Foundation of All

Sean woke up to wind whipping at him as a blur of green leaves whipped above him. Several somethings were pinching his arms and legs as he moved. He struggled a bit and one of the pinches suddenly grew tight and Sean could only scream as his left arm was cleanly severed just above the elbow by the jaws of what he could see were the beatles carrying him. He thrashed wildly in pain screaming and to his surprise the creature that had bit him hissed and drew back, its carapace bubbling like it had been dipped in acid where Sean pointed his stump. In a desperate bid to get the others to release him, Sean quickly pointed the stump of his arm around him and wherever it pointed material bubbled away as a result.

Sean was unceremoniously dropped to the ground at full speed and rapidly rolled until he slammed directly into a tree faster than most vehicles. He felt bone and flesh crunch and blacked out for a moment.

When he came to, Sean was laying on top of a pile of woodchips. He quickly scrambled to his feet in his tattered clothes and glanced around frantically to see himself surrounded by the beetles on all sides, breathing heavily as he began to panic as he saw that he was surrounded. They kept their distance and clicked their jaws and Sean stared at his left arm and blinked. His hand… his arm, it was there completely unharmed. Everything had gone so fast, maybe he had just imagined it in his panic? Sean looked around, but saw the pitted and damaged shells of some of the creatures around him.

He glanced back to his arm with the missing sleeve. What in the world was happening? He had died at least three times now and yet here he was in the middle of the forest…

One of the beetles darted forward out of the crowd and Sean tried to dodge but it managed to grab his leg, making sure to not injure him. He could feel its firm but gentle grip as he pounded fruitlessly on its head with his fists. It felt like his father’s hand gently pulling him away when he was a child and being stubborn…

With one of his limbs pinned, the other beetles rushed in and grabbed him as well and started dragging him away again. Sean thrashed until one of them reflexively injured him and then he would wave his stump over them to injure them and force them to let him go and back off. This repeated several times and to Sean’s rising panic.

As he kept going he also noted that he wasn’t feeling anything more than slightly exhausted as he continually thrashed and fought for hours against the growing swarm of beetles. But he felt helpless as he did so, no matter what he did, what he tried they always ended up capturing him again. The sun began to lower in the sky and the forest grew darker and darker. The farther they carried him the more and more that seemed to gather despite him managing to kill several as he fought.

Sean finished fighting them back and they all backed off and watched him as his severed arm began to regenerate from nothing. It was happening faster and faster as time passed, and Sean watched dejectedly as the bones of his forearm and hands appeared out of thin air one white grain of bone at a time, his eyes darting to the swarm around him.

It was odd, Sean mused as his head snapped to the side as one of the beetles shifted forward slightly during this strange time of peace between his battle with the beetle swarm. This only time he had a break from the constant battle. He almost wished his arm would heal slower to give him more time. An odd wish and not something he would ever imagine thinking yesterday. But a thought he kept coming back to nonetheless.

He raised his arm and moved his detached bone hands with no muscle or tendons in place. A few seconds later the muscles and tendons sprouted from nothing and then covered the bones. Then the muscles, then the skin… and then he was fully healed.

Sean’s breathing hitched as one of the beetles charged him again after a few more moments of waiting. Time to go another round despite his mental if not physical exhaustion.

It had been five days and Sean had been able to accomplish nothing to escape the swarm. Clearly they were trying to bring him somewhere, but Sean was completely lost in the wilds and had no idea where he should go for safety. There had been the engines of several ships flying overhead in the last day, but none of Sean’s shouting or the swarm of beetles seem to have been noticed by any of them.

Sean’s arm was bitten off again and he started flailing it around. Something odd had happened after the first day. There was a moment where the beetles had swarmed in on him that it all seemed like too much. He had just curled into a ball and started shaking as they rushed inwards, barely even hearing them. The world started fading away around him, his mind caught in an endless loop of panic and stress. But then the next moment it had all just washed away and he was calm again. For the next hour he was perfectly emotionless as he mechanically fought the beetles around him by using the dissolving power when his limbs were severed.

This state of nothingness ended after some time, and Sean returned to baseline. Scared, but not in an irrational state of panic like before. Over the course of the next day it built up again as his panic increased more and more. Faster and faster, before he reached the breaking point and returned to sweet nothingness again.

It now took eight or less hours before the cycle completed as Sean reached the fifth day. He had returned to emotionlessness less than ten minutes ago and fought as efficiently as he could. He wondered what happened when the cycle of panic was shorter than his protected emotionless hour. Would he be stuck like this forever? He didn’t care right now, but he knew he would when his emotions returned.

