Taking over Scion 1

My first shard was a tiny one, barely the size of a car. It wasn't important in the scheme of things, and it wasn't really sentient or sapient in the way that the larger shards possibly were. I couldn't move too quickly; even with Mantellum's power, I could hardly afford to be detected by any of the other shards. I moved slowly, growing like moss at the base of the shard. I analyzed everything I could about the shard, and I used my other abilities to adjust myself.

Shards could feel pain, and I needed a way to make sure that this one didn't notice what I was doing, like some species of leeches that secreted anesthetic when they bit their victims. Worse, I couldn't use too much energy to change myself because Scion had shards specifically designed to seek out any anomalous energy readings. There were other shards that were supposed to detect damaged shards and to help a third class of shards identify and either heal or eliminate them.

It took agonizing days to gradually cover the shard, and to transform my appearance to blend in with the shard so that it looked the same. Even as I sent tendrils inside it to crack it apart, it never noticed the damage to itself. Instead, it went about its prosaic purpose, working until it had been hollowed out from the inside out and I had taken over its function. The changeover was the part I worried about; there would be a blip in communications that would raise questions if the shards were alert.

Fortunately they weren't. They were going about the great work of setting up the dimensional barriers and scanning the human world for threats. The security shards were much more frequent near Shard Prime; out in the boonies where I was, we had weekly communications and scans from the shards, but they weren't as intense as the defenses the actually important shards got.

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Alien