Every single one of them was going to die.

  The thought pulsed in my mind with my monstrous heartbeat, sending a thrill and a chill through me with every pulse. I was scared to do it… But only for the repercussions with my friends. But more than that, I felt everything inside of me already moving towards that end. I wanted it… just like in the old days, as this monster. Yet… this was more me than anything before. I wanted them to stop trying to hurt Autumn… and I WOULD make them stop.

  There was one fact that cemented their fates, even the humans that lingered in their ranks. At first, I had questioned why they were even there, but ultimately it didn’t matter. They were equally as guilty as everyone else. They came here alongside Clive for one reason. They were here for Autumn… to kill her. Everyone was complicit.

  But the even greater fact of the matter was that I sensed a resonance in the woods. It was faint… cloaked somehow. But whatever it was couldn’t be completely hidden from me. It was the elder… The walking skeleton, who was the last of the trio that had killed me down in the pits. For some reason… he was here.

  This, alongside their choice to come here for Autumn, sealed their fates.

  I hadn’t even realized how I probably looked while all the talking and yelling were going on, but I hadn’t moved from the table. I had closed my eyes and retreated into my mind, sending out rapid pulses of my Primeval senses into the area. I could see all of the incoming enemies, which totaled around 67. There might have been a half dozen humans mixed in there, but it was hard to know for sure because some of the creatures were so weak that they could almost pass as human. That was the only hiccup. If some of these people were from Jane’s clan… What would their reactions be after I slaughtered them?

  I was also waiting for a vision from Death. Once I realized the bone-elder was here, manipulating this scene somehow, or just going along with it, I didn’t know, but I knew that Death wanted him dead. He had a relic of Hunger, and all of them needed to be wiped out. He had to send me a vision… right?

  No vision came. What did come, though, was a word spoken through Clive that grabbed my attention immediately. I didn’t hear the full sentence he said, but the word popped in my head like a bullet fired from a gun. “Primeval.”

  My eyes ripped open, void blackness spilling over them as my monstrous form began to shift out. I welcomed the fire in my gums as razor-sharp fangs shifted and tore through my gums. I gripped my fists tightly as the obsidian black talons punched through flesh and bone, squeezing the hurt-so-good feeling that I knew was a precursor to the slaughter.

  My hood was over my head, and part of me didn’t realize how it got there. I wasn’t wearing it as I spoke with Jane, but somehow it just appeared there at some point once the group had arrived. I was glad for it, though, because now they couldn’t see my face… the transformation… until it was too late. Speaking of my transformation, I felt it taper off at a certain point as I prepared to stand. It was a testament to this new body.

  As I stood tall, the chair behind me groaned back across the concrete and fell over, snapping everyone’s attention to me. I knew they were all looking my way, the family hopeful that I was about to stop this threat, or at least defend their daughter's life. Clive and his desperate, weak, tainted pack of misfits were all shakily aware of something standing before them. Something that they were not prepared for.

  “You think she's the threat?” my twisted voice warped out of me like an alien entity. It shifted the atmosphere of the entire area.

  My words hit Clive, and I could see fear in him… all of them. It wasn’t just what I had said, but the feeling that rolled off of me, cranked up to the max, with the knob broken off. Everyone in the area, including the family, was feeling it; undiluted, pure terror! The dread that comes from encroaching annihilation.

  “You think that she is the reason your visions don’t let you see anything but death?”

  Eleanor started saying something next, trying to explain to Clive why his own brand of visions were messed up when they were centered around me. He thought it was from Autumn, but it was me, and the time I was around her. Part of me thought that Eleanor was trying to de-escalate the situation, and that this could be talked out. I could have been wrong, but either way, I didn’t care. Their time was up, and it was my turn to show them the monster that they were truly after.

  Before the transformation could rip any farther through me, I moved.

  I moved so fast the world didn’t even get the chance to register that I’d crossed the entire clearing before I hit my first target. The cloaked figure carrying the same resonance as the bone elder was my priority. Remove the obstruction… clear the path, and then I could continue the slaughter.

