It was just about ready to activate all its Skills and hope for the best, because it genuinely could not deal with this anymore.

The more tired the human became, the worse his stability got, and all it could do was slide a couple inches forwards, then back.

Then forwards and back again. And again. Thump. Slide. Thump. Slide.

It had been something like an hour, and it was starting to feel delirious.

It was in this state of mind that it decided to try something it thought was futile just ten minutes ago, which was to try and jam its venom fang through the man’s uniform.

Which had proven to be exactly as useless as it had expected, the man immediately noticing the sharp bit trying to dig through his uniform and into his stomach, and dropping the wolf’s cage on the steps as he jumped back.

After falling down the steps on a rolling cage, and with the human having decided to hold its cage longwise right after, keeping its tail far from his body, it could confidently say its efforts were rewarded with more misery than they were worth.

After that the wolf began paying as much attention to its surroundings as possible, mostly to try and distract itself from the nausea and mounting irritation. They’d moved up a long shaft, exited out of a tiny door hidden in a little nook beside a broken water pipe and a cracked open gutter grate, and then the human went to some kind of open square to meet up with some other humans who started escorting him.

And the more time went by, the more it began focusing on nothing but its surroundings, any idle musings on trying to sleep and craft a key forgotten.

It wasn’t sure why, exactly, but the air was just… a lot cleaner than it could ever remember it being, beside in that one moss-covered room, way down into the human nest. Which made it think that it was really, really far away from all the places it knew.

That was a rather uncomfortable thought.

It’s assumption was very quickly confirmed when the alleyways they started moving through seemed wide enough to have ten humans walking side by side, and the roads they were flitting through became wide enough to have thirty humans walking side by side.

It had never seen places this… open, besides that one time it had accidentally stumbled into an open space, across from a gargantuan tower, and almost got hit by a bolt made of sparks from some angry human.

Of course, that was not the only difference. The streets were more even, the floor was universally more flat and just more… traversable, and from the couple dozen feet it could feel through the human’s vibrations, there was a lot less… chaos, in general. It was all in the details.

No pipes sticking out of random places, no barred alleyways barely thick enough for a human to squeeze through, and all the walkways extending over the small human nests had actual metal supports that people had to weave through as they walked under them.

There were of course a dozen other tiny details, but it eventually let them slide away from its mind and solidify into the vague thought that wherever it was, it would be much easier to navigate than what it was used to.

There were also less people walking around than it was used to.

Significantly less. It could feel dozens and dozens of humans sitting in their metal boxes all around, above, and sometimes even below itself, but the amount of them wandering the alleys and streets were so few.

It idly wondered if something happened in the nest, because there was nothing it could notice that would justify all the humans hiding inside their miniature nests like this. No poisonous gasses, no tell-tale rumbling of a collapsing factory, a sight it had caught a glimpse of once, near the start of its life, many months ago, and no fighting.

Well, any more than the usual amounts of fighting that the humans did.

It had been a long time since they’d started moving, and the human and his followers didn’t seem inclined to stop any time soon. It let out a long sigh, its frustration having been already spent, and its mind and body now well accustomed to the uneven rocking of the human’s gait.

It squeezed its melatonin sack dry as soon as it had produced a bit more, for the third time, and tried to empty its mind, fall into sleep. And despite how incredibly uncomfortable it felt to do so, it even sheathed all its antennae into its fur and flattened its ears, for the sole purpose of trying to sleep.

It took a few minutes, its mind continued brushing along the edges of a lucid awareness, and eventually, what felt like seconds later but was likely several minutes, it felt its mind slip under, embraced in restfulness.

Now to craft a key as fast as it could before the sounds of its surroundings and the annoying rocking would wake it back up again.

The process was not fast whatsoever. It had to focus on vibrations to properly calculate sizes and distances for the key’s grooves, and the more it focused on them, the less solid its grasp of sleep became. External stimuli and sleep just didn’t work together. The deafening sound of grinding pulleys and humming electrics, the rocking of its cage, none of them helped the wolf whatsoever.

