A/N: I'm warping reality a bit. I KNOW it's probably not possible to have recruited Grunt, Garrus, Mordin, Kasumi, Jack, AND managed to do Kasumi's loyalty quest before completing the Horizon quests. Deal with it.
Shepard stood grimly, meeting the eye of each of her crew. This was going to be big. The first time the Illusive Man had actually been helpful for once, instead of just holding back a key part that could possibly get them all killed.
Horizon had gone silent. The Collectors were on their way. And Shepard intended to put a stop to it all right here, right now.
Garrus nodded curtly when she looked his way, doing the turian equivalent of a smile, mandibles twitching. Grunt just pounded his fists together, eager for a real fight. Mordin was in his lab working out the "kinks" in his anti-seeker swarm thing. Jack hadn't bothered to show up, but Shepard couldn't bring herself to be surprised. Jacob and Miranda both looked professional and military. Well, Jacob looked military. Miranda looked like she was posing for a spandex commercial. Kasumi had clasped her hands together and grinned.
Alex, however, looked unimpressed. He glanced up at her from beneath his hood—he'd been inordinately relieved when he'd finally shed the suit and put on his original outfit again—and folded his arms.
"It's obviously a trap," Alex rolled his shoulders, not looking all that put off by the possibility. "What are we waiting for?"
Shepard nodded. It seemed too good to be true, but on the off-chance this info was solid, they could be saving thousands of human lives. "Joker—"
"Way ahead of you, Commander."
Shepard took a deep breath. This ends now.
Alex eyed the swarms of strange insects buzzing in massive groups just out of arm's reach. He doubted their toxin would be of much use against him, but he didn't want to have to save Shepard's ass if she gets herself stung.
"Mordin, you're sure these armor upgrades will protect us from the swarms?" Shepard's slightly nervous voice rang over the comm as she readied her sniper rifle.
"Certainty impossible. But in limited numbers should confuse detection." Mordin sounded far too cheerful to be talking about hiding from the enemy. "Make us invisible to swarms!" A pause. "In theory."
Alex hesitated mid-step. "In theory? Sucks to be you guys."
"Experimental technology," he apologized, not sounding at all apologetic. "Only test is contact with seeker swarms. Look forward to seeing if you survive!"
"Yeah, me too," Alex smirked. If he has to pull Shepard and Garrus' collective asses from the fire, he's ripping Mordin's other head thing off.
Alex had, of course, not had any armor to upgrade. Mordin had approached him with some kind of needle, and Alex had threatened to show him what color salarian organs were if he so much as poked him with it. Medicine—needles—and viruses did not mix. Shepard had tried to talk him into it, but Alex was adamant. His organic armor was more than he'd need.
He stepped away from Shepard and one of the seeker swarm bug things darted towards him, hovering awkwardly nearby, as if not sure what to do now that it was close to him. It landed on the arm holding his rocket launcher and tried half-heartedly to sting him. He didn't even feel it through his biomass armor, and grabbed it in his fist as it tried to fly away.
This thing could paralyze humans. Alex crushed it in his fist and felt it twitching uselessly. Experimentally, he called the tendrils to his hand and plunged them into the insect. Alien DNA was always more difficult to consume and assimilate than that of humans. Difficult, but not impossible. He'd gotten pretty good at finding the important parts in foreign anatomy and splicing them with his own over the years.
He opened his fist again and shook a leg from his fingers, the rest of the seeker pulled into his skin and consumed. As a bug, it held no workable memories, but he did manage to isolate the part of its genome that allowed it to produce a paralytic toxin. He grinned beneath his helmet. He could work with that; Alex filed the knowledge away for later.
Anything that gave him an edge was worth the trial and error process of mutating it to fit his own needs.
Shepard looked at him oddly and Alex just shrugged, readjusting his grip on the rocket launcher.
"Tastes like chicken," Alex smirked and Shepard just rolled her eyes, forging ahead with Garrus at her heels.
When Alex saw his first Collector, he couldn't help but wonder if the seeker he'd consumed was just a tiny version of the bigger ones. It looked like a bipedal insect with a roughly pyramid-shaped head, although the damn particle cannon it shot at him ripped through his armor and took a good chunk out of his shoulder.
"Damn it!" Alex barked, dashing behind some cover as his biomass reknit itself. He made a mental note not to stand in front of that again. It had stung like a bitch. He fired a blind shot over the cover with the rocket launcher, gratified when he heard a screech that indicated one of the bug things had gotten a face-full of shrapnel.
