Chapter 105: Infiltration
The creature moved.
Tendrils extended and retracted silently as it crossed the floor, navigating around furniture. It reached the bed and began climbing—up the bedframe, across the sheets towards the Manager's face.
The Manager's face was turned slightly to the side, one cheek pressed against the pillow and his mouth slightly open. Vulnerable and unaware.
The eyeball positioned itself on the pillow beside the Manager's head, its tendrils splaying out for balance. Then one tendril extended toward the man's neck, finding the carotid artery beneath the skin.
The tendril's tip thinned to a microscopic point and pierced the skin. Venom flowed into the Manager's bloodstream—a paralytic agent synthesized from Alex's absorbed knowledge of neurotoxins, refined through countless iterations until it could freeze a body while leaving consciousness intact.
The Manager's eyes snapped open.
Instantly like the sudden alertness of a predator sensing danger. His eyes were wide, pupils dilating in the darkness, and his mind immediately tried to command his body to move.
Nothing happened.
His arms wouldn't respond. His legs remained still. His chest continued breathing—shallow, automatic breaths controlled by the autonomous nervous system—but his voluntary movement was gone. Even his jaw was locked, preventing speech and screams.
Terror flooded through him as his eyes tracked frantically, the only part of his body still under his control.
He saw the ceiling. The shadows. And then, moving into his peripheral vision, he finally saw the thing on his pillow.
An eyeball.
A perfectly human eye—except for the tentacles extending from its bottom like a grotesque spider. It crawled across the pillow toward his face, and the Manager's mind screamed wordless horror that his paralyzed throat couldn't vocalize.
What is this what is this what is—
The creature's tendrils touched his face. One tendril traced the edge of his right eye socket as if measuring something.
Then two tendrils hooked over his eyelid and pulled.
The Manager's right eye was forced open wider than natural, the lid stretched until it felt like tearing. His pupil contracted in panic, tears streaming reflexively, but the poison kept him frozen and even from blinking.
The eyeball positioned itself directly in front of his opened eye, its own pupil dilating as if making eye contact—mocking him of his situation.
Then it pushed forward.
More tendrils emerged, these ones sharper, designed for some specific purpose. They slid around the Manager's eyeball, finding the optic nerve, the muscles and the connective tissue underneath. And then, they began to cut.
The Manager felt everything. The paralytic blocked movement but not sensation. He felt each severance of tissue, each snap of connective fiber, the horrible pressure as his own eyeball was pried loose slowly from its socket.
His mind broke into static, breaking down under the weight of horror and physical trauma happening to him.
Then the eyeball came free.
The eyeball's tendrils caught it carefully, then set it aside on the pillow like a discarded marble. The Manager's vision in that eye went dark, but his left eye—still functioning—saw the creature position itself at the edge of the now-empty socket.
No no no please no—
It pushed itself inside.
The sensation was indescribable—foreign tissue sliding into the cavity where his eye had been, tentacles extending inward like roots burrowing into soil. The creature pushed deeper, past the socket, into the space behind the orbital bone where nerves and blood vessels clustered.
Then the tendrils found his brain.
They pierced through the thin orbital bone— finding the natural gaps, the spaces where nature had left vulnerabilities. And once inside the cranial cavity, they spread, branching, seeking specific neural structures.
The Manager's consciousness flickered as foreign tissue interfaced with his cerebral cortex, his motor centers and his memory structures. He felt his thoughts becoming cloudy, distant, as if wrapped in cotton. His sense of self began to blur at the edges—
And then, like a switch being flipped, everything stabilized.
The paralytic's effect faded. Sensation returned to his limbs. His jaw unlocked. But when he tried to move and scream—
His body moved, but not at his command.
His hand raised itself without his willing it. His head turned to look at the displaced eyeball on the pillow. His mouth opened and spoke words he didn't choose to speak: "Integration complete. Subject viable. Neural override functional."
The voice was his own, but the words weren't. The Manager was still there, still conscious and aware—trapped inside his own body like a passenger in a vehicle someone else was driving.
He was a puppet. And somewhere, pulling the strings, was the thing that had done this to him.
---
Alex's clones disguised as a captain and his team members walked through the secure corridor toward the barracks where the rest of Sentinel Solutions' contractors were quartered.
The night shift guards at the barracks entrance nodded recognition.
"We're clear to access?"
"Yeah, go ahead. Most of the others are sleeping, though. Try to keep it—"
Captain's hand shot out, grabbing the guard's throat and crushing his larynx before he could finish the sentence.