Mercifully, there were extended periods of time where its cage would be put on the floor, free of interference.

It had to stop every couple glimpses to allow its mind to sink back into rest, before the next bout of fast-paced mental measurements took place, and it would add another groove into the key.

It was in the middle of confirming the height of the third groove when its vibrations picked up on the fast-paced steps of a human marching towards its cage, and before it could react, light flooded its cage, a stark, sickly white.

Forcefully pulled out of its sleep, its eyes snapped open in a squint, and its lips curled into a snarl.

Now it was going to have to start all over again on the groove.

It wanted to bite the man’s head off so bad.

Or at least it wanted the irritating light beam out of its face.

“Are we sure that thing’s alive? It hasn’t moved or made a single sound and we’ve been escorting you for like three hours.” The nameless escort asked, leaning back and blowing out his cigarette smoke out beyond the bars, idly watching the Great Tower’s countless lifts and platforms moving beyond, above and below them, their own lift a single speck within a complex web of metal and glass.

“Check if you want, just don’t antagonize the damn thing. It’s really pissy.” He warned, too tired to give a shit about maintaining the mystery, and he watched dispassionately as the young man took his flashlight out of his belt, pressing the button on the shaft as he marched to the beast’s cage and lifted the blanket.

It was pointless, really. The mutt had thrashed and refused any kind of nutrition and water he could give it, whether it was by needle or tube, and it somehow still seemed just about ready to turn rabid at the slightest provocation.

Not to mention how it woke up six hours later from poison that was supposed to put it to sleep for at least four days.

In short, it was fine and very healthy. Somehow.

He couldn’t help but tense as the man pointed the flashlight straight into the cage.

He was still somewhat paranoid about the damn thing somehow getting free, very vividly remembering the horrific screams that had guided him and Niet to the thing’s precise location.

He was very glad he wasn’t going to be the one carrying it from now on.

A sharp snarl like a bark boomed out of the cage with enough volume to make them all jump, and in an instant, a deafening metal bang filled their lift as the cage screeched forward a few inches with a sudden jerk. The man jumped back as if burned with a rather undignified exclamation of surprise, stumbling back before falling on his ass, and he stared with slightly widened eyes at the two rings of golden malice glaring at the man from within a pitch black cage.

Then they slid over to him, and its pupils might as well have turned into needle points, a low rumbling like the menacing purr of an engine making the metal beneath his boots and at his back vibrate.

It made his hair raise in goosebumps, his shoulders instinctively raising to hide his neck at the memory of the way the thing had ripped off that woman’s head.

He couldn’t wait to be rid of this mutated biomancy experiment or whatever accursed freak it was. Holding it next to his soft, squishy stomach when getting out of the apartment had given him such anxiety he was sure he was going to be having stomach cramps for the next week.

The brown-feathered corfid woman Pietre had personally sent was the one to grab the blanket and cover the cage back up a mere moment after the growling started, and after another moment of rumbling, the beast seemed to calm down, silence returning to their group once more as the lift continued rattling its way up the Great Tower’s spine.

“Well, it’s definitely alive.” The man awkwardly quipped as he picked himself up off the ground, trying to scrap together some sense of dignity, and returned to his spot along the bars.

He tuned out of their idle ribbing and banter as he closed his eyes, leaned back against the bars, and returned to doing his favorite thing.

Absolutely nothing.

Much as it wanted to stay awake and feel for its surroundings, it was much more interested in escaping, and had thus managed to keep itself asleep for long enough to get to the seventh groove of the key.

Unfortunately, the room they’d put it in was just too infuriatingly loud to concentrate. And too tantalizing. Progress had slowed to a crawl.

There were so many damn animals in one large room, their cages stacked on top of one another. And it was torture for the wolf, because it wanted to eat every single one of them.

