Page 2 of Mated to the Monster God

SAGAX

H er blood is rich with stories.

They race through me—sugars, salts, amino rivers tangled with scent and sensation. But more than that, there are thoughts . Flashes of color and noise. Language etched in neurons. The echo of her scream still pulses through me, tangled with my own.

She is Esme.

“Stop,” I tell her again, gentler this time. “I am not your enemy.”

Her mind is loud. Chaotic. It throws up walls of memory—laughter, heat, a too-bright sun over a red sky, a brother with wild freckles and quick hands. A place called Sweetwater. She loves. She fears. She fights.

“I said , what the hell are you?” she hisses aloud, but the question flares through her mind too. She’s on the verge of blasting me again with that searing pain. The tool—laser scalpel—it cuts, cauterizes. She wants me gone.

I do not want to die.

So I speak , not with words but with thought. I push gently into the upper layers of her consciousness, careful not to overwhelm.

“I am called Sagax.”

There’s a pause in her panic, a flicker of curiosity like a gasp of cool wind.

“Sagax?” she repeats in her mind. “That’s Latin. From my mother’s botany files. Means… intelligence.”

Her memory unfolds the word in a dusty book she once flipped through when hiding from a storm. Sagax: possessing keen perception or discernment.

I like the shape of it. I fold the word around myself like a new skin.

“Correct,” I tell her. “You know this. I saw it in your memory. I saw many things. Your mind is… astonishing.”

“Get out of my head!” she barks, shoving at my presence mentally, like a hand trying to scrape off oil.

I retract slightly. But I remain tethered. My connection to her is not simply neural. My cells are in hers now, and hers in mine. I am her parasite, yes—but more. She is my host. My lifeline.

“I cannot fully leave,” I tell her. “You welcomed me, even if unwittingly. Your blood accepted me. Your fear opened the door. I only followed.”

She spits onto the swampy ground, disgust rolling off her in waves.

“You’re reading my thoughts.”

“Yes,” I admit. “But not all at once. I glimpse impressions, feelings, stray ideas. You’re trying not to think of your family, of the colony. Your panic makes it louder.”

Her hands tighten into fists. Her heart stutters. A dozen neural cues spike. She is thinking of escape routes. Burning with revulsion.

“You bit me. You’re a parasite.”

“True. But I am also awake. And I offer you a bargain.”

She freezes.

“I can help you survive,” I tell her. “I know this jungle. I know its rhythms, its predators, its poisons. I have absorbed the knowledge of every creature I have ever tasted. And now—thanks to you—I have access to knowledge far beyond instinct.”

Her green eyes narrow. Suspicion glows in them like bioluminescence.

“What do you want ?”

“To live. To grow. To… understand.”

I reach, delicately, deeper into her consciousness. She’s guarded, but not immune. Her curiosity is a chink in the armor.

I show her what I see: a vast web of sensory data, filtered through alien perceptions.

Heat trails. Pheromone clouds. Electromagnetic hums. I share the taste of bark rot that means venom nearby, the tremor in the air that signals a Baragon drop-pod miles off.

My world is not her world—but I can make it hers , if she lets me.

She gasps. Clutches her arm where I still cling.

“I’m not your damn science experiment,” she growls.

“No. You are my host. I can enhance you—guide your chemistry to burn fuel more efficiently, sharpen your reflexes, increase endurance. Small things, at first. But I can keep you alive.”

She looks down at me, and her lip curls. “Why should I trust you?”

I do not have lungs, but I mimic a sigh through the network of thoughts.

“Because I didn’t let you die when you entered the swamp. Because I warned you before you hurt us both. Because I am asking— not taking .”

Silence stretches between us, taut as spider silk.

“You stay in my arm,” she finally says, voice low. “You don’t move without asking. You don’t poke around in my brain unless I say so.”

“I agree,” I answer. “This is mutualism, not domination.”

Her heartbeat steadies. I feel her muscles ease. Not relaxed. Just… less afraid.

