The Wyrms of &alon

It was definitely an ungainly return. Now that I was enfleshed again, I found my body was reporting all sorts of strange (though not necessarily unpleasant) sensations running through it. Almost immediately, I understood how much things had progressed in the real world since I'd last been in corporeal form.

Triune preserve us…

The battle! Adam, Vernon, Ichigo, Yuta.

Pel and the kids…

I figured I might as well face the music now, rather than put it off later. I was really getting tired of all these last-minute surprises.

But—speak of the Norm—wouldn't you know it, as soon as I tried to open my eyes, I discovered that I no longer had any eyes to speak of. As I now used my eyes to hear, I couldn't hear, either.

For a moment, I focused on my body, feeling out where it was and where it wasn't.

I was down one arm. The one still left wasn't in the best shape. It was short and stubby and severely lacking anything in both the hands and fingers department. Meanwhile, my head and upper body were working overtime. They felt three times their usual size, with the former feeling more like a lopsided anvil at the end of my neck as opposed to anything that resembled a head. I also seemed to be quite bloated, as if I'd swallowed a bus and gotten it lodged somewhere in my midsection.

Then it hit me. Angel's breath, I think my body was assimilating the fungus growing within the infected Vyx ship!

Did this mean I was going to be half spaceship now?

I would have laughed if I could. Maybe cried, too.

Not knowing what else to do, I decided to fight against my situation in the only way I could: flailing around helplessly. There was a great deal of resistance at first, as if I was encased in metal or concrete, but bit by bit I got more wiggle room as pieces broke away.

No. What was I doing?

For the first time in forever, I didn't feel the least bit hungry. Not only that, I felt powerful, more so than ever before. Considering the stakes I was up against, I'd be a fool to pass up those two boons. Still, I was troubled by the thought of how big I might get. It might make things awkward, not to mention make me an easier target for the Vyx(it).

As fate would have it, however, any worries I had about excessive growth came to an abrupt end as the battered front half of the ship broke off from the rest of the ship's, forcibly separating my body from its food source in the process—not that I was complaining. My imagination ran wild trying to picture what it must have looked like as the half-wyrm half-starfighter creature I'd become schlubbily slithered away from the rear half of the ship, dragging myself along the ground by my claws.

Given the friction I felt against my fingertips through my claws, I figured I was on a stretch of pavement. Seconds later, my guess was confirmed when all six of my eyes reformed on the outside of what had once been the front part of the starfighter's hull. I shook myself out slightly to help my brand new biomass distribute itself across my body. For a moment, my vision was filmy, but the disruption quickly cleared. Then everything went back to normal—my new normal, I mean.

Gosh, I was big. Like, use-the-roof-of-a-single-floor-building-as-an-armrest big (guilty as charged), though my surprise immediately took a backseat to my shock at seeing what had become of Fort Marteneiss.

"Holy Angel…" I muttered.

Violence had tilled the land. Entirely new gullies and hillocks littered the Fort Marteneiss's grounds where the devastation had rearranged the earth. Most of the Fort's buildings had been reduced to smoldering campfires. A few lonely flag posts remained, ragged and burnt. The post bearing the Trenton blue and green was bent at an oblique angle, as if it was waiting to wave a winner across the finish line.

But the winner would never make it.

Wyrms were going through the wreckage, sifting through broken machinery, both earthly and not. Curiously, the fungus was rapidly decomposing the Vyx tech, though, I suppose that made sense. If their ships were "alive", it wouldn't be a stretch to assume that the same was true of the walker mechs and other Vyx tech.

I sat in the middle of the main runway, at the edge of a gnarly trough gouged into the pavement by the Vyx starfighter that I was currently digesting. Turning to the left, toward the coast, the sinking Sun gleamed emerald green as it passed behind spore clouds settling at the horizon. Further up, there was a bright flash as a decent-sized Vyx ship exploded like a crack of thunder.

In the back of my mind, I could feel Dzrtk taking in the sights, awed by it all, in spite of himself.

"Genneth, you've returned!" Yuta said.