It had never seen any of these things before. There were four-winged birds, there were lizards with wings, small, six-legged furry animals, a quadrupedal furry thing that meowed incessantly, there were human-sized lizards that had the rough anatomy of a canine, there was even some strange, round creature covered in what felt like… rocks, leather and crystals?

There was even some absurdly large moth as big as the wolf’s head, that had some kind of artificial environment in its glass tank.

It couldn’t see any of them due to the blanket still on its cage, but it could damn well feel just how different and varied the life in this room was. Never mind how many new smells were assaulting its sensitive nose with every inhale. It was so hard to tune it all out and focus on the key.

The moment it got out, if it was fast enough, it could have a small feast on its hands before cutting a hole through the bricks and getting out of here. Unfortunately, it did not have any faith in its luck, so it decided to plan for the worst case scenario, which would be that it might only have time to eat one, maybe two things in this room before it had to run.

So it would have to pick carefully.

It turned off its hearing by dissolving the microscopic hairs in its cochlea in seconds, and squeezed out some adrenaline as it woke up, just to take a quick look. Its right hind paw slammed into the floor in a steady rhythm.

The canine-shaped lizard was… boring and uninteresting in its design besides the tail.

It was long and covered in bony spikes, none of which seemed decorative whatsoever. And judging by the vibrations, it was a fairly complicated setup of little muscles made to flare or flatten the spikes, and a strange configuration of tendons underneath that it couldn’t quite understand the purpose of.

That thing’s tail would be number one.

It turned its attention to the rest of the chaos filling the room. The ball-like thing covered in crystals was by far the most interesting thing, but its cage was more of a thick box of closed metal, and the wolf couldn’t find something all that useful for its continued survival on the thing.

It kept looking, but finding something useful based on nothing but vibrations was a tall order.

Sure, it could eat that screeching beaked bird thing, but it didn’t really feel like it needed feathers, and while flying sounded great, it had no idea how it would go about doing such a thing when it was so heavy. How huge would its wings have to be? Would it fit anywhere if it added wings that could actually carry it? And if it messed up, how likely was it to die?

Questions like that made it steer away from the flying creatures, instead turning to other quadrupedal creatures.

There was a six-legged thing that had a strange neck and head biology, with two giant, curling horns coming out of its head near the eyes. It looked both strong and intimidating. Unfortunately, it was also within a box of metal, and thus cutting into that, and killing it, before eating the head and neck, would take far too long.

Then, some strange, small, furry thing, tucked into a large cage and…

It was very interesting.

It almost looked like a tiny dog, but its tail hair was flat, and its body felt almost like liquid, impossibly flexible. Its nails were somehow embedded into its paws, and as it stretched, the wolf felt them flex outside of its paws, something that would definitely be useful to have for itself.

It was the thing that kept making the grating meowing noise. And it was small enough the wolf could easily chow it down in two or three bites.

Its targets decided, it got back to making the key.

It was half-way through the twelfth groove when it felt a small entourage of humans barge into the massive room, among them the human that had originally captured it. He was hurriedly walking beside a strange fat man who waddled with speed, while the other men and women followed behind.

It decided to be optimistic and go back to its key, hoping they were there for another animal.

As always, being optimistic meant that it was being wrong, because they were heading straight to it.

The fat man said something it couldn’t quite pick out, and it saved its progress on the key, fixed its hearing, then filled its veins with a bit of adrenaline, flashing itself awake with a light shiver, its eyes squinting at the yellow light glinting off the wooden floorboards below the blanket and straight into its eyes.

The musty smell of a hundred different animals within one enclosed room was quite suffocating, now that it had the mental capacity to notice.

Two humans marched forward among the small jungle of cages and enclosures, and put their fingers through the bars, each holding one of the handles, and pulling with speed, dragging the wolf towards the middle of the room, a square-ish area clear of cages.

It eyed their fingers with disdain as its chest tightened with anxiety, and it briefly considered poisoning them to death, watching their lungs stop breathing due to complete and utter paralysis.

