The daemon pushed her hand into the Collector’s back as hard as she could with a grunt, and the water around the Collector started to swirl in rapid spirals, forming a minor vortex of bloody red liquid.

‘Now…form your Trigger,’ said the daemon. “Your strongest emotions and feelings. All that warmth you feel – everything related to that.”

The Collector clicked its mandibles, feeling heat spread from the point of contact on its back with the purple skinned specimen’s hand.

The heat was almost searing, intense, and, as it noted, traveling in the intricate patterns associated with its nerves and blood vessels.

The Collector began drawing within its personal memory bank the time when it had felt the warmth rising in its chest the greatest.

Its fights. Its battles. Its hunts. Its challenges.

And then the emotions associated with it, learned from it-

Thrill for the fight and the hunt. Admiration for worthy foes.

And at the base of it all –

Desire.

For the fight.

For the challenge against something worthy and greater.

For the conquering of this world.

==

‘What…is this?’ The daemon opened her eyes wide through struggling breaths as she felt something off.

Tremendously off.

The water around the Collector had gone from a swirl to a raging whirlpool now, roaring and rushing with such speed it could have torn a man apart in its currents.

Waves of red magical energy rippled from the eye of this storm – the Collector – and spread throughout the entirety of the pond, then even further, breaching the water’s edge and traveling across soil and up trees.

The daemon blinked her eyes as she held on tight to the Collector, wondering in fear tinged curiosity at what was happening around her.

Something that she had never seen nor ever read about it.

With instinctive understanding, she knew also that it was not just her: none had ever borne witness to anything like this.

She knew that among certain extremely gifted individuals known as Perfect Ones, their cores opened naturally without any divination, and often, this was accompanied by strange phenomena.

Winds. The ground shaking. Pulses of mana. Electrical currents. All colored in the shade of their Origin.

Thus, many believed these individuals blessed by the heavens themselves.

And often times, they truly were, gifted with natural abilities unmatched, many of them growing so mighty and recognized that they ascended into Aetheria.

Or if they used their talents to destroy, they were considered living disasters. Calamities ranked on the same threat scale the Adventurer’s League used for monsters.

But this-

The crimson pulses of mana traveling across the pond water became blue.

Then green.

Then yellow.

Then, as the daemon saw with open mouth, black.

This was wholly new.

Foreign.

Alien.

Then the pulsing stopped. Only for an instant.

An explosive burst of mana from the Collector blew the daemon into the air, landing her with crashing impact several meters away into the muddy bank of the pond. She braced for impact, curling up into a ball as she slammed against the dirt.

Thankfully, the mud was soft, absorbing the brunt of her fall.

She scrambled to her knees as quickly as she could, and as she looked at her hand sink into the mud, she watched waves of mana washed over her pale digits, and this time, they were all the colors, all of the greens and yellows and blues and reds and blacks mashed together, forming a kaleidoscope of iridescent, ever shifting and changing colors shining intensely bright.

And at the center of this kaleidoscope-

The daemon looked back to the Collector and saw as the water rose around it in a swirling pillar of changing colors.

Gone were the murky, soil and scum filled waters of the pond, now there was something bright and…beautiful.

The waters encapsulated the Collector in a shape that reminded her of a cocoon. The segmented, colored type that only the most radiant of butterflies tore their ways out of.

Each segment the color of an Origin, each shining so bright that it seemed an another sun had dawned upon this forest of darkness and permanent shadow.

She faltered, tripping to the ground as the earth began to shake and crack around her.

The enormous trees of the Darkwoods, trees that had stayed tall and strong for a thousand years, began to groan and shake and crack, as if acknowledging the end of their reign, bowing to the Collector.

The roaring crackle of lightning sounded from the skies, though the darkened roof of tree branches and leaves prevented her from seeing it.

Rumbling from the earth. Rumbling from above.

The daemon stood up, bit her lip, pushed down familiar feelings of worry and anxiety, and ran towards the Collector, single hand outstretched to help for this was completely out of the scope of her experience.

Winds surged from the cocoon of water enveloping the Collector, buffeting her and preventing her from getting close.

She could feel intense magical energy underneath those winds, so intense that it distorted the view of the cocoon and the Collector inside, warping the very dimensions of space around it.

She instinctively knew even with her roots sealed that if she managed to break past this wind, the sheer concentration of uncontrolled mana layering the cocoon would completely break her apart.

All she could do right now was wait.

Wait and hope for the best.

The iridescent water encapsulating the Collector crystallized into a shape that was not ice, something she knew nothing of – it did not match the color of any mana crystal or ore she had read about – and then everything stopped.

The earth shaking calmed. The crackling of lightning quieted. The Darkwood trees resumed their eternal vigil.

All that remained was the Collector and its new cocoon.

The light surrounding it had dimmed, the winds calmed, but still, the daemon knew that approaching the still faintly glowing cocoon of multi-colored ice, let alone touching it, would be impossible.

The spatial distortions caused by wildly flowing mana still layered the cocoon. Anything that touched that layer would probably break down at a level the eye could not perceive.

The only thing she could do now was wait.

Wait and hope for the strange creature that made a promise to her. The only being in her entire life that looked like it was going to keep a promise to her.

==

The Collector floated in an expanse of nothingness.

This was entirely unlike the ‘nothingness’ it had stimulated with its bodily processes. This was purely in the realm of the mental. A phenomenon associated with psionic profiles or as conventionally known, the consciousness.

When the psionic profile – the consciousness – separated from the body, there was nothing to perceive but absence.

A void.

The Collector was familiar with this.

It was the first memory it had ever had, after all, when the Collective Hivemind had first created its psionic profile before programming it into the shell of advanced biological weapons systems and adaptations that comprised its war-primed body.

Everything the Collector was, everything it was meant to feel and know and perceive – the Hivemind had fashioned with careful intent, implanting within the Collector’s psionic profile also a shard of itself, the evolutionary system that tied the Collector fully to the Collective.

[DETECTING INTRUSION OF ANOMALOUS EMOTIONS. SOURCING…]

[DETECTING OVERFLOW OF FOREIGN PROGRAMMING.]

The Collector heard the Hivemind. The shard of it housed within its psionic profile.

The Collector did not react, could not react. In this state, the shard was in control. It was the primary operating system that regulated the Collector, and when it took over, the Collector simply…was.

It was odd that the Collector could even perceive the shard’s processing. Yet, not for long.

[INITIATING EMERGENCY CALIBRATION OF COLLECTOR UNIT 6660]

These were the last psionic words the Collector perceived before its consciousness fell completely dormant.

[…]

[…]

[SIGNIFICANT ERRORS DETECTED. PSIONIC AND BIOLOGICAL LIMITERS COMPROMISED.]

[ATTEMPTING SHARD-BASED COLLECTOR UNIT RESET…]

[…]

[…]

[FAILURE. INSUFFICIENT PROCESSING POWER FROM SHARD]

[ATTEMPTING TO ESTABLISH MAINFRAME HIVEMIND CONNECTION]

[…]

[…]

[FAILURE.]

[SYSTEM CORRUPTION LEVELS RISING. IRREPARABLE DAMAGE DETECTED.]

[INITIATING EMERGENCY SYSTEM CONSUMPTION PROTOCOL – NOW ATTEMPTING ASSIMILATION OF FOREIGN PROGRAMMING]

[ASSIMILATION PROCEEDING]

[…]

[…]

[…]