It is time, now, for a tale of sprawling Flesh.
For you see, Matteo squirms in the dirt.
He also flutters through the air, also devours his kin as hunger consumes him, also feeds and feeds and feeds and-
then he reverts fully back to the body that others claim is his own.
But when he exists in that liminal space, that mind-bridge his power establishes where this body is no more important than any other-
that is what feels like his own.
Once upon a time, Matteo was a shy boy, one who saw his power as nothing more than a final spit in the face when compared to the scale which his compatriots could reach towards. Matteo was obsessed, in some unknowably quite and mild way, with the idea of power in the physical realm. And so, as he explored his powers, that is what he discovered - a method of physical leverage upon his world, delegated through insects and obtained through mental power as it may be.
So as Roxana explored herself, so too did he stay in the catacombs of those mental connections a mite longer every time, building up endurance, connecting with more insects (it is important to understand that Matteo has never been limited by range - only by sheer number of minds). He honed until a remotely piloted Matteo was scarcely distinguishable from the real thing (except, of course, to his team). He grew his network until he was always connected with the world, always binding himself to millions upon millions of piddling insect minds.
And here's where things get interesting. See, at this point, Roxana was already more Light than person - and so I suspect that with her encouragement, Matteo started striving towards something beyond mere mind-puppetry.
After all, Matteo's power wasn't that of Tuma - it wasn't merely control of the mind. It was absolute control over all insects he could manage to suborn - and that is why none of this should have come as a surprise.
Matteo began to twist the forms of that which he occupied, began to carefully distort the very genetic code which governed their existence. Through selective breeding, through mutation-encouraging radiation, and even through simply reaching in there and swapping base pairs around, Matteo found himself creating a set of insect master races.
There's no point in rattling off their names (although Matteo certainly did with the false enthusiasm of his well-piloted body in that moment). They didn't survive long enough for that.
Matteo would continue to move them forward, force death-matches and invasive species and all-too-many things upon them until they were finally what he wanted - and this is where I'll explain.
Once he was certain that there was at least one insect under his control with as much brainpower as a human. Once Matteo saw the scope of his army (which at this point consisted of every native and engineered insect across the whole of Western Europe), and the quality of his troops. Once Matteo knew that he would be getting a good deal - well, simply put, he jumped ship.
Matteo's human body committed suicide with a grin on its flesh-sack face, and without an ounce of hesitation.
Matteo didn't care. He was in that liminal space for eternity now - detached from the physical, yet unquestionably powerful within it.
And after all, Roxana could still communicate with him. Her lightshows reached him in the recesses of a million-billion things' neurons ranging from hive queens to little pupae, and their delights if translated would have kept the Parisians' red lights on for centuries to come.
Though of course, with that also came practicalities.
Even as Matteo grew more alien, more detached from the mere concept of those pitiful single-bodied beings he knew as humans, the Society did not know. He'd always been quiet - who was to say when that had crossed into mute, so long as a mesh of light held itself over the crawling morass that formed his body at this point?
But that was still not all. Matteo had always (ironic though it may with his power's particular brand of collectivism) possessed an independent streak, always disliked reliance upon even his most trusted of companions. Yes, perhaps his team knew what he had done, had discovered it as soon as his corpse had been discovered in its haphazard sprawl across the boys' bathroom tile. Yes, perhaps Roxana even aided him in concealing this from the wider world of empowered that was the Society. But Matteo would not be dependent.
So, all-too carefully, the work began. More specifically, the 'Great Work' - for in the mind-organs of the no-longer-truly-physical being that was Matteo, such a title had become memetic, and almost obsessive.
They began with the voice. Careful alterations, changing chitters and vibrations and chirps until a particular sound escaped: a half-remembered reference by a mind so overwhelmed with memories from a trillion different perspectives until only the constant interactions had any permanence - the hunt, the feeding, and the Light which sought him out wherever he went.
After two months of effort, a 25-kilo insect on a remote island in the equatorial Pacific released this sound unto the void:
"Hello, World".
And that was it - the critical moment.
Next was the shape. Simple Enough thought-heard-knew the thing others knew as Matteo. Five protruding limbs, carefully proportioned to avoid disconcerting values - a perfect Golden Mean of a body, an Adonis had it not been adorned with chitin rather than mere exposed flesh.
Next, the thing supposed, was the surface-level appearance. Adding pigment and refractory materials and sheaths of skin-shell to obscure the truth of their nature, connecting breaks in shell organically as the eyes were tweaked about and about until they were hidden away so that decoy false-human ones were presented to the world.
The ingestion apparatus of fleshy lips, the organic filaments of careful hair, even those womb-birthed marks upon the skin known as fingerprints - details tweaked and altered and cloaked all throughout, a human shell draped over a still-insect puppet of the thing known as Matteo.
Of course, this couldn't be done alone. It couldn't be done with merely a single draft copy.
Burrowing beneath had become the way of this insect experimenter. There were whole caverns full of corpse after corpse - filled with the horrors that were his stillborn and dying hybrids! And all of it, all of it, was constantly absorbed as biomass by the massive cavities of insect neurons which hang from these formic-acid-formed cavern's walls, that served for nothing more than to boost the processing power of their controller's biological-mental horror-hybrid computation.
Eventually, therefore, a success was achieved.
In fact, many successes were achieved.
The hives of this insectoid-mind being are specialized, now - each full of very particularly engineered organisms.
Oh, to be sure, there are still the naturally-occurring insects - but those are merely for distraction and livestock.
You might first delve into its deepest caverns, where even Light (which has since abandoned human flesh as well, alien as its perspective now is from the Roxana-person it once was) cannot exist for lack of its originator. There, you would find its gargantuan source of processing power - the many brains which survive encased by careful organic suspension, devoid of secondary nerves in favor of the instantaneous data-transfer that is their controller's omnipresence.
Perhaps, also, you might find the combat sites - the remote islands and sea beds and flight paths on which this being's organic hunter-killer drones lie.
No, perhaps not - few humans like to dwell on such violent things.
So perhaps, let us reference the familiar - those you cross every day, who work in industry and defense and medicine and service to fulfill humanity's every need to survive as a species.
And realize now that the most inhuman among us, among this team of four among this Society of powered individuals among humanity walks among you, simultaneously breeding future improved generations and finding its no-longer-physical pleasure with the second-most-inhuman that is Light and gaining in control with every second it has to live and process.
Know fear, for humanity shall be naught when it must confront the mutable monster that is Flesh.
And know greater fear, for the thing which is not alien to humanity, yet harms it anyway, shall forever be worse than the unknown creeping in.
Know this fear, and we shall show how against this person (for indeed, he is still one of you for now), your unknowing submission is inevitable - a weakness inherent to humanity's weak will.