It’s poison didn’t just disable nerves after all. It was a neurotoxin. It destroyed them unless washed out, or regenerated. However, with seven humans in the room, that would likely only make its position worse.

It decided that the best thing it could do, was precisely nothing. Just wait to see what would happen, wait for an opportunity.

Such an opportunity did not seem like it would come, as two more humans approached its cage, and the first two stopped dragging it, throwing off the blanket.

The fat man wordlessly extended a hand to its original captor, and after the key exchanged hands, he made a noise for one of the humans, who turned around and caught it midair with a deft catch.

Its eyes and attention both briefly stuck with the strange man, both curious and confused. The man was… eye-catching? His coverings were ridiculous to the point of being actively restrictive to movement, covered in strange frills and pointless machinery, like the clocks ticking away on top of both his shoulders.

And his metal arm was somehow moving with the grace of a normal one. It had seen metal arms and legs plenty of times before, and had just accepted that humans could somehow make it move, but watching a fake limb move with such fluidity felt downright unnatural.

In the moment it took to observe the strange man, the key was shoved into the padlock and twisted. Before it could puzzle out what was going on, the door flew open.

“Wave this around the mutt, will you, gentlemen?”

Between varying human coverings, it saw a needle-prod exchange hands, and a human hand darted into its cage, grasping at the leather straps pushing into its face and head, and pulling with strength that felt like a ton of bricks, like it was trying to rip off both its head and the muzzle.

Another two hands fisted into its shoulder fur and pulled, dragging it out of the cage as it remained stiff and silent, its eyes tracking the prod with laser focus.

It refused to get poisoned again, this close to escape. That stuff was potent, and it did not wish to wake up in another unknown place again, without having any say in it, nor knowing where it even was.

And just considering its luck, they’d probably change its cuffs and render its progress null.

One of the four people surrounding it took it from a tall, lanky man, and started holding it as if he was about to jab.

It didn’t want to raise their guard, but it had to draw a line, and this was it.

Its lips raised into a deep, rumbling growl, its thick vocal cords and [Logotexnia] putting an extra dose of intimidation into it. Its fur spiked across its back, and its tail curled with the intent of jabbing the human in the leg the moment he twitched.

Despite the hands holding it down, one on the back of its neck, one on its right shoulder, and two pairs holding onto its legs and pulling them back, it was just about ready to activate every Skill and hope for the best.

The man turned to the fat one, and did some sort of head-jerk, to which the fat man responded by doing an up-and-down head jerk.

The needle approached, and it thrashed side to side, twisting and yanking the humans’ arms around as it struggled, pouring more mana into its growl, feeling the floor vibrate beneath its chest.

“Alright, enough.” The fat man said, and the needle prod retreated, the black haired man who wielded it passing it back to the tall, lanky man.

“Seems you’re right, my good sir. Likely some kind of experiment. Doesn’t like needles, very... strange changes to what looks like a purebred, or something close to it. A damn good lookin’ specimen, I must admit. Very dark fur, very canine face. Snout's nice and long. We can only speculate, but point is, this little fella looks strong, healthy, and besides the slightly-too-wide shoulders, the closest thing to a purebred I've ever seen. What you've brought me... could be worth its weight in gold.” The fat man made some kind of laugh-bark, then put a hand on its captor’s shoulder.

“While I’m not convinced its eyes glow because it’s Awakened, and thus I cannot claim this to the auction members, I can assure you this merchandise will sell for a lot of gold crowns. Likely quadruple digits. If it was tamed it would sell easier, and had we some guarantee it’s Awakened, that price would likely go up eight or so times.” The fat man continued speaking, his voice like the deep croaking of a canal frog.

Its original captor’s heart sped up to an almost dangerous degree, and the wolf simply continued sitting inert on the floor, pinned and just barely holding back the growl in its throat, its lips curling and uncurling in fear and rage both.

It hated this. It hated this.

