1:26 a.m., Wednesday, February 5, 2020.

“Is it over?” I stood still, waiting for the world to throw another curveball at me. I was tempted to say, how can this get any worse? Just to tempt fate, you know? I was feeling pretty cocky with my situation even though I'd just been through the bowels of hell.

No other monstrous asshole showed up.

Finally…they stopped coming.

A severed head was by my foot, an oversized demonic baby head with one eye. Its pupil glowed crimson, same as the parasites tinged in red inside it. It faded. Both the eye and the glow of the parasites. A fellow cyclops, hehehe. I could feel derisive snorting coming but recalled my metal body wasn’t capable of that. What a weird sensation.

I kicked the head away and it rolled into a pile of broken bones, remnants of the off-season Halloween-version-centaur that fucked me up.

This guy!

Those fucking blades.

They were shattered now along with the rest of its body. But just the sight of them gave my metal self phantom shudders. I didn’t experience any pain when I was broken into pieces. I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel, like I should feel pain but couldn’t.

It wasn’t pleasant.

At all.

Imagine seeing the most bizarre and uncomfortable uncanny valley effect ever, experiencing the weirdness not only with sight but all of the senses at the same time, with the eeriness cranked up to ten. Not sure if that made any sense, but neither did the sensation I felt when I got dismantled.

Fuck this stupid body of mine. Its individual pieces were indestructible—bullet and blades couldn’t put a scratch on it—but it was so easy to break me apart like a toy. My joints gave way too easily and I was too weak to fight back practically any monster here in this building.

At least, I could reassemble my body just as easily. Even if I was broken apart, the individual pieces remain connected with the same blue string I used to link with puppets. I then needed to concentrate to pull myself back together, and that required a lot of focus.

I picked up the horned skull of the centaur, staring at it with appreciation and a mild sense of accomplishment. I tried to crush it by squeezing it between my hands but couldn’t. Would’ve been cool as fuck if I could. I threw the skull into its open ribcage and it landed on its squished innards.

Oh, well, whatever, I thought as I made my way to my puppet.

Wait, no. My helper.

No, no, that was also wrong.

My friend.

I have a new friend.

The floor was slick, coated with about an inch or so of blood of various colors and gore and other indescribable discharges from numerous dead monsters. Most of the monsters still retained a humanoid shape, several were mutations of body parts, a handful were not connected to the human form in any way. There was a couple I just couldn’t make heads or tails what they were supposed to be.

Careful with each step I took, I navigated piles of shredded monster corpses. I already learned my lesson how slippery fresh blood could be. That stupid centaur couldn’t have bullied me so much if I didn’t lose my footing.

The corridor was barely recognizable. I could put up a booth and open this as a haunted house and it would be a sure hit. Doors and walls of the rooms along the left and right sides were knocked down or broken through, the ones that still stood were painted with disgusting colors of battle. There was even a huge hole on the ceiling where a sofa-sized worm dropped from the floor above; it was now a deflated sack of leaking pus mixed in with all the other corpses.

I hesitantly peeked up at the hole on the ceiling, cautious that something else might fall down.

“Huh? That’s a lot of holes,” I said. The worm apparently dug through several floors. So that's why a ton of monsters showed up. The ones from the higher floors jumped through the hole it opened. Lucky for me, my puppet got me covered.

Ahem, my friend.

Where was he anyway?

The two blue strings linking us, the one that gives strength and the one that heals, would lead me to him. I could barely feel his mind. The last message I got from him was a weak, (No), when I tried to heal him after I reestablished connection.

I came upon strings of entrails scattered on the floor like a child threw a plate of spaghetti in a tantrum, only that each strand of pasta were as thick as an anaconda. I traced the entrails through a wide opening in the wall and into a huge living room, probably a three-bedroom unit, finding their owner: a golem creature that surprisingly had fleshy innards. I recognized its craggy exterior as the same material as the pillars of the building.

The blue threads also led into this room through the hole. However, draped over the hole, half its body inside the room and half outside in the corridor, was a tall humanoid creature with a giant mouth that opened lengthwise from its neck down to its crotch.

“Yeah, I’m not going through here,” I said. I went for the door instead, which was fortunately unlocked.

I paused before the body of the golem. It had an amazing surplus of intestines for a half-stone monster. It was lying on top of a man, one of the residents. Dead. Squished by its weight. Lucky enough to remain human but unlucky to be in the middle of the battle of monsters.

I continued into the spacious kitchen of the unit where I finally found my puppet…friend.

Saying he was not in a good shape would be an understatement. Laying on the rubble of the sink with his limbs splayed out, his body had grown about three times larger than his original size, extremely muscular with lots of tumorous growths which I assumed were a result of giving him extreme amounts of power from the energy core within me—he probably had muscles and bones that a normal human shouldn’t have.

Like my puppet before him, his skin was red from the pressure of the sudden growth and was severely torn like an out-of-fashion ripped jeans, revealing boulder-like clumps of bare muscles and barnacle-looking bones. Pieces of flesh were falling off his body as if he was a brisket, slow-cooked for ten hours. Hmmm…the fuck was that mental image?

On top of my friend's chest, pinning him down, was a horned head the size of a yoga ball covered with shaggy brown fur; a severed head of a buffalo monster. The headless body of the monster was thrown over the toppled fridge. Judging by the hole on the kitchen wall, it burst through from the next room and attacked my friend.

I went closer to him and realized that not only did the massive coiling horns of the buffalo monster sunk deep into his flanks, messing up his insides, the front of his torso was also skewered by dozens of horns sprouting from the face of the buffalo monster.

I didn’t need the greyish color coating him to know that he’s dying soon.

Pity?

Was I about to feel pity? Actual pity?

