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This one wasn’t screaming.
This was new.
“You aren’t screaming.”
“I- I’m sorry!” the human quickly uttered, its voice snuffed – after a glance, he concluded it was probably due to the mucus dribbling down its face. The King wasn’t yet too keen on the differences, but he assumed the human to be female.
Not that it mattered much.
He turned back to his portable console, going over the rules of Gungi as Pouf instructed the human to sit still and wait; he hadn’t paid them much attention. Humans were extremely dull creatures, and nothing marked the one sitting across him as any different. While Pitou gathered her research subjects, the King entertained himself by besting every aspect of the primitive human culture in the manner of a few hours. As his physical superiority was a given, simply an objective fact, he took to defeat humans at a variety of unsophisticated board games, an unchallenging competition involving no blood shed.
Next on his list was Gungi, which seemed to be more of the same – a game for two opponents (human minds were in such a primordial stage, they couldn’t tackle more than one opponent at a time), black and white pieces whose weight proved no challenge, shaped into small circular discs representing different hierarchical standing or military function. A wooden board (which was probably the most interesting part about this game, an actual remain of a long-dead-plant which kept for many years and did not decay), with a simple pattern of straight lines across. Humans seemed to favor those, even when they didn’t have anything straight in their entire bodies. It was probably the easiest for their simple minds to process.
It took him some time before closing the console and setting it aside, looking up at the human across him.
What a pathetic thing, he mused. With her dominant sensor malfunctioning, she was a defected product of breeding. Two of the breathing holes on her face were leaking, suggesting further flaws. It was unclear how, indeed, she still drew breath. It wouldn’t matter; she wasn’t going to live much longer.
At first Pitou suggested the mucus may be some sort of defense mechanism, either to render the prey less appealing to the predator by assuming a fake illness, or maybe a toxic or venomous trait they have yet to discern in the species – a sub-species, of a sort.
As a whole, Human-kind was exceptionally homogeneous and dreadfully boring to document and inspect. Their internal structure was the same with each and every specimen; the exterior varied with its hues, but was always soft, lacking any shell or a sensible exoskeleton. Their method of conception was limited and chaotic, bound to a coupling and a grueling process in which the next generation fed on its mother, acting as a parasite, stealing her energy and resources to selfishly build itself – but the mother could not predetermine the inclination of her newborn, which meant it was all in vain – generation after generation of useless foot-soldiers. Humans’ instincts wired them to protect the newborn, even when it was virtually worthless for the better part of the first two decades of its life. Foolish, as if the parent died, the young would never reach adulthood by itself.
They even taste the same – he had thought maybe the different hues suggest different stages of ripeness of the flesh, but the texture is the same, not significantly varying between the freshly born or the ones soon to perish; neither of the genders, or age, or fat and muscle ratio. They all taste rotten, the promise of their finality and death coded into each cell, acidic and disgusting in the King’s mouth.
The King’s kind was superior – they had great diversity among themselves, which enabled a variety of traits and abilities utilized to their finest form; they had a genetical inclination toward hierarchy and order, and knew to follow the best specimen, the pinnacle of their colony.
In the King’s world, the human wouldn’t have made it past her few first breaths.
He had lost.
He blinks once at the Gungi board, at the pieces, the lackluster plain carved wood connecting between them. It doesn’t take him more than a few seconds to analyze where he hadn’t fully realized his potential, the mediocre choices he had made while he should have taken other courses of action.
No matter, he thinks, crushing a piece between his fingers.
By the next game, he’d be ready.
He had lost.
Again.
He starts their eleventh match feeling an unpleasant sensation, an emotion, perhaps? He hadn’t had too much of those, but he can distinctly discern them from goals and ambitions. They have a different shape in his mind, they flow differently through his limbs. He chooses not to spare it much thought – the human just made a particularly aggravating move, placing her spy on 9-3-1, and he has to completely re-analyze the board for the fifteenth time since the game had begun, twenty moves ago.
So she’s better at this tricky war game, maybe fueled by her human inclinations towards fear and defeat, which bend the strategies and the forms and structure on the board.