It felt like it was a skin-wreathed skeleton again, a little helpless pup that could die at the whim of something stronger at every single moment. Were they talking about which one would get which cut of its body to eat?

“Besides the regeneration… Its claws. Saw the thing cut straight through a reinforced uniform when it was drowning in that maintenance fill and clawing its way up.”

Something at the edge of its soul but just barely beyond, just barely untouchable, flared to life, whispering ‘half-lie’ into its mind without using words nor pictures, and the wolf only stiffened for a moment before it remembered that it had that useless Title. Something about breaking illusions because it saw a higher being. Witness of Divinity, whatever ‘divinity’ meant.

It hadn’t paid attention to it since it hadn’t activated before, ever, until now. It was a little curious, because it didn’t get the sense the human was lying from its mere sounds, but from all its sensory options. It felt the half-lie in the vibrations, in the aftershocks of his feet shuffling against the floorboards, in the way he looked as its eyes flicked to him.

But it still didn’t pay attention to it, because it simply did not care about the humans lying to each other, even if it was a good distraction from the turmoil in its chest. It instead paid attention to another exchange of keys, which were given to the man holding its right leg in place.

The man unlocked the metal sphere that had been crushing its right hind paw, and it clicked open, clattering to the floor. It stiffened, struck with the desire to kick at the human’s throat just to kill him.

“Check with this.” The fat man said and tossed some kind of little tin bottle, and the human at its leg caught it.

Then he adjusted the wolf’s paw, his grip still made of iron, almost tighter than the sphere it replaced, and quickly phased the tin bottle through its nails.

“... That’s either enchanted nails or it has some kind of Skill.” The man said, blinking at the four perfect lines cut into the tin bottle, turning it slightly to observe what it assumed was the cut its claws made. Then it turned the bottle and put it up in the air, almost showing it off.

Maybe it should have blunted its nails if they were getting this much attention.

And there was also a human sneaking about on the rafters above, which it just noticed.

What was going on?

The human sounds continued, and it stayed relatively silent, even when the humans rolled it over onto its stomach. Its teeth grit together with enough force to hurt its gums, and it kept both [Bloodrush] and [Maddened Frenzy] at the edge of its mind, just in case, its eyes flicking momentarily to the dark silhouette nearly gliding across the rafter beams with movements that were nigh unto perfect.

For a moment, their eyes met, and the man stiffened, before redoubling his pace.

Was this some scavenger or something?

“Don’t see a dick, so it’s a female. And it seems more than healthy enough for today’s auction. Though we might be cutting it a bit short. Do we clean it up?”

“Yes, usual process. Try not to irritate our canine friend too much. She’s got to look good and calm for the showcase. Let's see if I can convince people into thinking she might be Awakened...” The fat man hummed, and the human at its right paw quickly put the sphere back on.

It was turned over onto its chest again, and grabbed once more by the strong human before being shoved face-first back into its cage.

Which… was actually good, now its tail would reach the lock much easier. The door rattled shut behind itself, and it stood still as they locked it back up.

The human on the rafters began to slip away, prowling through and under crisscrossing iron rods, vents and shoddy supports, and it carefully felt his path, wondering where he was going. Maybe he knew a way out, if he knew a way in.

And he did. He unlatched a metal plate the wolf hadn’t noticed could open, lowered himself through it, put his feet against the two walls separating the insulation of the building, sliding down a tight space just between, just wide enough for the human to shuffle through, chest and back rubbing against the metal walls, and it felt his fleeting steps as he climbed up some iron support rods, then aligned himself with a rather shoddy-feeling plate of metal and foam.

One that seemed to be connected by nothing except a single loose rusty nail, hanging on via nothing but friction. That was probably how he’d gotten in here.

It stopped paying attention as the human began slamming his shoulder into the panel, knowing the fastest path to the outside now, and focused onto the humans surrounding its cage.

Unfortunately, after they all broke off and walked away, it didn’t get to sleep one more wink, as just a minute later, four of them returned, three carrying some kind of machine full of water connected to a hose and the fourth holding some strange metal device with a pinched mouth.