  He didn’t react. Didn’t even flinch. He stood there like some painfully average human in disguise: blue jeans, pale blue shirt, blond hair, blue eyes. He could’ve been anyone. But beneath that laughably plain skin, I felt the relic pulsing, and the same warped flavor that marked the elder who had helped kill me.

  I hit him like a runaway freight train.

  His flesh detonated, and everything that made him look human burst apart in a wet explosion of blood, meat, and shredded organs. Gore sprayed out in a twenty-foot radius, drenching everyone close enough to witness the impact. That’s when the screaming started.

  Then the screaming twisted into confusion because the thing that stepped out of the collapsing meat suit wasn’t a man. A skeleton, bare, weathered, and impossibly animate, was thrown free of his body… and then stood back up.

  That broke them… I saw it. Many of Clive’s followers weren’t here for this; they weren’t ready for the sight of someone they thought was their own, peeling out of a human shell like a parasite leaving its host. They ran in confused fear. But they didn’t get far… not in the radius of my pulse-sense. They stayed close enough to come back if needed. They just had to get away from the two monsters that were a much greater threat than they were prepared for.

  It was time to end this shit. Not just Clive’s little game, not just the hesitation that had let people corner and attack what was mine. No more caution. No more second chances. Elder, supernatural, human… if you went for my friends, your life was already over; and every one of them here stank of guilt. They were complicit!

  As they stumbled in the crimson muck coating their faces and clothes, I reached forward into the hidden dimension where the blade slept. My fingers slipped through reality like water; quiet, clean, and then the weapon slid into the living world.

  Power roared off it. Before, in a human body, just drawing it would have killed everyone nearby. But now? I absorbed it. Drank in every drop of Death’s killing force… funneling it into me, feeding the rising storm inside my monstrous chest.

  I wanted the blade because the bone elder couldn’t be killed cleanly with normal means. His bones weren’t inert… they lived. They regrew. I could tear him apart piece by piece, but I wasn’t convinced it would hold. He wasn't like normal beings. I knew I couldn’t just attack him physically… he would put himself back together.

  So I drew Death’s scythe, and the metal glinted under the moonlight, rippling the air around it like a heat haze in the cold night. And even without flesh or eyes, I felt the bone elder’s surprise. Something in his posture… skeletal as it was, shifted. He didn’t know what this weapon was, but he recognized its threat. His left bony foot slid backward.

  Then I vanished.

  I shifted through the veil as instinctively as breathing, appearing behind him in a blink. My blade came down, cleaving straight through the top of his skull. The crack wasn’t dry… it boomed like a thick, wet log splitting under an axe. His bones weren’t hollow; they were dense, moist, trying to knit themselves together even as the blade’s energy devoured them.

  They failed. Pieces of him hung limply, barely clinging to the weapon before the rest of his form clattered down to the ground. A pulse of deep red flared inside his empty sockets. It was the relic. His jaw fell open, whatever life force he clung to collapsing under Death’s consuming power.

  Then the relic slipped from his mouth and drifted into the air. It didn’t simply fall—it glided, pulled by some unseen command. Slow, steady, deliberate. Its full shape left his body, a crystalline fang of an ancient monster… Hunger.

  I turned, still gripping the elder’s remains, and followed its trajectory. It was moving toward Alex.

  I dropped the heap of bones to the ground and sped forward, grabbing the relic out of the air. I placed the edge of death’s blade against the red, crystalline-looking object. The moment the blade hit the fang-looking item, the light flickered in it and then died out immediately. The reddish glow gone… leaving only an empty, hollow shell.

  I didn’t know what would have happened if Alex had gained more of Hunger’s power, but I instinctively knew she didn’t want it. I also knew I didn’t want her to have it. She already had one piece of Hunger, and Death had not sent me for her. But I had a bad feeling that if she gained any more of Hunger’s power, Death might send me a vision… for her. To cleanse a power not meant for this world. At least… that was a fear I had.

