Chapter 223: Your Memories Are From the Previous Version
"Tsk, what are you still standing around for? Hurry up and scram," Klein drawled, his tone dripping with impatience.
The lead DNAlien froze. It stared at Klein in silence for a tense moment before letting out a series of guttural, clicking shrieks to the rest of its squad. Without a second thought, the creatures dropped the massive Oscillator Key onto the dirt and backed away.
While the DNAliens were fiercely loyal to their masters, they weren't entirely suicidal. With only a handful of them present, a full-blown firefight would have resulted in their total annihilation in under thirty seconds. Reclaiming the Oscillator Key by force was a pipe dream.
Since the objective was a lost cause, a strategic retreat was their only logical option. Surviving to report this anomaly back to the Highbreed commanders would at least salvage some of their usefulness.
Realizing Klein had absolutely no intention of chasing them down, the DNAliens spun on their heels and scrambled into the shadows.
This bizarre display of mercy—and the monsters' immediate compliance—left the inexperienced young man, Tyler, utterly dumbfounded. His jaw hung open wide enough to catch flies.
"What exactly are you...?" Tyler stammered, staring at Klein as if he were looking at a ghost.
Before he could finish his sentence, a violent spasm of agony tore through his skull. Tyler cried out, clutching his head as he collapsed to his knees. A chaotic torrent of fragmented images violently hijacked his mind.
In his mind's eye, towering, grotesque white aliens with root-like feet and imposing statures stood in a sterile command center, coldly calculating their next move.
After a grueling minute, the pain finally subsided. Tyler gasped for air, slowly opening his eyes. The initial haze of bewilderment quickly gave way to wide-eyed revelation.
"I remember! I remember it all!"
Tyler scrambled to his feet and grabbed Ben by the shoulders, shaking the teenager. "What I saw back there... they weren't just monsters! They were another group of aliens!"
"White ones?" Ben asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Tall ones?" Kevin chimed in, leaning against a crate.
"The really ugly kind?" Gwen finished, crossing her arms.
Tyler froze, his frantic energy evaporating into sheer confusion. "How... how did you guys know?"
Kevin let out a dry, amused chuckle. "Those are the Highbreed. We're old rivals at this point."
"What do they want to do?" Gwen asked, her emerald eyes narrowing as she cut straight to the core of the issue.
Klein also shifted his lazy gaze toward the young man, waiting for the punchline.
Tyler swallowed hard. "They're building a massive trans-dimensional channel in Los Soledad! They're planning to use it to warp their entire fleet here and launch a full-scale invasion on Earth!"
He waited for the group to panic. Instead, they just stared at him with incredibly strange, almost pitying expressions. Tyler shifted uncomfortably. "You guys... what's wrong?"
"No way, man. Your memories are from the last patch," Kevin retorted, shaking his head. "We already blew up that trans-dimensional portal in Los Soledad a while ago."
Tyler's eyes darted between them, struggling to process the information. "But... that shouldn't be possible. Then why...?"
"Because those memories aren't fresh," Ben said, his brow furrowing as he pieced the puzzle together. "They aren't what you saw right before you supposedly escaped."
Gwen nodded, her sharp intellect catching up instantly. "Those memories are from much further back."
Klein didn't bother with deductions. He simply stepped forward, his hand darting out toward Tyler's face with blinding speed. "They come from..."
Snatch.
"...when you were still a DNAlien."
With a swift yank, Klein tore the ID Mask right off Tyler's face.
A series of holographic glitches rippled across Tyler's body. The illusion of a normal human boy shattered, melting away to reveal the grotesque, bulbous, multi-eyed form of a DNAlien.
Seeing Tyler's true form, Kevin instinctively pushed off the metal cargo container, his muscles tensing for a fight. Gwen's delicate brows pinched together, and a faint, dangerous violet aura flared to life around her hands.
Ben and Klein remained relatively unfazed, but the tension in the air spiked. They couldn't be entirely sure about this particular DNAlien's situation. From the looks of it, this guy had gone rogue due to a severe case of amnesia.
But what if it was a trap? What if this entire helpless act was a calculated ruse?
Tyler, however, wasn't attacking. He was staring in absolute horror at his own hands—hands that were now pale, clawed, and decidedly non-human.