What followed was…

Rather cleansing, actually, besides the deafening sound both devices made as they blew clean water and hot air all over the wolf’s form.

It quite enjoyed itself, contrary to what it had expected. It was such a rare feeling, to be clean.

Until one of the humans got closer to the cage and started spraying nose-burning chemicals all over it. Not burning because they were genuinely toxic, but because their scent was so intense it felt like it was burning the insides of its nostrils with each breath.

If it wasn’t for the overwhelmingly powerful scent, it would have smelled wonderful. As it was, it was utterly infuriating. Curse humans and their stupid useless noses.

Sneezing for the twentieth time in a row, it wondered what the point of all this was, trying to ignore the mounting dread in its stomach and enjoy the sensation of hot air washing over its body and drying its fur.

It took a long time, but eventually the humans seemed satisfied with how clean the wolf had gotten, and after tilting its cage around to get rid of some water pooling at the bottom, and blowing hot air at it for another ten minutes, they slid its cage back among the racks, and the wolf huffed as it settled down to rest and finish its key.

It would be out of here soon. It already felt over half of the key having grown on the bottom of its tail tip, next to the venom fang, hidden under bushy fur. Just one more groove and an hour or two to grow the bone-key, and it was out of here.

It noted that it actually kind of liked how puffy its fur felt as it slipped back into [Devourer].

“Dyce.”

Tracer’s careless voice growled through the comms tablet without warning, and he held up a hand to the fox-masked man, who gave him an understanding nod, the table between them littered with reports, stray blackthorn cigarettes and a barely comprehensible map of the dungeon from the side, crumpled and faded from where their fingers had rubbed the ink off from use.

The smell of cigarette smoke, aged leather and paper had made the atmosphere quite relaxing to him despite the stress, until now.

He brought the tablet close to his head, pressed his thumb into the mana sink, and a transparent bubble of undulating, pale gray force sprung into existence around the tablet and his head as he leaned back into the soft couch.

Then he used the tablet to hide his mouth, because all these bastards knew how to lip read, and sighed right back into the oversized microphone.

“What is it?”

“I found it.” Tracer breathed out, sounding like he was one step away from falling over and sleeping, and he blinked at empty air for a moment before blowing stray bangs of black hair out of his face, confused at both the unusual tone and his words.

“You- what?”

“I said. I found the fucking thing.” Tracer growled, his breaths deep and lethargic for a few pregnant moments, before Dyce’s eyes widened in understanding.

Looks like he wouldn't be needing all these scout teams he'd been planning for.

He didn’t say anything as he bolted to his feet and almost stormed out of the room, stomping straight towards the only genuinely private room the Fox Den had.

She wasn’t a caretaker.

Still, she did her best.

All the black-scorched chitin along her arms and fingers was a testament to that.

Mirena sighed, dropping her face into her palms, all four of them, caressing the harsh plate that made up her forehead, the mask just below.

She barely felt it, but it was a far more pleasant sensation to the feeling of the liquids that formed and filled her insides boiling under her exoskeleton every time she’d have to help Carnage move.

The soft sizzle of water slowly turned to boiling, to hissing and foaming, and warm, hot steam was siphoned out through a shoddily welded pipe in the ceiling, the beaten up bathtub just beside her steadily starting to glow orange along the bottom, the soft shades of firelight dancing through the steam acting as the only illumination in the dim room.

Besides the two little suns that took the place of Carnage’s eyes, half-lidded and far away, projecting her wandering gaze like spotlights with every sway of her head.

Watching the crescent lights that swayed along the brick wall, was at least, mildly entertaining.

Without looking, her bottom right arm extended behind her stool to reach into the small bin by her side, and pulled the pin on her latest emergency device, feeling hundreds of tiny runes within invert and activate, the mana crystal at its core spewing out all of its power, the way the energy was swiftly entrapped within the runes and slowly began powering them.

