"Intel showed entrances here and here," Twelve instructed, pointing to a diagram of an enemy capital ship projected on the wall before them. "We'll be hitting them nearby where weaker entry points are observed. We're not sure who runs the ships, but we know they possess the Corrupted hordes at their whim. We'll meet up with the other squads once inside. I'm designated Twelve, and you're Thirteen."

Thirteen was used to having unconventional mission details, but this seemed like suicide.

"Tell me again, how will we not get pulverized mid-jump? I seriously question the odds of this plan."

"These suits seal everything, so we'll be blackbodies; they won't see us." Twelve answered, patting their bulky form under the sleek, dark combat suit. The suit material was of a particular kind that absorbed nearly all electromagnetic radiation that struck it, making it appear so black that it looked two-dimensional. Coupled with the latest in gear advances, and was all but undetectable.

"Alright," Thirteen sighed. "But how do we board? Chemical thrusters would make us visible."

"We're launching via magnetic propulsion tubes and tether. We'll have an interference run to distract it until we land on the ship's surface. If we miss then we'll have the grapple. Once we launch, line-of-sight comms only. I recommend leaving that sword of yours behind. Going to be a tight fit in the tubes, and it's going to be useless in zero-g."

"That's non-negotiable. If I'm going in, it's coming with me," Thirteen retorted.

Twelve chuckled, a hint of mockery in the tone. Still, he knew of Thirteen's abstruse reputation. "I'll never grasp your attachment to that relic. We have newer, more compact models on board."

Thirteen shook his head firmly. "I prefer this one, thanks."

"Alright, but don't say I didn't warn you. You should start to prep now. We'll jump soon. I'll see you on the inside."

.

Thirteen entered the mag tube, a cylinder barely wider than he was, and hit the door control to seal the tube. Once locked, he checked all his equipment and suit seals again, ensuring that everything was accounted for: mag tether, charges, plasma knife, pistol, ammo, and artifact. He hooked the primary tethering filament onto the tube anchor and checked the secure connection. Satisfied, he gave a green status on the network and went broadcast silent. Within a few minutes, a small light in the tube illuminated yellow, signalling to stand by.

"Alert, dropping out of FTL speeds." the VI declared. "Prepare for ejection."

There was a barely perceptible shudder as the craft dropped out of FTL and then was steady. The light switched to red.

"Prepare for ejection. Ejecting in 5...4...3...2...1..."

His body was ejected head-first from the tube into the void without a sound - seeing nothing, then seeing everything. The enemies' behemoth capital ship, a vessel dwarfing all others, loomed in front of him, strange and monstrous. Tentacle-like appendages moved and flexed at the base of its cephalopod-like body, tearing through swarming crafts like giant hand swatting insects. His body flew silently through the vacuum, praying for this abomination to be blind to their approach. The craft's running interference continued to zigzag in unpredictable patterns around it, distracting it from the approaching bodies' minuscule forms.

Behind him, the filament that anchored him to the ejecting craft rapidly unravelled. He began applying a brake to the line to slow his approach but noticed no change in his inertial reference. When he looked behind, he perceived that the craft that anchored them had silently shattered like glass in the vacuum, felled by a single shot from the enemy ship. Now tetherless with no opposing force to slow his speed, he was at the mercy of classical mechanics; Objects in space stayed in motion until an opposite force could be applied. He continued to sail forward at high speed and rushed to fire his own personal tether toward the enemy ship. It raced ahead of him, its charged tip finding purchase in a chink within the capital ship's armour. Thinking quickly, he activated a small compressed air cartridge on his tool belt, pushing him laterally toward his right to avoid a direct head-on collision with the enemy craft. As he flew past the ship, the secured tether began pulling him in an arc around it as his momentum was preserved. He applied a brake to the line as it continued to unwind, and he used it to slowly decrease his speed further as it unravelled. Once his momentum ceased, he activated the reel-in, and it tugged him back toward the ship.

With his boots bound to the surface of the ship's armour, he removed the plasma cutter from his belt and readied himself to begin laboriously cutting through the armour. He decided against it at the last moment and re-secured it to his belt. Instead, he removed his sword and plunged it with all his might down toward his feet. Although he was in a vacuum and sound could not travel, he internally heard a sharp, ringing, clear tone as the ancient blade sunk through the ship's black hull. Long had been the days since he had found it under the desert ruins, yet its mystery was still fresh. He carved up a gash in the hull through repeated cuts large enough to permit his body. Satisfied, he slipped through the improvised entrance into the ship's interior.

