Allowing a moment to pass, I cleared my throat and started in on the real discussion.

  "The reason I asked about your memory was that something occurred during our fight, and I wasn't entirely certain if you had meant for it to happen or not."

  Her eyebrows slid closer together, and I continued.

  "A blood-red sigil formed over your forehead, and you entered a semi-conscious state. You essentially went berserk."

  Her eyebrows reversed course and shot up her forehead, and her eyes widened until they seemed like they would burst from their sockets.

  She looked absolutely terrified, and it unsettled me.

  "What's... wrong...?"

  I was worried I'd said something I shouldn't have.

  She was slowly shaking her head, her hands making their way up to her temples. As her fingers worked into her hair and I tried again.

  "I'm not sure what upset you, but whatever it is, we can work thr—"

  I was cut off as Armela bellowed at me in desperate hysteria.

  "You can't work through this!! You don't understand, Vita, it's a fucking curse ... fuck!!"

  She rocked in place, clearly battling a terrible mood spiral.

  "I should have suspected ... I should have fucking known ... all this time..."

  Her eyes darted around, seemingly picking through old memories with a new context. She was breathing heavily, on the verge of a panic attack.

  "Then explain to me, Armela! If I understand, then maybe there's something I can do to help you with it!"

  I tried to halt the nose dive Armela was taking—breaking into her frantic rambling.

  "I know you're upset, but please try to calm down and talk this over with me!"

  I had my hand on her forearm and attempted to make my tone as pleading and compassionate as I could—hoping to bring her back into a stable headspace.

  "I can't—I can't—I can't deal with this. I can't handle this. Everything is breaking. I'm breaking."

  The mania in her voice was escalating.

  "Fuck! Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck pleaaasseeee!! Anything but this! Not this fucking curse! Save me! Fuck, I don't want this! I hate this! Fuuuuuucckkkkkkk!"

  She screamed, clutching her hair. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut, and her jaw was clenched. It looked as though she was trying to prevent her head from exploding.

  I tightened my grip on her arm, which finally seemed to pull her out of her downward spiral, and she whipped her head to face me, teeth still bared. Her eyes were wild and unfocused, like she was swimming through the heart of every fear she had deep inside her mind.

  I tried once again to get through to her.

  "Armela, we're going to be okay. I'm right here. Let's figure this out."

  I slowly brought my other hand up and gently placed it on her shoulder.

  "I'm right here."

  Her eyes cleared, and she finally came back to reality.

  "Vita...."

  Her face contorted with so many emotions that I couldn't decipher everything she was feeling.

  There was pain, unimaginable pain, deep, harrowing sorrow, aching loss, a burning rage, but above all, there was terror. An endless, yawning, cavernous void of terror. As though if she moved a single inch, she'd tumble into it and never be found again.

  Something in my bearing must have finally sunk into her, because she suddenly flopped forward and wailed into my chest.

  It was the sort of crying you do when years of horrific memories suddenly surface all at once. The sort of gut-wrenching, rib-racking, muscle-clenching cries of agony that you can only experience after having your heart truly and utterly crushed.

  She had cried before, but compared to this, it had been like she'd stubbed her toe and needed to vent the minor frustration. This was a level of suffering I had never witnessed, let alone been party to.

  I held her gently, coursing a hand through her hair like I'd done before, knowing that I held a truly broken woman against me. Having finally lost her last thread of sanity to the cruelty of the world.

  This was not at all how I'd envisioned our talk going.

  Her claws tore through my vest as her body violently shook from the exertion of her sorrow.

  Eventually, I decided to simply lay her down, keeping her pressed tightly to my chest as we cuddled on the bedroll. I didn't speak, choosing to let this run its course before we continued.

  Apparently, I was altogether worse at interacting with people than I'd ever been as a human because I just couldn't for the life of me prevent this woman from bursting into tears.

  I understood that this wasn't directly my fault. But still felt guilty about it. I was closing in on a 1:1 cry-to-conversation ratio, and it was severely damaging my self-esteem.

  As the afternoon marched on, she slowly worked down into whimpers and sniffles.

  She didn't speak, or acknowledge my existence beyond simply clinging to me like a life preserver.

  Eventually she simply fell asleep, having completely exhausted herself in the flood of emotions. I supposed that meant our talk had been delayed slightly and pondered whether this had been the right path to take.

  Obviously, I couldn't have known how big of a landmine the berserk sigil would be, but allowing things to spiral like they had certainly hadn't brought me any closer to having my questions answered.

