Something was wrong. Very wrong. And yet, his brain was in a fog. He couldn't quite tell what exactly was the problem, as his thoughts were jumbled and interrupted each other incoherently.

Add concussion to injury report.

His mental command was once again met with only silence.

Using his right hand as a support, he slowly pushed himself up. The tree scraping on his charred and half-torn back armor filling him with unease.

Status report.

He probed the tree he used as support with his working hand, feeling the burnt trunk and its irregularities.

Venusian trees aren't this rough. Where the hell am I?

His anxiety picked up as his vision slowly focused. He clasped his hand on the tough weave covering his chest as he started hyperventilating with a terrible realization.

Why aren't you answering me??

Not once in his life had he felt so alone. So exposed. His healing wasn't kicking off as fast as it should have. The nanites that flowed in his blood not helping him in the least in the process. The pain dampeners were also not functional, leaving only him and his training responsible for keeping him alert. An arduous task, considering the state of his arm.

But worst of all that, was the absence of the soothing presence of his oldest companion, guide, and leader.

His Cluster Instance.

He slid his back down into the warm ground, silently crying and wondering about his next steps.

What should I do now?

Minutes passed as he sat there, waiting for an answer, or maybe for the instance to return online. This was supposed to be impossible, after all.

If someone who was a part of the Imperial Cluster somehow disabled their personal instance, an extremely hard feat in and of itself, the cascading reaction would destroy the person's brain. A safety measure, to keep its near endless knowledge database from the enemies' hands.

Alik coughed. His throat was parched. The smoke in the intensifying fires around him reaching his lungs through the damaged mask he still wore. The answer and information he had waited for not reaching his mind.

I need to find a safe spot. I need provisions. I need water. And I need to know where I am and what has gotten me here.

In spite of the absence of his lifelong artificial leader and teacher, Alik's body and mind had been trained extensively for extreme scenarios.

Where knowledge failed and panic threatened to drown rationality, instinct would take over. Instinct as deliberately ingrained within him as every strand of his DNA. An engineered dissociative switch of sorts, taking over his actions whenever his distress reached a certain threshold.

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

He stood up. Steadier than before. His eyes focused around him. He was in what seemed to be a typical Earthen tropical forest at night, in spite of only moments ago being on a small outpost on Venus, near noon.

Looking around, he noticed a circle of burnt plants around five meters in radius, with its center being completely devoid of plant life and the ground glassed with heat. It still glowed ever so slightly with residual heat. Seeing it made Alik shiver, appreciatively resting his good hand on what was left of his chest piece.

Whatever process that had gotten him here hadn't been gentle.

The soft moonlight and the small fires around him lit his surroundings enough for his eyes to easily scan the area for threats, even though he could see clearly enough without either. Just like all other Shards, he wasn't constrained to a normal human's limitations when it came to his senses.

No threats. Where should I go?

His question, asked more out of habit than anything, was met with silence once more. Alik grimaced again. He felt more exposed by the silence within his mind than by his near-dismantled left arm.

Deprived of most of his knowledge, he let his body guide him. Pulling the mask away for a moment and smelling the air, he felt the wind coming from his right, carrying not only the smoke, but a slightly humid and sweet scent. The light chirping of unfamiliar birds also seemed more concentrated in that direction.

There might be a river that way. Well then... Alik sighed, eliciting another cough fit. After painfully clasping the left arm's sleeve into an insert to keep the arm more immobile, he slowly started walking.

Alik's left arm was shattered in several spots, and although he had an abnormally high pain tolerance, he was still somewhat human. He was losing focus as his adrenaline and endorphin levels decreased.

He leaned into another tree for a few moments to rest. His head had already mostly cleared up. The acute effects of the concussion already mostly dealt with. The thirst, however, was now worse than ever. His body had used his water reserves to improve his rate of recovery, but taking note his singed clothes, he concluded that this was not ideal. He had already lost too much of it.

The hairs on his neck were suddenly raised. The ones he still had left, that is. He instinctively reached for his hook dagger on the left side of his hip, only to find it missing. Instead, he then clasped his thigh armor with his palm and lightly twisted his hand, unlocking a single use short range sonic weapon from its surface and onto his palm.

Requesting permission to engage. He momentarily thought, before dismissing the habitual action with more than a tinge of anger at being reminded of his loss.

He controlled his breathing as a new dose of adrenaline cleared his mind further. The forest was silent. Entirely so. The birds he had heard before were silent as far as he could discern, which was quite a distance. He was alone. More so than ever. But now, he wasn't afraid.

His heartbeat slowed. He was injured, disoriented, mentally crippled, and lost. But fighting was what he had been made for. What he excelled at. He hadn't gotten all of his promotions before his fourteenth birthday by avoiding conflict, after all.

With all of his senses on overdrive, he stood still. A wide stance, with his one good hand ready to trigger the blast charge against whatever attacked him.

Seconds ticked by as nothing happened, but he kept his alert, fully trusting his instincts to tell him where to strike. His heart beat three more times when a sudden thought jolted him into action.

Eight o'clock.

Alik shifted his weight to his right leg with a strafe, spinning counterclockwise to face his assaulter with his fist pulled back. Were he to be attacked while rotating, his already unusable arm would take the brunt of the hit while his fist would already be coiled to deliver a punch and possibly a sonic blast, if needed.

Or at least that would be what he expected to happen, were his opponent anything he had ever faced.

A near invisible cloud rushed towards him faster than he could dodge, surrounding him. Alik coughed at the suddenly increased air pressure, inhaling a part of it and immediately feeling a wrongness spread through him from his lungs, into his heart, and then the rest of his bloodstream. A familiar sweet smell of decay was present in the area, stronger than earlier.

A biological weapon? No, it moves too deliberately and on its own. This aberration is sentient, somehow.

He tried running away to buy himself time to think of something, but regardless of how fast he ran, the dust-like sentient cloud followed him as if stuck to his skin. His breathing became more and more labored at every breath as he inhaled more of the strange being, and his skin itched and blistered at its touch.

The Meridians don't have this kind of tech, and even less so a foothold outside of their home planet. What the hell did I just stumble into?

The cloud started condensing further and further, making his sight more and more unreliable until his foot stumbled on a jutting root and he fell face first on the floor, with a branch lodged into his lower ribs.

Alik gurgled in pain but refused to leave his back turned to his foe for longer than needed. He turned his body upwards, coming face to face with a strange humanoid body that floated above him with its many arms outstretched and entangled into his body, etching deeper through his skin by the second.

The creature grew more concentrated by the second as it burrowed under his skin, becoming increasingly more tangible.

Deciding this was as best of a shot he was going to get, Alik stretched his open palm towards the center of mass of the creature and tapped his thumb on the mechanism, unleashing a loud burst of sound and pressure directly against the creature, dissipating it in its entirety and completely splintering a tree trunk that stood behind it.

If Alik were to be standing at his current state, the recoil would have been enough to toss him to the ground like a wet mop. Due to his prone position and injuries however, he only felt agonizing pain.

Before he could muster enough strength to drag himself out of the way, the remaining parts of the trunk cracked and the struck tree fell directly on top of him, leaving him with his still broken arm, poisoned, with a punctured lung, chemical burns on and under his skin, several broken ribs from the impact, once again concussed, and to both his luck and misfortune, unconscious.