.

The interior was unlike any craft he had ever seen.

The ship had rooms within, large open spaces, some so big that he couldn't see the end through a haze that lingered in the air. The walls, ceilings and floors under the walking surfaces consisted of thick cable, coils and machinery arrangements that twisted and flowed in bizarre and unsettling ways. It was like being inside a gigantic, hollowed-out monster, he thought, every detail of its interior modelled after some prehistoric organic template but replaced with tech. There were no colour, culture, or comforts of any kind that he could identify, and the stark metallic grey of its construction was present on every conceivable surface. The shapes and angles of the rooms seemed all wrong, and there was nothing that he found familiar other than the gravity and the air. But by far, the strangest part of all these was that it was empty. He found no crew or indication of any supposed race controlling the ship. He advanced room by room silently with his weapon extended and all senses on high alert, but he was met with nothing but strange groans emanating from the walls and an un-before-heard ringing of some sound that seemed to follow him.

He detected movement at the end of a room and settled low, sending a short laser line-of-sight hail. It responded, and the two others silently crossed the large room and approached each other like shadows.

"Six and Seven," the two squadmates relayed to him.

"Thirteen," he responded.

"Glad to see someone else made it in. You're the first squad we've made contact with. Where's Twelve?"

"Our craft got hit en route. I veered off course," Thirteen explained, "Found another way in."

"Have you made any contact with the enemy?"

"Negative," he said, shaking his head, "Place looks deserted."

"I don't get it, and I don't like it," Seven interrupted, clearly irritated. "You're the first living thing we've come across. Makes no sense. Where's the damn crew?"

"I'm wondering the same thing. If the ship is empty, we'll find the others. Let's go."

.

They found One, Three, Four and Ten. Each was just as bewildered as they were and just as unsettled. A palpable tension was in the air, a feeling of being constantly watched. Eerie groans would occasionally sound, but never from a source they could identify.

One stopped the group.

"Dark energy fields follow these sets of cabling that lead down to a central cavity in the structure. I reckon that's where we'll find the mass effect core. Ten, Thirteen, guard the rear. Three and Four, see if you can find anyone else, then meet us back here. Six, Seven, on me."

The group advanced to the doorway leading to the core. It was open, and One, Six and Seven moved cautiously while he and Ten stayed on the other side of the door in case it closed on the group unexpectedly. Within, suspended in the middle of the space with massive cables extending from it, was the ship's gleaming, gargantuan mass effect core. They all stopped in awe at the overwhelming magnitude of it.

"Mothers of the skies, that's huge," Three gasped.

"The largest I've ever seen," One commented.

"How much do you think all that dark-e matter is worth, One?"

"I don't think I can count that high. Let's stop ogling; we need to bring this thing down. Six, Seven, set the charges."

At the very mention of setting the charges, the walls shuddered around them like a giant breath inhaled. A dark and harrowing sound erupted from the ship's bowels, a low cranking note that vibrated through their bodies and struck nameless fear into their hearts.

As the sound reverberated through him, Thirteen became aware that the faint ringing sound in the air he had been hearing became louder and more pronounced.

"By the winds! What is…" Three began to stammer before the background energy levels of the room rose in pitch as massive amounts of power began flowing through the core. Residual flux from the dark energy fields blazed to life on their sensors.

"Shit, the ship just jumped!" One explained to them, checking sensors on their wrist. "We're stuck here until it exits again. Everyone, dig in and stay sharp."

The group manned their assigned stations, but it was clear a thick unease had settled on all of them. The mission parameters began making less and less sense, and their questions only increased as it dragged on.

Thirteen and Ten kept watching in the distance of the large room, periodically scanning the walls and entrances for changes. Thirteen noticed that Ten would raise his weapon every few minutes, peering at a particular place on the wall, then set it down again.

"So, any news from the homefront?" Thirteen asked Ten, hoping to pass the time a little.

Ten turned to him slowly, cocking his head to the side in confusion. "You… haven't heard?" Ten asked in his slow, partially broken accent of the outer colonies.

"Heard what?"

