“Lizzie, get down on the floor!” Doms unholstered her gun and pointed it at the head of the monster ferociously gnawing the side of her neck. BAM! BAM!

Her stupid kid screamed shrilly in terror.

The spider monster, its face bloody, an eyeball dangling out of its socket, let go of Doms. It shoved her away and jumped back to the ceiling.

I caught Doms as she nearly went through the hole with the force of the push. “Fucking heavy. Careful, you’ll hit my…the body,” I managed to say while concentrating on keeping my joints together. Her armor, even though it was thin as I intentionally kept it to a minimum, added a lot to her weight. I grabbed the sides of the hole to stop myself falling backwards while propping her up with my shoulder to stop her from falling on my human body.

Fortunately, Doms was also able to keep herself upright, pushing herself up on the handle of the cart which was slumped over the opening. Our faces close together, she looked at me with fierce eyes. “What in the Mother Core’s grace did you do to me?”

“Don’t worry. I—” But before I could give her an explanation, she turned her back to me and faced the spider monster, her gun pointing upwards. Our enemy was erratically crawling all over the ceiling, shrieking in pain, dripping its gooey black blood on the floor like an abstract painting. “Such bad timing,” I said. I pulled the cart with my human body back into the kitchen with Cesar’s body, then I dove through the hole. I spent time getting Doms on my side; I wasn’t going to let my initial investment on forming a team go to waste. Plus, we couldn’t lose here. My human body is here!

Doms swore as she missed a couple of shots.

“Kreecchhh!” the monster shrieked at us. An extremely long spiky tongue extended out of its mouth that was partially torn by a bullet.

“Mommy? What’s happening?” Lizzie said, her voice quivering. Still with her blindfold on, she crouched beside a small table a few feet to my left, sticking as much as possible to the wall.

The monster turned to her.

“No!” Doms yelled.

I leapt in front of Lizzie. A sound cracked in the air. Wham! Something whipped my side, sending me rolling across the floor. I pushed myself back up so I wouldn’t crash into Lizzie. I positioned myself to shield her as the tongue shot in our direction again. It hit my back. The force was tremendous, sending vibrations through my body, but I felt no pain.

“Don’t touch my baby!” A couple more shots, followed by a mournful inhuman whine, the bullets finding their mark.

“Mo-Mom…?” Lizzie took off her blindfold, saw me and cried, “Ah! Mommy, help!”

Hey, I look weird but I don’t look scary. “Don’t be afraid,” I said. I would’ve offered her a smile, but my metal face didn’t have that feature. “It’s me, your Aunt Pino.”

“No!” she said with a kick. “You’re not! You’re a monster!”

They say you were really ugly if a kid called you ugly. So, what did that make me? “Calm down,” I said, nearly adding ‘you fucking brat’. I wasn’t really good with kids. As expected, she didn’t calm down, ferociously thrashing her arms and legs while I hugged her. I should keep tabs when saying ‘calm down’ actually worked.

“Help me!”

“What are you doing to her?” Doms yelled. Her gun still continuing its duet with the monster’s shrieks.

“Your daughter is fine!”

“Get your hands off her—Ungh!” A loud crash followed.

I turned to look at what was happening.

The monster still hung from the ceiling with its many thin arms. The upper half of its face blown off by Doms’ expert shooting. It could no longer see, resorting to wildly swinging its thick tongue laced with fearsome barbs every which way.

It appeared to have luckily, or unluckily, caught Doms with its tongue and sent her flying. But she was now crawling to a sofa chair to hide behind it; the armor presumably saved her from severe injuries. The tongue whipped in her direction, tearing up upholstery and filling the air with feathery white cotton.

“Let go of me!” the brat said, continuing her futile struggle. I wasn’t strong but I sure can hold a four-year-old down.

“Stay still or we’ll get hit,” I said. The tongue whipped over us and I pushed Lizzie to the floor. The vase on top of the table beside us shattered with the passing of the tongue. The kid cried as the broken pieces of wood, shards of the vase, and shredded flowers rained down.

“Lizzie!”

“She’s fine!” I assured Doms. How are we going to win this? Should I also connect my first finger with Doms and give her strength? But what assurance did I have she wouldn’t go after me when we won? Even before that, she'd fight off my thoughts of making her mutate. She was now aware of what I was doing.

And why was this monster still alive? Its head was already blown off.

The parasites should…the red color...

They're still alive inside the monster! I recalled the first couple of zombies I fought with my first puppet; they seemed to be the same type.

“It’s the tongue!” I yelled at Doms. I also sent my thoughts to her because it was faster to explain everything that way.