No matter, he thinks.
“Warrior, 6-6-1.” He announces.
It’d be over soon.
“My King–“ Youpi starts.
“Not now.”
“But–“
Annoyed, he cuts off one of Youpi’s arms with a lash of his tail.
"Don't make me repeat myself."
Youpi bows and leaves.
In front of his, the human fidgets in place.
“What is it?” He hisses at her.
“I- is it- okay? I can… wait… if you’re needed elsewhere…” she mumbles, before perking up in alarm. “I wouldn’t change the board or anything!” she waves her arms around. They’re such fragile arms; Meruem could snap them off with just one of his fingers. It’d be messy, sure, but he could poke his finger through each of the fibers connecting her skin, her poor excuse for muscle tissue, her bone–
“… Or not?” her voice snaps him out of his thoughts; he’s almost surprised to see her sitting unharmed. He flexes his fingers.
“Rook, 2-4-2”, he says, only to lose mere seventeen moves after.
“What’s your name?” she asks back.
“My name?”
He had never thought of it.
He calls his Senior Science-Officer, Shaiapouf; his Head of Security, Menthuthuyoupi and his Chief Medical-Officer, Neferpitou.
“What’s my name?” He asks them.
They kneel in a tense silence.
“You’re our King–“
He swats Pitou to an inner wall; useless words for a useless creature.
“Neither of you has an answer, then.”
They remain silent; Pitou stays where she slid to the floor.
That’s progress.
He dismisses them and goes through the archives; every birth is recorded, and a King’s birth would definitely leave its mark upon history, much less a file system. It’s no matter; the human- Komugi, he corrects himself absentmindedly, would take a while to replenish her strength; she needs sleep and nourishment. Humans are bothersome like that.
For the first time since he was born, light years away from the gravitational pull of the planet he came from, in a desolated place in the galaxy, the King finds out his name.
Komugi calls him ‘Meruem-sama’ due to foolish human notions common in her native region, as a sign of respect– but that’s not pleasing at all; to put him in the same category as high-ranking humans is almost insulting, if he was a being who cared for a human’s opinion of him.
“We’re… in space?” she repeats his words, phrasing it as a question. Meruem (he started referring to himself as such, it is far more pleasing) had noticed this strange habit of hers, to utter a thought out loud. He makes a note to check if it is a common phenomenon, maybe linked to the fact humans are psy-null, a method that developed as an unconscious way for a being to communicate their thoughts to another.
It is marginally more interesting than anything else they inspected about humans, quite an unimpressive species.
He doesn’t care to respond, sorting the stones back to their containers, until a sob startles him to notice a drastic change in Komugi’s demeanor.
Her eyes are leaking in an alarming rate; Meruem drops the stones and rushes to her side, pressing two fingers to each eye, attempting to stop the fluid from escaping. She startles; it’s the first time he had touched her skin, and it is pleasantly warm. He had touched the skin of other humans, but Komugi’s skin is different; it’s not a skin he’d like to pierce with his teeth or peel off to pass the time.
“What’s happening?” he asks her, voice filled with urgency, when his fingers fail to plug the liquid in; it slips past them and dribbled down her cheeks. “Are you in pain? Do you require medical attention?”
“Huh?” She utters, the skin on her face turning dark-red in a fashion which would signal a blatant challenge to fight to the death in a few more advanced species. Meruem tenses further; perhaps the leaking water that’s streaming out of her face signals her brain is melting? It is not the first orifice malfunctioning with Komugi – she is a defected human, after all. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume her brain would shut out irrelevant parts to reduce energy consumption, as it’s the most demanding of the organs; perhaps to make room for growth in the limited space–
“I’m crying,” Komugi says, “because I’m happy.”
“Happy?” he echoes back, not familiar with the term, suddenly aware he had just repeated the same mechanism he berated not moments ago.
She experiences some sort of a convulsion from her neck, making her head shake up and down a few time.