I stared at the jets of water shooting forth from the busted pipes, down to the water mixing with copious amounts of inhuman blood that drained from his body.

No.

How should I begin this? “I just realized you regained consciousness earlier,” I said.

When I began to control him, I was barely using my healing power, keeping the damage his body suffered above what was regenerated to make sure he wouldn’t wake up and fight off my control. Eventually, I had to give him more strength, mutating his body even further.

There was no going back for his body. There was no going back to human for him.

What else could I do? Monsters came pouring in and he needed to get stronger. It was for both of us. If he died, I’d die next. At least one of us would survive.

Me, obviously.

It was a necessary sacrifice to make.

To counteract the massive damage his body took, I pumped him with more and more of my healing power. Otherwise, he’d just die. Somewhere along the way, he might’ve come around. I wasn’t sure when; must’ve been pretty early on. But he kept on fighting the monsters. He didn’t try to drive me away from his mind. He didn’t attack me with the tremendous strength I bestowed him. He could’ve easily broken me apart to disconnect our link.

Which was why I never noticed it—that and I was too focused on avoiding the monsters—until he saved me.

He didn’t respond to what I said but I felt his mind stir. Despite his earlier request to stop healing him, I decided to go against his will because I wanted to learn something.

“Why did you save me?” I tried a different line of questioning as I felt his consciousness resurface.

(Save you?) He was able to answer me with his mind, but I sensed he couldn’t continue this for long.

“Yes, why?” I was both speaking to him and also projecting it into his mind to make sure he understood me. “When the centaur broke me apart, I was distracted and lost my connection to you.” I also lost my connection with that other woman. A weakness that I should remedy by maintaining focus no matter what happened. “You realized that?”

(I did feel…freedom.)

“Why did you rescue me?” I used the word ‘rescue’ even though I wasn’t in danger of getting destroyed. But I was helpless as fuck, so I guess I needed rescuing. That was also when I knew he had regained his consciousness even before we disconnected. “Were you afraid I will try to regain full control of your body again? Well, that time the centaur knocked me down was the best time for you to attack me.”

(I didn’t…)

“But why though? Or you could’ve ran away. Even that woman chose to flee. I don’t know what’s up with her. First coming with me then…” I didn’t continue anymore because I could guess his thoughts about what I did to that woman’s husband.

(I-I can’t…can’t run away.)

“Because you’re…?” I didn’t finish my sentence out of consideration for my friend. Just like it was tactless to tell a friend they were ugly to their face, even more so to tell a friend they looked like an actual monster. “I guess it will be hard to explain to the BID if you are able to escape from this building. Still, you could’ve attacked me for what I did to you. But you didn’t.” A true friend? I found it very interesting that I was resolved to know the reason.

(I need to fight…I need power…Without you…can’t fight.) The thoughts he sent to me were jumbled. He couldn’t form the words. Then the image of two people was broadcasted clearly in my head.

“Your wife and daughter.”

(I love them…I’ll fight for them…) More alien emotions. I hated this.

“I can save you. I’ll try to find someone—”

(No!) Perhaps his strongest thought yet. (Just…let me die…)

“I understand.” Phew, good thing he didn’t want to be saved. I wasn’t feeling up to the task of looking for a surviving human I could coerce into willingly accepting the damage of my puppet…friend…here. I wasn’t sure if I’d get lucky to find people like that couple again. “Anything you want? Before you, um, before I leave you here to…rest?”

(Promise me…promise.)

“Yeah, sure. What do you want from me?” A promise from my kind didn’t mean much, unless it was something connected to our Rules. We basically had two types of promise: a promise that we intend to break from the start, and a promise that we will keep with utmost loyalty until we no longer wanted to; if it suited us, we’d break any promise with anyone. This guy did me a huge favor. Since he was my friend, I'd extend him the courtesy of the second type of promise.

(Please…don’t…)

I held up both of my hands and watched as the blue strings from the index fingers of my left and right hand faded in the air, the red symbols on my fingers also stopped spinning. He wasn’t able to finish his sentence, but he transmitted a hint of his thoughts...his last will to me.

“I promise I won’t take control of your wife and kid,” I said.

Funny that he didn't ask me to promise to save them, but rather I'd leave them alone. I must admit that I did consider testing my fingers on them if I found them, but, for this time only and for the sake of my friend, a promise was a promise...until it wasn't.

I came closer to him and attempted to close his eyes, just like what I did with Vanessa. Again, I also failed to do so. His eyeballs grew as large as tennis balls and were bulging out of their sockets. No way I could close his eyes. In death, he stared blankly at the ceiling.

“Ok then, rest in peace, my friend,” I said. Wasn’t it nice that I was making plenty of friends recently? Two of them dead. But that just meant I needed to make more friends.

I made my way to the elevators to check them. There were four elevators here, lining the left side of the corridor. I pressed the down button and none of them worked. One had destroyed doors, apparently opened by a monster that came from inside the elevator shaft. The other two doors weren’t opening; I guessed monsters destroyed the elevator in other floors. The last door was open as the elevator stopped in this floor.

I peeked inside.

And wow, what a sight. I could tell my friend entered here and fought a bunch of monsters. I examined their dead bodies mixed with what appeared to be half-eaten corpses of humans they were snacking on. It looked disgusting as fuck, the most disgusting image I've seen so far since I became an Adumbrae.

However, I didn't back away as something caught my eye. In the corner of the elevator, nearly hidden by the bodies, was a cart with boxes, like the ones delivery company people used to bring packages to people's doorsteps. The boxes were crushed during the fight that happened here, their contents strewn over the dead bodies.

Broken vials and canisters. All empty.

“Hmmm. I don’t know what those are supposed to be, but that cart would be an awesome way to carry my body."