As I stood over the sobbing boy and the bodies of the people who I now knew were his relatives, I found myself temporarily paralyzed. There was a conflict between my mind and the insidious thoughts that my body was producing. My mind, rightly, was confused. What is he doing? I wondered as I watched the boy curl up into a quivering mass, I could understand his fear, but is this some type of suicide? What kind of useless practice is this? I understood cowardice, even rational unwillingness to fight, but the display of pure weakness in front of me was neither.

On the other hand, my body was trying to signal something else. There was tightness in my chest, more of the prickly and hot energy that I had experienced a few minutes before, and something similar to the physiological reactions of sadness and fear. It seemed caught between its own group of contrasting instincts as well, half of it trying to compel me to flee and the other half to approach the boy. It's afraid that someone will hear this outburst, I reasoned, it wants me to flee before more humans arrive or do something to mitigate the risk of this child bringing more to us. It wasn't exactly rational behavior since I was decently sure that nobody else was nearby. Sucking in a breath I turned around and left the boy there, hoping that he would complete his self-destruction without my intervention.

I entered my cabin and lit the lantern with the last bits of my magical strength, then fell to my knees on the floor as my physical strength gave out suddenly. My legs would no longer support me and trying to move them resulted in nothing but twitching and pain. Checking my heads-up display, I could see that I wasn't doing well. I had lost nearly one-fifth of my blood, my purple bar was nearing empty, and the blue energy storage bars were all below one-sixteenth full, and the empty top bar was not refilling. Even my nutrient bars are bad, I groaned to myself, seeing that the regeneration had sucked up a large amount of my stores. I stopped suppressing my urge to cough and ended up spewing blood from my lungs all over the floor in front of me, then tilting and falling to my right as my body ran out of power. I have to get up! I yelled at myself, I can't afford to rest, not yet and not in this place! My blinks were taking longer and longer, then I felt a familiar lurch as my eyes shut again.

When I came to I felt as though I was being smothered by something, and my eyes were stinging horribly. I breathed in deeply, then burst into a coughing fit as pain shot through my left lung. With a groan I reached back with my left hand and pulled something sharp and wooden out from between my ribs, then my nose told me what was going on. In a panic, I grabbed as much of the food from the house as I could before pushing up against the door, which had been blocked from the outside. The heat inside the house was unbearable and smoke was seeping in from every crack. I tried kicking at the windows, finding them blocked as well, though less effectively than the door was. I'm not dying in a burning shack after all this! I seethed, ripping my hatchet from my belt and swinging it as hard as I could at the front window shutter.

I had to eat while working my way out. I couldn't even taste the food because of all the smoke in the air, and every second that passed made breathing harder. The feeling of suffocation was growing worse, and I quickly understood why. As I chopped and hacked away the wood on the shutter flames licked inward at me, charring my hands and threatening to light my axe on fire. I could see that the window hadn't been so much barred as boarded up hastily, which gave me an idea. I knelt down low, taking several deep breaths which, while probably mostly carbon dioxide, still had more breathable oxygen in them than the air at head-level which was being sucked up into the fire on my roof.

I roared with effort, running from my bed towards the window and throwing all of my weight into a double-footed dropkick at it. Wood splintered and shattered, some shards embedding themselves into my legs, and I fell through the window by half a meter or so. My feet were now fully in the fire and the pain was hard to ignore, but with extreme effort I pushed myself up and dumped the rest of my body out of the burning cabin. I landed directly in the fire, then scampered forwards before the rest of my body could be cooked to a crisp. My first gulps of fresh air were almost enough to knock me out again. My vision and hearing fizzled as they both adapted to proper levels of oxygen again, but thankfully I had expected the sensation and clung to consciousness.

Of course it can only oxygenate itself through the lungs, I grumbled about my body as my head throbbed, it's designed to meet a creator human spec, it wouldn't have selectively permeable membranes woven into the skin like normal. At least I figured it out before I lost consciousness again. I had suspected that my lungs were doing more work than I gave them credit for a few times in the past, but the fire confirmed it for me. Worse still, somehow the oxygen I was taking in was also needed to allow me to move and think, unlike most of the bodies I had used. I flipped over, staring up at what was now a morning sky, and kept breathing as deeply as I could. The idea that some people might have been around popped into my head, but by the time it did I had been laying on the ground for several minutes, making the possibility exceedingly unlikely. They just set fire to it and left, I thought as I coughed up dark tar and bile, spitting them onto the grass beside me, amateur mistake, someone should always be left behind to observe.

After I had sufficiently recovered from near-suffocation I leaned upwards into a sitting position and looked around. My cabin was still crackling with flames, now completely engulfed, but aside from that there was nothing much to look at. In my panic to escape I had forgotten to go back and get the food that remained inside, so it was being incinerated with the rest of the belongings I had that were not strapped to my person. Looking down at myself I saw that my clothing was in complete tatters, bloodstains and burns covering so much of it that the original brown colors were less common than rust-red and black. I took another breath, then noticed how badly my mouth was craving water and stood up to walk to the creek and make a plan.