  I considered this from Armela's side, though. She had been slowly warming up to me over the past day; encouraging her emotions and providing her with a stable source of compassion and security had gone a long way in getting her to lower her guard.

  The simple fact that she had clung to me as she lamented spoke volumes about her comfort level with me now. Giving her an opportunity to finally vent all of her built-up pain and sorrow was potentially much more beneficial than pressing her for information.

  She wouldn't be out cold for too long a time anyway, considering she'd already spent a good portion of the morning unconscious.

  This situation was also aiding me in establishing the fact that I was dedicated to investing both my time and attention into her. Bolstering the understanding that I was willing to provide her not only with the strength she immediately desired but also a companionship she had been without for an incredibly long time.

  Regardless of what form that companionship would take, she would no doubt come to think of me as someone to rely on when she needed it, and that would be invaluable if she were to help me on my conquest.

  I figured this was as good a time as any to tackle how I would go about changing her body, seeing as she was unconscious.

  If discovering the sigil had put her through this amount of turmoil, I could only assume it amounted to something akin to a death sentence. And that was nothing but bad news for me if I wanted her to continue this journey with me. So, the immediate priority would be to prevent that from being an issue in the future.

  Obviously, she would need to consent to whatever changes I ultimately concocted, and fully understand what it would mean to do them to her.

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  I was planning to offer this to her as an option before, but now it seemed like it might be necessary in order for her to continue living, let alone take up the mantle of being my comrade.

  Gaining her approval for the changes would be the critical point; without that, I would need to think of some other way of disrupting the 'curse' as she had called it.

  Next, I needed to figure out how to go about making the physical changes. I considered giving her an exosuit, or some sort of modified combat armor; but that would still leave her a squishy, vulnerable, weak bag of meat underneath.

  I didn't want her to end up falling ill, or contracting cancer, or starving, or dying to a bullet to the head. Ultimately, I needed to remove her ability to die.

  I could produce the parts for her like I did with the spider miner, but that didn't feel right to me. The parts would seem... dead, inanimate, not at all suited for a living, thinking, feeling being.

  I supposed, then, the most appropriate option would be to simply give her part of my body. Or rather, give her the same body I had.

  I would turn her existing body into a living 'Ship of Theseus'—slowly swapping out her organic cells for my own, nanoscopic robots.

  By letting it happen over days, it would hopefully save her from the shock of losing her lungs, or stomach, or her heart.

  Once her body had been converted over to the new 'cells', she would be capable of shaping herself as she desired. Once she got the hang of it, at least.

  There wasn't much I could do so far as her brain went; those functions would need to be maintained by the robots as I did not possess the omnipotent, omniscient capability to create another miracle star like the one my core had been formed into.

  While her thoughts and reaction time would receive an exponential boost from the Lightspeed transmission of information, she would not be capable of layering her thoughts, or calculating vast amounts of information like I was.

  But this didn't entirely mean that she would be without special benefits either. With the digital nature of information storage conducted by the small robots, she would gain access to the same photographic recall I had, and with the ever shifting sea of cells at her disposal, it would still be possible for her to learn and forge new memories.

  Albeit at a faster and more accurate pace than normal humans. If she lived long enough, it would be possible for her to attain the same level of knowledge I did, but her ability to perceive the world would only ever be limited to a single plane of computation.

  Routing stimulus into hundreds of millions of different channels to effectively grind reality to a halt would be forever outside her ability.

  Once the transformation had fully run its course, I was fully confident there would be no entity on this planet capable of challenging her in any capacity. Which I believed would fall well within the outline of her initial request of becoming stronger.

  While she couldn't be made into one of Mechanriel's Reforged, like I had been, she very much could find her place as the first of my Technological Acolytes — Technolytes?

  The First Technolyte Armela. That didn't sound half bad, actually.

  Basically, the way I would swing this would be that after a robot 'cell' had entered her body, it would find the next spot in the sequence of robots and simply replace the existing cell at that point.

  All of her bodily functions would remain active as the robots would fill the role of the replaced cell initially. Once every cell had been swapped, then they could reorganise into any shape or form Armela willed them to.

  I would essentially hand off control of them to her. As for power, that was where my explanation to her needed to be absolutely clear. She would get every ounce of her power directly from me.

  If anything were to happen to me, or I chose to cut off her supply of power for any reason whatsoever, she would simply... shut off. She wouldn't 'die', at least not in the traditional sense. If power were ever restored to her, then she would simply wake back up.