  There was a lull, just a few breaths as the remaining onlookers clustered deeper into the woods. They were desperate enough to believe that numbers would save them now. I tracked every one of them with my senses, keeping each heartbeat pinned in place. None slipped past my range. None would escape once it began.

  Clive planted himself at the front, looming and half-transformed, his bear-form tearing its way through his skin; muscles twisted, bones jutted out, his face elongated into a grotesque parody of a bear/human predator. Behind him, more bodies distorted in the tree shadows; some writhing into half-wolves, some cracking and reshaping like their skeletons were trying to force a change so drastic they couldn’t fully muster it up. Others sprouted patches of fur or elongated limbs, all of them pushing themselves as far as their strange, corrupted blood would allow. Maybe belonging to this Clive-pack granted them abilities they shouldn’t possess in their normal environment… or maybe it was something else. Whatever taint the bone elder brought… or the other thing I felt lingering on Clive.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  It was interesting… but meaningless. Let them twist into whatever shapes they thought were threatening. Once they were finished, I would show them what a real monster looked like.

  Behind me, Eleanor and Jane shouted… voices strained and distorted. I couldn’t make out the words behind me; I was so focused on what lay in front. At one point, I thought they were yelling at each other. Eleanor’s tone felt desperate… begging me to stop, to wait, to come back and talk about what we should do… But Jane’s voice cracked, warbling as her own transformation surged outward; claws scraping, bone shifting as she pulled all of her alpha-level strength and control out to her limit. She was the most feral I had ever seen her become, growing close to Darry on the night of that full moon back in France.

  That’s when I sensed movement. Alex and Autumn had left the ground. They hovered behind me, suspended by that vibrating, psionic power that could shred flesh down past the marrow. Both of their bodies had changed. Alex stood enormous, armored in hard plates of death-forged chitin, still feminine but monstrous in her relic-given power. Autumn’s form was the same as before; slimmer, rust-red accents lined the smaller portions of her body that took on the same armored features. She too hummed with a resonance, but it was all her own; Primeval adjacent. Her eyes were completely red, glowing like molten iron submerged in blood.

  Two sides: the enemy before me, my friends behind me. I was the thing in between. I was surrounded by monsters… but none of them were enough to end what needed ending. In those moments… between the snapping bones, the snarls, the rising growl of their courage… I made a decision.

  I wanted all of them, even my friends, even the ones who loved me, to truly understand what I was… and what I would do.

  I released Death’s blade from my grip, and it vanished back into the hidden realm. It shimmered in the air, fading from this world. Then I let go of the reins on the monster and left my human form behind.

  The transformation happened so fast it looked like my body was vacuumed out of reality and something much larger ruptured through the space I’d once occupied. My human shape bled away into something titanic. Muscles stacked and hardened across my body like stone erupting from beneath my darkening skin. I soared upward… twelve, maybe fourteen feet tall. My frame ballooned into a juggernaut of violence. My face sharpened into an angular mask of fangs and cold inevitability.

  My spine strained as the tail tried to grow, as it had in the pits, but I stopped it. I didn’t need a tail for what was about to happen. This form was massive, sharpened, and monstrous… it was enough.

  The monster… Myordrakien’s aura roared out of me, ten times heavier than before, drenching the clearing in dreadful terror. Even from this distance, I saw the flicker… Clive’s confidence breaking, his glowing eyes faltering. Others behind him trembled in their weak, monstrous forms.

  Then I moved.

  The ground shuddered under the first step. Something my size shouldn’t move that fast… but I did. I slammed into Clive in a blur of black talons and monstrous muscle. One clean slice, a single swing of my arm, and his entire torso separated from his waist in the blink of an eye. His upper half fell forward, arms still reaching, mouth still trying to roar, until blood filled his throat and turned his breath into a gurgle.

  Before he hit the ground, I was already on the next one.

  I dropped low and swung outward, cleaving the head from a shorter attacker. The head spun off into the trees, trailing a ribbon of arterial spray before it rolled into the shadows.

