Back in the present, a man without much hair was sitting in one of the offices located deep under the Silver Republic’s capital city.

  In a darkened room within the bunker complex, he was busy shuffling through papers at his desk with a blank look while a cigarette he had taken only a few drags from then forgot about sat idly burning in an ashtray.

  After a few minutes of mindless teeter and bureaucratic ramblings, mostly redundant updates on the same stale situation, he came across a large printout that looked more like a work of abstract art than it did an official state document.

  The man spoke with a low voice to the attendant in the corner of the room, who quickly stepped forward.

  “What is this, someone put their child’s drawing on my desk?”

  “Ah? Ah-no, Mr. Secretary, those would be the latest captures from the Argentum satellites.”

  “The satellites? They’re up?”

  He gave a look over the pictures once again, thumbing through the whole stack. Unfortunately, there was not much of a story told by the pile of low resolution images. Where a blur of dark shadows and grey pixels had been printed on one image, in the next there was a blur of dark green, then red, and so on.

  Eventually it was clear a gap had emerged between the times the satellite pictures had been taken, and in the next stack he could make out a somewhat describable image of a gathering of tents and equipment from a zoomed out perspective.

  “Is this really the whole stack?”

  The secretary gave a look of dissatisfaction to his aide, who blanched while searching for the right words.

  “Ah…well, it seems that the event that caused our satellites to blackout also resulted in the shifting in several of their alignments. As of now, two of the Argentum-models are following near identical orbits, causing there to be a significant blind spot in the period we have imagery over the Jejune. Argentum-3 is expected to gain a visual on the site in just over three hours, though we’ll need to work with the Diplomatic Corps to readjust Argentum-1 and 2’s orbits.”

  The younger official quickly rattled off something from a tablet, to which the secretary responded by extending a hand for it to be passed over. Reading over the same report again, he sighed.

  “And we still have no idea what the source of the disturbance was?”

  “That’s correct, Mr. Secretary.”

  The older department head scratched through his dark goatee.

  “Well then, we’ll need to gain visual on the site through other means. Radio contact has been cut off since 0200, correct?”

  The other man nodded.

  “Then we can’t rule out the possibility that there has been some outside interference. We need to establish more analog methods of observation.”

  “But with the Dreadmoore in between…”

  The secretary held up a hand, silencing his attendant from speaking further.

  “Of course, I hadn’t forgotten that. It will be impossible to send the observers over land with that swamp blocking them in between here and the Jejune, though the boys at CAHD could certainly accomplish it, I hesitate to call on their department…”

  “I fear the Chancellor will be hesitant to sign off on their use for something like this, Mr. Secretary.”

  The Secretary paused before nodding, motioning to a diagram affixed to the far wall as he continued.

  “Regardless, we have an alternative in our arsenal.”

  “You don’t mean?”

  “It’s a valuable thing, a biological asset with this potential. From what we’ve heard, it could be worth the diversion from our current operations to secure it. Write to the Chancellor, tell him…”

  The secretary looked up and raised his eyebrows at the attendant.

  “Are you writing this down?”

  “Oh, of course!”

  “Alright, write to the Chancellor requesting for the deployment of a division from the airship fleet. Make sure to impress upon him in your letter just how vital such a specimen could be in our efforts to quell the mutant population. Make it abundantly clear that this will also be a huge boost to his prospects of reelection.”

  The Secretary knew that the Chancellor of the Republic was a materially-driven man if nothing else. He saw the value in things he could see and feel, so attempting to make the argument for the specimen potentially changing their understanding of biology or whatnot wouldn’t have much appeal.

  “Have you got all that down?”

  “Ah…yes!”

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  “Good.”

  The secretary sat back into his seat, thumbing back through the photos.

  All in all, they were a pile of shit from his standpoint, but at least they showed the perimeter the battalion had been able to establish was secure. It was hard to make out much with the low resolution, but the hexagonal mounds of mortar emplacements were hard to miss at the edges of the camp.

  It was just too bad they hadn’t been able to get any images of the specimen before the seismic detectors went off. For some reason the satellites had gone out shortly before that, though with the standard of maintenance in the Republic, the Secretary could hardly chalk it all up to a conspiracy.

  Still, the eyes of the Department of Defense had been blind for the last four hours from a high-altitude perspective until these pictures had arrived on his desk, and it sounded like they would be blind again for another three.

  Hopefully after that, they’d have more indication on the state of the camp’s security, and a better indication on their next planned movements. In the meantime it was a priority to reestablish radio communication with the camp, and get the Chancellor’s signature on the deployment order…

  The secretary huffed. In truth, he didn’t know much about the potential gains they could make with the specimen in their hands, but he knew for certain he didn’t want another country to get to it first during this critical period. While they still had the threat of the Principality at their backs, they couldn’t afford to let any advantage slip.