There were a lot of them, and they flew in like a bunch of pigeons, but none of the others had that particle cannon at least. When he was sure he wasn't going to get ripped apart again on a cellular level, he left his cover and turned himself in a veritable meat shield as he forewent his rocket launcher for his claws. It was far more satisfying to get up close and personal, no matter how big the explosion was.
The Collectors seemed to hesitate as he charged them, as if they could never have comprehended what he was doing. They all seemed rather mindless, he thought, as he tore the head from one with his bare hands and threw it into its nearest friend hard enough to punch a hole through the armored carapace. Like the Infected back in Manhattan; just following orders, acting on instinct.
Alex made a point to know as much about his enemy as he could, and in order to do that, he tended to consume at least one of every species he ran across. With the exception of the hanar. Those things were just weird. He saw one of the Collectors off to the side, keeping up a barrage of suppressing fire on Garrus' location.
Alex pounced at the Collector, claws outstretched, and just as he got his talons around the bug's throat and prepared to jerk it to the side, the thing's shell cracked and it began to glow.
"What the shit?" Alex cursed, impaling it with his tentacles before it had a chance to finish whatever the hell that was. The glowing Collector writhed in his grip long after any ordinary creature should have been dead, and then it fixed glowing yellow eyes on him and Alex ripped it in half with a feral snarl, letting his body finish what he had started.
It was a walking bug. It couldn't possibly have any—
"We are the Harbinger of your perfection."
Alex screamed and grabbed his head with his clawed hands, falling to his knees in the grass. That voice… it was every soul he'd ever consumed, every man woman and child that had ever drawn breath and been ended, every race, every tongue, every nation. Incomprehensible, and yet it made perfect sense.
"We are your genetic destiny."
He clawed at his head, trying to force the voice to stop. All he knew was agony; his entire race, torn to pieces, broken down, rewritten at the genetic level… it was so slow, tortuous, inevitable. And the screaming, God the screaming…
"You are bacteria. Shortsighted. The flesh is a machine; evolution cannot be stopped."
Blood, so much blood, screaming, crying. Quickly quickly, into the stasis pods! We will not be eradicated. We will endure. The Reapers. The Reapers are coming. Beware. Beware!
"We are the beginning, you are the end."
The end. The end. Alex screamed aloud, inhuman, more animal than man, clawing at his armor and struggling to silence the chorus, the untold millions, screaming as one voice and sundering the very world with their agony.
"Alex!" That voice… so very far away… so very familiar… Dana?
No. No hope… no life… no purpose… they should all give in. No use. No use…
"Alex!"
Alex snapped his eyes open to find himself kneeling on the grass, claws digging through the helmet of his biomass armor, his body just barely holding on to its humanity. The pain throbbed near the back of his head like an old bruise, and he stood stiffly to his feet, hands on his knees. Gradually the crimson haze at the edges of his vision faded away, and he straightened, fingers twitching, every cell in his body on a knife-edge of tension.
He stared at Shepard. She had been shaking him while he knelt in the grass, screaming. Her eyes asked a question that he didn't have the answer to.
"Well," Alex cleared his throat. His voice sounded hoarse, unnaturally so. Had he really be yelling that loud? He flexed his fingers to hide his unsteadiness. He was not afraid. He was Alex Mercer. Blacklight. He did not feel fear. Fear felt him. "That was fun."
Shepard narrowed her eyes behind her visor.
Alex shifted his weight to his other foot and readied his rocket launcher. That's the last time he ever consumes one of those, that's for damn sure. "I'll explain later, okay?"
Shepard stares at him for another long second before nodding, almost knowingly. He'd heard she'd received visions from the Protheans.
Maybe she did understand.
Alex sure as hell didn't.
Other A/N: What would happen if Alex consumed a Collector possessed by Harbinger? The biggest migraine of his life, most likely. Poking around in a Reaper's brain is not a Good Idea, Alex.
EDIT: Some of you mentioned that the M-920 Cain does not actually launch nukes. I am aware of this. A gun that literally launches nuclear warheads would be a little ridiculous; I just chose to call it a 'nuke launcher' and 'pretend' that it's actually doing so for the humor value. My Alex likes explosions. The M-920 Cain makes large explosions that resemble nuclear weapons. Alex has had bad experiences with nukes and decided to make the CAIN his bitch. Commence giggles.
