Taking over Scion 2

Fortunately, I'd been absorbing energy for seventy years, and I gained more when I broke up the shards I devoured, even if I mostly converted it into more mass.

My second shard wasn't as slow as my first. I had more confidence in myself, and I worked more quickly. When the next scan came, there were two of me hoping to remain unseen, and when we were ignored, the two of me began working on two more.

It was only a matter of time before we were discovered; I had to be ready because Scion had shards that worked like an immune system.

Most often they simply scanned us, but occasionally they came to physically examine shards. They drifted through the sea of their brothers in a seemingly aimless path, but one that gave them the maximal observation abilities over a period of years.

By the time a seeker shard came by physically, there were sixty four of me physically.

Most shards, at least in this area weren't all that aware of what was going on around them. They depended on the others to protect them while they went about their work. No one here was busy giving out abilities to humans; those shards were all concealed in their own universes, separated from the body as another layer of protection.

So when the shard physically arrived, we swarmed it and subsumed it much more rapidly than any of the others before, and once I'd replaced it, my senses suddenly expanded greatly. I could sense what the shards in the sea of flesh around me could do, what they should look like, and what anomalies to look for in a damaged shard. There were shards designed to help repair shards that weren't too badly damaged, and I was able to summon them at need.

***

Alien