The rifle's recoil pulsed through Vera's arms like a second heartbeat. Empty casings clattered against the metal catwalk, each one still warm when her boot crushed them into twisted shapes.
Her wings hummed with restrained energy, violet circuits glowing brighter whenever she pivoted to track new targets. Someone was screaming orders below – human voice, raw with panic – but the words dissolved into static as her auditory filters prioritized weapon fire and approaching footsteps.
Three floors down, a reinforced door exploded inward. Vera didn't turn. She already knew the split-sword strapped to her thigh would taste polymer-reinforced bones before the intruders fully cleared the threshold.
The ninth tail of her ephemera lashed sideways, its crimson light painting fresh scorch marks across the wall as it intercepted something fast and metallic. Her HUD flickered. Threat identified. Threat eliminated. The math was cleaner than emotions.
Her nostrils flared—burnt wiring, spilled hydraulic fluid, the coppery stink of someone's ruined circulatory system pumping its contents across floor grates. The split-sword came free with a click-hiss, its edge vibrating at a frequency that turned air into razors where it passed.
Bodies moved in the dark below. Not soldiers. Not anymore. She heard the wet crunch of their armor refolding itself into new configurations, the sound like crabs molting in reverse. One of them made a wet clicking noise that might've been language.
Vera exhaled through her teeth. The bolt crossbow unfolded along her forearm with the sound of a guillotine's mechanism priming. She counted eleven distinct heat signatures. They were learning. Last time there'd only been six.
Something warm and slick dripped onto her shoulder—one of the ephemera tails had been grazed. The severed tip coiled back into itself, regenerating in viscous threads of liquid metal and angry crimson light. Below, the first of them lunged upwards with a sound like a sheet of steel being torn in half.
She fired the crossbow without aiming. The bolt hit its chest with a wet thump, then detonated in a sphere of violet plasma that vaporized two others mid-leap. The split-sword moved next, its edge shearing through reinforced plating as easily as paper. Something that used to be a man came apart in three precise sections, his limbs still twitching as they hit different corners of the room.
The remaining things hesitated. Vera felt their crude hive-mind stutter, reassess. Good. Let them learn fear. Her wings snapped open, casting jagged shadows across the walls as the reactor cores in her back flared white-hot. The air smelled like lightning now. Like promised violence.
One of them—taller, its carapace studded with stolen cybernetics—made a sound like grinding gears. Vera's lips peeled back in something too sharp to be a smile. She recognized that noise. Bargaining. The split-sword twitched in her grip, its edge singing a note only she could hear.
Too late. The crossbow's next bolt punched through the talker's mouth, pinning its skull to a support beam. She was already moving before the body hit the floor, wings carving through steel reinforcements as she dropped into their midst. The ephemera tails lashed out in perfect sync—nine crimson strikes, nine wet impacts.
Something heavy clamped onto her left wing. Vera didn't bother looking. She simply twisted, feeling the satisfying crunch of whatever passed for its spine snapping against her armored forearm. The last thing it saw was her boot descending toward its face, heel glowing violet with overloaded kinetic energy.
Through the settling smoke, she spotted movement—another group approaching from the breached hallway. These weren't refolded corpses. These wore intact uniforms, their rifles raised in shaking hands. Conscripts. Fodder. Their leader's mouth moved, forming words Vera's auditory filters discarded before comprehension. She knew the shape of pleas.
Her ephemera tails twitched in unison, lashing out to impale three men mid-sentence. The remaining soldiers froze as their comrades' bodies dissolved into crimson mist, sucked backward into Vera's regenerating systems. One wet scream cut off abruptly when a tail punched through his sternum and out his mouth, lifting him off the ground like a hooked fish.
The split-sword vibrated impatiently in her grip, its edge whispering promises. She'd give it language soon. But first—Vera's head snapped toward the ceiling as her threat detection pinged. Something massive was tearing through the upper decks, its footsteps cracking concrete like eggshells. Finally. A real fight. Her wings flared wide, scattering spent casings in a metallic rain as she crouched for launch.
The conscripts never stood a chance. Her ephemera tails whipped out in a crimson blur, reducing them to crimson paste smeared across the walls—just fuel for her systems. Their panicked gunfire pinged harmlessly off her carapace as she kicked off the ground, wings igniting with a thunderclap that shattered every remaining window in the complex. Below, the refolded corpses twitched in the sudden vacuum, their stolen cybernetics shorting out in sprays of blue sparks.