(Got it), she replied with her mind. As the tongue swung near her, she leapt from behind the sofa, almost tumbling from the weight of her armor, and caught it. The spikes on the tongue snagged and ripped her clothes but it couldn’t penetrate her white bony armor. She stabbed the thick piece of wriggling flesh repeatedly with her knife. Goo spurted out, splashing on her clothes.

The spider monster tried to fling her away, but couldn’t. It didn’t have the momentum, and the armor was too heavy.

(Don’t make it thicker!) I advised her what I learned from my brief experience of using the armor finger on one of the fleeing residents when Cesar was fighting the monsters on our way to the elevator. (You’ll get weaker!)

In its desperate attempts to pull its tongue free, the spider monster accidentally fell from the ceiling, the part it was hanging on to broke off. It rolled on the ground, trying to flee, but Doms hugged its tongue and continued stabbing it. The tongue was steadily growing bigger, the host body slowly shriveling up.

“Ah! What’s that?” Lizzie said, poking her head through my arms, spotting the spider monster.

“Shit!” I exclaimed. The spider monster, sensing us, tried to go in our direction. Fortunately, it was already too weak. Doms pulled it towards her. The tongue was bleeding out. She was practically swimming in black goo. “Quick, go over there,” pushing Lizzie on to the other side of the room.

“Okay, okay.” She didn’t resist anymore, crawling away from the monster as fast as she could. She looked back at me. “Aunt Pino, save Mommy, please.”

“I will.” I grabbed a broken leg of the destroyed table and rushed to the spider monster. This guy was going to die given like a minute or more of bleeding out, but not before I showed off my good side.

With my special eyesight, I could somehow detect the ‘points’ of life force of the tongue of the spider monster—which was essentially its main body by now—indicated by more concentrated glowing red spots. I stabbed at them with the sharp end of the table leg, backing each downward thrust with my weight. Black goo also splattered on me, but they slid right off my smooth metal body.

After a tense several seconds of holding it down, me with the crude stake and Doms with her knife, it stopped moving.

Doms stood up. “Is it over?”

I withdrew my power from her. Shards of white armor fell off her body, leaving her with torn clothes coated in vile black goo.

“Mommy! Are you okay?” Lizzie came running to her, but stopped and violently coughed upon inhaling the stench of the foul substance.

“Sweetie, don’t come near me.” Her daughter was puking on the floor and she helplessly watched.

“Hand me your knife,” I called to Doms.

She walked towards me, her eyes suspicious, but, after a moment’s hesitation, handed it to me handle first.

“Thank you,” I said. I knelt over the body of the monster, the human body not the giant tongue, and stabbed the remaining point of red I saw at the nape of its neck. One of its offspring I surmised. I had seen them multiply with my ‘life force’ vision, if that was the right term, inside the zombie that was knocking on my door. “There. Done. Good teamwork.” I extended my hand to her. You gotta trust me after all of that. I was proud of my performance.

“It’s time.” She glared at me. “It’s time you explain to me what you did to my body. Explain what’s going on. Explain what are you doing with that girl.”

“Clean yourself up first so you can carry your daughter. There might be clothes you can use in this room. I can get the girl through the hole. We need to get moving soon. We can talk on the way.” I also needed some time to think about a good story to sell.

The wheels of the cart clanged as we carefully traversed the corridor. We still encountered dead bodies, mostly humans, but they were few and far in between, so the cart’s path was mostly clear. We slowed down each time we neared an open door or hole in the wall, just in case some mutated fucker controlled by a parasite was waiting to ambush us.

“Do I still smell bad?” Doms asked her daughter. She had wiped herself as best as she could and wore the clothes of whoever was living in that room—we found their corpses by the trampled door of their room, gored as they were escaping by the same buffalo monster that dealt the killing blow to Cesar.

“No, Mommy,” she bravely said, but her hands covering her nose and mouth betrayed her. Doms made her a new blindfold and mask from hand towels we, technically, looted. “Mommy, is Aunt Pino our friend?”

“I hope so, sweetie,” Doms said, giving me a sidelong glance. “So, Pino, are you our friend? Can we get our explanation now?”

“Friend? Perhaps, for now. Not an enemy would be more accurate.” I stretched one hand to gesture at the dying bodies we passed. “As to what’s going on, you probably already have a guess. The group the BID fought last Saturday? This is their work. They aren’t just some random smugglers dealing with illegal Adumbrae body parts. They're a group composed of Adumbrae. A huge organization, actually. We refer to them as the ‘2Ms’.” I was talking out of my metal ass here. I wasn’t even sure if this was the 2Ms—that wasn’t even their actual name—or some other organization who came to know about who I was. And were they really targeting me? Why just send mindless monsters?

“I see,” she said, although from her tone she hadn’t fully bought my story. “An Adumbrae organization? Haven’t encountered those since my stint in Bucharest.” I made a mental note of what she said. Did she mean that huge cult in Eastern Europe that ended up controlled by an Adumbrae?