Looking down, I looked down and saw Lord Uramaru and the other spirits I'd left behind standing beside me on the undamaged sections of the main runway, looking for all the world like plus-sized action figures.

Thankfully, my body had kept up the wyrmsong that enabled my spirits to interact with the other wyrms throughout my changes. The news of my return must have spread through that network like wildfire, because the next thing I knew, a whole cadre of wyrms was slithering toward me. Since many of them were injured, I was more than happy to acquiesce and let them have the rest of the spaceship.

Then came the inevitable questions, from both sides.

"What happened?"

"What was it like?"

"Were you successful?"

They answered my questions first, seeing as their situation was simpler to explain than mine.

"You could say we won the battle," Brigadier General Watterson said, "though we might have lost the war."

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That wasn't the best news, though I should have expected as much. I already knew Team Wyrm's quest for survival, vindication, and freedom was going to be an uphill battle, to say the least.

The Brigadier General looked over the smoldering ruins. "The battle was too close for comfort," she said. "I don't think we'll be able to fend the Vyxit off if and when they strike again. Too many of our personnel are currently recovering from their wounds." She turned back to face me. "Dr. Howle, have you had the displeasure of having to regrow your body?"

I shook my head. "Fortunately, no."

"It's a painstaking process," she answered, "unless you can find one of those big-ass fungus behemoths to chow down on."

"Can't you go find some?" I asked.

She shook her head. "They're too big and conspicuous to carry, and splitting them up takes too long and risks exposing us to the enemy, especially while the Sun's still up." She glanced at the sunset on the horizon. "We'll start sending out foraging parties once night falls."

I looked up at the Vyx motherships high in the atmosphere. "I don't know if we even have that kind of time."

Slick crossed his arms. "Why do I get the feeling that you're about to tell us something really ungroovy?"

I shrugged. "Eh, your mileage will vary."

Lt. Dueright slithered close. "Unfortunately, that's not the only trouble afoot."

"You don't say?" I said.

The lieutenant turned toward Elpeck, not that the city itself was visible at this distance. "We're pretty sure a whole bunch of nukes went off in Elpeck earlier this afternoon."

I blinked. "Wut?"

"That's just your theory, lieutenant," Watterson said.

I slithered forward. "Stop bickering and tell me what's going on."

"I happen to have a nuclear engineer on board, so to speak," Dueright said. "He informs me that even though we're too far away to have been able to see the explosion in visible light, the ionizing radiation was visible through our third pair of eyes. Nukes are the only possible explanation for that much radiation."

I turned to the Brigadier General. "If it's an expert opinion, why would you second-guess it?" I asked.

Amity shook her head. "I don't deny that something happened over there. All I'm saying is, with how little we know about the Vyxit and their weapons capabilities, it's possible that they caused it using some kind of weapons we don't understand."

I couldn't believe that I was actually hoping it had been nukes, rather than some Vyxit weaponry.

"Has anything else happened?" I asked. "Any news from the city?"

"No clue," Slick said.

I sighed out spores.

"Now, Dr. Howle," Brigadier General Watterson said, "you were saying something about a time limit?"

"Unfortunately, yes," I said.

Then I told them what had happened to me while I'd been away. To save time, I sang the information to them directly. I wished I could have given better, more confident answers to their questions.

"In short," I said, after finishing my summary, "the good news is we have the Key to what might be our best shot at stopping the Lodestars from being fired and killing everyone. The bad news is, the K'rrt—who, remember, we thought we were going to be rescuing—were actually the ones in control of the Dominion, and, by all accounts, they were and still are monstrously evil. So… yeah," I hung my head low, "all I have to go on are hopeful legends and legendary hopes."

"That's not nothing," Lt. Dueright said.

"It's pretty much what I had last time, when I still thought &alon was fighting against the fungus. Look how that turned out!"

What can I say? I had serious doubts about our prospects.

"You found a Key to use to get to the Tower where you can stop the Lodestars from being deployed," Watterson said. "That sounds like good news to me!"