  Then I leapt high into the air above the clearing, aiming for my next target. I came down on the lightning-wreathed man, the one whose power had felt familiar to me somehow. Whatever strength he carried meant nothing beneath the weight of a house falling on his spine. His ribs caved under my feet, his organs bursting upward in a wet bloom as my talons shredded through him with the ease of stepping through wet paper.

  I hit all fours and surged forward.

  My skeleton shifted automatically, bones rotating inside me to make running on all fours feel as natural as breathing. I moved like a beast, like the thing that once stalked me in my backyard. Like Jon, when he passed the monster into me that night when everything changed. Every stride cracked the earth. Every pounce tore another shape apart.

  After ten kills… ten broken bodies lying open in the moonlight of the Chasse backyard… I finally noticed movement behind me. My friends were retreating toward the house.

  Even Autumn.

  Even Alex.

  They moved back with wide eyes, their monstrous forms trembling at the sight before them. Not because of what I had done to the elder… or even Clive. It was because I moved between everyone. I didn’t stop… didn’t hesitate. I just moved… and I killed. They knew there were humans out there… Even though Clive had come for Autumn… they didn’t know what to think as I moved on the rest of them with absolutely zero leniency.

  Sobs and screams echoed all around the growing graveyard, pleading, begging. Calling for mercy. It affected all of the Chasses and my friends. They wanted me to slow down. They wanted me to stop.

  They could feel it… the unstoppable coldness radiating from me as I tore through everything in the woods.

  But I wouldn’t stop. They may have wavered at the cold brutality required… but I didn’t.

  My vision reddened, anger, purpose, hunger for death… and it amplified everything I already intended. They came here for Autumn. That was enough. There was no more “talking.” No more “maybe we can save them.” They’d chosen their side.

  And I was ending it.

  Waves of sensory pulses blasted from me; my mind splitting, half tracking every living heartbeat, half focused on slaughter. I didn’t need precision. I didn’t need style. I just needed them dead.

  Humans were the strangest to cut through. Their bodies offered no resistance. I passed through them like slicing through soggy paper. After the first one, I paused internally, waiting… half-expecting Death to intervene. To twist fate and stop me from killing someone whose time wasn’t meant to end.

  But he didn’t. Death was ever silent.

  They were tainted. Hunger’s influence clinging to the bone-elder. Clive’s corpse still held the faint whisper of an alien resonance, like he’d been near something other than Hunger recently. A different Primeval that had moved onto the board, maybe. More proof that every single one of these creatures was compromised. Fair game.

  Or maybe I was royally screwing up Death’s plans, and he’d have to fix it later. Either way, if he wanted me to stop, Death would’ve had to physically restrain me.

  He didn’t. So I kept going.

  I don’t know what time it was, or how long it actually took me, but I knew it was fast. The only thing that consumed the time was the distance between each target. Nothing else slowed me. Not fear, not hesitation, it was just the stretch of ground between kills. When it was done, the woods outside the Chasse home were silent. The shadows were filled with the corpses of creatures I’d never seen and others I’d grown familiar with. All of them dead… no exceptions.

  My form collapsed inward, shedding the towering monstrous bulk that had moved like a living storm between the trees. Branches snapped off me as I shrank, bones grinding back into place, and when the transformation finished, everything that had coated me… gore, blood, shredded organs, slid off and hit the ground at my feet in a thick, wet dump. As if the moment I let go of that form, the filth it carried could no longer cling to me.

  I walked without slowing, stepping through flattened leaves and smeared trails where bodies had been shoved by impact or clamoring in panic. I broke the tree line and stepped into a graveyard. Most of the bodies were in torn heaps… limbs scattered, torsos split open, heads nowhere to be seen. Others were pulped so badly they didn’t resemble anything but mounds of meat. No ties that bind… no bloodlines… none of it meant anything anymore. They were all simply dead.

  Frank stood over Jane as she knelt beside one of the corpses. Her shoulders shook violently, ragged sobs tearing out of her chest. I knew what that meant. I’d seen her face when she confessed her fear of these members of her pack… the “family” who would betray her. I’d felt the ache in her when those two spoke of her failures as their alpha. But she still cared. Even betrayal couldn’t erase that. She never wanted them dead. But she also couldn’t stop them from choosing Clive over her… for choosing to come after Autumn. And now she was left with the brutal truth of it… Her family would be changed forever. Some of them had betrayed her… and they were slaughtered beyond recognition.

