Perfect Assimilation: Evolution of a Shapeshifting Slime!

General Hadrian Marsh stood at the long window of his office and watched the parade ground three floors below.

A Bronze unit was running drills in formation. The drills were the third set of the morning, and they were not going well.

Two of the recruits had broken stance in the last sequence, and the drill captain was already walking toward them with anger on his face.

Hadrian did not entirely watch the unit. He watched the edge of his own jaw in the faint reflection of the window.

The grey at his temples had crept further this season. The lines at the corners of his eyes had set deeper after the long winter campaign on the southern reach.

He was sixty-four years old by the count the system had stopped tracking decades ago, and he was, by the count the system did track, the second strongest Diamond on the Eastern Front.

The first strongest had returned this morning from the Pale Reaches.

A tablet on his desk chimed once. Hadrian did not turn from the window. He had known Roric Vale for forty years.

The two of them had entered the academy in the same intake, had risen through the same ranks, had stood beside each other in the same firefights, and had stood across from each other in every promotion board for the last twenty.

The Marshal seat had opened three times in those twenty years. Three times, the seat had gone to neither of them.

Three times, the seat had been awarded to a candidate from the Western Front on the reasoning that the Eastern Front already had two Diamonds of comparable merit and a Marshal could not be drawn from one front without unbalancing the command structure.

Roric had, in private, called the reasoning a polite excuse for indecision. Hadrian had agreed, in private, that it was.

The two of them had not stopped competing. Each campaign they ran was tallied. Each kill above Platinum was tallied.

Each war won by men under their respective commands was tallied. The tallies were public record at the senior command level, and the tallies, this morning, had shifted.

Roric had cleared the Ghoul nest in the Pale. Three confirmed kills above Platinum. One Ace level cleared without losing a Silver.

It was the kind of campaign that would have been written into a textbook if the front had textbooks.

Hadrian had read the after-action report at dawn, before the report had been officially filed, because the senior command staff in this complex still owed him favors from the southern reach.

He had read it twice. He had set the tablet down without comment.

The chime on his desk sounded again. He turned from the window. His aide, Captain Voss, stood at the door.

"Sir."

"Speak."

"A registration report from the testing wing."

"I do not read registration reports, Voss."

"Sir, this one."

Voss crossed the office and set the tablet on his desk. The screen had been left on. Hadrian glanced down at it without sitting. He stopped glancing. He sat.

The image on the tablet was a still capture from the testing chamber. The platform. The scanner. The hexagon turning slowly above the platform.

The readout etched across the face of the hexagon, in characters the system drew clean and large for the benefit of the room: Apocalypse Bronze Metal Core.

Hadrian’s hand reached for his beard without his permission. He had grown the beard the year his wife had died, twenty-two years ago, and it had been with him for so long that he no longer noticed when his hand reached for it.

His thumb passed through the grey hair at his chin in a slow, unconscious stroke.

"Voss."

"Sir."

"Read me the registration name."

"Ayla Hayashi, sir."

"Hayashi."

"Yes, sir. The City Lord of Old York’s daughter. Sixteen years old. Registered this morning. Primary clearer of the Veins of the Devourer, as recorded in the field log filed last week."

"The same girl who walked out of the apocalypse tunnel."

"Yes, sir."

"And the boy."

"Kenji Hayashi, sir. Brother. Registered alongside her."

"Both of them are Roric’s grandchildren."

"Yes, sir."

Hadrian set the tablet face down on the desk. He turned his chair toward the window again. The Bronze unit on the parade ground had finished the third sequence and was beginning the fourth.

The drill captain had finished walking toward the two recruits who had broken stance, and those recruits had been sent to run the perimeter. The rest of the unit continued without them.

Hadrian watched the parade ground without seeing it. He had heard two days ago through the family network that Roric’s grandchildren were inbound.

The news had reached him through a cousin’s wife, the way most news in his family reached him, in a long message about an unrelated family event that had buried the relevant line in its third paragraph.

The relevant line had read that Sarah Hayashi had sent her son and her newly acknowledged daughter into the Crusade, and that Roric had insisted on personally escorting them.

Hadrian had filed the news under family politics. He had felt, briefly, the same flicker of disgust he always felt when the Government pushed teenagers into the Spire intake.