The second guard reached for his sidearm but one of team members moved faster, driving a blade through the guard's eye and into his brain. The body dropped silently.
"Secure the entrance,no one leaves. No communications."
The clones moved with perfect coordination, products of a single consciousness directing multiple bodies. They dragged the dead guards inside, arranged them out of sight, and sealed the barracks entrance.
Inside, all the soldier's slept in their bunks, exhausted from preparation work. Professional killers, all of them. Men and women who'd taken money to enable death games, to hunt witnesses and to maintain a system built on suffering.
The clones moved through the barracks like shadows, silent and merciless. Each guard died in their sleep—quick death, but deaths nonetheless. Blades to the heart. Hands over mouths to prevent sound.
It took eleven minutes to kill all the people including the captains.
When it was done, the clones arranged the bodies in neat rows, methodically searching each corpse for useful intelligence—phones, documents, access cards, anything that might provide information about the Crucible's operation.
Then, their purpose fulfilled, the clones returned to the entrance, positioned themselves at strategic points, and waited.
---
The Manager—now controlled, his body puppeteered by the biomass interface connected to Alex's consciousness—stood in his bathroom, staring at his reflection in the mirror.
His right eye was gone, replaced by the eyeball that had integrated itself into his skull. But Alex had been careful—the creature had extended tissue across the socket's surface, forming a realistic replica of an eye. Not perfect under close inspection, but sufficient to pass casual observation.
The Manager's consciousness screamed uselessly in the background, a prisoner in his own head, forced to watch as his body moved without his consent.
Alex, controlling the body remotely through the neural interface, tested the range of movement. The paralytic had fully metabolized. Motor control was complete. Speech centers responded perfectly. Memory access was functional—he could shift through the Manager's knowledge like files in a database.
Names. Locations. Client identities. Security protocols. Bank accounts. Everything.
The Manager's body returned to the bedroom and lay back down on the bed, positioning itself naturally. Alex released direct control, allowing the body to rest. He didn't need to actively puppeteer every movement—the connection allowed him to surge forward and take control whenever necessary.
For now, the Manager would appear to sleep normally.
After some time, the bedroom door was knocked.
"Boss? You awake?"
Buchinsky's voice.
The Electrocutioner was checking in, probably doing a routine security sweep before his own rest period.
Alex surged forward into the Manager's neural pathways, taking direct control. The body sat up, appearing naturally drowsy, and called out: "Come in."
The door opened. Buchinsky stepped inside, his massive frame filling the doorway and electrical current crackling faintly along his scarred arms. "Just checking in before I grab a few hours. Everything quiet on your end?"
"Quiet," the Manager's voice confirmed.
"Get some rest. We have a long day tomorrow."
"Will do, boss." Buchinsky turned to leave—
Then stopped.
His eyes narrowed and his head tilting slightly. The electrical field around his body intensified, sparks dancing between his fingers. "Boss... something feels wrong."
Alex's mind raced. Metahumans with electrical powers sometimes developed sensitivity to electromagnetic fields, to the subtle currents that ran through living nervous systems. If Buchinsky could sense the abnormal neural activity-
"What do you mean?" Alex asked through the Manager's mouth, keeping the tone calm, curious, not defensive.
"I don't know. Something's..." Buchinsky's eyes locked onto the Manager's face, specifically his right eye. "Your eye. Something's different about your eye."
The Manager's hand moved casually toward the nightstand, where a loaded pistol rested in an easily accessible drawer.
"It's late, Buchinsky. You're seeing things."
"No." The Electrocutioner took a step closer, electricity now visibly arcing between his hands, his body tensing for combat. "I can feel something's wrong. My instincts rarely go wro—"
The Manager's hand closed around the pistol.
"Boss, what the hell is—"
Alex pulled the trigger.
The shot was perfect—aimed for the heart, an instant kill that would drop even a metahuman before they could react.
But Buchinsky's survival instincts, honed by years of combat and enhanced by his electrical awareness, kicked in at the last possible microsecond.
He threw himself sideways.
The bullet caught him in the upper left chest instead of the heart—high enough that it missed the vital organ, but tore through muscle and clipped the top of his lung. Blood sprayed across the wall as Buchinsky crashed into the dresser, his body crackling with uncontrolled electricity as shock and pain disrupted his concentration.
"You're not the Manager—" he gasped, electricity surging wildly across his body as his powers activated in response to trauma.
"I know, I guess the integration process via this method still needs some tuning.."