Sean absentmindedly kept fighting the nearby beetles. The power was eating away at the creatures much faster now, but as a trade off he now had much less time before he fully regenerated again. The effect was strange, Sean mused as he plunged his stump directly onto the head of the closest beetle to kill it. At first he had thought it was like acid, but it wasn’t like that exactly. He still had a phantom sensation of his arm and as his arm regenerated pieces of the beetle disappeared into nothing as if little chunks had been scooped out of it. Something that Sean had discovered killed it rather quickly when Sean’s phantom arm was through its brain.

Sean kept fighting through the woods, unsure what else he could do. He definitely didn’t want to go wherever the swarm wanted him to go, but he could only fight them off for a little while before his wounds healed again and he was vulnerable to them once more. He only had forty more minutes before his panic began building again and he started descending into irrational panic.

It was now the eighth day and Sean was unsure why the beetles would be taking him so far. Wouldn’t their nest be near town for them to attack? Why were they so focused on him? He could understand them learning to try not to injure him after getting a hurt a few times, but they moved with purpose that was unusual from most of the hostile beasts on this planet.

But there was finally hope of escape. The sounds of ships engines had sounded above him for days, but all had passed by without stopping. Except one that had descended past the treeline in the distance an hour ago. Ever since Sean had been furiously fighting towards it, making sure to only injure beetles in that direction so the whole swarm gradually shifted towards the spot.

He didn’t have many landmarks, but there were two distinctive hills in the distance that he was heading towards in that general direction. He just hoped whoever was on that ship was friendly and could handle the beetles gathered around him.

Sean after killing a few of the insects and clearing space again quickly climbed a nearby tree to regain his bearings. He had started doing this four days ago to delay them picking him up again, but it was only coming into use now that he had an actual destination to fight towards.

He had to climb the tree now so he could focus and plot his route while he remained emotionless. His cycle panic was down to less than two hours now. One hour calm, and two where he rapidly spiraled as the seemingly never ending swarm pressed in on him from all sides.

But he had to focus on his task. His emotional self worried about the consequences of the rapidly accelerating panic cycle more than was productive, there was no use thinking on it further. Sean had to focus on his task and getting to the ship first. He was sure he was getting close.

Unfortunately the insects had no qualms in using their jaws to saw through the base of the tree to knock it down. But with big leaps as the tree toppled, Sean was sometimes able to grab onto the next tree nearby and delay the time before he had to directly fight the swarm again. The tree groaned and began to fall and Sean jumped and pushed off at the last moment to grab a nearby branch on a neighboring tree. His hands slipped as he twisted under the momentum and he plummeted to the ground head first.

Shit… he thought before his head hit a rock full force and everything went black again.

He woke up with his head and upper torso surrounded in stone and his legs sticking up in the air. He felt odd, more collected than he had in days. Yet he still felt normal emotions, including panic. But it was no longer like a surging wave pulsing up within him.

Instead it was a steady tongue of flame waiting for fuel to burn. For him to start panicking again. Sean felt the jaws of the insects tugging and pulling on him trying to pull him out of the stone but he was stuck tight, wedged deeply in a crevice in the stone. He could barely even open his mouth in the tiny space encasing his head on all sides in stone, but near his hips he could shift himself a tiny bit.

His chest burned a little bit and Sean realized that he hadn’t breathed for almost two minutes without even thinking about it. He waited for the burn to become excruciating and his vision to grow dim, but nothing happened. He just remained with the light burning in his chest as the insects kept trying to extract him from the rock. He nearly laughed as they continued to fail in their task.

Was this the solution the whole time, to just root himself headfirst in a stone? It was soothing to him, hearing the swarm chipping away at the rock. The vibrations shook his body like some sort of deep massage he had heard about villagers who went to the capital talk about. Only the firm tugs and wiggles on his legs exposed to the air made it feel any different. Every second he was stuck in here was another second he wasn’t being dragged away by them. That was good, and helped him keep his panic down for now.

But the swarm was persistent and for an indeterminate amount of time kept trying to extract him to minor success. Eventually he heard them scraping away at the stone in an apparent attempt to mine him out, but it was very slow progress. They had excavated him up to his chest before suddenly there was a series of electric crackles and screeches and they stopped.

Sean heard a muffled female voice above him, but couldn’t make out what she was saying. There was a long pause before she said something else, a little annoyance entering her tone. Sean felt a pinch as something nicked one of his legs before the voice demanded something again, sounding exasperated. Sean wriggled a bit, but he was wedged in the stone tightly and unable to move too much.

There was silence from above as Sean kept trying to find a way to escape but nothing he could think of worked. He kept moving until suddenly in a blast of blazing pain he felt a sharp blade pass through his ribs and hit his spine, and then suddenly it was like he had teleported onto the trampled grass outside, blinking at the light of the sun above him. Sean just sat there and let out a long breath as he lay there in the tattered remainders of his pants.