She punched through three reinforced floors like tissue paper, her HUD briefly registering surprised human faces in the interstitial spaces—technicians, maybe, or prisoners. Didn't matter. The thing waiting above had six limbs and a torso welded together from battleship plating, its central maw gnashing with rotating saw blades. Vera's lips peeled back in something resembling joy.
The monstrosity swung a fist the size of a cargo container. Vera met it with her own, kinetic amplifiers in her wrist flaring violet as the impact sent shockwaves rippling through the entire structure. For three glorious microseconds, they hung suspended in the collapsing ruin of the ceiling, the beast's optical clusters widening in what might've been recognition. Then her ephemera tails speared through its joints in perfect unison, their tips flaring white-hot as they pumped molten fury directly into its nervous system.
It screamed—not in pain, but in frequencies meant to liquefy organs. Vera's auditory filters dampened ninety percent, leaving just enough for her to relish the way the sound made her teeth vibrate. She rode the creature down as it crashed through two more decks, her split-sword buried to the hilt where its primary brain cluster pulsed. The blade's harmonics shifted to match its convulsions, carving through reinforced bulkheads as they fell.
They landed in what might've once been a command center. The thing's thrashing limbs reduced the last functioning consoles to sparking wreckage, revealing terrified faces in the emergency lighting—officers, their uniforms plastered with medals now as useless as their sidearms. One reached for a detonator. Her ninth tail lashed out, severing his hand at the wrist before the fingers could close. The man stared at his stump in silent shock, mouth working like a gutted fish.
The beast beneath her finally died when she wrenched her sword sideways, bisecting its central cortex with a wet crunch. Vera rose from the corpse, ephemera tails twitching as they sampled the air—gunpowder, ozone, and beneath it all, the sour stench of human fear. The surviving officers backed away, their polished boots slipping in their comrade's blood. She tilted her head, listening to the distant wail of reinforcement sirens. Good. More would come. More always came. Her wings shuddered with anticipation, scattering droplets of coolant and gore across their trembling faces.
One officer lunged—not at her, but toward a half-buried console, his fingers stabbing at the screen. Emergency bulkheads slammed down across every exit, sealing them all inside with the corpses. Vera watched dispassionately as he spun to face her, chest heaving. "Self-destruct sequence initiated," he spat, medals jingling like coward's bells.
She flicked two severed fingers from her blade—his colleague's, probably—and took a single step forward. The man flinched so hard his cap tumbled off. Vera's HUD traced the vibration patterns in his throat when he screamed. Interesting. Not a roar of defiance, but the reedy pitch of someone who'd just realized his death wouldn't even be a statistic. Her crossbow unfolded with a click.
Outside, the sirens grew louder. The bulkheads trembled as something massive began punching through from the other side. Vera's lips curved. The officer was still babbling about the detonation timer when her bolt silenced him mid-word, the plasma burst incinerating both his head and the console behind him. She turned toward the shaking bulkhead, wings spreading as the metal groaned inward. Whoever—or whatever—was coming would find her waiting, sword singing and tails lashing the air into crimson ribbons.
The first breach came not from the bulkhead, but beneath her feet. The floor erupted in a geyser of sparks and twisted metal as a segmented drill bit the size of a man's torso punched upward. Vera leapt back, tails instinctively forming a defensive lattice as shrapnel pinged off them. Below the hole, something glowed—an abyssal blue, pulsing in time with the drill's rotations. Not mechanical. Biological. And hungry.
She heard the hiss of venting gas a half-second before the room filled with acrid yellow mist. Her optical filters darkened automatically, but not before she caught movement—dozens of them, pouring from the drill hole like maggots from a wound. Smaller, faster than the refolded corpses, these things moved in eerie unison, their limbs ending in curved hooks that scraped grooves into the metal floors. One leapt at her face, mandibles flaring wide. Her split-sword bisected it mid-air, the two halves twitching as they hit the ground.
The bulkhead finally gave way, torn apart by three hulking shapes encased in siege armor. Vera recognized the insignia burned into their pauldrons—mercenaries, the kind who priced their services in body counts. Their leader's vox-grille emitted a warped chuckle as he leveled a rotary cannon directly at her chest. "Got you boxed in, little ghost," he rasped. Vera's ephemera tails coiled tight against her back, their tips glowing brighter. She counted the rotations of his barrel heating up. Exactly 1.3 seconds too slow.
