Reincarnated as a Mushroom?

Of Tendrils and Thresholds: A Mind Laid Bare

—

Roughly thirty minutes after I'd extracted myself from the circus of posturing and mercenary banter, I found myself at a small table—alone, at last, and about to consume something that resembled a real meal.

No nutrient paste. No syn-protein sludge. Just cooked, seasoned, warm-blooded food prepared by someone with hands and a soul.

Heaven.

I had just finished savoring the scent when Kathrine swept into the mess hall like she owned the architecture. Her coat flared slightly from the breeze of the automatic doors. Her eyes scanned the space with deliberate curiosity until they landed on me—and narrowed with amusement.

She strode over and plopped down beside me with the ease of a woman who decided proximity was hers to command.

"That was a long five minutes," I commented idly without looking up.

"A lady's five minutes," she said smoothly, "are functionally equivalent to a man's fiscal estimate. Wildly inaccurate and entirely fabricated."

She snapped her fingers toward the kitchen like some planetary queen dispatching her palace staff. Two uniformed attendants emerged bearing food. They placed her plates down with fluid grace, bowed, and ghosted away.

"What?" she said, noting my amused expression. "I'm accustomed to a particular standard of living."

"I didn't say anything," I replied, offering a smile that hovered somewhere between amused and indulgent.

We both dug into our meals for a brief moment of companionable silence. The tension of leadership peeled off her shoulders one forkful at a time. Then she spoke again, soft and curious, but laced with that strategic glitter her eyes always carried when she was learning something new.

"Handsome," she began, "what do you really know about your armor? I examined it last night. Couldn't place its origin. It's not Eradai, and it sure as hell isn't Coalition-standard."

I swallowed, wiped my mouth like a gentleman, and launched into the narrative I'd rehearsed half a dozen times by now.

"The story goes like this: my father's men found a derelict ship—just blinked into our system via a collapsing wormhole. The vessel itself was beyond repair, just twisted slag by the time they got to it. But the cryogenic capsule inside? Untouched. My armor was in that capsule. Pristine. Waiting."

I paused, letting the rhythm settle. Kathrine stared at me with the quiet hunger of a woman trying to solve a riddle through your soul.

"It requires telepathy to operate properly," I added, gesturing vaguely. "Another of my party tricks."

I winked.

"It's unusable otherwise. Damn thing weighs a ton and siphons ambient psionic energy like a starving beast."

Kathrine's fork paused mid-air. "Wait—you're a telepath? So that means… you can hear the voice in my head? Constantly?"

There it was. The hesitance. The tension. Spartari didn't breed many telepaths naturally; the Coalition did—and that made psionics a dirty word in these parts.

"Not quite," I said. "I've got enough control that I only hear what I want to hear. No accidental eavesdropping. Unless I'm drunk. Then it's a mess."

I reached for her hand across the table. Gently.

"Do you trust me?"

Kathrine froze.

The rational part of her brain screamed no. She had committed more felonies than most planetary warlords and betrayed more rivals than there were moons in the belt. Trust was not something she gave—it was something she faked.

But with me?

"Y-Yes," she whispered.

The vulnerability in her voice didn't match the iron spine of the woman I'd seen commanding fleets.

I smiled. "You're psionically gifted. Whether trained or not, you've got a mental barrier—an autonomous defense shell. You might not know it's there, but it is."

With her hand in mine, I gently touched her barrier. Not a mind. Not her thoughts. Just the perimeter—like brushing fingertips against the outside of a soap bubble.

She jolted. Eyes wide.

"That," I said softly, "was your barrier reacting. If I were attacking you? You'd be dizzy, nauseous, hemorrhaging cognition. This? Just the shock of realizing you have a shield."

She relaxed slightly—then twitched again.

I continued. "I'm prodding, gently. My tendrils are letting your barrier know they're not here to break or corrupt. Just… massage."

Kathrine's breath hitched.

The next pulse of contact sent a strange quiver through her spine. Her eyes dilated, her lips parted—and for a moment she looked utterly disarmed. Vulnerable in a way she hadn't prepared for.

"I am," I whispered, watching her squirm, "massaging your Mindspace's outer defenses. It should feel… good. Especially for a first-timer."

It did.

And she was doing her damned best not to scream.

