Chrono X Angel, Book 6: Branching Paths

Chapter 3

She was running again, and she hated it. Would she ever be able to stop?

Kasumi was dashing through the woods, now back in her human shape once more, and desperately trying to put as much distance between herself and those weird girls as she could, not knowing they were no longer chasing her anymore. Even still, the voice in her head said she needed to run, and so she did.
That voice had not always been there, nor had she always been partially inhuman. It had all happened so fast one day. She had been out late several weeks ago, picking mushrooms in the forest, when she saw an odd man in a suit climbing down from a tree. That in itself would have been weird enough, but it was when she approached said tree after he had left did things turn truly dire. Up in the higher branches was a mangled human corpse, slash marks all over its body, the face too mutilated to make out. She tried to scream but the sound died in her throat. Kasumi felt hands grip her shoulders, and she jerked her head around to see the same suited man looking down at her. The expression on his face was utterly terrifying. It was not rage, or anger, or even concern. His face was a perfect mirror of calm.
Kasumi tried to scream again, but the sudden blue fist going through her stomach prevented that. He dropped her before disappearing from sight. As Kasumi's vision began to fade though, something weird happened. A small voice called out to her from inside her head.

"Do you wanna live?"

Too weak to speak, Kasumi mentally replied "yes", and an odd sensation passed over her. Terrifying at first, but quickly she felt warm and relaxed. She could feel her body almost melting, shifting. If she were less panicked at the moment, she would have noticed the hole in her guts had vanished as her body began reforming.

"Don't worry, we won't hurt you" stated the voice in a calm tone, "We want to help you. We will be one with you, but you will also still be you, while also being us."

Kasumi, already near her wits end by this point, simply passed out, which allowed whatever this thing was doing to her body to finish. When she finally awoke, her hands immediately went to her stomach to find: nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary anyway, her body looked fine. It was when she poked her belly, and her hand painlessly phased inside of herself, did she know something was wrong.

"We are one," called the voice again, only from outside of her head this time. Kasumi slowly glanced over to her right and saw her own face staring back at her, only in miniature and coming from a pink tentacle made from her long green hair.
"Be not afraid," it urged her, it's voicing coming from "her" mouth, "We only want to help you."

"Wh– what are you??" Stammered Kasumi after a solid minute of staring at the thing.

"We do not know what we are," the being replied, "We were born in the white place, where many others like us were. They did not think we were correct, so we were disposed of, but we survived. You have survived too."

"That sounds... awful..." said Kasumi, looking down at her hands. Were they even still her hands? She flexed her fingers a few times, balling them into fists and relaxing them. Yeah, they were still hers. For now anyway...
"Look I'm really sorry but... I don't like the idea of having someone else in my body. Isn't there anywhere you can go?"

She could feel the confusion in it's mind as easily as she felt the worry in her own. It seemed not to understand the question, something the head tilt the avatar face looking at her expressed with a furrowed brow.

"We are one." It repeated once again. If this thing had a catch phrase, Kasumi thought, that would probably be it.
"If we were to separate, Kasumi would die. Too much damage to the original form, organs missing. Separation is impossible now. We are sorry we did not tell Kasumi, but time was low."