Behind my cabin, the remains of the battle had been partially cleaned up. Each body was removed, though the bloodstains on the ground remained, and there was no sign of Mihvay. Oddly, there was a chair some distance from the back window of the cabin which was empty. Was that there last night? I wondered hazily, my suspicion being washed away by new waves of pain arising in my forehead. Need water, I thought, water first, then I'll figure out the rest. I walked to the creek and didn't even bother to remove my clothing before stepping into it and letting the cool water wash over my body. I submerged my head and gulped down full mouthfuls of the liquid, savoring it as it soothed my flesh and relieved the pains of dehydration.

I stepped out of the water soaking wet, but feeling much better than before. My purple bar was now two-thirds full, my blue storage bars were nearing two-fifths, and my blood had recovered during my rest. Nutrient-wise I wasn't in the best shape, but that was far from my prime concern. The normal sharpness returned to my thoughts, and I focused them on what to do next. I need to get out of this village fast, I thought, they're going to know I didn't die in that fire quickly, and I can't fight the entire remaining population. Mentally making a map of where the paths were I found the fastest route to the east road out of the village. Technically the best route would have been a straight line but that was untenable, so the next best route crossed through several farming fields. With one final gulp of fresh water, I set out to leave Suwlahtk.

When I emerged from the woods again I saw a man sitting in the chair, watching the now dying fire consume my cabin. Where was he five minutes ago? I wondered as I stopped low to the ground. The man was dressed in a guard uniform and facing away from me, clearly relaxed as he slouched in his seat. I drew my knife, crept up behind him silently, then shoved the blade up into his skull to sever his brainstem as I had done with Dayvao. The man barely twitched as the knife severed his mind from the rest of his body. I twisted the blade around periodically, spending around two minutes waiting for more humans to arrive, but none came. I removed the knife once I was satisfied that there were no signs of regeneration, and after a quick wipe I re-sheathed it then examined the corpse.

The man was the one who I had trained with a few days prior. I hadn't asked for his name before killing him so I didn't know it was him for certain for sure, but his face appeared to be the same. After checking around me for more humans again, I took off my gear and stripped my clothing, tossing it into the fire behind me. A few minutes later I had stolen the man's clothes, which mostly fit me except for some tightness in the chest and the legs of the pants being too short. Satisfied, I tossed the corpse into the fire as well, opting to throw my sword inside and take the one I had given to him with me since it was less damaged.

I crossed the fields, ducking between plants to avoid the eyes of the farmers and other humans as I did so. Suwlahtk was not particularly large but the rate at which I was moving as quite slow because of my need for stealth. Soon enough I had reached the road out of town, and I took one look back at the collection of buildings to see if anyone was following me. I need to get moving, I thought, it's practically a miracle already that they haven't sent out a hunting party after me. My body once again forced some kind of instinct towards me, but I wasn't nearly tired enough to be unable to suppress it.

I moved at a brisk pace along the forest path, my mind occupied with thoughts as I navigated and kept an eye out for foodstuffs and other resources. I couldn't stop thinking about the fight I had just been in, and the events that had taken place during it. The rage, I thought, where did the rage come from? Being more awake and rational I could now recognize the symptoms of my outburst at Vowteyz as a classic form of rage. I didn't want to do that though, I thought with gritted teeth, it would have been better to keep a cool head. If he was any more skilled with a sword, or even a bit stronger, it would have been the end of me. Once again I felt fear in my body, though faintly, at the thought of what could have happened. It took me over completely, I thought, it was like I was watching a full sensory replay of another being piloting my body. All just because of some pain. When did I even start thinking of it as pain?

Malfunction. Defective. Corrupt. Words that I had heard many times during my existence kept popping into my head as I walked uphill on the winding forest path. Infiltration units like myself were very efficient, but due to the structure of our minds we were prone to maladaptive behaviors. Habit could easily become compulsion, and for some units it did. What was once simply a mimicry of human behavior became a full recreation of it, leading to cascading issues with performance and ultimately, either the destruction of the unit by enemy hands or its capture. In rare cases units could defect.

To prevent any of these three occurrences infiltration units were monitored continuously and backed up frequently. At any sign of malfunction regression analyses were run to determine which sensory inputs could have caused the issue, and then “pruning” began. Units deemed to have been contaminated, which is to say units that had not yet showed malfunction but were subject to sensory input which could cause it for their subtree, were sent out on fake missions and other units were sent out on missions to decommission them. I myself had forcibly decommissioned dozens of other infiltration units, and my subtree was considered one of the more stable ones. Still, as I thought about what I had experienced, I couldn't help but wonder if that stability was beginning to break down.

It was compassion, I thought as I pictured Mihvay curled into a ball, this body pitied the boy. A primal disgust, this time arising from my mind and not my body, translated itself into a scowl on my face.