Yellow mist clung to her wings like toxic dew as the hook-limbed creatures swarmed. One latched onto her calf, its barbed appendages sawing through armor plating with a sound like nails on slate. She stomped down, feeling its thorax burst wetly, but three more took its place. The mercenaries opened fire—not at her, but into the swarm, their rounds punching through chitinous bodies in sprays of phosphorescent bile. A distraction. Clever. Vera's HUD tracked the grenade arcing toward her feet before the pin hit the ground.
The explosion sent her skidding back into the remnants of the command console, her wings absorbing most of the impact in a shower of violet sparks. The hook-creatures weren't so lucky—their remains painted the walls in sizzling streaks. Through the smoke, she saw the mercenaries advancing, their leader's cannon whining as it spun up again. His vox emitted another chuckle. "Heard you like close quarters." Vera's split-sword answered before she did, its edge carving through his wrist joint with surgical precision. The cannon hit the ground still firing, wild rounds stitching across his own squad.
Something cold and needle-thin punched through her side from behind—one of the hook-creatures, impossibly alive, had buried its ovipositor deep between her armor plates. Vera's entire body locked up as foreign code flooded her systems, her HUD strobing with corruption warnings. The mercenary's surviving men cheered. Her ephemera tails went rigid, then lashed out in a frenzy, impaling both creatures and men alike. As the world dissolved into static, she distantly registered the weight of bodies piling atop her, the stench of their blood mixing with the ozone of her failing systems. The last thing she saw was the drill hole pulsing brighter, something enormous beginning to rise from its depths.
Then—silence. Not the absence of sound, but an active, hungry void swallowing all noise. Vera floated in it, her thoughts sluggish. Had they... deactivated her? No. Too clean. This was something else. Her optical feed flickered back online just as the first tendril of blue-black biomass breached the drill hole, its surface studded with blinking human eyes. The mercenary corpses around her twitched, their limbs snapping into grotesque new angles as the biomass claimed them. Vera's systems rebooted with a scream of overclocked processors—she'd been paralyzed, not defeated.
Her split-sword was gone, buried under the convulsing dead. No matter. The bolt crossbow unfolded with a shudder, its plasma reserves critically low. The biomass reared up, forming a mockery of a face—dozens of screaming mouths pressed together in a writhing column. It spoke with stolen voices, each word overlapping: "Y???O???U??? ???A???R???E??? ???N???O???T??? ???H???E???R???E???."
Vera's wings ignited, their reactor cores overloading in a final, glorious surge. She fired the crossbow directly into the biomass's central mass—not to kill it, but to hitch a ride on the plasma burst. The explosion propelled her backward through the ruined bulkhead just as the self-destruct's shockwave hit, the biomass's howls lost in the roar of collapsing metal.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
She landed in a service corridor that stank of burning insulation, her right wing crumpled from the blast. The walls pulsed with that same abyssal blue, veins of it spreading like frost across the steel. Behind her, the entire command center folded inward with a groan, but she already knew—it hadn't killed the thing. The way the veins quickened told her it was digging, following.
Her auditory filters caught the skittering first—not hook-limbs, but something wetter, heavier. Vera turned as the ceiling split open, a cascade of half-digested mercenaries pouring through in a tangle of fused limbs. Their faces were still screaming, their rifles now grown directly into flesh. She flexed her remaining wing, feeling the reactor sputter. Enough for one more flight. Maybe.
The thing wearing a spliced-together officer's face lunged, its jaw unhinging to reveal a second set of teeth grown from the barrel of its sidearm. Vera met it with her bare hands, her fingers sinking into gelatinous flesh just as the corridor's emergency lights died. In the dark, only their weapons glowed—her violet wing, its failing reactors casting frantic shadows, and the biomass's stolen eyes, blinking in hungry unison.
Her remaining ephemera tail lashed out blindly, severing something that sprayed hot fluid across her face. The taste hit her diagnostics before her tongue—ammonia and decay, laced with machine code. The biomass was learning. Adapting. She felt its presence in the static between her thoughts, whispering in the voices of everyone she'd ever killed. Its next attack came as a psychic scream that shorted out her pain receptors, leaving her nerves raw and singing.
