Chapter 2: Chapter 2. Parasite

«Annoying. Kill that one, you want?»

A bristling alien voice echoed in Marisa's head. It was strongly accented with vaguely broken grammar, a little like someone had taught a frilled dragon to speak by blowing air through its fluttering neck sack. The raspy voice was very unsettling and hard to understand unless you were familiar with the monster's vocal quirks. Actually, Nafiori's fluency in English had improved several magnitudes compared to the beginning, which was remarkable progress given the fact that that the alien was initially nonverbal.

The officers walked alongside Marisa, oblivious to the fact that a mother was whispering directly in the mind of the 22-year-old girl.

This was not telepathy.

Neither Marisa nor the primal zerg had any talent for .

Actually, there was a piece of Nafiori, the primal broodmother, literally inside of the female terran. Any veteran from the would be familiar with it — the Arachnis — which was a notorious specialty of the . Just as its name implied, the parasite could infect other organisms and fuse with the victim. It was relatively "harmless", although it was impossible to remove without killing the host. The parasite was difficult to detect, and they were commonly used as a form of battlefield espionage. Zerg Queens could tap the nervous systems of their victims and see the world through their proxy's eyes and ears.

Marisa just happened to have one of those bugs inside of her.

Nafiori was the 'queen' that infested her.

Technically, the original Arachnis strain had largely fallen out of favor by the time of the , and the old strain of Arachnis Queens were largely extinct. The ability to cast parasites was discarded in favor of offensive evolutionary adaptations that made the more suitable for direct combat. Nafiori, like many primal zerg, had a great appetite for , and she had assimilated the abilities of the decommissioned Arachnis queens during her brief stay with 's Swarm. It suited her style, and unlike her muscle-headed cousin , Nafiori preferred adaptations that made it easier to avoid direct conflict and survive undetected.

Evolution is a Great Teacher, and it was not the dinosaurs who lived through giant meteor showers.

More often than not, the smartest strategy in a free-for-all brawl was to wait it out until the end, avoiding notice by the biggest fish until you were the last one standing. People often called it cowardly and dishonest, but mindless bravery was a useless quality if it only led to a premature death.

Manipulation, deception, and subterfuge were preferred tactics of the weak.

Nafiori was a puppet master, and this million-year-old primal broodmother preferred to work with toy marionettes. Marisa Huynh was perfectly self-aware of her status as a living pawn, and she had been willingly "compromised" by the ancient zerg maestro almost since the beginning. The problem was that it sometimes felt like their roles were inverted.

«Ugly terran. You dislike, I kill.»

The broodmother was practically cooing at Marisa for approval, almost as if she was an old cat-loving grandma trying to win the affection of her favorite grumpy housecat. Nafiori spoiled Marisa to an unreasonable extent, and sometimes she was so excessive that Marisa wanted to facepalm. Obviously, there was no benefit to killing the Dominion officers, and if anything it would bring more trouble down the road when the military sent inspectors to investigate the disappearance of their scouting party.

Nafiori almost certainly knew this as well, but recently the zerg broodmother had gotten especially complacent. She didn't seem to fear the Dominion military very much anymore. Murdering the hellion officers was a totally frivolous and whimsical idea, and Nafiori likely only suggested because she tended to pamper Marisa backwards and forwards. Perhaps killing the mortal enemies of your favored ones was a zerg expression of affection, but Marisa wasn't quite acclimated to zerg cultural norms.

The terran female was not especially fond of the idea of sticking a through a random person who made a slightly off-putting remark.

Marisa winced slightly and shook her head back and forth.

Lacking a psionic connection, she didn't have a way to convey a response. The broodmother could transmit messages to Marisa through the parasite embedded in her body, but this was a one-way street. Marisa needed to get creative if wished to communicate specific words back.

However, further elaboration was not needed this time. Nafiori could vaguely sense Marisa's emotional state and feelings, and the zerg mother understood her implicitly.

«Caution wise, but need not suffer. Have strength. No more fear.»

The primal zerg mother was essentially telling Marisa that it was okay to be confident. There was no way that a handful of terran hellion officers could harm them, especially after Nafiori had spent over five years turning the Huynh family farm into her fortified nest. Primal Zerg did not use , but a primal broodmother's nest was no less defended than the Swarm's .

The static defenses were much more subtle.

The seemingly dead shrubs right by the front porch, for instance, were actually a kind of modified . The withered tree in the backyard was an animated plant, and it could move its heavy limbs and whack things like a whomping willow.

The were masters of adaptation, and over many millennia on , they had perfected the art of engineering the environment through mutation. Unlike the , Primal Zerg did not transmute drones into structures and residences. Instead, the Primal Zerg created their burrows by modifying the organic life around them. A Zerusian , for instance, was derived from a giant armored commonly found on Zerus. They were not naturally capable of spitting out and — but rather they were genetically modified so that their large stomach could be used as a residence for smaller zerg strains.

Howerever, it was impossible for Nafiori to make Primal Wardens without the original critter indigenous to Zerus. The fauna and flora of were different from her homeworld, so Nafiori had a drastically different palette of organisms to work with. Metaphorically, she needed to reinvent the wheel entirely from scratch.

The difficulty of the knitting challenge did not hinder Nafiori in the slightest.

Within a few years, Nafiori was spinning genetic strands with rabbits, raccoons, and palm trees. She routinely complained that there was no megafauna that could be adapted into large buildings, and she compensated for the lack of dinosaurs with a grudging reliance on subterranean fungal networks and thorny Korhalian desert shrubbery.

