Chapter 52 They’ve Gone Dark

Caution: Due to some of my readers discontent with the darkness of some of my chapters in the past, I feel the need to caution any of my readers who read this chapter. There are deaths that happen, due to the instability some of the characters are suffering from. I am not the author, merely the editor, but wish to impart this warning so my readers don't get angry with me. Thank you for understanding.

"Mr. Griffon!" a child shouted from outside his room.

"What is it?"

"You said you wanted me to let you know when that big red light started flashing at your workstation. It keeps saying that an error has occurred."

Griffon sighed. He knew he'd typed one of the numbers in wrong for his simulation. "Alright, I'm coming to check it out."

"Oh, and Argenti wants you in the kitchen when you're done with that. She says she found something you might find interesting."

Griffon opened his door and started to head down the hall.

It'd been several days since Loyd had left and the last attack wave had been destroyed. The crawler had gone south and found an abandoned warehouse only partially buried in the sand and had finished with its repairs before heading back north to repair the other crawler.

Griffon sat down in front of his work station and opened the error report. "Major mental instability detected. Estimated time until full breakdown due to stress and poor psychological and environmental negatives; two days six hours?! What the hell?" Griffon checked back through the report again. "Loyd's gone berserk! He didn't leave to fight the Swarm on his own. He left to protect us from the fallout!"

"That's the same conclusion I came to," Sara announced from somewhere behind Griffon.

"Then, why didn't you tell me?! If I'd discovered this sooner, I might've been able to reverse the effects!" Griffon shouted, trying to find where she was hiding.

"Because it's better this way," Sara sobbed. "He'd been insane since the day we met him. Do you remember the first day he joined us in the simulator? He was already a monster pouncing and devouring his prey with little regard for his own life. I loved the way he fought. He was little more than a bundle of death in a human body. Then, after he killed everyone at the first enemy stronghold, he rebuilt himself stronger by tapping into something he didn't understand yet. The leg structure of his first redesign is almost identical to the small armored swarmlings we've been fighting."

"What are you saying?" Griffon questioned.

"The first mission our corps went on, all of us joined in his madness. We tore people apart because it felt good. We devoured humans like they were granola! We only spared those too scared to taste good. It didn't matter if they had a gun or not. We were better off never meeting Loyd."

Griffon sat in his chair remembering that fateful day. "We all have memories of that day. None of us knew what we were doing. We did it because our bodies craved it. We let loose the monster inside us and liked how it felt. That happened in the past, right now we're stuck on Earth trying to salvage a fubar situation while Martian nukes streak towards us. So, snap out of whatever funk you're in and help us get to Loyd and try to help him."

Sara stood up from behind a table and looked at Griffon; her eyes puffy from crying. "You don't understand. Loyd is beyond help now."

The two stood there in silence for some time, glaring at each other.

"Mr. Griffon I told you Argenti needed you in the kitchen an hour ago! You need to get down there before she comes looking for you!"

Griffon turned to the door. "We'll finish this discussion later, Sara. For now, just take a nap or something. We're all stressed from the nukes."

Sara sat back down, tears returning to her eyes.

The child looked past Griffon and shook their head. "She's broken, I'll have to repair her later."

Griffon clenched his fist and sent the child flying into the wall. They slid down leaving a bloody streak as they fell. "You cannot simply repair human- hybrids. It's not that simple," he explained to the unconscious body.

"GRIFFON!" Madeline shrieked staring at the scene before her. "What have you done!?"

Griffon looked down at the kid. "Why don't I feel anything?" he muttered.

"Such a waste. We don't have the time to grow another youngling before we reach the other crawler. This won't set us back too far though." Tiny muttered as he retrieved the child his humanoid form mid-way through some form of mutation.

"TINY! How can you say that?!" Madeline questioned.

"Empathy is something you hybrids and humans possess and something I was trying to achieve. Then I discovered this empathy is ultimately useless to a species' survival once they achieve a certain degree of self-sufficiency," Tiny answered as he crawled past, the child clutched to his chest.

Madeline stepped in front of Tiny blocking his way. "Where are you taking it? The medical center is behind you," her exasperated voice was now cold and threatening.

"They are biomass are they not?" Tiny asked. "After viewing your sim memories, you seem fine eating your own."

Madeline lowered her gaze and clenched her fist. "It can still be heal-"

Tiny looked down to where Madeline had fallen to her knees and thrown up. "If it sickens you that much now, I wonder what's changed so wildly in only a month and a half."

"It wouldn't still be them."

Griffon's eyes widened. "What do you mean?! The body gets brought back exactly like it was when it died."

"But they lose their soul."

Griffon and Tiny both broke out laughing wildly.

"Their soul?! What makes you think those are real? And assuming they are, which they aren't, what makes you think we haven't lost ours already?! Do you have any idea how many people we've slaughtered! Half of Mars burns because of us!" Griffon mocked.

Argenti grabbed Griffon by the arm. "Daddy said souls existed. He said no matter how much black you put into them, they would never brea-"

Argenti hit the floor hard enough to bounce back up. Griffon may have broken his hand but it didn't matter to him; he had gotten rid of the majority of what was annoying him with that punch.

Madeline stared at the monsters in front of her and shed her first true tear. "You've gone too far now, Griffon. What happened to you to make you into this?"

Griffon turned towards this new annoyance his memories of this person being destroyed. "Tiny, remove that obstruction we're going to change how we do things around here."

Tiny almost seemed to smile before smashing Madeline into a paste against the wall.

"You're going to have to kill me too, you know," Sara declared.

Tiny turned back to Griffon. "She's the best fighter we have but she can always have her skills implanted into a more obedient body."

"You're right."

xX down south Xx

"You came here to kill the swarm off?" Jill's father asked Loyd.

"That was my primary objective, yes. It would appear as though you've been able to avoid it all these years by tunneling through the ice." Loyd turned away from examining the room they had given him. "You realize what that means don't you?"

The two men looked at each other confused.

"That means something aboard your ships puts off a damping signal. You're actively repelling the swarm while tunneling."

"How can we be doing that? The only thing that could possibly put off this damping field your talking about is the primary reactors and those things are shielded inside the drill heads."

"It might have something to do with your drill heads. The shielding would be heaviest towards the ice your cutting through making your drill into something like a shaped charge's focusing cone. It might also have something to do with the fact you use reinforced steel tungsten alloy for your drill's teeth. I'd need to see them in action to really be able to tell much more about the way the field is generated," Loyd declared with a shrug. "Now for the reason I'm here. That massive city nearest to the primary swarm entity, fired on me whenever I tried to get close to it. There is something aboard each of your ships that allows you to return to that city if the need were to arise."

"Wait, nothing's gone near the city in the past couple of years except for one incident two days ago. That wasn't you was it?" The old man asked.

"Two days sounds right."

"Then, what's been tracking us for the past month if it wasn't you?"

"Oh, I ate that. You don't have to worry about it anymore," Loyd answered.

The old man nodded while Jill's father stared at Loyd awestruck that such a young boy could ever fight against the swarm and win.

"Judging from the look on your faces, you don't know just how fragile the swarm truly is," Loyd analyzed.

"Those things can tear our entire barge apart within seconds! How dare you tell us that the swarm is-"

Loyd looked down at the man's heart as it continued to beat in his hand. "You realize I'm over ninety-eight percent swarmling right. Don't lecture me about what I do or do not know about them."

The old man stepped back as Jill's father's chest wound began healing.

"Welcome to the hybridized. You're no longer human and neither is your daughter. I needed a loyal army that I was willing to sacrifice. Turns out you've supplied it, gramps."