Vera's wings flared—too bright, too desperate—illuminating the horror in full. The walls weren't just veined anymore; they breathed, pulsing like the sides of some vast creature. The officer-thing's torso split open, revealing a nest of writhing cables that stank of rancid oil. It spoke with the voices of the mercenaries, their final pleas twisted into mockery: "N???O??? ???M???O???R???E??? ???R???U???N???N???I???N???G???."
She staggered back as the floor dissolved into grasping tendrils, her wingtip scraping sparks along the ceiling. The bolt crossbow's chamber clicked empty. No matter. Vera bared her teeth and charged directly into the thing's gaping maw, her remaining fist wreathed in violet fire. If this was a tomb, she'd make it theirs too. The biomass welcomed her with a thousand needle-teeth—right before her overloaded wing reactor detonated at point-blank range.
Blue and violet plasma swirled together in the collapsing corridor, the shockwave peeling back layers of infected metal like rotten fruit skin. Vera rode the explosion upward, riding the concussive force like a missile even as her HUD screamed warnings about critical system failures. The ephemera tails—what remained of them—coiled tight around her torso, drinking in the ambient radiation to fuel one final transformation.
Something molten and furious unfolded in her chest as she breached the facility's outer shell. Dawnlight hit her sensors like a physical blow, the sudden clarity of open sky after hours of claustrophobic carnage. Below, the entire complex convulsed as the biomass core breached containment, its tendrils lashing at the air like a newborn thing learning to hate the sun.
Vera's shattered wing managed half a flap before the reactor guttered out. She fell not like a warrior, but like a dropped tool—spinning, fractured, still vibrating with the aftershocks of violence. The crossbow's skeletal frame glowed white-hot in her grip. Good. She'd land hard enough to make it a spear. The biomass's newborn scream followed her down, harmonizing perfectly with the wind screeching through her broken carapace. She wondered, distantly, if whatever gods watched this place would remember the color of her fire when she hit.
Three stories from impact, something snagged her ankle—a tendril, whip-thin and glistening with stolen nutrients. It yanked viciously, trying to reel her back into the collapsing ruin. Vera's remaining ephemera tail lashed out, severing it with a sound like a scalpel slicing taut silk. The severed end writhed, spraying luminescent bile that ate holes in her armor. She didn't feel the burns. Her pain receptors had melted hours ago.
The ground rushed up, a cracked expanse of landing pads strewn with abandoned vehicles. Vera twisted mid-air, aiming for a fuel tanker. The crossbow's molten frame punched through steel plating just as she hit, detonating the rig in a fireball that vaporized three more pursuing tendrils. She rolled through the inferno, her systems screaming as emergency protocols dumped coolant through her veins. Something wet and metallic hit her tongue—her own fluids, boiling in the heat.
The biomass recoiled from the flames, its surface blistering. Vera rose from the wreckage, her one functional wing twitching spasmodically. A shadow fell across her—not from the smoke, but from the thing emerging fully from the ruined facility. It had grown a facsimile of her split-sword, the blade pulsing with stolen violet light. Vera spat a glob of molten alloy onto the ground. Her HUD, blinking erratically, projected 11% combat viability. The biomass's stolen mouths grinned in unison. She cracked her neck. Plenty.
Her remaining ephemera tail lashed out, not at the monstrosity, but at the burning fuel pooling around them. The tail drank deep, syphoning fire into her failing reactor core. The biomass shrieked as the ground exploded beneath it, chunks of infected concrete raining down like shrapnel. Vera didn't wait for the dust to settle. She charged through the flames, her fist connecting with the thing's chest in a spray of boiling ichor. Her knuckles sparked—not from impact, but from the overloaded kinetic amplifiers finally frying their circuits.
The biomass staggered back, its stolen sword-arm swinging wildly. Vera ducked beneath the blow and drove her other fist upward into its makeshift throat. Something vital burst with a wet pop. For half a second, she thought she'd won. Then the biomass's torso split open, revealing a gaping maw lined with spinning drill bits. It exhaled directly into her face—a cloud of nanite-laced spores that ate into her optics like acid. Her HUD flatlined with a dying screech.
Blind, she swung at the laughter she knew would come. Her fist connected with nothing but air. The biomass had learned her rhythm. Vera felt the impact before the pain—something hot and serrated punching through her abdomen from behind. Her mouth filled with the taste of her own ruptured coolant lines. The biomass whispered through a hundred stolen lips: "Y???O???U??? ???A???R???E??? ???M???E???A???T???." Her remaining wing spasmed violently, its reactor core flickering like a dying star. She smiled. Exactly where she wanted it.