The ambient murmurs of the mess hall receded to static as her world contracted around that sensation. Ten seconds of psychic stimulation ticked by—measured not in time, but eternity.

She was panting by the end of it, face flushed and hands trembling just beneath the table. Mercenaries nearby had definitely noticed.

I withdrew my tendrils with the softness of a sigh.

"That was…" she blinked. "How long did you have me under?"

"Only ten seconds," I said. "But it'll feel longer. Perfectly natural. Temporal dilation inside a non-aggressive Mindspace interaction. First contact is always intense."

She exhaled shakily, recovering.

"You're more dangerous than I thought, handsome." Her voice was shaky, but smiling. She laced her fingers with mine. "But maybe not in the way I expected."

I ignored the flirtation.

Maybe because I was still narratively obligated to finish my made-up origin story.

"So as I was saying, once the suit's linked through telepathy, it moves like an extension of my body. Before my psionic awakening, I could still use it—but the difference was like comparing paper planes to orbital railguns. Night and day. Or rather—galaxy to galaxy."

Kathrine's brow furrowed in intrigue.

Spartari culture leaned heavily into hardware. Metal limbs. Implanted augmentations. But using one's mind—unplugged—to animate a suit like it was just a second skin? That was alien.

"Would you like to give it a test run?" I asked.

Kathrine stared.

"You… you'd let me pilot it?"

"Sure. You won't need to link with it yourself. I'll stay connected and act as a relay. You'll hear my voice in your mind, though. Psionic jargon, don't worry about the wiring."

Kathrine's pupils dilated. Her heart rate spiked. To offer something like that—to share control over such personal gear?

That wasn't flirtation. That was intimacy. Trust in a form Spartari didn't even have words for.

"I—I'd love to," she said breathlessly.

She grabbed my arm and practically dragged me out of the hall, to the delight of the gossip-prone mercenaries. I could feel rumors blooming behind us like a trail of speculative grenades.

To me? The suit wasn't a treasure. Just a node of the hive, a grown limb rather than crafted gear. I had no idea the gesture had hit her like a psionic freight train of significance.

—

Inside her private quarters, I walked toward the wardrobe where the suit stood like a dormant titan.

Kathrine paused at the threshold.

"What's wrong?"

She didn't answer right away. Her eyes locked on the violet orbs embedded in the chestplate.

"They… feel dangerous."

"They are," I said. "To open it, the user needs to sacrifice a little psionic energy. Nothing lethal. Just a dose of juice."

Kathrine hesitated, then stepped into the room slowly. The suit's interior shimmered with unfamiliar material—neither fully metal nor flesh.

It was grown, not forged.

"I thought you might react like that," I said. "It's a hybrid material. Organic-metallic. Sounds gross, sure. But no smell. No writhing. Totally sanitary."

(Lie. It definitely smelled like hive-grown muscle. Sweet. Clean. Alive.)

Kathrine—trying to play cool—stepped into the open suit.

"It's… big," she said, shifting her stance. "You're a mountain. I'm not."

"It adapts," I reassured. "Smart fitting. Once it closes, it'll resize to your form. Just let me know when you're ready."

She nodded.

The armor responded to my mental pulse and sealed around her. It shrank, morphing—fluid and hissing—until it hugged her silhouette like a custom-tailored psionic cocoon.

Then—

'Hmm,' came her voice, in the echoing duality of Mindspace. 'Why did the suit get curvy?'

"It's responding to your form. Link's established," I replied telepathically. "Let me know if you feel discomfort. Try moving."

She moved. Slowly at first. Then confidently.

"The weight distribution is…" she frowned. "Surprisingly light."

"Well, I'm assisting," I said. "Without me—"

Her limbs suddenly locked. Her hands dropped to her sides. Frozen.

Kathrine's eyes widened. "Irvine?"

A beat.

Then freedom. The joints released.

'Sorry,' I said sheepishly. 'Just wanted to demonstrate how much heavy lifting I was doing. Telepathic puppetry isn't subtle.'

Kathrine stepped out, breath visible in the cold air of the room.

But something had changed.

She stared at the suit, then at me.

"How strong are you?" she asked.

I thought about it.

The truth was… I didn't know. Not really. Growing up inside Crystal's web meant my sense of scale had warped long ago. I didn't know what normal was. What baseline even meant.

But compared to a single human?

I smiled.

"Very."