"Oh." Ten exhaled slowly, uneasy about sharing the news. "Ah. Well, the news is not so good; Homefront is gone. Dirty bastards bombarded it from orbit a couple revos ago. I hear there's nothing left."

Thirteen's mouth opened and closed, shocked. The words emerged broken. "Wait, what? The whole planet? No, that's an exaggeration… right?"

"Nobody tells us nothing," Ten answered, "but it's not hard to figure out. Their corruption machines? You know, the spikes," Ten motioned, pointing his weapon at the sleek spires in the room with them, "the ones that have been turning the other races into freaks? We think it does not work on us so well because of the anti-dark-e matter in our bodies. So," Ten explained, moving a hand in a circle, "we have no use for them, so they remove us."

Thirteen was stunned. "Just like that? Are we finished? I thought the tide was turning?"

"No, sadly. I think it was all just a test from the enemy to see our strength. Once they saw they couldn't get anything from us-" Ten snapped again to the place on the wall.

"Do you see something?" he asked Ten.

"I keep seeing… gray thing on the wall there. It disappears when I look at it. Do you see?"

Thirteen looked at the spot painted for him on his display but saw nothing out of the ordinary, though this place was anything but.

"No, I don't," he replied. "I have a question: Do you hear a sharp ringing? Seems to be following us everywhere."

"No, no, just silence. I do have a headache, though; I can't remember the last time I got a headache." Ten mulled. "I have a bad feeling about this place; it's not... right…. Hold it, there, on the other side of the room!"

They spotted three dark forms approaching them. It was Three and Four, dragging something limp and unmoving between them. When they reached the entrance of the core chamber where they were stationed, they dumped their burden on the floor between them. It was the remains of Twelve, looking savagely beaten, suit crushed and torn into bloody shreds by repeated attacks.

"We found Twelve. He's dead," they reported.

"What happened to him?" One asked them, having exited the room once he heard the commotion on the channel.

"We don't know. We found Twelve lying face down in the middle of a gangway. It looks like getting in was successful, but got ambushed by something. We found no other bodies."

The strange creaking noises continued to sound around them.

"I don't like this place," Seven insisted, "not one fucking bit. We need to get out of here."

"No one is leaving until we finish the mission." One declared. "Six, set your charges."

Six unhooked one from his belt, looked at it, turned it in his hand a few times, then returned it. "I don't think we should."

"Come again? That's an order, not a suggestion."

"Just think how many ships we can build with that much dark-e matter. I say we salvage the core instead. Blowing it up would be a waste!"

"Are you disobeying a direct order?" One asked, whose commanding tone would have straightened any enlisted member at any other time.

"I… I am."

"I see," said One, and One raised their weapon and fired a shot straight through Six's head. Six crumpled to the ground, dead.

The rest were stunned by the sudden, explosive exchange, not believing that Six would suddenly become insubordinate or that One would so casually execute one of their own. The tension in the room reached new heights.

"Someone wants to explain to me what the fuck just happened?" Seven asked.

"Six was insubordinate on a critical mission. Let that be a lesson for you all," One warned. "Three, plant your charges. Four, watch with Thirteen and Ten."

Three moved toward the core while unhooking a charge from their belt and were surprised to see Four mirroring their movements. Both turned to watch each other, surprised to see one copying the other as they both set their charges around the core.

"What are you doing, Four? One asked you to take point," Three asked.

"Four? I'm Three." Four replied.

"No. I'm Three. You're Four."

"What the hell is this game you're playing?"

Three stammered, at a loss for words. "Game? Have you gone crazy? Check yourself!"

Four flicked up their personal interface and checked the mission roster. Indeed, Four found that they were Four. Four shook their head, bewildered. "What? How am I Four?"

"We need to go. We need to go. We need to go right now," Seven repeated with desperation, holding his weapon with shaking hands. "The walls are moving. Can't you see!? We need to get out of here!"

"Get a grip, Seven!" One yelled. "What's gotten into you? And you, Four, I ordered you to stay with Ten and Thirteen! What are you doing?"

Four pressed their hands to the sides of their head, trapped in a mental fog they could not reach. "How can I be Four? Nothing's making sense. My head hurts. How did we get here? Why are we here? Who am I?" Four asked. He stood swaying in place, non-receptive to their hails or waves, without seeing or hearing, seemingly in a complete fugue state.