The Spire took a hundred and eighty children a cycle and returned ten at most. The arithmetic had not improved in his lifetime.

He had, in his own command, refused twice to sign release papers for any soldier under twenty, and he had absorbed the political cost of those refusals without complaint.

He had assumed Roric was making the trip on the same principle: a grandfather walking his grandchildren to the gate, doing what little a Diamond rank could do to bend the intake rules in a single family’s favor.

He had not assumed the grandchildren were anything more than two more teenagers in pale blue dresses and clean uniforms.

The hexagon on the tablet rotated in his memory. Apocalypse Bronze.

The only confirmed Apocalypse core in the human registry was held by the Conqueror. The Conqueror had obtained the core at Ace rank after a campaign that had cost humanity six hundred thousand lives and nine years of frontier bleeding.

The story was told to every cadet in every academy as the high-water mark of human achievement inside the Crusade.

A sixteen-year-old girl had walked into a tunnel a week ago and walked out with the same thing.

Hadrian’s thumb moved through his beard again. The arithmetic of the situation began to assemble in his head. Roric had, with this single morning, secured the most valuable human asset to register in the last forty years.

The girl was not yet Bronze. She would be Bronze before the end of the cycle. She would be Silver inside three years if her growth curve held. She would be Gold inside ten if the curve continued.

The political weight of a Gold rank in the Hayashi family, paired with the existing Gold rank Sarah held, paired with whatever Damien’s house had been stacking quietly for two decades, would shift the Eastern Front balance in a way that no amount of campaigning on Hadrian’s part could reverse.

The Marshal seat would not open in the next twenty years. When it did open, the senior command would no longer be choosing between two equally weighted Diamonds.

They would be choosing between the Diamond whose granddaughter held an Apocalypse core and the Diamond whose grandson had finished the southern reach campaign with a respectable but ordinary kill count.

The choice would not be a choice.

Hadrian leaned back in his chair. He could see, very clearly, the shape of the next twenty years. He could also see, with equal clarity, the shape of those years if he made one small adjustment to the present.

His face did not move. The corner of his mouth did. It lifted by a fraction, the way the mouth of a man lifts when he has been handed a problem and has, in the same breath, been handed the solution to it.

’If you cannot win,’ he thought, ’steal instead.’

"Voss."

"Sir."

"Call Austin."

"Sir?"

"My grandson. Call him. Have him on a transport to this complex by tomorrow morning. I do not care which campaign he is currently attached to. Have him reassigned."

"Yes, sir."

Voss did not ask why. Voss had been Hadrian’s aide for eleven years and had learned that questions about the General’s personal directives produced no useful information and a reduction in the General’s mood.

"And Voss."

"Sir."

"Have his service record updated before he arrives. The current photograph is two years old. He has grown since then. Have a fresh portrait taken at the eastern barracks the moment he lands. Cycle the new image through the senior command channels by the afternoon."

"Sir."

"And Voss."

"Sir."

"Pull whatever is on file for the Hayashi girl. Photographs. Background. Habits. Preferences. Whatever the registration intake collected this morning. I want it on this desk by the third hour."

"Yes, sir."

Voss left.

Hadrian turned back to the window. The Bronze unit on the parade ground had finished the fourth sequence. The drill captain had brought the two recruits back from the perimeter, and the unit was now reformed at full strength. The recruits ran the fifth sequence cleanly. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

Hadrian watched without seeing them. His grandson was twenty-one. Tall. Broad in the shoulder. Silver rank, cleanly earned, on track for Gold inside the decade.

He had been raised in the eastern estate, trained in the family yards, and presented at every senior command function since he was sixteen.

He spoke four languages. He danced at the official galas. He had broken three engagements in the last five years, all at Hadrian’s quiet instruction, because Hadrian had been waiting for the right match to appear on the political board.

Austin had also been described in the Crusade gossip channels as the most handsome man in human service.

’Which girl would not fall for my grandson?’

The thought was not boasting. Boasting required the existence of doubt. There was no doubt.

Austin had been engineered for this exact moment by twenty-four years of careful family planning, and the moment had finally arrived.

To seduce a naive girl would be too easy. A smile reached his eyes as he stroked his beard.

"Roric Vale, get ready to call me in-law. Haha."