It was a satisfying feeling. The feeling of something clicking together and working, just as she’d envisioned.

With a casual toss, the device was thrown into the spasming, boiling waters of the bathtub, just barely missing Carnage’s sternum.

It didn’t take long for the boiling water to calm down to a shimmering broil, then mere warmth and the faint wisps of steam, the orange bottom of the metal bathtub quickly cooling down.

The faint whisper of a word was slurred out from between Carnage’s lips, and her eyes flicked to her face from between three hand’s worth of fingers.

It wasn’t a pretty sight.

But then again, it never was to begin with.

It just wasn’t so glaringly obvious before. The fact she was so closely tied to her element that she was a mere misstep away, a mere overexertion away from becoming an elemental spirit. A mindless mechanism of the world, consumed by her nature.

The scariest part of it all was that Carnage would probably love nothing more than to surrender herself to just that, were she a little more lucid.

Like cracked obsidian, her skin was black and peppered through with glowing veins of angry orange, pulled taught over whipcord muscle and veins of magma, all pulsing with each heartbeat. Every inhale made the temperature in the room rise by several degrees, her veins flare and flicker as if her insides were nothing but flame, and every exhale made it drop just as much, her veins dimming like fire losing its oxygen.

She didn’t understand how any of this worked. In fact, it simply did not make sense to her, based on what she knew about the average Pyrokinetic. She also didn’t know how Ghoul knew everything about it to the point he could deduce what was happening by staring at her for a few minutes, but she trusted in his word.

And his word was that it would take a long time for her to be safe using her powers as liberally as usual. She was sure it would take much longer for Carnage to learn how to control herself, stop her from frothing at the mouth at the mere sight of something flammable. Ten steps forward, a hundred back.

As long as they could keep her from turning into a spirit on purpose the moment she felt like that was a genuine possibility, for some reason she didn’t understand, she’d recover.

Carnage attempted another barely legible imitation of the word ‘thanks’, slurred and half of it too low for her vocal cords to even voice out, still barely conscious despite the ice bombs slowly trying to cool her down.

Her mandibles clicked into a V-like shape beneath her mask, which twitched into the ghost of a smile, if only for a moment.

She had hope, at least. Things were getting better.

All she had to do was keep this up for another hour until the runes of the cooling pod had finished imprinting, and she could put Carnage in there to rest again, free of her consciousness that was no doubt squirming for something to burn.

This was like... a glorified fever, truth be told. A very dangerous one, but still a fever. She just had to keep her cool.

It would be much less stressful to go through all this if Ghoul were around as much as he used to be, but without Carnage dogging his heels, and cut off from their allies, he was always doing something. Always looking, plotting, learning.

She kind of missed having someone conscious around…

The water soon began boiling once more, and her bottom right arm extended back, grabbing onto another grenade.

As the pin was pulled with a small click, she could have sworn Carnage’s eyes briefly sharpened, the black holes that served as her pupils narrowing, before they hazed over once more.

Her mandibles clicked into a V-shaped smile for another brief instance, but the light feeling in her chest remained.

Yeah.

Carnage would be fine.

Just had to have a little hope and optimism. Even if some dark corner of her mind whispered to her that she was just trying to delude herself, it was easy to ignore it, because it didn't feel like she was.

A black spider writhed and bucked within his right fist, its fangs feebly trying to poke holes into his gray-toned finger, its legs flailing and struggling to find purchase and escape, to push his vice-like grip away.

Ghoul stared into its eight eyes with a hundred of his own, a faint echo of contempt within his covered gaze, and it writhed ever more, its legs breaking and snapping on his skin from its own efforts.

The consciousness within fought the little predator for control, its natural instincts battling against its mistress’s control.

His left hand tightened around the pipe he was holding onto, and his eyes languidly rolled within their metal confines, watching every inch of the walkways, buildings and streets below, the depths of the gutters peering at him from within the murk of the alleyways, hundreds of feet away.

