“Dude, get up!” Delgue shouted, hammering against the door. “Did you actually get a cold? You know that that’s a real achievement when you live on an eternal summer paradise, right?” He stopped for a moment in his constant knocking. To rest his hand, as it wasn’t the most pleasant motion to make with a metal gauntlet on, and to give him the opportunity to answer. There was none, so he took the handle and began shaking it when he found the door locked. Just to make some noise. “Seriously, man, we have to guard the west district today, that’s safe enough that you can do it even with a cold! Don’t let me do that entire walk on my own, it’s super boring!”

There was a noise behind the door, a loud rustling. Delgue recognized that noise quite easily, it was one every guardsman encountered on some days. An armour stand toppling over. Now he was actually trying to open the door out of worry.

“Are you okay?” he asked out of genuine concern. “Hello, are you there or do I need to break open this door and drag you to the healers?”

“…Yes,” a surprisingly deep voice answered from the other voice. It was hard to make out through the door, but a proper cold could distort people’s voices quite a bit, so Delgue wasn’t too weirded out by this.

Relieved, he answered as a joke, “Yes you’re there or yes you need me to break in?”

“Former,” the quick answer came from the other side, accompanied by the scraping sounds of armour being dragged over the floor.

From experience, most of it hungover (which was a fairly similar state to a bad cold), Delgue knew how long it would take to get the armour assembled again. “Dude, you can just let me in, I’ll help you,” he offered. “If the cap’ asks, we both overslept.”

“Thanks, but not needed,” the voice from the other side responded. After just a few more seconds, the door suddenly opened and the guardsman stepped out, wearing his full armour. The blue eyes were barely visible behind the gap in the visor. “I… re- I AM ready for guarding… friend.”

“…Did the cold get to you really badly or something?” Delgue asked, looking at his comrade up and down. The armour fit perfectly. Filch was a tall, if somewhat lanky dude and, although the armour was serialized, it was fit to every guardsman that had more than two years of service. Still, for how quickly he must have put it on, it sat almost a bit too well. “You sound kinda guilty.”

His opposite had nothing to say to that, only hanging his head in shame. The situation remained like this for a few, awkward moments, while Delgue waited for his friend to banter back.

In the end, he just laughed it off. “Wow, don’t let this get to you that much,” the luckless guard stated and punched his comrade’s shoulder in a friendly fashion. It felt a bit weird, as if he wasn’t entirely solid under that armour. ‘Better be very careful with him today,’ Delgue thought, ‘that must be a serious sickness.’ “Okay, seriously, we’re getting you to the healers,” he said with a supportive smile, extending his hand in a helpful fashion.

Hesitatingly, the fully armoured male took it. They walked together, very slowly. It felt as if every single step needed to be taken consciously, with limbs not designed for the task. “Thank you,” he told Delgue, his voice still sorrow-struck.

“Bloody hell, dude, calm down,” Delgue pat him on the back with another laugh, equally concerned and meant to calm them both, “you’re so sick you almost sound like a different person.”

The guard stopped mid-step for a moment. A moment during which the light from a nearby window fell perfectly into the eye slit of the armour, illuminating the blue eyes. Although the armoured male continued moving, Delgue did not. He had just clearly seen it. A slit pupil widening from the sudden increase of light.

‘I must be… no, that can’t be,’ the luckless guard thought and scolded himself. He had to also be affected with something. Nevertheless, his mother had always said something that had guided him well in his career as a guardsman. Trust but verify. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, buddy,’ Delgue thought and suddenly moved in.

Although the armoured male tried to sway away from the assault on his helmet, it was already too late. The luckless guard had his finger under the edge of helmet and pulled up. His heart stopped, sunk like a heavy stone, when he saw the first bits of skin.

The helmet came off completely and Delgue let out a mixture of sounds. A panicked scream, a call for help and the gargling someone about to throw up all combined at the sight of the head under the helmet. Both of them were frozen, although for different reasons.

Dark blue slime surrounded a human skull like a layer of translucent skin. Sunlight reflected on its smooth surface, only interrupted by a pair of half-formed fox-ears and two sorry-looking cat eyes. There was no nose or human ears whatsoever and the mouth was nothing but a lipless, slit that parted slightly, along with the overly sharp teeth that didn’t seem properly attached to the jaw whatsoever. “I’m so sorry,” Apexus said one more time. “Certain he was a good person…”

“MONSTER!” Delgue finally managed to scream, hastily grabbing his sword. The slime simply fell over, dodging the angry and panicked strike. The sound of rattling armour and more shouts from the luckless guard causing everyone else in the barracks to be alerted.

People stuck their heads out or simply stormed to help, many frozen the moment they came onto the scene. Delgue whirled around, trying to find his footing, only to witness the creature peeling out of the plate armour like an insect out of its old hide. Human bones, dislodged to allow Apexus to crawl out through the relatively small neck opening, flowed out along with the slime. With the first ribs, folded over one another, came the emerald wings.

The feather seemed to explode in volume, once they were no longer cramped into the armour, and grew even bigger with each passing moment. Delgue saw in those wings a weakspot. He moved in to hack at them, but was thrown back by the very same Growths, as they beat once in a large defensive gesture.

More like an ape than a human, Apexus’ bones assembled on the other side, his wings continuously beating to keep the ever-growing number of guardsmen at bay. People shouted for spears, a much more effective weapon in this situation, while Apexus now sprinted on all fours towards the window, whose light that had given him away. It was wide open, like on all days that weren’t rainy, and so he could simple leap out and beat his wings. The new shape was unfamiliar to fly with, but he stayed in the air anyway, gaining height as people chucked spears at him and hastily fired arrows.

Although two of them hit, they simply sunk into the slime without dealing any damage. Then Apexus soared over the garrison’s walls. His makeshift limbs became part of his body again, arms fusing into torso, legs melding together.

Apexus lived.