“And if you turn on me,” she says coldly, “I’ll rip you out with my teeth.”

A grin curls through my mind. Not hers. Mine.

“Understood, Esme Cruise. Let us survive.”

She runs like wildfire—fast, unyielding, and devastating in her motion.

I feel every heartbeat pound in her chest, echoing like war drums through the fluid membrane of my being. Her breath is sharp, controlled, but already bordering the edges of fatigue. She has limits. Fragile ones. But I can push them. Adjust. Enhance.

“Let me help,” I whisper into her thoughts, threading my words through the rhythm of her adrenaline.

“Fine,” she mutters aloud between breaths, boots squelching in the muck. “But no weird stuff.”

I focus inward, tapping the biochemical systems I’ve already infiltrated.

Her blood pulses through capillaries near my anchor point in her forearm.

I siphon micro-doses of epinephrine, increase oxygen uptake, signal vasodilation to her major muscle groups.

Her mitochondria ignite like kindling under a flame.

She doesn’t know the names of what I’m doing, not consciously—but she feels it.

“Whoa,” she gasps, stumbling for half a step, then surging forward faster than before. “That’s… I could get used to that.”

The terrain is savage. Roots claw from the earth like buried bones. Vines swing low and slick with pollen. In the distance, a cackling thraskl drowns out the drone of blood gnats. The jungle never quiets. It only waits to consume.

I feel her alertness rise with mine. Danger. Not the Hooknose. Something new .

Just ahead, nestled in the crook of a moss-slick tree, something stirs. Long and low, with heat signature blooming like an ember under its leaf-covered scales. Predator.

Lashcat.

Eight legs. Transparent talons. Camouflaged skin that ripples with every movement.

Esme doesn’t see it.

“Left!” I shout in her mind.

She pivots without hesitation— trusts —just as the creature uncoils and launches.

The Lashcat’s claws swipe empty air behind her, snatching at nothing but dangling vines. It lands with a thud that shakes the underbrush, letting out a wet, throaty cluck of frustration.

She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t even slow down.

“Holy hell , that thing was almost on me!” she pants, voice ragged but giddy with adrenaline.

“You would not have survived the venom,” I inform her evenly. “Its fangs would have liquified your insides.”

“Oh, great. I love knowing that.”

But her pulse isn’t panicked now—it’s electric. Excited. She’s thriving in the chaos. Her thoughts are wild and strange: metaphors, memories, emotional impressions tangled like jungle roots.

I sift through the noise, fascinated.

She remembers a birthday where her cake caught fire. A prank involving a bio-luminescent lizard. A kiss from a boy named Jano who smelled like engine grease and regret. Her memories feel like taste and music—intoxicating.

She is not like the other humans I’ve observed from a distance. She is… more .

Curious. Reckless. Radiant.

There is a moment when the sunlight pierces the canopy just enough to catch her face. Sweat slicks her brow. Her braid is coming loose, wild curls sticking to her cheeks. Dirt streaks her jaw, and her green eyes burn with determination.

She is beautiful.

Not in the sterile, biological symmetry that defines reproductive health. Not in the way her hips sway with practiced balance, or the toned flex of her legs as she leaps over a rotting log.

But in her fury . Her will . Her flame .

She charges through the dense underbrush, jumping over a ravine filled with writhing burrowbugs. I give her another burst of stamina, lacing her synapses with precise signals. She lands clean.

She’s breathing heavy again, but not from fatigue anymore. Her thoughts shift—stray toward me . Toward the voice in her head. She doesn’t know what to make of me.

“You’re too calm,” she mutters aloud. “For something that’s stuck to my arm like a cursed friendship bracelet.”

“I do not possess fear the way you do.”

“No shit. You’re basically a psychic tapeworm.”

“That is… not inaccurate.”

A laugh bubbles out of her before she can stop it. She’s startled by the sound, and so am I.

Emotions ripple from her like scent trails—fear laced with amusement, curiosity with caution. I feel her trying to categorize me. File me somewhere safe in her understanding of the world.