One pair saw the temperature, with senses he could not describe if he tried. Another idly rolled within its case, and he watched the faint echoes of radio signals struggle to move through the metal jungle. Another watched the faint discoloration of electricity flowing through the wires next to his bare feet, all else around him an empty void besides the most minute sources of static.

Another pair glanced around, noting the various elemental energies, their meek remnants in the air.

A man, with his head ducked and his hands shoved deep into his pockets, walked with haste through the alley below, and one pair of eyes watched the determined resolve and paranoia flood the air around the man like a human radiator.

Another peered into his skull, into his brain, looking for lucidity, consciousness. Faint whispers of caution, the background image of a Guard’s uniform floating around within his subconscious. The tiny inklings he could see, nothing less and nothing more than surface thoughts or presently subconscious ones.

And he peered even further, deeper, past the brain and into the metaphysical concept of the ‘mind’.

Through it, like a chaotic tunnel with a trillion different paths, the eyes traveled, searched within moments, and peered mere glimpses of the collective racial consciousness the man was a part of, a loose, undefined bubble unto space-time, where its edges melded with another. All confined into the black dot that the human’s head had been turned into from the vast distances. Like staring into a swirling, endless void.

Yet, all he was, was a simple, normal human. With some distant hint of a beastkin in his blood, only a tiny bit of overlap to another bodiless concept too vague to be determined with his limited vocabulary.

The eyes writhed and dissected all in sight, peering through all as well as each other.

The spider twitched violently within his grasp, one final time, and with a hundred eyes, he turned to stare at it, his head just barely turning.

The mind within spoke of blood, witchcraft and more besides, a collective consciousness as chaotic as the people it was a creation of. It felt… artificial, borne of artificial differences put upon countless different people throughout the ages.

Patchwork, almost.

He brought the spider a little closer, his left hip settling against the metal to his left as his right leg curled and settled flat against the wall, relaxing against the steel that stopped him from falling off the second floor’s ceiling and into the quiet streets below.

Not that such a drop would hurt him.

“Did you think I wouldn’t notice?” He asked, plainly.

He wouldn’t receive a reply, of course. Spiders couldn’t speak.

“You are not as subtle as you think you are. Not when in sunlight, watching the burning wreckage, and not when in shadow, trying to extend your web beyond what you can handle.”

A muted hint of alarm roiled within the mind he saw nestled deep within the spider, but it was… filtered. Through distance, magic, and the spider’s tiny speck of an existence. Even the faint sense of alarm faded in an instant.

Still, it meant she understood.

He brought the limp predator ever so slightly closer, his head tilting.

“I will drink your blood for that. Whether it happens tomorrow or in a thousand years, it will happen. I don’t believe in forgiveness. Until then, however, I think I’ll have a taste of Miaro.” He murmured, and allowed his cold, dead, stretchy flesh to twist into a wide, shark-toothed grin full of iridescent black steel and gray gums, the tendons of his neck peeking through the corner of his ‘lips’.

The spider began convulsing feebly once more, Arach’s control slipping.

“After all, you coven bloodsuckers all taste the same, don’t you?”

With a satisfying crunchy squelch, fluid and chitin burst from within his clenched fist, chitinous legs popping and plummeting below. The smile faded in an instant, all expression disappearing from his face.

His eyes calmly observed the cloaked figure that confidently walked into the auction house, just in time to cut off all long-range communication, and his long, dry tongue idly licked along his open palm, licking off bits of cracked chitin and softer bits of the arachnid’s insides.

Spider tasted like little more than salty slime.

He blended into the metal behind him like an illusion, his concept of self and environment melting together, to the point where even should someone look straight at him, all they’d see would be a black silhouette their mind would instantly dismiss as nothing more than a meaningless shadow, not worth a single thought, much less a second glance.

Their eyes would hold a thousand times more interest for the window beneath him or the wires above him.

And so, he waited for his opportunity, silent.

-

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