Before The Fall (origins)

Experiment

It's so nice.  Every resonance extinguished decreases the chances of danger.  They were making it so easy.  Did they want to die?  They didn't look like they wanted to be extinguished.  But they were so weak.  Every one of them hadn't even unlocked two thirds of their potential.  Did they desire extinction?  Surely they didn't want to die...

Or was it because they didn't know their limits?

The creature shifted uncomfortably.  This was a lot of information to process in its new existence.  From what it had seen, all of the four humans he had extinguished were not even fully prepared for him.  Maybe because they barely moved at all.  Maybe because they seemed so small.  They barely showed as alive.  There was only the slightest difference between their resonance and the resonance of the green things surrounding them.

Another human leaped at him.  Something whispered at him to dodge in his brain.  The vessel wanted to dodge and run and hide under a rock with all is might.  But the vessel was merely a vessel, and had no power over the ball of instinct that was this creature.  And so the creature watched patiently as a human unsheathed a gleaming bar of something.  The voice told it that the it was a weapon and weapons were dangerous.  But it didn't look dangerous.  More flashy than dangerous.

The creature decided to take the hit, and was mildly interested as the sword cleaved through the black mass of its torso with a sound like a finger running around the lid of a wine glass.  It looked down with semi-interest as the sword cut itself into its body diagonally and cleaved him from left shoulder to hip.  It felt a weird sliding sensation as his upper half slid slowly down along the cut the sword had made.

The creature was completely aware of every nerve in its body screaming out in pain, saying something along the lines of "You're going to die!".  So it didn't die.  Wrapping its organs with threads of black, it stitched the his two halves back together with increasing precision.

All in 1 second.

The look of what it thought was surprise registered on the assailant's face.  His blade ignited with a green fire, and he swung his sword in an arc around his wrist, aiming to take the creature's head off at the neck.  As the blade swung down, the creature took note of how sluggishly the blade moved.  Like a feather moving through honey.  And it was already bored of getting cut.  Being bifurcated once was enough for a lifetime.  So it moved on to the next logical step.

The creature raised its left hand, and its forearm unraveled into a thousand separate tendrils of darkness.  The tendrils shot out, and seized the man's foreman, hugging it from the tips of his fingers all the way to his shoulder.  And with barely any effort, the tendrils jerked, twisted and bent twenty different ways across his arm, none of them in a way acceptable by any human arm.  The man's raw screams were muffled by the tendrils slithering down his mouth, then its gullet, then into his gut.  It explored the man's organs for a minute, as it watched with dull fascination at how the man squirmed with intense discomfort.  When it was satisfied, the tendrils rapidly expanded, splashing bits of the man onto the dirt road of the village.

It thought about what it had learned from this experiment.  how each organ was situated at the perfect spot.  How to most efficiently put each organ to sleep.  It rearranged its own organs for another minute, testing how each would fit in a new position, feeling the blood pour though its body as its organs were smashed and regenerated just as quickly.  Satisfied, it went further into the village.

Five Elite down.  Three minutes into the massacre.