There was not much organic life in the Korhal Wastes, but it would not be an understatement to say that every single living organism within a 10 kilometer radius of the ranch was inside the palm of Nafiori's hands (claws?).

One of the hellion officers tripped over an exposed root and promptly swore. The gear that he was carrying crashed onto the ground, and dozens of rounds of loose ammunition spilled everywhere like shiny cylindrical marbles in the sand. Mild bloody scrapes appeared on the officer's palms, mostly because he had been unfortunate enough to break his fall on a couple jagged rocks.

"Fuck."

"Having a bad day, George?" One of the officers teased him.

"I swear it wasn't there a moment ago!"

"You need to get your eyes checked."

"I volunteer to write the incident report: Dominion Officer injured by tree root. Requesting support for next mission. Or better yet, a with Restore to improve officer's vision."

The captain of the hellion squad rolled his eyes, too tired to say anything about the sheer incompetence of his inexperienced subordinates. They were joking around with each other, clearly already sold on the conclusion that their sensor equipment was faulty. The captain also felt that it was the most likely explanation, but he knew from years of personal experience that it never hurt to be too cautious when it came to dealing with the Zerg.

The Zerg always hit the place where people least expected it.

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If you let your guard down for a single second, half of your squad was already dead.

A frown of concern appeared on the 22-year-old rancher's eyes. Marisa squatted down next to the hellion officer that had 'accidentally' tripped and fallen.

"My goodness. Are you alright, officer?" Marisa said with a worried look. "You're bleeding. Do you need bandages? Neosporin? I have a first aid kit back in the house."

It was one hundred percent a fake act, but it was totally normal to put on your best behavior in front of a police officer. Even if you were doing something illegal, the soldiers were more likely to leave sooner if they were relaxed and thought that everything was normal.

The hellion officer named George smiled wryly at Marisa.

"Thank you, miss. It's just a few scratches. It's nothing to worry about."

"Can I at least get you some water? Just to wash off?"

"Actually, do you mind if I use your bathroom?"

"Sure! It's up in the farm house. I'll show you inside."

The terran officer smiled appreciatively at Marisa, causing the rest of his colleagues to shoot a jealous glare at him. Out of the entire squad, George probably had the fairest looks. With his golden locks, sky blue eyes, and soft bishounen frame, he looked like he came from a rich family — as if he was a distant relative of Emperor .

Marisa wondered if there was hazing in the military. It was hard to imagine a pretty-boy like George getting along with ex-convicts and seven-foot marines who looked like polar bears. She had certainly read plenty of web novels over the years, but it was hard to tell how much of the drama purported to occur in men's locker rooms was truth or fiction. If the verbal exchange from earlier was indicative of anything, she guessed that perhaps there was quite a bit of harassment in the terran barracks. Marisa would feel sorry if they gave that unlucky officer a hard time once the hellion squad returned to base.

If that was the case, it might be better if she acted a little more egalitarian.

The 22-year-old turned around momentarily before resuming her trek back up the hill.

"Can I get the rest of you a few glasses of water?"

A weird grin instantly appeared on the cracked-tooth officer's face.

"I'm dyin' of thirst, ma'am. Much appreciated." He answered eagerly with his strong accent.

"I'll take a cup too, if it's not too much of a bother."

"Make that three, please! Do you have an ice machine?"

Meanwhile, there was a slightly confused look on one of the shorter officers with glasses. He hadn't said anything up until this point, and frankly he felt a little more like a forgettable background character with hardly any personality or presence.

"...Err, don't we have water rations back on our hellions?" The man ventured quizzically, adjusting the metal frame of his glasses. "Besides, is the water even safe to drink out here in the ? I think—"

The cracked-tooth officer elbowed the dissident in the stomach, hard.

The poor man instantly folded over and crumbled to the ground, gasping through his lungs.

"Ignore what that guy said," the cracked-tooth officer said with an ominous grin. "Private Warren is new around here. He got no idea what the hell he's talkin' about."

Marisa blinked expressionlessly.

Oh. So that's how it is.

Marisa glanced down the field, and it looked like the squad captain had already moved ahead to inspect the barn. Since their commanding officer wasn't around, the soldiers apparently arranged themselves into a natural hierarchy around the heavily-accented cracked-tooth officer.

«Terran sociology, so very fascinating.» Nafiori's voice commented inside Marisa's head.

The zerg broodmother had observed the entire scene in silence.

"It's all because of the old equipment," another officer chimed in, backing up his leader with a somewhat plausible explanation. "Leaky pipes and water tanks. Tastes rusty, and smells a bit like . Drinking that sick stuff makes ya nutty like a ."

"It's totally disgusting. Undrinkable." A third officer hurriedly added in agreement.

Marissa expressed her verbal sympathies to the party of terrans. It was shockingly callous of their superiors to deprive such fine soldiers of basic rations. Of course, she doubted that the Dominion officers were telling the truth, but a couple glasses of water was not that much of a favor to ask for.

It really didn't hurt to play along with the story.

"I do filter the drinking water that accumulates in the roof rain collection system," Marisa explained, addressing the one concern about the potability of water in the Radiated Wastes. "It's supplemented with iodine, so apologies in advance if it tastes a little bit strange."

"No worries at all, ma'am." The cracked-tooth officer reassured her. "We soldiers ain't picky."

"Okay. I'll be back shortly then." Marisa said, backing off politely, and the officers saluted at her.

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