Chapter 18: Chains of the Mind's Embrace
I stirred from a restless slumber sometime later, the familiar weight of Kimchi's bio-mass embrace conspicuously absent—a fact that rattled me more than I cared to admit. Nearly six years had passed since I'd woken without her clinging like some living blanket, and the sudden void felt as unsettling as stepping into a starless void. My gaze flicked across the chamber; there she stood, resolute, a sentinel forged from flesh and will, stationed directly between my levitating blade and my own restless form. Her eyes, sharp as obsidian shards, scanned the surroundings with the fierce vigilance of a warrior queen guarding her throne.
And why the fuck wouldn't she be on high alert? This wasn't just any rival—it was a queen of a separate hive, a creature that had endured the cosmic cruelty of being shredded into biomass, then forged into a weapon. Not just surviving, but thriving, against every psionic and physical hellfire thrown her way for seventy-five millennia. I'd heard it said that bugs could endure nuclear fallout, but this—this was a goddamn psionic apocalypse survivor on a scale beyond mortal comprehension.
I turned my gaze to Crystal, her gleaming faceplate reflecting the ambient glow as she prepared to unravel the tangled skein of questions swirling in my mind. "So... what's the goddamn plan? Is my sword—this fucking living relic—going to get blasted to smithereens? And seriously, how in the shimmering depths of the Mindspace did that queen survive such a brutal reincarnation?"
Crystal's voice slid through the mental static like a sharpened blade. "Excellent queries, my Irvine. From the fragmented echoes of my ancient memories clashing with hers, it appears her psionic essence wielded a power beyond even my old cunning—a power allowing her consciousness to imprint fully onto another's biomass. That form fought at the front lines, a ravenous parasite of sorts. Whenever my forces devoured her bio-matter, the biomass was rendered inert, useless husks. Only after annihilating every fragment of her scattered hive was I able to silence her."
She paused, a ripple of somber awe threading her tone. "I never acquired her unique psionic signature after consuming her—now I see why. Her mind is no longer tethered to flesh but embedded, atom by atom, in every fiber of that biomass. A Mindspace ghost haunting the shell of her old self. Immortality, twisted and fractured, but immortality nonetheless."
I blinked, the weight of the revelation sinking deep. Psionic power wasn't a monolith—it was a labyrinth of strange magics and monstrous resilience. This queen's essence was less a spirit and more a fractured titan, surviving in the quantum architecture of matter itself.
Crystal turned her attention to the sword, her voice dipping with a mix of warmth and warning. "As for the sword's destruction—during its forging, the chaotic storm of psionic energies intertwined with our love for you, inadvertently embedding it in its core. It recognizes no threat from you, Irvine. Thus, for now, it lives." She shot the blade a glance sharp enough to cut through steel. "For now."
Kimchi's stance relaxed slightly when I approached, her tense shoulders easing under the stroke of my hand. "At ease, my fierce one. Crystal has decreed my obsession with you is no different from hers," I murmured, smirking as Kimchi lowered her sword.
Floating there, the blade hummed with a deep blue fuller, thrumming with the pulse of a trapped consciousness. "So," I mused aloud, "there's a living, breathing entity—well, sort of—inside my sword? That's either the coolest or the most fucked-up thing I've dealt with."
Crystal chuckled, a sound like a thousand tiny bells ringing in unison. "While she retains a fragment of her former self, seventy-five thousand years of biomass existence have eroded her cognitive functions to primal instinct and raw emotion. No complex thoughts. No conversation. Only an unwavering drive to guard you."