Inside the Slagbeast's mind, Bea floated in silence. The terrain no longer shifted with each of her movements, no longer mimicked her emotions. It had learned to keep still. To lie in wait. And yet, she could feel the tremors beneath the stillness. It was adapting.
And worse—it was doing it by copying her.
She spotted it tucked away in a fleshy mental fold—a malformed structure clinging to the inside of the creature's mind like a tumor. Her first thought was disgust. Her second was disbelief.
It looked like her.
Not physically. No, the malformed lump of flesh looked nothing like her elegant amoeboid form. But spiritually. Architecturally. She could sense that the jagged core of the mimic structure was laced with branching trails that mirrored her own mental framework. Fuzzy, misaligned copies of her memory relay paths. Primitive command-routing nodes trying to delegate tasks. It attempted to simulate how her splits operated independently.