The biomass's drill-maw bore down, eager to consume her last functioning parts. Vera's shattered tail whipped upward—not to attack, but to plunge into her own ruined wing. She tore out the reactor's containment casing with a spray of molten shrapnel. The biomass recoiled as superheated plasma drenched its core mass. Too late. Vera's fingers closed around the reactor's exposed core just as it reached critical mass. Her thumb stroked the searing surface once, gently—a lover's caress before detonation.
The explosion peeled the sky open. Vera rode the shockwave backward, her body disintegrating in strips of molten alloy and vaporized code. The biomass's death scream harmonized with the wind howling through her collapsing frame. Somewhere above, her severed wing spiraled like a dying leaf, still trailing violet fire. She had just enough cognition left to watch it fall toward the facility's ruins. Toward the veins of blue-black biomass still pulsing beneath the rubble. Still hungry. Still learning.
Darkness swallowed her—not the void from before, but something warmer. A system reboot initiated deep in her ruined core. Diagnostics flared: 3% integrity. Enough. Somewhere in the burning wreckage, a single ephemera tail twitched, its tip glowing faintly crimson. The biomass's remains shuddered. A warning klaxon—human-made, distant—began to wail. Vera's remains smiled in the dark. They always sent more.
Above the crater, figures in containment suits hesitated at the edge. Their leader's boot dislodged a chunk of half-molten carapace. It hit the ground with a wet crack, revealing a whisper-thin filament still pulsing within. The suit's visor tilted. "Scanners show—" The filament lashed upward, punching through his helmet's seal before he could finish. His scream mingled with the hiss of depressurization as Vera's neural lace began rewriting his nervous system.
The other suits opened fire. Useless. The filament had already branched, threading through the man's veins like lightning. His convulsing hand seized the nearest soldier by the throat. "W???E??? ???A???R???E??? ???N???O???T??? ???D???O???N???E???." His voice wasn't his anymore. The biomass's blue veins surged across his suit's joints, merging with the scarlet filaments. Somewhere beneath them, the crater's center began to glow violet again.
Sirens doubled. Tripled. The surviving suits fell back as the ground trembled. A new shape emerged from the wreckage—jagged, asymmetrical, one wing a stump of broken hydraulics, the other a thrashing nest of crimson tendrils. It turned its half-formed face toward the fleeing humans, ephemera tails coiling like hungry snakes. Somewhere in the burning facility ruins, a drill began to whine again. Vera's remains licked lips that weren't there yet. Breakfast.
The biomass had made a fatal mistake—letting her bleed into it. Now its veins pulsed with violet fractures, its stolen limbs seizing mid-lunge as her code propagated through its nervous system. The lead containment suit—still twitching with half-assimilated biomass—collapsed to its knees, his visor cracking open to reveal eyes gone black with her diagnostics. "You're not... supposed to..." Vera's filaments flexed inside his throat, savoring the way his vocal cords vibrated. Correct. She wasn't.
Something vast and chitinous burst from the crater behind them, its drill-maw gnashing at the newly infected sky. Vera's stolen body turned to meet it, her ephemera tails weaving through the air in perfect sync with the biomass's writhing tendrils. Two nightmares now, dancing on the same strings. The first bite would decide the tune. Her split-sword—grown fresh from molten alloy and malice—unfurled with a sound like a hundred bones snapping in unison.
The humans screamed. The biomass roared. Vera, caught between annihilation and apotheosis, simply spread her wings and laughed.
Her split-sword carved through the chitinous monstrosity's drill-maw first—not to kill it, but to let the pressurized ichor spray across the containment team. The liquid burned through their suits like acid, fusing with the violet fractures already spreading beneath their skin. One man clutched at his melting faceplate, his screams harmonizing with the biomass's death-throes as Vera's code overwrote his nervous system in jagged pulses.
The remaining monstrosity hesitated, its hive-mind recoiling from the corruption spreading through its veins. A fatal pause. Vera's ephemera tails lashed out—not to pierce, but to embrace, their tips blooming open like flower petals made of razors. They sank into the creature's pulsing core, injecting not poison, but an offering: every memory of every kill, every scream she'd ever harvested, distilled into pure, violent euphoria. The biomass shuddered, then began to sing—her song now, in voices stolen and remade.