  But since I'd have the robots linked directly to my core, it would take another Reforged to rekindle her life.

  Basically, in agreeing to become my Technolyte, she would become mine, placing her life and existence solely in my hands for the rest of her forever time.

  While I could promise her I would never use that power against her, there wasn't truly any way for that to be enforced or upheld beyond me simply keeping my word.

  I hoped that our interactions so far had done enough to show her I was only ever going to be interested in helping her lead a happy life, but for how much the woman had cried around me I had my doubts about that.

  For a warrior, she seemed to be rather quick to tear up. I supposed she had just gone through some of the most traumatic events someone could go through, so that was reasonable.

  I looked down at her sleeping face; her eyes were swollen and red-rimmed. Even as she breathed softly in and out, the pained look on her face was hard to stomach.

  It made me reminisce about my time with Ava. The warm moments spent floating across our God's hazy heart, arms around each other, laughing or arguing over this or that, her critiquing every minute aspect of how I carried myself.

  Poking fun at my awkwardness or slapping my ass while commenting on how, if I hadn't had that, I'd have been sent back to the irradiated waste of my planet.

  I missed her.

  I missed how her hair felt, snapping and crackling across my skin with electrical discharges, concentrated data streams arching from the strands across the rich digital atmosphere of my Gods core and shooting along my arms and chest.

  Everything about her had been designed from the ground up to appeal to me. And she had absolutely nailed her purpose.

  I looked towards the open hole at the top of the tent and wondered if she was somewhere beyond the great blue expanse above me, looking down on my sappy self and groaning inwardly over how pathetic I was being.

  I shrugged up at the sky.

  "The fuck are you gonna do about it... biiiiiiiiitch."

  I smiled. That most certainly was going to earn me some form of ass-whooping.

  And it would be so, so worth it.

  Armela mumbled, rubbing her nose against my chest and snuggling in closer before her deep, subconscious mind must have realised that whatever was happening to her body wasn't normal.

  Wrapped up as she was in my arms, she probably interpreted that to mean she was being dragged away by more kidnappers.

  She went from a deep sleep to scrambling away from me in less than a heartbeat. Naturally, I immediately released her, raising my palms up in an 'I mean you no harm' gesture before speaking.

  "Eaassssyyyyy Armela, whoa there—breathe, just breaaaaathe. Think calmly now."

  She was panting hard, and it took her a second to get a bearing on where she was and what was happening.

  "What were you doing? Also, don't fucking.... talk to me like I'm some startled animal... it pisses me off."

  She was assessing me like a potential threat as she attempted to get her breathing back under control.

  Well, that was encouraging; discourse was better than frantic wailing.

  "Duly noted, people-talk from now on. Also, I did nothing... or at least I did nothing crude. You... well, you had a bit of an episode there, for a bit. I was simply lying with you to comfort you."

  She looked around the tent again; she seemed to be much more focused than before the involuntary nap. It looked like warrior Armela had come back to handle things.

  "Yeah, I had gathered that much, dumbass. I meant, why were you doing that? Most folk would have been a few hours down the road by now, putting as much room as they could between themselves and the fucking crazy woman."

  I crinkled my nose and shook my head slightly as I replied.

  "Well... first of all, you aren't crazy."

  She scoffed and rolled her eyes at that.

  "Second of all—because I actually care about you, and didn't want to abandon you like that?"

  I tried not to sound annoyed by her accusations and self-deprecation.

  "Or maybe it's because whatever it is you were worried was happening to you wasn't a threat to me."

  I crossed my arms, falling back into a fairly mundane tone to emphasize the lack of urgency I was feeling.

  "Or maybe it's because I believe I can help you through whatever it is you're suffering from. Take your pick; they're all equally true."

  She hesitated at that, then shook her head.

  "Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I'm the fucking head priest of Rel. No one can be that selfless, especially to some batshit, part-time, half-assed mercenary like me."

  She jabbed a finger in my direction.

  "What's your angle, Vita, and don't fucking tell me it's 'nothing' because that's horseshit and we both know it."

  She was right; there was absolutely a selfish component to this. There had always been, and she'd known that from the start, I'd outright told her that serving my God came before all else.

  She was clearly suffering from some pretty severe emotional whiplash and wanted me to rip the band-aid off to prove to her that the world was still just as shit as it had always been.