  Around them, the others stared as I approached; confused… horrified, and silent. Carter held Eleanor close. Jane clung to Frank. Alex and Autumn had landed nearby, standing side by side, eyes fixed on me as if I were some distant threat they weren’t sure they understood anymore.

  None of them spoke. No one dared. No one knew what to say as I stepped out of the forest where I had just killed so many people… monster and human alike.

  A wet, choking snarl snapped my attention left. Clive, what remained of him, dragged himself through the dirt. Only his upper half was left, leaving a long trail of blood behind him as he clawed toward the woods. It was like he thought if he could only get past the tree line… he’d be saved. When I had cut him in two, his animal form collapsed, leaving this pitiful human torso scraping its way toward a pointless escape.

  I walked toward him slowly and deliberately. Each step turned me further from my friends. Clive stopped crawling and took two trembling breaths before lifting his head. His expression was a twisted knot of rage, terror, and disbelief. As if he thought he already knew how this should have gone. As if my undisputed victory broke some script he trusted.

  Blood bubbled at his lips as he rasped, “What the fuck are you…?”

  I crouched beside him, taking a knee. His fading eyes locked with my void-black eyes.

  “I’m the one you should have left alone...”

  We held that silence for a long moment. Then his arms gave out, and he slumped forward. His life vanished in an instant.

  A faint thrum pulsed through me… his death feeding into Myordrakien’s hunger, a soft echo of strength absorbed. Not even enough to matter. Just a lingering taste.

  Blood leaked from his mouth as he lay face down in the dirt, hollow and finished. Nothing more than a discarded shell of an old acquaintance of the Chasse family. Someone else who dared to deem them an enemy after they had me in their lives.

  I rose and turned back to the others, taking in the scene again. I wasn’t sorry. Not even close. I felt right. Aligned... I had done what needed doing, and I had ended a threat that had come for my people.

  Two corruptions of Primeval power had been mixed into this group. One tied to Hunger through the bone elder. The other tangled with Clive, linked to the strange resonance I’d sensed weeks ago when I found Frank in that downtown building. After a few moments of deep thought, I realized it felt similar to the presence that fled the moment my senses brushed it. Similar to Hunger, but twisted differently. Another Primeval’s hand in the dark, maybe? Watching me? Testing me? Or trying to strike before I could?

  Whatever its motive, I had finally become aware of its existence. Part of me wondered if Death was pulling strings to lead me in this direction, or if this was purely by coincidence. A quick millisecond of thought told me that was not the case. If I ran into another Primeval… that was definitely Death’s hands behind the scenes.

  There was only one thing left to do now: speak to an old friend. Someone I’d always known I’d have to face again. Someone who never fully answered my questions.

  The Chasses, Jane, Alex, and all of my close friends needed space; time to comprehend what I’d done, what it meant, how far I was willing to go. They needed to process the massacre. To clean up the aftermath with the help of Alex and Autumn, and reckon with the truth of who I was now… and where that put me alongside every one of them.

  Too much time had gone by, and they saw this watered-down, tamed version of what I truly was. They needed to see me at my absolute truth. I was a pure fucking monster… it was why I still walked this world. To kill those who were on the wrong side of the balance maintained by Death. To set the scales right.

  It wouldn’t be pretty. It wouldn’t always line up with their morals and methods… but if I could use it to keep people like Clive away from those I cared for… I would.

  It was time they understood who I really was… what I really was. Because I already knew exactly who I was… and I was done fucking around.

  If something was tied to the Elders, the Primevals, or anything else that threatened the people I cared about, I would show them no mercy, leniency, or hesitation.

  I turned my back on the clearing and walked into the shadowed woods littered with bodies. Leaving the Chasses, Autumn, and Alex behind because they would need to deal with the remains.

  I had somewhere else to be. I had to go see Abel.