  “Also, notify the boys in the bay that the research team will be following suit on the airships when they get sent over. Tell them to nix the choppers for future missions. They’ll arrive later, but it’ll give them a far more solid foothold in the desert.”

  “Should I contact the encampment about the change?”

  The attendant was writing all of this down.

  “I would say so if that were possible, but with nothing from their radios, the situation has become blurred..”

  The attendant nodded.

  ”I also want to see the researchers swapped out with a more dispensable unit. No need to send the best right away. We don’t know the situation in the Jejune is yet. Better to avoid the risk.”

  “…Mr. Secretary, isn’t that more of a call for the executive to make?”

  The older official crooked a brow at that comment, slightly aggravated as if the younger man had just asked a dumb question. Which of course, he had.

  “Just get it done.”

  …

  By the time the sun had come up over the Jejune, Justin had realized why the battalion hadn’t brought any land vehicles.

  The whole surface of the rocky basin was completely filled with wide cracks and ravines. During the march they had been causing everything from insignificant tripping to full companies being lost from suddenly getting swallowed up by the ground.

  It was as if the desert itself was alive, and consciously trying to eat through Justin’s troop reserves. Of course Justin himself didn’t have the mind for superstition, so he chalked it up to the costs of traversing a hostile environment. Men were going to be lost, especially when he was the one guiding their feet as they walked. He couldn't account for everyone, though he tried.

  The process of trying to do so had been straining thus far, however. As Justin’s main body, the Origin, sat near the middle back of the marching battalion and hoisted up by a small team of soldiers, he felt beads of sweat falling from his head.

  ‘Keeping this many assimilated at once is taxing my mind more than I thought it would. It’s nearly comparable to the pressure the parasite had exerted. Is it because of its low intelligence stat? Or am I not supposed to breach the limit at my level?’

  Justin could have only had an idea of these things if he had prior knowledge of the scourge’s development path.

  As a Volta too used to the idea of classes, his experience could only get him so far, even from the perspective of the C-Grade. Though a lot of daemon’s abilities were specialized around specific stats, he wasn’t sure if he could progress along the typical route given his unique situation.

  Put in simpler terms: daemons, like voltas, derived the strength of their system-based abilities from the individual stat categories of the system.

  For instance with voltas, Pugilists were specialists of the Strength stat, Coursers were specialized in Dexterity, Clerics in Endurance, Espers in Perception, Technicals in Intelligence, Psychics in Charisma, and Augurs in Mystery.

  Daemons worked with the same stat specializations, but in relation to their race instead of class.

  Which meant that Daemons that had access to the system would always specialize in strength for instance, if their race was already strong. Or charisma, if they were already psychically-capable. So while daemon without the system and from the same race would still be abnormally potent as well, it would not be to the absurd degree one could reach thanks to the System.

  With this in consideration, it had been observed by many scholars that Daemons actually held an advantage in accumulating strength as compared to Voltas, who being from a humanoid race generally didn’t have any innate qualities of their own.

  In fact, it might have been Daemons and not the various races of humankind spread throughout the galaxy were it not for their aversion to organized thought and civilization. Only rarely did this kind of grouping happen between daemons of different races, and even then the group usually found itself in the form of a cult.

  But Justin’s dilemma was that he was pretty sure that the Scourge race, hiveminds in other words, were specialized into either the Intelligence or Endurance stats, but those were exactly what he was trying to avoid raising. It put him at a crossroads on how to proceed, as with the system he could control the direction of his growth, but erring away from the pre-established path could leave him at a bottleneck, or faced with a Stage Quest he wasn’t able to complete. In other words, handing control back to the hive’s real consciousness.

  By now it was midday though, and Justin was beginning to see the mountains.

  ‘Given that I’m just seeing the tips of those mountains and they’ve only barely got snowcaps, they’re probably something just under…15,000 feet with this planet’s size? I shouldn’t be more than 200 miles from them if that's the case.’

  Justin adjusted his mental focus to pan around the entire marching unit. A few hundred men with corpse-yellow eyes marching stiffly, plus what was left of the battalion in front of them at gunpoint. With a breath, he was able to get a read on the group’s average condition.

  ‘With this group I could cut the travel time to a week, half that if I didn’t have the survivors following.’

  Justin had a brief wicked thought emerge before he quickly stuffed it.

  He also had to consider the food issue. The hive could subsist off of biomass, about one unit per individual per week, but the natives needed regular rations. He had brought the remaining rations from the encampment, but a majority of it had been destroyed by the mortars, leaving him barely enough to stretch past a week given the two hundred or so survivors left.

  They were restrained and placid for now, but their numbers were still dwindling further down each hour spent in the hazards of the desert.

  If the situation didn’t improve, Justin couldn’t even be sure he’d have a full hive a week from now.