His fingers follow the movement and enable her to move at all; if he presses in, applies a minimal amount of force on the tissue, he could rip it apart; her skull would cave in, her useless eyeballs pop out – would they taste any different, would their mootness benefit the predator which was bound to have their teeth sunk in them at some point? – her slow, underdeveloped brain would splatter across the floor with an unappetizing display, and the stray electrical currents that would carry a few moments on after her death would make her muscles seize and twitch, before stiffeni–
A touch brings Meruem out of his musing to note a small hand upon his own. The fingers are delicate and breakable, the nails can’t serve even as an excuse for claws or weapons, and the rhythm of Kumagi’s heart carries, albeit faintly, from the tips of her fingers to his own shell.
“To be here. You’re the nicest person I’ve ever met.”
For the first time in his life, Meruem does not know what to say.
“Meruem-sama,” she asks after he’d lost seven more games, “why did you come to Earth?”
“What do you mean?”
“I- er-“ She starts shifting in place, a stilted flow of movement he learnt to associate with her near-constant agitation between games. “It’s just, you’re an alien… an important one, at that. Yet you’re so kind to spend so much of your time with me…” she fidgets some more, “I- you’re probably- um- have business, on Earth? Pretty much any other human is far more capable than me to…” she trails off.
I came to take what’s rightfully mine, he wants to tell her. I came to use your species as rations for my Empire, to strip your planet from its resources and to leave nothing but stardust behind me.
Yet something keeps him from telling her that simple truth; a nagging feeling that skips inside of him, an instinctive conclusion that Komugi would not take those words well.
It shouldn’t matter, it doesn’t matter–
“You’re the most capable human I’ve met,” he replaces one truth with another.
Komugi glows.
Meruem watches Komugi when she sleeps in her quarters, tail swaying back and forth as he tries to make sense of her. By now he knows enough of her to tell she was exhausted; her shoulders slumped, her pink lips lost their colour, and the skin under her eyes turned dark and lax. Why did he send her away to rest, when he still wished to play? Why was he even keeping her alive? This unsightly creature, with her wasteful way with bodily fluids, her nasally voice and simpering expression.
Gungi was nonsense, entirely inconsequential – just a game fit for an idiotic breed to pass their meaningless lives with.
Displeased, Meruem frowns; he dislikes it when he doesn’t understand his own mind.
Did he mean to make her his Queen, then?
He thinks of his own mother and grimaces; he has no qualms over his birth – it was the sole purpose of his mother’s life and her endeavors. He was born when he thought it right, and nothing proved him wrong thus far. But imagining Komugi ripped open by their spawn – that’s different. Komugi isn’t the same as he is; she’s just a human. She’s far more worthy to him alive than dead after bearing a young that would serve no purpose for Meruem other than competition.
So he sits in her room, quiet, and observes her until the pieces would fall together and he could figure out what was it that she’s worth.
(More than just a Queen, certainly.)
“My King,” Pouf disturbs their match yet again. “It’s time.”
“I’m busy,” Meruem glares at the board, at the bothersome pawn that would soon lead to his downfall. “Go. Don’t return until I summon you.”
Pouf mumbles some sort of response, but Meruem doesn’t care for it – he found a rare opening – an opportunity. A thrill fills him; Komugi is playing against him seriously now, pushing him to make riskier and riskier moves, until they barely follow any sense of logic, instead spreading in a feral fashion to try and take the board and seize victory like a mindless mob.
“7-8-2, New Lieutenant General,” he announces with a smug smirk.
“Meruem-sama,” Komugi says, again with her fidgeting. “Is- shouldn’t you-“
“Make your move,” he growls back at her, but she doesn’t relent.
“That person said ‘it’s time’… I wouldn’t want to keep you from anyone important…”
“Don’t be an idiot, Komugi,” he dismisses her, “I decide what to do with my time, no one else." He raises his eyes to meet her blank ones. "And there’s nothing that could make a better usage of my time than playing Gungi with you.”
She cries (again).
He loses (again).
(Together, they make their own rhythm - an entirely new thing.)