My Only Familiar Is Me[A Late-Blooming Evolution Story]

The artificial sun inside the portal blazed mercilessly, baking the alien jungle beneath a blanket of thick, suffocating heat. The air smelled of rotting vegetation and burned rubber. I stood over what had been a living enemy soldier barely a minute ago, calmly taking in every detail.

There was almost nothing left of the nameless warrior from the Loz’an tribe. The first compressed S-Power blast had taken his head clean off, leaving nothing but a ragged stump where his neck had been. The second had blown open his chest and torn away an arm. Yet for creatures built the way they were, they were astonishingly hard to kill. Pieces of the body scattered across the ground still twitched, convulsed, and struggled to crawl somewhere, leaving thick, slimy streaks across the purple grass.

Their blood was essentially a liquid brain distributed throughout their rubberlike bodies. It took a long, agonizing minute for enough of that thinking substance to drain into the mud before the creature finally lost what remained of its cognitive functions. It simply forgot how to move, every instinct and memory fading away with the escaping fluid. Another minute later, clinical death finally claimed it.

The sight was fascinating.

I was not a sadist, and I had never taken pleasure in another creature’s suffering. Years of dull office work had trained me to observe with detached precision. This was nothing more than professional curiosity. On Earth, living organisms died differently, predictably. Here, the rules were something else entirely.

The most effective way to kill a Loz’an was either to drain its body of as much fluid as possible in the shortest time imaginable or, as Danny preferred, literally boil its synaptic fluid inside its shell. That was exactly why the quartermasters had issued us nothing but S-Guns. Ordinary lead rounds, even high-caliber ones, would simply bounce off their elastic hides. Even armor-piercing ammunition capable of punching through that rubbery flesh would accomplish very little because the tissue would seal around the wound almost instantly, trapping the liquid brain inside.

”Listen up, platoon,” Leon ordered as he holstered his tactical tablet after logging the corpses’ coordinates for the recovery detail. The colonel’s voice was flat and hard. ”The easy part’s over. We’re at war now. We’ve lost the element of surprise, and every Loz’an reserve they can spare is heading this way. Trust me, they’re not gonna take it easy on you. They’re coming in swinging. So I expect every one of you to give me everything you’ve got.”

The platoon fell silent, hanging on every word. The thrill of our first successful skirmish had vanished without a trace, replaced by the heavy certainty that something far nastier was waiting ahead.

”Our best move is to keep pushing forward,” Leon said, sweeping his gaze across the canopy. ”If we stop, we become perfect targets for an airstrike. Same rules as before. Save your S-Power until we make contact. Once the shooting starts, you’ll burn through energy like water down a drain, so make every drop count. First squad, sweep the perimeter along our route. Second squad and the rookies, keep your eyes up. These bastards love high-altitude jumps and ambushes from the upper canopy. You know the drill. Stay sharp, and you’ll make it back to base on your own two feet. Move out!”

We pushed deeper into the emerald jungle, cutting our way toward the aliens’ command post. The creatures had left plenty of traps behind, and the colonel had no intention of wasting time on careful mine clearance. The scouts in the first squad handled them the simple way. They tossed branches and rocks ahead to trigger whatever was waiting. Every now and then, one of them deliberately tripped a wire after cranking his tactical shield to full power. It chewed through our S-Power reserves and made enough noise to wake the dead. My ears were still ringing with the hideous, teeth-rattling screech of razor wire grinding uselessly against energy shields. Still, we were making incredible time, moving at least five times faster than we otherwise could have.

”Pretty standard once they’ve spotted us and all that’s left is a full-on assault,” Danny said from a few paces ahead. He casually looked around with the relaxed expression of a guy out on a Sunday picnic. ”Speed’s your best friend when you’ve got fresh coordinates. Dude, if I wasn’t babysitting the kindergarten squad, I’d already have kicked in the afterburners, flown over this whole damn jungle, and turned the place into one giant barbecue.”

”So without the rookies slowing you down, you clear portals a lot faster?” I asked, methodically checking every gap between the tangled branches. My neck was already starting to ache from constantly looking up.

”Oh, way faster, bro. It’s not even close!” Danny said, enthusiastically waving his free hand. ”With the newbies, you’ve gotta explain every little thing, show them where not to step. Otherwise we just tear through at full speed and blast every green face that sticks its head out. My personal best for clearing a portal is fourteen minutes and nineteen seconds. Man, that was beautiful.”

”Fourteen minutes? Seriously?!” Ted, walking to my left, stared so wide-eyed that his boot caught on a thick root, pitching him straight toward the mud.

I reacted without thinking. I caught the canister on his back before he hit the ground, hauled him upright, and planted him firmly on his feet.

”Get it together, Ted,” I said quietly, my voice leaving no room for argument.

”Uh... yeah. Thanks, Tom. You saved me,” he muttered, swallowing hard as he straightened his crooked helmet. His eyes, though, were still blazing with almost manic excitement. ”But seriously? Fourteen minutes? Danny, come on, how’d you pull that off? That’s freaking insane!”

”Shut it, rookie!” a veteran from the first squad barked, spinning around at the noise. ”This isn’t your damn school playground!”

”Sorry...” Ted shrank back immediately, hunching his shoulders as he gripped his S-Gun with both hands.

