Watching the Shattered tear into the Undead was quite interesting. I hadn’t really considered how two serious brutes would fight, neither of them showed any obvious pain, nor did it look like their rapidly accumulating injuries were slowing them down, beyond the purely physical stuff. Once the Shattered managed to tear off the Undead’s arm, the Undead wasn’t swinging it around but even when the Undead managed to break the Shattered’s leg to the point that it was visibly deformed, the Shattered could continue to fight without issue. Clearly, their physical bodies, including bones and such, were just tools, puppeted by the magical energies flowing through them.

Somehow, that made me feel a little better about my actions. If the Shattered were nothing but puppets, controlling them with magic didn’t feel wrong. They were, after all, already controlled by magical means, so I only exchanged the controller from whatever force had originally animated them to myself. It made me wonder if Lia had been some sort of special case, if I had merely been in time before the remnants of the person she used to be had left or if every Shattered held the remains of a deeply buried person within. It wasn’t something I enjoyed considering, if only because I had killed hundreds of Shattered by now, but it was something I wondered about. As did Lia, for obvious reasons.

She, together with Alex, had done some quiet and very private experiments with Shattered, experiments I wasn’t really supposed to know about, trying to create more vampires. So far, she hadn’t asked me for my advice, which is why I respected her privacy, even as I wondered why my daughter was so stubborn. Not that I truly knew a way to help her, but I had managed to create her, possibly by a stroke of cosmic luck, so shouldn’t I be considered the authority in that regard? Similarly, I had managed to help with Alex, at least to a point, and we had created a companion for her. Maybe that was just part of growing up, that she was trying to find her own path and make her own friends. Only, she went about it a lot more literal than it was usually the case.

My musings were interrupted by the destruction of the Undead, the Shattered ripping off its head with a fairly sickening sound, before dropping the mess in the street. Moments later, the Shattered stilled, freezing completely to an unnatural degree, before it started to sniff the air, carefully searching the area. I had a feeling it was trying to find me and tightened down the concealment magic hiding me, pulling Shadows and Wind tightly around me so no hint of my presence could escape.

The Shattered’s strange behaviour didn’t last long, just a few minutes, before it moved back to its original position, acting as if nothing had happened. In the meantime, I had checked my log and found that I would have gained EXP for the destruction of the Undead but the level difference was simply too big, making the fight trivial. At the same time, I began to wonder if the Shattered had gained any EXP, or if it merely counted as a weapon I wielded, and thus not worthy of EXP, just like my frozen Shuttles didn’t gain their own share of EXP.

Sadly, I couldn’t walk up and ask the Shattered, well, I could but I doubted I’d get an answer I could understand. However, regardless of the EXP situation, the test was quite a successful one. I now knew that I could imbue commands into a Shattered and the Shattered would follow them, though there were a lot of details I needed to work out. Details, like the possible complexity of the commands, how long they could last, if there was a way for others to realise that the Shattered wasn’t acting by its own will, whatever that might mean, and a host of others. Just knowing that the Shattered’s eye flames took on the colour of my eyes for a moment when I gave a command was worthy of notice, as it might give away the game if I had to command a Shattered when others were watching. My eyes were fairly distinctive, so I couldn’t be confident nobody would notice if a Shattered suddenly matched my eye colour. Especially given that Luna, Lia and I all had something going on with our eyes, adding another point to a forming pattern.

No, any commanding I wanted to remain unnoticed needed to be done beforehand, out of sight, and, if at all possible, long-term. Some sort of plan or scenario for the Shattered to act out, but there, I ran into the previous question, how detailed could I make my orders and how long would they last?

Did the Shattered continue fighting against the Undead because they were simple creatures and would continue a fight until one of them was dead or the enemy had fled or did they continue their battle because the command remained?

Clearly, more investigation was needed. So, for science, I repeated my earlier actions, weaving together Mind and Death Magic, trying to insert a command into the Shattered. This time, I didn’t command it to fight, instead I commanded it to climb, focusing on a nearby building. It wasn’t a high one, nor were the walls terribly sturdy, meaning the Shattered should be able to climb it if it was motivated.

Again, just like before, I could feel resistance from the Shattered, but a stronger resistance than before. I had to push myself a bit, channelling extra Astral Power as the Death Magic consumed some of my vitality, but I managed to force the command into the Shattered without exhausting myself. Hopefully, this would get easier with practice, or maybe it was easier to command a Shattered that hadn’t been commanded recently, or ever. Maybe they were building up some sort of immunity with repeated exposure or something like that.

But for now, the Shattered had to climb the building, while I was watching from my hideout. There was no skill involved as the Shattered climbed, it was quite similar to its fighting style. Strength, used with reckless abandon, allowed it to claw its way up the building, leaving a trace of old blood and damaged masonry. Curiously, once it was on top of the building, it froze once more, its body a little more damaged than it had been after the fight, and again, it seemed like it was trying to find something. Most likely me, if there was any sort of intelligence or instinct involved it had to realise that its actions had been influenced, though I couldn’t really tell just how intelligent it was.

To my surprise, the thing managed to focus on my position, though I had no idea how it managed to do. I should have been all but invisible, thanks to the dense shadows around me and trying to hear or smell me was similarly impossible, thanks to my Wind Magic. And yet, the thing focused on me and, with a suicidal leap, jumped off the building I had made it climb, trying to land on me. And, most likely, do horrible things.

I had no desire to have horrible things done to me, so I struck first, using Wind Magic to push it off course and have it smack into the ground instead of into me. Before it could ever get up, I launched my next attack, using Mind and Death Magic, just like I had earlier. Only, I wasn’t trying to push in a command, I simply overpowered a blast of Mind Magic, obliterating the thing’s mind with overwhelming force. The Death Magic was mainly along for flavour, adding that little bit of ending to the usually less-than-lethal Mind Magic. I had used the combination before and knew that it was potent, silent and quite subtle, meaning none of the Undead around had truly realised what was going on.

Their existence was a peculiar one and a part of me wished there were more people around with the time and interest to study these creatures, there was something about them, the way they repeated actions that most likely used to be part of their bodies’ routines, it was fascinating and unsettling at the same time. Sadly, I doubted there were many who saw them as anything but the desecrated bodies of former humans, something that needed to be laid to rest so the world could heal.

Either way, I now had a few fairly interesting data points for my plan, though many more needed to be established for it to work out. That meant, more experimentation was needed, carefully, spread out amongst different Shattered as it seemed that commanding allowed them to find me, even with my excellent stealth. Luckily, there were more than enough Shattered around and if nothing else, I could, and probably should, repeat my experiments on the Undead, too. Just to make sure. And for science.