I nodded. "Yes, and that's exactly why we don't have any time to lose—assuming the Key and the Tower work as advertised. If the Lodestars are used and the planet is destroyed, the Darkness will feast on Kléothag's powers." I shook my head and shuddered, flopping my tail to the side and flexing my back spines. "I don't want to even imagine the kind of horrors that will unleash. Honestly, how I feel about this doesn't matter. I'm just venting my frustrations right now. We need to get moving." I looked over the wyrm brigade. "Just gimme a minute to check up on my wife and kids, and then we'll head off to find another ship for me to hack into the Vyx Network ASAP. Angel… even now, I'm worried it might already be too late."

But the wyrms just stared at me. It made me feel more than a little apprehensive.

"What is it?" I asked.

Watterson slithered up to me and let her hand come to rest on my forearm. "Genneth… we're in no position to go anywhere right now, let alone fight." She looked up at the sky. "And look, the battle is only getting more intense."

All my spines drooped. "How bad is it?"

"Bad," Slick said. "I mean, not as bad as the end of the world, but still bad."

"Fudge…" I whispered.

"Dr. Howle," Lt. Dueright said, "we've lost too many of our weapons." He gestured at his aerostat vest and Slick's laser buckler.

Their gear was wrecked, and I hadn't even noticed!

I shook my head again. "No, but… how…" I nearly started hyperventilating. "How am I supposed to do this all on my own?" I looked down at my spirits. "Sure, I have my spirits, but the powers they use are just extensions of mine. I can only spread myself so thin!"

"Can't you find other allies?" Dueright asked.

"That will take hours, and—let me remind you—we don't have hours!"

"Can't you repeat what you did here?" Watterson asked.

"Not on my own! They'll cut me to ribbons before I'm even in reach of one of their starfighters! And I don't know if I'll be able to find a downed ship that's infected enough for me to tap into the Network but not so infected that its connection has already been severed."

If my experiences in the D'zd Archive had taught me anything, it was that there was no way I was going to be able to stop the Lodestars on my own. I need others' help. Against threats this big, with stakes this high, teamwork was mandatory.

My anger spiked.

I swore, thrashing my tail at a wrecked aerostat. "Dammit!" The impact sent the aircraft crashing through one of the main building's burnt out, moribund walls.

"If only I was stronger…" I said.

"You're not the only one who feels that way," the Brigadier General replied.

Sensing Suisei wanted to speak, I crooned out the lines of wyrmsong needed for Watterson to hear his words, too.

He stepped into being beside me. "Genneth, have you considered asking &alon for help?"

"No," I said, answering bluntly, "and even if I did, it wouldn't make a difference." I looked up at the battles in the sky. "She's already got her hands full."

"I think it's worth a shot," Watterson said.

"You should listen to them, Genneth," Mr. Himichi said.

Not you, too.

Sighing out spores, I crossed my arms and admitted defeat—though begrudgingly. "Fine."

Closing my eyes, I dialed up the imaginary phone number of everyone's (least) favorite fungus princess. The whole thing was a perfunctory effort. Not bothering to put my request into words, I sang it to her directly, communicating the entirety of the thought in just a couple of seconds. Honestly, considering how much I hated doing this, the effortless efficiency of this form of communication almost made it bearable.

Almost.

&alon's response was everything I could have hoped for, by which I meant it was horrible, just like everything else in my life.

She popped into being in front of me, within arm's reach, cross and fiery.

"Why should I help you!?" she cried. "You're mean to me! You hate me! You want the aliens to make me go away! I can't trust you, Mr. Genneth! I can't!"

"Guilty as charged," I muttered.

"I dunno what that means, but I don't like it!" &alon said. "I hate you!"

Then she disappeared.

I closed myself off to her and shook my head in disgust.

"Well?" Watterson asked.

"Both of us hate each other. &alon isn't going to do anything to help us, even if it's in her own self-interest to do so."

"Fuck," Slick said.

"Yeah…" I nodded. "Okay, so… I'm going to go see if I need to cannibalize my family and then… well, I'll have to do something, I guess."

Then I slithered off to see more of what fate had wrought.