Chapter Thirty-Five: The Synaptic Threshold and the Afterglow of Catastrophe
I cradled Crystal's doll-like body in my arms for what felt like a warped eternity — two minutes, precisely, by internal clock, though subjectively stretched by adrenaline, guilt, and the throbbing ambient pulse of the hivemind. She had yet to recover. Her borrowed vessel was limp, breathless, all too eerily still. I hadn't meant to do this. Not like this.
I'd touched her open psionic link — gently, reverently, lovingly. And that single contact had detonated through her entire local neural lattice like a thermal lance through silk. When my fingers passed through her incorporeal crown, she had received pleasure not unlike an orgasm — but fractalized, multiplied, smeared across the senses of thousands of bodies sharing her thoughtspace. A planetary climax. A synaptic supernova.
I didn't regret the intent. Only the magnitude.
"I-Irvine..."
A voice crackled into my mind through the psionic relay — cracked like glass and hot like static. I turned, recognizing the vocal signature even before the timbre stabilized.
"Kimchi!" I yelped aloud, pivoting on instinct. She was crawling toward me on hands and knees, wobbling like her bones had melted, leaving behind a glistening trail of clear liquid. Her entire form trembled with overstimulation.
"Kimchi, what happened? Are you alright? Is Crystal okay?" The questions tripped over each other like drunks on ice. My panic surged — irrational, yes, but emotion doesn't care about logic. It only knows loss.
"Orchid— no, Kimchi— is fine, my mate," she slurred with a half-giddy, half-pained wince. "The Queen is also fine. She… she had to abandon that body. Retreat to her prior one. Your touch caused a psionic overload — too much input. Too much love."
There was a pause in the link — an emotional breath. Then:
"Y-you really should have warned her before plunging into her open neural nexus like that, Irvine-love. The pleasure was so fucking intense, Kimchi still feels it in her teeth."
Relief slammed into me like a wave. My shoulders slumped. No damage — just disarray. No hurt — just too much ecstasy to metabolize in real time. I exhaled a long, ragged breath and gently laid Crystal's vacant vessel onto the warm, cracked floor.
"You sure you're alright?" I asked, already lifting Kimchi into my arms. Her legs had jellyfied beneath her.
"Mmmmh… Kimchi is recovering… slowly… but better now that she knows she can freely mate with her Irvine now," she purred, pressing her head against my chest with the smug heat of a satisfied cat.
I chuckled, brushing a kiss to her brow. "You're lucky I don't carry a stick, my dear. You're basking in post-hive-orgasmic bliss, and the only thing on your mind is when it's your turn. You're fucking incredible."
"Feeling your hand touch Kimchi's essence through the Queen's psionic cortex… it was divine," she whispered, her hand already slipping downward toward my groin. "But Kimchi would rather feel you directly. No middle-mind."
Seeing her revert to her typical libido-goblin self made me relax even further. The danger was past. The rest was just biology catching up. I let her go so she could try standing, and turned to retrieve Crystal's body. "Come on. Let's not leave her collapsed in the cold room. I'll carry her to my quarters — she'll be more comfortable waking there."
Kimchi pouted with theatrical exaggeration but didn't argue. As I lifted Crystal, Kimchi's eyes caught something on the floor — a glistening puddle, seeded and seeping through fractured tile.
"You coming?" I called.
"A-ah yes! Kimchi is coming right away! Just needs to order a few drones to clean the mess!" she called back, already tapping a command node embedded in her wrist.
I saw nothing odd about it — she commanded clean-up crews all the time — so I left her to her logistics.
Once I rounded the corridor and vanished from her visual cone, Kimchi dropped the pretense. Her gaze locked on the glimmering spillage of our earlier union — thick, fragrant, undeniably mine. Her tongue flicked over her lips, her irises dilating.
"A little snack wouldn't hurt..." she murmured, eyes gleaming with unrepentant hunger.
—
Back in my room, I laid Crystal's body on my bed, tucking her beneath the silky folds of the bio-woven blanket. I even summoned my bedbug — a small, affectionate arthropod — to nestle beside her, offering warmth and ambient psionic resonance. It wasn't much, but it felt like something.
Kimchi slithered in a few minutes later, humming with suspicious delight and taking a very large gulp of something she didn't explain. She plopped into my lap like a purring parasite.
I didn't ask what had made her so chipper. Intuition warned me I wouldn't like the answer.
Instead, I sat there quietly, processing.
I had just lost my virginity. To Crystal. The Queen. The god-mind who had adopted me, shaped me, reshaped entire ecosystems for my comfort.
But it hadn't felt like a milestone — not in the way stories make it seem. There had been no fanfare, no imaginary fireworks, no dramatic shift in cosmic gravity. It had felt… inevitable. Natural. As if we were merely following a script written in the marrow of existence.
And yet, worry gnawed at me.
She was fine — she was — alive and active in her other body. But the image of her limp form lingered like a bruise on my thoughts.
Kimchi noticed. Of course she did. She began grinding her hips against mine again — not subtle, not restrained, just pure want disguised as a "distraction."
Eventually, I sighed. "Okay, Kimchi, enough. I'm not in the mood. What happened with Crystal just… happened. It wasn't planned. It felt right, in the moment. Like our time in the pools. Natural."
Kimchi blinked, disappointment flickering, before smiling softly. "Of course, my Irvine. Kimchi would wait ten thousand years if it meant a single moment with you. But… the Queen's heat, when your hand touched her? That cascade of pleasure echoed across all bioforms. It's still unspooling inside us. Like psychic molasses."
I lifted her off my lap and stood.
"In that case, since Crystal's taking her time, how about a sparring match? Burn off some of that energy the old-fashioned way."
The moment I said it, Kiya stirred from her standby position. She shot toward me like a torpedo, nearly skewering Kimchi on her shimmering blade.
"Ohoho~ It seems your sword is as horny as I am," Kimchi teased, sidestepping the blade with dancer's grace. "Careful, or you'll end up impaling your loyal Kimchi from behind like some rude insect. No wonder that lesser queen was devoured by us — such predictable attacks."
Kiya's fuller flickered briefly — red-hot irritation — before cooling to blue again so fast it might have been imagined. I stroked her blade with a tenderness that made Kimchi visibly pout.
"Don't look down on us. We did fine in that last battle. Didn't we?" I whispered to Kiya.
"Now come. Grab your blades. We'll use the other room — more space, fewer breakable things."
Once there, I finally put on some pants. Because as funny as it would be to fight nude with my meat mace flailing like a distraction spell, I had no intention of testing Kimchi's restraint that hard. She treated our sparring sessions like sacred duels — not even a full-frontal helicopter maneuver could break her focus. Probably.
I opted to fight without my power armor, as always. First, I'd never needed it against Kimchi before. Second, her swordsmanship was terrifyingly precise — for a former five-meter-tall murder-bug, her technique was elegant as a song and twice as deadly.
She wore her full war-body — an exoskeletal horror of gleaming claws and built-in reflex nodes. I'd long since accepted that she preferred me to fight with lethal intent. Real lessons only land when there's real danger.
And yet, the most I'd ever managed was a half-suicidal lunge that sank Kiya's blade an inch into her stomach. In a real fight, she'd have gutted me mid-thrust.
I stretched, feeling my muscles coil and wake. Then, stepping close, I gave her one last kiss on the cheek — a token of peace before the coming violence.
A flash memory stabbed across my mind — Kimchi, drenched in blood after the Ker'min massacre, her eyes gleaming, her body dancing in the gore.
I shuddered.
And then I took my stance.
"Ready when you are, dear."