Divider

Dividers were tall, thin Necromorphs with the rare ability to break apart into smaller, independent creatures. They were encountered aboard the USG Ishimura and on the Sprawl, and their severed head, the Creeper, could go on to claim a fresh body and rise again as a Shambler.

Anatomy#

A Divider was built from a reanimated human corpse, its major organs fallen away or assimilated along with most of its skin. The Dividers found aboard the Ishimura were made from the bodies of high-ranking officers, judging by the tatters of blue clothing they wore, while those on Titan Station seemed to have been scientists in white lab coats. The limbs had stretched long and slender, the fingers fusing into elongated claws, and only enough muscle remained to hold the body together. With the organs gone, the abdomen was left open as a large hole through the torso.

Despite its frail look, the Divider was a loud creature, giving off deep, whale-like bellows when idle and high-pitched shrieks when agitated. It strangled its victims with a long tongue extended from the mouth, preferring to suffocate prey from a distance, and used its clawed arms to slash at anything that came close. The mutation left its arms and legs self-aware, able to move on their own once the host body was destroyed.

The head and the Shambler#

The head was the main Necromorph; the arms and legs only served to crawl, leap across surfaces, and strangle. In a finishing attack the head latched onto a victim's neck and, once the prey was weak, used its powerful appendages to sever the head from the body and hijack the corpse, presumably by attaching itself to the spine and seizing control of the nervous system.

When a Divider took heavy damage it would seem to fall dead, then split into a head, arms and legs that became independent creatures, sometimes called components or Divider Spawn. The scattered parts were fast and would harry and strangle a survivor, but were far weaker than the whole and chiefly served to distract while the head sought a new host. The arms moved like snake-like creatures crawling on three limbs, able to climb walls and slip into vents to ambush, while the legs became smaller, slower crawlers of nerve and muscle. With the head destroyed, the remaining parts posed little real threat beyond being small and hard to hit.

The Divider's head outlived the series of outbreaks that first produced it. On Tau Volantis the head appeared as its own Necromorph, the Creeper, which could throw itself free of a damaged body and, when it claimed a corpse, animate it as a Shambler. The Creeper showed a faint, clumsy intelligence in this state, even able to fire a weapon in the hands it had seized, though very inaccurately.

Behavior and threat#

Dividers tended to be loners, though a pair, or a single Divider supported by Exploders, was not unheard of. They were among the rarest Necromorph variants of the outbreaks, and survivors almost always heard one before they met it, warned by its deep bellow in the original encounters and by a dry, creaking crunch on the Sprawl. Freezing a Divider with Stasis and striking the whole body at once with a Flamethrower or Contact Beam was a reliable means of putting it down, and a Line Gun mine laid among the scattered components could destroy them together. Left intact, a Divider's head was capable of dragging off a fresh kill and carrying the new Shambler away to spread the infection further.