  Or, she really had woken up in dreamland and somehow Prince Charming had come riding down from the heavens to sweep her off her feet.

  Armela was practically daring me to ruin her fantasy. She wanted to believe I wasn't there for her. She absolutely hated the idea that it might be true, but she desperately wanted me to say it was.

  I could hear it in her voice and see it clearly spelled out in her eyes. 'Do it, fucking tell me the truth, you bastard. Fucking prove you're some asshole selling snake oil. Tell me you're selling a dream.'

  Silently, I apologized to Armela in my mind.

  I needed her with me on this one, so reality would just need to sit the fuck down for now.

  "Armela, why, exactly, do you think I've spent the better part of a day specifically trying to get to know you better? Do you honestly believe that if I'd wanted something from you other than you, I wouldn't have just taken it?"

  I opted to lace my words with a slightly ominous tone. Inducing the thought of our earlier conversation, in which I outlined my agency.

  "Do you really believe that I would need to go through the trouble of making you food, listening to your stories, coming up with plans to strengthen you, and accepting you into my God's service if there was something other than you I wanted?"

  Her expression was faltering now; she hadn't expected to be questioned like this.

  "W-well, no, but—"

  I cut in.

  "No, no 'buts'. There's absolutely no good reason for me to do any of that if it weren't simply for your sake. What's so difficult to grasp about this scenario for you?"

  I hated that I was gaslighting her like this, but considering she believed she was an unwanted woman on the brink of an unavoidable death, it was for her benefit.

  "Is it really so hard to believe that I just... want you? That I find you interesting, talented, kind-hearted, and yes, even beautiful?"

  She blustered at that, partially embarrassed and partially flattered.

  "Remember, you came to me looking for acceptance, and when the opportunity to turn you away was presented, I took you in with open arms."

  She was losing ground quickly, questioning why she'd doubted me, but her instincts were strong and I could see that she was warring over the feeling that I just wouldn't have done this without gaining something from her.

  And while it was true that I wanted her, I also wanted what she could do for me. So I'd feed her a partial truth.

  "You wanna know what my selfish reason is? This shady 'thing' I want to get from you?"

  The defensive look reentered her eyes but she couldn't hide her look of interest. She was taking what I said as truth. Good.

  "It's you, Armela. You're the thing I'm selfishly trying to get from you. That's my big secret—the horrible, cruel truth of my ultimate scheme."

  Her jaw unhinged for a second, flapping soundlessly as she fought to muster words.

  She'd maybe thought I was buttering her up for information, or maybe for her to lead me somewhere, or help with the next group to visit the camp before sending her off, but I could see she hadn't seriously considered that I would work so hard only to gain her as a companion.

  Sure, she'd offered to enter the service of my God, but even then she had fully expected to be rejected by me.

  Everything up to this point was flying in the face of every prior experience she'd had in her adult life, and it showed.

  "You... I mean... but you couldn't actually... want... me? I don't understand. I'm not special; I'm not even pretty."

  She looked down at her feet as she crossed an arm over her stomach protectively. Bashfully.

  "Fuck, Vita, I'm God-cursed, do you even understand? I'm broken. I'll be useless within a year or two. I'll be... reduced... to a savage, drooling animal."

  There wasn't so much sadness in her words as there was a forlorn hopelessness.

  "You just... can't look me in the eye and tell me you could still possibly want me. You'd have to be insane."

  I cocked my head at her.

  "Armela, I can assure you that I haven't even begun to show you the true depths of the insanity we're going to experience together."

  This, more than anything, struck her. Her eyes widened marginally, and her nostrils flared.

  "I'm nothing if not a man of my word. I have accepted you into my God's service as his arbiter, and I will tell you now, there are things I can, and have seen that would simply cause that pretty little head of yours to pop."

  I gently poked her forehead for emphasis.

  "I'll say it as many times as you need me to in order for you to believe that I want you."

  She threw her hands out to her sides.

  "So... what? You'll have a little 'devotee' for however long and then need to put me down like a rabid creature? And you're just... fine with that?"

  She was floundering now, well outside of her comfort zone.

  "You'll go to all the trouble just for that? I'm going to fucking die! Don't you get that? I'm... I'm going to die, Vita."

  I coughed lightly into my hand and looked at her through my eyebrows.

  "Well... about that, actually. I would really rather you did not. So I'll be robbing death of the satisfaction of claiming you, at least, for as long as I live."

  To which I quickly added.

  "And as long as you agree to it, of course."