“You alright there, pal?” a woman’s voice said and a shadow fell over his face. Sean turned his head towards her and blinked as he sat up and took notice of his bloodstained and nearly naked state. He looked back up at her. Her black hair contrasted with her blue eyes and freckles on pale skin.

She was wearing a gray and metallic tight fitting suit under what appeared to be some sort of assorted black body armor with menacing black metal plates over her chest, shoulders, and down to her thighs. She had an oversized pistol strapped at her hip, that's what she must have used to kill the beetles around him. He knew from experience that they dragged their dead away whenever they could, so the swarm had probably escaped with the corpses after the woman chased them off.

“Ah, you don’t suppose you’d have any clothes I could borrow?” He asked hesitantly, “Thanks for saving me there. Who- Who are you?”

She rolled her eyes and took a metallic bracelet off of her arm and threw it to Sean, which he caught. He inspected it for a moment before shrugging and put it on. The woman stared at him with an eyebrow raised as he fumbled with it before eventually finding a button on one side. As soon as he pressed it a metallic gray mesh like the one under the woman’s armor spread over Sean’s body, leaving only his hand and feet exposed as well as everything above the neck. He stared at it in wonder. This thing must cost a fortune to be deployed from a little wristband like that!

It was… rather tight. Not physically uncomfortable, but it did leave him feeling a little exposed still as the woman stared him down.

“Seriously?” The woman interrupted his thoughts, “It’s like you’ve never seen a clothing wristband before, they’ve been around for millions of years already. They’re practically everywhere in cities these days. Now, you’ve got your clothes. Care to explain what you’re doing all the way out here on the outer rim? You’re lucky I found you out here before one of those stuck up enforcers noticed all the commotion in this sector because of you.”

“The rim?” Sean asked in confusion, “I’ve never heard it called that before, our star proximity density isn’t nearly small enough to be considered the edge of the Human galaxy…”

“Milky way galaxy…” the woman said in annoyance, eye twitching as she heard Sean’s use the common name for it.

“Err… sure,” he replied unsure why she was being so hostile after saving him, “I mean, I was born here. Haven’t ever been anywhere else.”

“Hah, a likely story,” she said skeptically, “Do you even have a permit from the Immortal council to be out here? You should know the treaties… You’re at least twenty or thirty right? They’ve been around since far before you were born.”

“What? Yeah, I’m twenty five. Immortals, like in the stories? What are you talking about? I’ve never heard of this council before.”

She gave him a flat look, “Immortals? The group you and I belong to? C’mon, don’t make this any harder than it has to be. I cut you in half to get you wedged out of that rock, you’re not fooling anyone by playing dumb. Just pay the fine, give an explanation for what you were doing out here, and you’ll be fine I promise. They’re surprisingly reasonable as far as governments go. As long as you’re not on one of their shit lists already.”

Sean stared at his hands in horror, “I… I’m immortal? Does… does that mean I’m a Plaguebringer too? But…”

“Plaguebringer? What do you…” she paused and a look of realization washed over her face. Suddenly she looked incredibly guilty and swallowed before speaking again, “Say, um. When I asked you your age… Was that in years or millennia? Centuries maybe?”

“Years?” Sean asked in confusion, “Who asks each other their age in centuries or millennia? That’s absurd.”

Her face crumpled and she looked mortified as she stared at him, “Oh,” she said before flushing slightly.

“I’m… uh, God I can’t believe I was acting like that to someone new. Uhm, Err. No, you’re not a Plaguebringer. I’m sorry… I was just acting like a total bitch, I didn’t realize your situation. I… Fuck! I’ll… I’ll be back with my speeder in a few minutes. I’ll explain then.”

She turned around and stormed off completely flushed as Sean stared after her in confusion. What was going on? First she interrogates him like he’s a criminal and then gets flustered and storms off without explaining anything? But at least she had saved him from the swarm and given him some clothes…

Emily angrily punched in the code to unlock and start up her speeder hoverbike that she had left in the woods after chasing off that swarm of flesh beetles. God, she was such an idiot! How could she ruin her first impression on a new immortal like that! She growled at herself as she mounted the bike, angry at herself for assuming he was some sort of refugee or criminal. It was just… What were the chances of her meeting someone brand new? Her?

She was almost glad that her girlfriend Asuta wasn’t here with her. At least she hadn’t punched him in the face after meeting the new Immortal to ‘test his strength’ or something equally stupid without even asking any questions first. Yes, best that she wasn’t here. She always got Emily in trouble when they were meeting new people…

She had only dropped by to investigate on a whim, and now she had ruined her first impression on him. At least she had saved him from the flesh beetle swarm, that must have been an unpleasant few decades of an introduction to his immortality. She twisted the speeder around and started carefully navigating between the trees trying to compose herself as she went back to the… still unnamed new immortal. Hopefully she could still salvage things with him… He would need her help if he wanted to stay safe while he got used to his new reality.