His chest heaved with rapid, panicked breaths. Stumbling backward, he crashed into the side of the overturned truck. Desperate, he ripped a cracked rearview mirror from its housing and stared into it.
"A monster? I'm... I'm one of them?"
The grotesque, tentacled face staring back at him shattered whatever remained of his reality. His clawed hands instinctively clenched, crushing the fragile mirror into a shower of glittering glass shards.
Kevin relaxed slightly, finally connecting the dots. He walked over to the wrecked truck, patting its heavily caved-in chassis. "Makes sense now. A normal Earthling would have been crushed to paste in a wreck like this. You walked away without a scratch."
Tyler spun around, his distorted voice cracking with desperation. "But I'm perfectly normal! I have a life! I have memories!"
He couldn't accept it. None of it made sense. He was supposed to be the hero who escaped the alien lair to warn humanity! How had he suddenly become the very villain he was running from?
Watching Tyler's mental breakdown, Klein easily pieced the truth together.
DNAliens were created when parasitic Xenocytes latched onto human hosts, forcibly rewriting their genetic code. The Xenocytes themselves weren't highly intelligent; they merely served as biological control collars to force unwilling humans into serving the Highbreed. Thus, a DNAlien was essentially a human mind suppressed and driven by the primal will of a parasite.
It was a tragic, parasitic existence—one so unnatural that even the Omnitrix, which cataloged the DNA of all sapient life, registered them as genetic anomalies rather than a distinct species.
Tyler's current state was an anomaly within an anomaly. The domineering will of the Xenocyte had somehow died or faded away, leaving the human consciousness trapped inside the mutated shell.
Seeing that the guy's despair was entirely genuine, Klein voiced his hypothesis out loud.
By now, the final locked doors in Tyler's mind had burst open. He hadn't escaped from a DNAlien hive at all; that was just a coping mechanism fabricated by his traumatized, amnesiac brain.
The brutal truth was that he had been an active DNAlien, tasked with transporting the Oscillator Key to Los Soledad. Somewhere along the way, his latent human consciousness had violently rebelled against the Xenocyte's control. The resulting mental clash had wiped out the parasite's will, but his physical genetics remained permanently altered.
Understanding the full weight of his tragedy, Tyler slumped against the dirt, burying his monstrous face in his hands in utter defeat.
Ben and Gwen exchanged sympathetic looks, stepping forward to offer some words of comfort.
Tyler just waved them off weakly. "Don't worry about me. Just... go save the others."
Hearing that, Klein and Kevin exchanged a pragmatic shrug. If the guy wanted to wallow, they had heavy lifting to do. They turned their attention back to the massive Oscillator Key.
Kevin placed his hand against the steel hull of the cargo container, absorbing its metallic properties until his skin gleamed with a solid iron sheen. He marched through the battered doors the DNAliens had kicked open earlier.
The Oscillator Key was a behemoth of alien engineering—easily fifteen feet long and over six feet high. It was a dense, heavy lump of metal that no ordinary human could ever hope to budge.
Kevin grabbed the bottom edge of the device, gritting his teeth as he strained his metal-enhanced muscles. He managed to tilt one side a few inches off the floor before dropping it with a heavy thud.
"Yeah, no," Kevin grunted, shaking his hands. "To move this thing by myself, I'd have to mutate back into my old eleven-year-old amalgam form."
Klein leaned against the doorframe, peering lazily into the container. He turned his head and called out, "Dweeb, get in here and help."
Klein could have easily dialed up an alien to haul the massive key, but he figured he'd let Ben do some of the manual labor for once.
As Ben and Gwen jogged over to assist, Tyler remained sitting in the dirt, radiating absolute misery.
Klein sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. "Tsk. How long are you going to sit there moping, kid? Get up, help me haul this giant paperweight out so we can sell it for scrap, and I'll help you change back."
Tyler's head snapped up, his multiple eyes widening in disbelief. "I... I can change back?"
"Your genes have been completely rewritten from the ground up," Klein stated flatly. "Ordinary medical methods won't do a damn thing."
Tyler's brief spark of hope dimmed, but he latched onto the specific phrasing. "Ordinary?"
Klein smirked. "Exactly. Luckily for you, there are always a few extraordinary guys for ordinary situations."
With a flick of his wrist, Klein presented the Another Omnitrix on his left hand, its sleek faceplate gleaming under the dim light.
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