Ten burst in. "You're right, Seven; I can see the walls moving too! Can none of the rest of you see? They're in the walls!"

In the pandemonium rapidly developing, Thirteen heard the whine of the ringing noise growing, and he shook his head. Perhaps accidently or by instinct, his hand brushed the artifact on his back and realized it was vibrating like a struck tuning fork. Surprised, he slowly raised his arm and grabbed the sword's grip. As his hand made contact, the ringing travelled up his arm into his head, becoming crystal clear, like how a soundboard affected a plucked string, amplifying underlying vibrations. While he held it, his mind remained sharp, and his vision of the walls around him remained still. Yet when he let go, his connection to it was broken, the sound became muffled, and confusion began stirring his mind. He didn't fully comprehend what was occurring, but touching the relic turned him against the source of whatever force was causing their imagined apparitions and countered its effects. He held it tightly, watching his comrades slowly succumb to an invisible pressure.

One punched Ten with a staggering blow that knocked the weapon out of his hands and his unprepared body down to the floor. "Get yourself together, man!" One yelled, now unhinged, and began punching Ten repeatedly.

Three attempted to pull One off of Ten, but One only became angrier. One removed his weapon and aimed it at Three.

"Don't you touch me! Get off of me!"

Seven was now shaking all over. "I can't do this," they heard him sob, and they watched him point his weapon at his own head and pull the trigger. Seven's body fell to the ground, lifeless.

The remaining members not comatose or dead: One, Three, Ten and Thirteen all looked at each other for a moment, and Thirteen wondered if the shock would have shaken them out of their insane spiral, but he realized that none of the others could hear the ringing of his sword and still looked crazed.

Ten began screaming in a harsh, full-throated wail from some imagined terror and lashed out for the tossed gun that had been knocked from his hands. Noticing this, One shot Ten repeatedly as Ten reached for the weapon.

"Dammit! Look what you made me do!" One yelled at Ten with deranged logic, "Why can't you just follow simple orders?!"

One emptied his entire magazine into the defenseless Ten, who cried out and convulsed under the multiple rounds ripping through his body. When One turned to Three and Thirteen, Three was waiting with his shotgun at the ready and blasted One point-blank. The wall behind where One had been standing was painted with innards.

"What a shitshow," Three calmly stated, turning to Thirteen. "I understand it now. There is no crew because the ships are not piloted. The ships themselves are the enemy, and It knows we're inside it; It swallowed us." Three raised the detonator. "Homeworld is gone. Family is gone. Friends are gone. I can't even think clearly anymore. The whole galaxy has gone to hell. Might as well go out with a bang."

And before Thirteen could move, Three pressed the detonator... but instead of immediately blinking out of existence, a timer started on their interfaces and began counting down.

Three dropped the useless detonator to the floor, seeing their swift death being cheated. "Kill me," Three asked Thirteen, sinking down to his knees. "Kill me. I can feel it in my head. It wants us to die. I can't think of anything else."

Three held out his hands in a gesture of hopelessness to Thirteen, ready for the end, but when he didn't oblige, Three, too, became aggressive.

"Do it! Kill me, goddammit! I'm dying here anyway! Kill me now!"

But Thirteen, paralyzed by the horrifying scene, could only back away. Three watched him move out and began laughing darkly. Three's laughter quickly devolved into something compulsive and forced, and by the time Thirteen had left, Three was screaming hysterically. As Thirteen ran out, screeches of corrupted apparitions came to life. They had always been surrounded and could have attacked at any time. The ship had been toying with them all along.

Clutching the artifact as though his life depended on it, Thirteen sprinted from the room, desperate to find the entry hole as the timer relentlessly counted down. Now out of sight of Three, Thirteen's comm could no longer receive his insane hysterics, and his voice disappeared from his ears. All around him, hordes of the Corrupted appeared; their hideous forms of fused flesh and metal crawled up from deep places and rushed toward him. Thirteen's gun repeatedly fired, creating neat holes in the faces of the screeching things, the backs of their heads exploding outwards with blue and black gore. There were too many, and they climbed over their kin's broken bodies toward him in an unstoppable wave. He then raised the sword and swung repeatedly, and the sharp, clear notes of the cutting overlapped the ringing of the intercepted insanity-causing signal from the ship. The horde disintegrated under his relentless strikes, but they seemed infinite, emerging ceaselessly. Thirteen fought to advance, slowed as he waded knee-deep through the undead masses.

