Pockmark was screaming, and if Sadea were to be entirely fair in her judgment, he had every right to do so. After all, she’d just drawn her pistol from her skirt pocket and shot him in the thigh.

As the man writhed in a growing pool of his own blood and shrieked, Sadea rolled her eyes.

“It’s only a flesh wound, for crying out loud, and my pistol is chambered in a very small caliber,” she said. “If you survive this, you’ll be alright within a couple of weeks. Eh, maybe more. Alright, fine, you might never be able to walk properly again, but it’s not like you were winning any athletic championships before, anyway.”

The other workers were clamoring and pointing accusatory fingers at Sadea, asking her why she’d shot Pockmark.

“I’m sick and tired of waiting for the beast to get hungry enough to attack,” she snapped. “We’ve been waiting here for hours, and it’s definitely gotten smart enough to know I’m using you lot for bait. But, if I know my stuff, and I do, it’s going to have a really hard time resisting spilled blood, screaming, and all that lovely psychic feedback from Pockmark’s pain.”

“But… that means…” one of the workers, an emaciated, bedraggled woman in coveralls too large for her. Sadea immediately nicknamed her “Beanpole.”

“Yes, it’s coming. Almost any moment now, and right here, exactly where I want it,” she told Beanpole, here being what she supposed was a storeroom housing huge blocks of spare assembly machinery for whatever this manufactory was supposed to produce. The machinery was largely comprised of steel, as were the plates reinforcing much of the floor. The storeroom was also detached from the central core of the manufactory, so that above its ceiling loomed the open sky. After the previous fiasco with the steam-filled pantry, she wanted as much of a terrain advantage over the chimera as possible.

The workers immediately started wailing, wringing their wrists, groveling, and begging Sadea to release them.

“Fine.” She gestured to the storeroom’s open door. “Go. There’s absolutely nothing out there waiting to eat you.”

Sadea chuckled and unwrapped another candy bar as the protests died down.

**

A long time ago:

“Marry me,” Arjun said.

Sadea had been resting her head on his chest after a very vigorous romp on his cot. She looked up at him, trying to find the punch-line, but there was no hint of humor on his face.

“What brought that up?” she asked, realizing that he wasn’t joking.

“Well…” Arjun looked away, as if embarrassed. “We’ve been doing… this for nearly two years already. We should affirm our union properly before God’s eyes.”

“Wait, wait.” Sadea grinned. “I’m going to have you back up a bit. We’ve been doing… what, exactly?”

“Well, this!” Arjun gestured at Sadea’s naked body coiled around his. “You know…”

“Playing doctor? Hiding the sausage? The ole’ in-and-out?” she supplied helpfully. “Or blowing the…”

Arjun broke out into laughter, and Sadea joined in, too amused to finish her list of euphemisms.

“No, seriously, marry me,” Arjun said. He waved his hand, and a small velvet-lined box drifted gently from the top of his desk across the small room into his grasp. A twist of his fingers popped it open.

Inside was a sapphire, larger than her thumbnail, set atop a ring of intricately coiled metals.

Despite herself, Sadea gasped.

“Copper, platinum, and gold. The latter two to reflect how precious you are to me, and the copper, woven as it is, works as a psi-focus,” he said. “And the sapphire…well, blue goes with your eyes.”

Sadea hadn’t been rendered speechless many times in her life, but this was certainly one of them. She turned, wide-eyed, to Arjun.

“It’s beautiful!” she cried, after many moments of awed silence.

“Not even the slightest bit more than you,” he said. “Will you put it on?”

Sadea answered his question by slipping the ring on her finger.

“When we return from the mission tomorrow, I’ll ask Doctor Horatius to marry us.” Arjun smiled. “I love you, Sadea, and I—“

She climbed on top of him before he could say more, and soon, there was no more need for words.

**

Beanpole was the first to die when the chimera came once more, swarming from the shadows amidst the blocks of machinery. It was mostly her fault, really. Sadea definitely didn’t tell her to try bandaging Pockmark’s wound, so she only had herself to blame for standing right over the wounded man and getting her head swiped clean off her shoulders by the beast’s feline claws.