“Where you met Daddy?” Lizzie said. “Right? Right?”

“Yes, sweetie. Where I met…Daddy.” Doms voiced cracked a bit. She cleared her throat. “Okay, so Adumbrae are here. These, uh, 2Ms. Then the explosion—"

“What did the media say about that again? That they were also smuggling explosives and it accidentally exploded in the fight? All a lie. It was the BID that deliberately caused the explosion. Of course, the BID won’t admit that.” Need to sprinkle in truths.

Doms held out her arm to stop me as we neared splinters of a door in the middle of the hallway, as if something forced itself out of the room on our left. There were bloody handprints on the floor, each as wide as a suitcase. Whatever it was, it clearly wasn’t here anymore. She waved for me to continue on. “If what you’re saying is true, I can see why they’d change the news.”

“Many people died. BID agents, police, other people in that raid. Innocent people in the surrounding buildings that collapsed. Why? Why were they willing to sacrifice those lives?” I paused for dramatic effect. Time to bullshit. “Because they were trying to stop something like this. Like what’s going on here in this building. And believe me when I say that it was way worse at the place they raided. A lot of the experiments escaped…were released, rather. The BID really had no choice there.”

“Is that what’s happening here? The Adumbrae are experimenting with turning people into monsters?”

“That’s right. What I know is the 2Ms settled in the abandoned tunnels beneath this city and setup a huge complex. They kidnapped many people for their experiments. They were able to do that because they control key people in this city, government officials, the police. That was the place the BID raided.”

“Tunnels? The subway?”

“I like trains,” Lizzie said.

“Not the subway. The abandoned shelters for Adumbrae attacks constructed decades ago.”

“I didn’t even know those existed.” We came up another destroyed wall and tiptoed our way past a pile of bones picked clean of flesh. Something here has been eating them. We stopped and observed our surroundings to make sure there was no threat. “So, how do you figure into all of this?" Doms asked. "And this girl?”

“I’m an Adumbrae who fights other Adumbrae. I’m afraid I can’t explain more about us other than that,” I said, intentionally using ‘us’ so that she’d draw wrong conclusions. “I suppose, I can say that I’m trying to stop what the 2Ms are doing in this city.

“This organization we’re fighting, they’re looking for people who could become Corebrings, those who have high probability of being chosen by the Mother Core, and try to force them to turn into Adumbrae. All these monsters are just by-products of their numerous experiments.”

“Wai-wait. I don’t understand. You can’t force people to become an Adumbrae. Except for a Purple Bloom—”

“You’re right, you can’t force people to become one. Even a Purple Bloom can’t. It assimilates people into its consciousness instead, which is different. But the 2Ms seems to think they can. And they're attempting it on potential Corebring candidates.”

“You mean this girl? She has the qualities of becoming an Initiate?”

“Something like that. I actually saved her from the underground complex of the 2Ms. But, unfortunately, she escaped my custody and returned here to her condo unit. I wasn’t sure what she was thinking. For now, I surmise her own energies are acting up. That’s why she’s out of commission right now.”

“I…I don’t know what to think of this.”

“It’s fine. This doesn’t concern you anyway. Escaping is your concern.”

“You’re right. But you know what’s a concern of mine? What you did to my body. Why did you use me? Why don’t you fight? You said you killed all of those monsters back there.”

“That’s simple. My ability is to bestow powers on people, including myself. But it comes with the condition that the stronger the person I’m giving the power to, the more energy I need to expend. The definition of strong is a bit iffy. Suffice to say that my body is pretty indestructible, super strong in a sense, and I need tons of energy to make myself physically stronger for combat using my unique ability; I expended a lot of my energy in that fight earlier and my tanks are now low. However, I only need a small amount of power to give strength to something weak, like a normal human.”

“I suppose I am weak in your eyes,” said Doms with a smirk.

"Mommy is strong!" Lizzie insisted.

“I help you become strong, I help you fight and protect your daughter, I help you escape. In turn, you’re also helping me to escape. It’s a win-win situation for both of us.” There was a slight rumble. I stopped the cart. We were already near the center part of the building. Up ahead, the glass doors leading to it were shattered, the walls on the sides smashed as if something big forced itself through.

“But how does it work? The specifics. Why can you speak inside my hea—?”

I held up a finger. We listened. There it was. Screams. Roars.

"Uh-oh," Lizzie said.

“What do we do here?”

“What do you think? We can go back and use the stairs, or go forward, try to help these people, and maybe find a better way down. Your husband may also be there.”

"You're right," she said, her expression growing determined.

“This is the best way to learn how my power works. Nothing beats a practical approach to teaching. Let's go!”