I gave the soldier a quick, assessing look. Just an ordinary guy in his early twenties, nothing remarkable at first glance, but I made a point of remembering his face. With one sharp outburst, he had shattered the rose-colored glasses the Corps had worked so hard to keep on its recruits. Any illusion that this was some kind of summer camp with friendly counselors had died right there. Back in training, the instructors had handled the newcomers with kid gloves, protecting their fragile minds and carefully choosing every word. But inside a portal, where death could come from behind every other bush, nobody cared about hurt feelings. In the business of staying alive, only one thing had any value: pure efficiency.

Until then, every soldier I had met had been polite, even considerate. Now I understood why. It had simply been the Corps’ welcome package for rookies, and it expired the moment you made it through your first combat mission. Fine by me. Maybe once I was out of this sandbox, I would finally meet the battle-scarred veterans from the old war movies, the kind who used profanity the way everyone else used punctuation.

”Danny,” Ted called quietly, leaning forward a little. The kid clearly had no idea when to quit, especially when his fanboy curiosity got the better of him. ”Seriously... how do you clear a portal in just fourteen minutes?”

”No magic, kid.” Danny shrugged without even glancing back. ”Just good planning and a lucky break. First, the assault team. Half the squad were speed flyers with solid combat skills, guys like me. Second, the terrain. Nice, flat, dry plateau instead of this godforsaken jungle. We were able to bring in heavy tactical bikes. And to top it all off, the locals turned out to be complete pushovers.”

”Weaker than the Loz’an?” Ted’s eyes went wide. ”Who were they? I don’t remember hearing about them in xenobiology.”

”They’re gone. Extinct. And that’s enough with the questions.”

For the first time since we had met him, Danny’s easygoing grin disappeared completely. In an instant, the seasoned professional had replaced the carefree guy everyone liked.

”Colonel Stewart’s right. Playtime’s over,” he said, his voice hard. ”Keep your mouth shut and stay focused. Your only job right now is to keep your finger on the shield trigger and activate it the second you hear so much as a twig snap. Lose even one second, and you’ll be going home in a zinc coffin.”

The words hit harder than a slap across the face. Ted straightened up immediately. The starstruck look vanished from his face as he stiffened like the fate of the entire mission depended on his posture.

”Contact! Enemy, twelve o’clock!” Leon bellowed into the tactical radio, though his booming voice carried across the jungle just fine on its own. ”Everybody, activate your shields...”

He never got to finish the order. The world came apart around us in the next instant.

Real war had nothing in common with elegant duels between noble warriors, brilliant games of tactical chess, or the battles of genius that web novels loved to glorify. It definitely was not like grinding mobs in an MMORPG, where you always had a health bar and predictable attack patterns.

It was deafening, filthy, chaotic, and impossible to process.

In the blink of an eye, the world around us turned into hell. Explosions battered my ears, the air filled with the stench of scorched flesh and chemicals, someone was screaming over the radio, the ground lurched beneath my feet, and the surrounding brush erupted into flames. Most people would have frozen in that kind of chaos and died before they understood what was happening. I would have done the same if my internal safeguard had not kicked in.

[Tactical Mode Activated]

A familiar icy chill spread through my body. My brain accelerated to impossible speeds, dragging my perception of time along with it. The world slowed to a crawl, nearly freezing in place, while my mental projection slipped free of my physical body and drifted several yards into the air, giving me a perfect bird’s-eye view of the battlefield.

Loz’an attack craft skimmed over the treetops, their silhouettes resembling massive silver window frames. Their fluid, elastic physiology let them throw their aircraft through maneuvers that would have turned any human pilot into pulp. They had opened the battle with a supersonic flyby, blanketing our position with cluster munitions loaded with highly corrosive acid.

My eyes swept across the battlefield, checking the squad’s status, especially Ted and Mary. Fortunately, Leon’s years of experience had saved us. Thanks to his perfectly timed warning, every soldier had managed to deploy an energy dome. Danny had already reacted. A roaring spear of fire burst from his palm toward the retreating aircraft, automatically locking onto the heat signatures and lingering engine trails. Smart move. Veteran instincts never faded.

The real danger, however, was coming from the ground. Loz’an infantry charged straight at us, tearing paths through the undergrowth on futuristic unicycles. Their anatomy let them ignore headwinds, crushing G-forces, and every limitation of a human sense of balance. They rode as though fused to their machines. As they closed in, long-barreled weapons swept our position with dense curtains of laser fire. Within Tactical Mode’s frozen moment, I could clearly see several violet beams already on target. One of them was hissing against my own energy shield.

This was bad. Loz’an acid had terrifying corrosive power, and while we stayed under our shields, it was chewing through our S-Power reserves at an alarming rate. The laser barrage only accelerated the process, melting away our defenses.

Their commander clearly knew how to think several moves ahead. At this rate, our shields would fail in two minutes. Even if we wiped out this wave, the next one would hit us after our reserves had been drained completely. We would be standing there with nothing left. Now I understood exactly what Leon had been warning us about. This problem had to be solved immediately.

The [Tactical Mode] timer mercilessly counted down its final fractions of a second. I completed a rapid assessment of the enemy force: nineteen Loz’an infantry, not counting the aircraft overhead. But what was the optimal response? Spray fire in every direction and hope for a lucky hit? Pointless. There were already plenty of cowboys doing exactly that. I did not have Danny’s arsenal of homing, area-of-effect abilities.

That left only one card to play. Max out my brain’s processing power, hand control over to the system itself, and let the algorithm produce the mathematically perfect solution to this lethal trigonometry problem.

[Special Command: Eliminate all Loz’an within this sector.]