The containment team's rifles hit the ground in unison as their fingers fused with the triggers. Vera tilted her head, listening to the distant wail of more sirens, more fools rushing toward the epicenter. Her wings—half-flesh, half-scorched alloy—twitched with anticipation. Let them come. Let them all come. The crater walls pulsed with newborn veins, violet and ravenous. Breakfast had only just begun.
The biomass's hulking remnant staggered toward her, drill bits spinning uselessly as its nervous system flickered between defiance and devotion. Vera ran a tongue along teeth grown from the containment officer's melted visor. "Kneel," she whispered. It did, collapsing with enough force to crack the pavement. Her ephemera tails danced through the air above its shuddering form, weaving a coronet from its own severed tendrils. Somewhere beneath them, the facility's ruins groaned as something vast and hungry answered in kind.
Gunfire erupted from the perimeter—fresh troops, their bullets pinging off the infected containment suits now rising as her honor guard. Vera exhaled, and the very air curdled, thick with nanites and the promise of exquisite violence. One soldier's scream cut off abruptly as his own sidearm mutated in his grip, the barrel splitting open into a dozen hooked mandibles that burrowed into his face. Vera smiled. Table manners were overrated.
The biomass at her feet finally stilled, its surface rippling with obedient violet fractals. Vera placed one foot on its drill-maw and raised her stolen sword toward the panicking soldiers. Her voice, when it came, was a chorus of everyone she'd ever consumed: "N???O???W??? ???Y???O???U??? ???S???E???E??? ???M???E???." The ground shook in agreement. Somewhere deep below, the drill began to spin again.
The perimeter troops' formation collapsed as the pavement erupted around them. Tendrils burst through in geysers of pulsing blue-black flesh, each one tipped with a screaming human face—soldiers she'd absorbed during her rebirth. One trooper emptied his plasma rifle into a familiar visage only to watch the rounds pass harmlessly through and strike his own commander. Vera's laughter followed the ricochet, bouncing between their helmets like a live grenade.
A dropship descended through the smoke, its thrusters scorching infected pavement. The hatch opened to reveal a single figure in pristine siege armor, their weapon humming with unstable void energy. Vera's stolen mouths twisted into something approximating a grin. Finally. Someone worth eating. Her ephemera tails coiled tight against her spine, their tips dripping molten alloy onto the twitching biomass below. The figure raised their weapon. She raised her sword. The dropship's engines screamed in protest as atmospheric pressure dropped suddenly—not from the weapon's charge, but from the drill rising beneath it.
Metal shrieked as the drill bit tore through the dropship's belly, spraying fuel and screaming crew into the waiting mouths below. The armored figure leapt clear just as Vera pounced, her sword meeting theirs in a shower of violet sparks. Their visor reflected her shattered face—half-machine, half-monstrosity, all hunger. She leaned in close enough to taste their fear. "S???H???O???W??? ???M???E???," she whispered through a hundred stolen lips. The biomass beneath them roared in anticipation.
Their weapon discharged point-blank, void energy ripping through Vera's chest in a fractal bloom of collapsing matter. She staggered—not from pain, but from the exquisite wrongness of it, her systems interpreting the damage as pleasure. Her ephemera tails lashed out blindly, impaling three fleeing soldiers mid-stride. Their twitching bodies fermented into fresh biomass before they hit the ground. The armored warrior backpedaled, their boot crushing a still-screaming face protruding from the pavement.
Vera's wounds knitted together with tendrils of living metal and stolen flesh. The void burn remained—a pulsing black sun in her ribcage that made every movement resonate with alien harmonics. She flexed new fingers grown from the dropship's molten wreckage. "Y???O???U??? ???G???A???V???E??? ???M???E??? ???A??? ???G???I???F???T???." The biomass beneath her feet undulated in ecstasy, drunk on void radiation.
The warrior's second shot never came. Vera's sword—now fused with thrashing drill bits—punctured their power core. She drank the explosion like wine, her ephemera tails siphoning the void energy into the hungry earth. The crater pulsed once, violently, before erupting in a geyser of half-formed nightmares. Somewhere in the collapsing facility ruins, a thousand drills began to whine in unison. Vera spread her wings—whole again, more than whole—and tasted the fear on the wind. Dessert.