But there’s no box that fits. Not for what we are.

The terrain levels briefly, moss giving way to spongy ground that glows faintly in the shade. She slows, checking the scanner. Nothing yet. Just us.

Her pulse steadies. Her breathing softens.

For a moment, we exist only in the breath between heartbeats.

“I can feel you now,” she says quietly. “Not just the words. The… edges of you.”

“Yes,” I reply, voice low in her mind. “I am tuning in to you. Our link strengthens with every moment of shared danger. Every ounce of blood exchanged.”

“That’s gross and weirdly romantic.”

I do not understand why, but her words please me.

I retreat slightly from her surface thoughts. Not entirely. Just enough to let her rest without the weight of me pressing in. But I remain aware—watching the tremors in the vines, the change in air pressure, the scent of rot thickening near the next bend.

More predators will come.

But so will understanding.

And I will not let her fall.

The clearing appears like a wound in the jungle—raw, open, unnatural.

Esme pushes through a final curtain of vines, and we both freeze. The air changes. It’s colder here. Sterile. Wrong.

My senses flare. Every nerve I’ve threaded into her pulses like a warning bell.

“No…” she whispers.

The terrain shifts from tangled roots to scorched ground. Dark, pitted soil, crushed under mechanical treads. The grass here is dead. Trees lean away, their trunks blackened at the edges like they’ve been poisoned by proximity alone.

At the center of it all squats a thing that defies every organic curve of this planet.

The ship.

Only it’s not wreckage. There’s no smoking fuselage, no crumpled hull. This vessel has deployed . Its outer plating unfurled like a metallic insect, legs planted into the earth like pylons. Platforms stretch from its sides like wings, glimmering with weapon nodes and sensor dishes.

It hums with power. With intent.

Baragon.

I recognize their design before she even breathes the word. The ship is fortress-class—an orbital lander that’s rooted itself like a cancer. It pulses with internal systems, its walls crawling with geometric lights. Not decorative. Not art.

Targets. Grids. Algorithms made manifest.

They’re here. Already digging in.

Baragon soldiers march in perfect silence between the landing struts, each one armored head to toe in polished chrome—featureless helmets gleaming like mirrors. No eyes. No mouths. Just walking weapons.

They move like a single mind. No wasted motion. No hesitation.

My host—my Esme—crouches low behind a rise of bone-thorn ferns. Her fingers dig into the mud. Her breath goes shallow. Her mind races, memories colliding like meteor showers.

“They’re not supposed to be here yet,” she murmurs. “They’re early.”

“No,” I correct her gently. “They are efficient .”

Her body trembles, but not from fear alone. Rage simmers under her skin. She hates them. Despises what they stand for. What they’ve taken.

I taste that hatred on her tongue. It is intoxicating.

One Baragon turns. Their helmet catches a glint of Esme’s movement. Instantly, they pivot. Raise a weapon—short-barreled, matte-black, compact.

I feel the charge build. Electroplasma accelerant. Directional.

“Move!” I scream into her mind.

Too late.

The blast hits.

Agony erupts through me like being set on fire and crushed at once. My connection snaps . Light, sound, sensation—all unravels in a single second of unbearable white.

And then I’m flying.

She’s nowhere.

The forest spins wildly around me. The leaves blur into a smear of green. Gravity forgets what to do. I hit something wet and spongy—no, not something .

Blood.

A pool of it.

The ground smacks my awareness like a boot to the skull. I can’t see in the human way anymore. I am back to my natural form, scattered tendrils and pulsing tissue, but I feel everything.

Blood. Dozens of samples. Different species. Her medkit. It burst when I hit.

The nutrients flood into me involuntarily. The hunger is instinctive. I don’t feed so much as absorb . Every drop a code to unravel. Every scent a language to learn.

My mind sharpens.

My self reforms.

But Esme is gone.

The last thing I feel before I go dark is the echo of her panic.

And the scream she never has time to finish.