The number on his display drew ever downwards until it was too late, and the hope of escape vanished like the sanity of the rest. The timer reached zero, and the charges deep in the ship detonated. A maelstrom of fire belched from the core and spread throughout the space, consuming everything in its path. From the ship's depths, a deep mechanical roar resonated once more. The vessel shuddered, its wounds forcing it out of its FTL jump. Catapulted through the ship's cavity by electric arcs and raging fires, he was bombarded by both flesh and metal as inertia and gravity reversed.

In the resulting chaos, he wasn't sure whether he had accidentally let go of the artifact or if it had been knocked forcefully from his grip, but Thirteen would later hazily remember that at the moment the relic slipped from his hand, he… stopped being him. Imagine a symphony that's all crescendo, he would later say. Imagine a tide that never goes out. The ship's core had been woven out of billions of organic minds - weak individually but together strong, like a full orchestra. Once he let go of the artifact, its protective song ceased, and every one of those minds within the ship resonated their will directly into him. The genetic memory of countless wills, all swelling together like an ocean that drowned his own out.

The sentient ship, unexpectedly dropping out of FTL because its guts had been torn apart from the inside, drifted silently and alone through open space. Not long after, it fell into the gravity well of a garden world in its inertial path and fell from the heavens.

.

Thirteen awoke a long time later - his mind blank, remembering nothing, not even himself. Even with his eyes open, he could not see above him; fine dust was falling gently, and as it did, it charged the air with unusual colour. It was the dust-form dark-e matter from the drive core of the ship when it broke in space above the atmosphere. This dust would settle and permanently change the planet's ecology in the coming years. Certain species of flora and fauna would evolve and adapt to the dust, manifesting peculiar traits that would later be recognized as biotic abilities.

Thirteen stared mutely upwards at the sky as the planet revolved, not feeling pain or hunger or thirst, not seeing or hearing or feeling... until one sense appeared to him: a high-pitched ringing.

The act of will required to extend his arm felt insurmountable. He focused on it with all his being for what felt like an eternity, creeping along so slowly that he wasn't sure he was moving. His singular concentration consumed him, the sound being the sole occupant of his thoughts, forever reaching - sure that a season had passed during his trial until the unfathomable moment arrived when his fingers brushed the ringing metal. Upon contact, the brilliant, complex song of the artifact burst into his consciousness. He returned to himself, realizing where he was and what had happened - understanding the truth of the enemy ships that would be later called the Reapers.

The collective shock nearly broke him, and though he had miraculously survived, he would struggle to process what he had experienced for years afterward. For countless days, every time he closed his eyes, he would see the grey walls, as if their afterimages had been seared onto his retinas - and for countless nights, nightmares of him running endlessly through the ship with no escape plagued him. He would often wake and find that he had been shivering and sweating profusely as though a fever had permeated his body, though he was not sick. Eventually, these would become less frequent over the years as his mind slowly processed the trauma, but a blinding fear of Reaper indoctrination would stay with him for the rest of his life.

Unable to discern where he was or how to call for help, Thirteen did what he could to survive. He ate what was available in his environment and slept under the stars. He laboured for days that blurred into months, years, centuries, and beyond - cutting up the dead god with his sword bit by bit and throwing its parts into the planet's deep oceans. Clutching the artifact compulsively day and night, never once releasing his grip, he continued until every tainted fragment of the dead god submerged into the depths, and his sword finally ceased its song.

For many years, he would not know that while he toiled, the rest of the sentient enemy ships scrubbed his species, their gift, and all others from their worlds, stations, and vessels before retreating back into dark space. Though he prayed and hoped to one day glimpse a familiar ship coming to rescue him, he became, unbeknownst to him, one of the last remnants of his species.

Sometime later, an alien craft landed on the planet's surface on a day as usual as any other. It carried an anthropoidal race with two pairs of eyes and heads covered in a thick, layered carapace, hoping to survey the lush garden world for colonization. They called themselves Prothean.

He left with them, asking about the people and places he had once known. They knew the places but not of his quarry or the people he named once great. He travelled from system to system, world to world, trying to uncover what had happened. The Protheans named him Peregrinator - a vagabond of the stars without home or haven, tirelessly searching for his lost place in the cosmos.