Naturally, Pockmark was the next to go. The chimera’s serpent head engulfed the worker and forced his body down its gullet within the blink of an eye. The man’s screams died amidst the sound of breaking bone.

The workers’ demise took seconds, but it was enough for Sadea to bring into existence a crackling web of lightning, the ends of which reached from one block of machinery to another. She grinned as she clenched her fists, tightening her electrical trap around the beast.

The chimera roared, hissed, and bleated as it lashed out, trying to escape the barrier of lightning that extended around and above it. But each brush it took against the cobalt blue streams of crackling electricity only hurled it back, singed and shocked.

Sadea raised her war-staff and sent a bolt of lightning directly at the ceiling’s storeroom. The cheap roof of paste-board and zinc sheets burst asunder, revealing the orange light of the dying sun. She sent her will out into the sky, reaching for the electron stream among the clouds.

The lightning that she could pull from her soul was potent, strong enough to reduce flesh to ashes and turn steel molten. At its height, she could de-atomize the object of her wrath. But there was no purer, no more powerful source of lightning than its primeval birthplace: the very heavens themselves.

Sadea forged three spikes of electricity amidst the roiling clouds in the sky. The chimera’s serpent head spat poison, and its goat head belched another cloud of petrifying gas, but the lightning web vaporized the beast’s weapons before they could reach her.

“Just die already, so I can go get drunk!” Sadea snapped her fingers, and the heaven-wrought lightning spikes blazed down. The chimera reared and scampered, but there was no place for it to run.

The first spike struck the serpent head and set it ablaze in eldritch flame. The second severed the goat head from the chimera’s body. The third sheared through the lion head’s eyes, leaving a cauterized ravine of ruined bone and flesh.

The chimera convulsed as the electricity coursed through its nervous system. Rents opened across the length of its scaled torso, and jellied, half-cooked ichor gushed forth. With a final shudder, the beast collapsed.

Breathing hard, Sadea let her lightning web dissipate and folded over, leaning heavily on her war-staff. The last two surviving workers poked their heads out from their hiding places among the blocks of machinery and gaped in horrified awe at the chimera’s carcass.

“Is… is it dead?” one of them asked, moronically.

“Why don’t you go find out, idiot?” Sadea sneered. “Go right on up and poke it in the ass with your finger. Then you tell me.”

To her utter lack of surprise, the workers actually did saunter up to the chimera’s carcass, and one of them started prodding the beast with a finger.

What the hell? Does no one understand sarcasm anymore? Sadea took a deep breath, ready to lambast the workers with insults at the top of her voice. A creature so infused with the energies of the Ethereal Tides was still dangerous in death, its demise usually causing severe instability in the veil separating the material and immaterial realms. Its corpse was pretty much an open invitation to any demons in the metaphysical vicinity to come over for a quick glance, if not a quick meal.

No sooner than the thought of meals crossed her head did the chimera suddenly lunge forward and bite a huge chunk of flesh out of a worker’s torso. The other worker shrieked and turned to flee, but a feline paw snagged the collar of his coveralls and pulled him back to a messy, eviscerating demise.

Goddamn it. Didn’t expect this thing to be so tough. Sadea groaned as she raised her war-staff. She was at the end of her strength, and the minor brain bleed she’d suffered in the steam-filled pantry wasn’t helping things.

To make things worse, the chimera was already regenerating from its wounds, having devoured the flesh and terror of two more workers. The cauterized meat atop its lion head writhed and spluttered, leaking ichor, and suddenly, there was a fresh eye where moments ago, there had been only charred ruins.

As Sadea watched, the burned stumps of its two other heads erupted in bubbles of ichor, and tendrils of flesh began churning and weaving, as if in grotesque parody of a seamstress’s crocheting.

Got to kill it first before it regenerates fully. Sadea wreathed her war-staff in lightning once more as the chimera padded forward, staggering with each step as it sought to re-sculpt its ravaged frame.

As she jabbed her war-staff forward to hurl a bolt of lightning, the lion head took a sharp, inhaling breath, strong enough to cause Sadea’s hair and the ends of her scarf to whip forward from the suction.

And then it roared. Unnatural sonic energy hurtled forth from the lion’s maw, strong enough to rip up the steel plates that had been bolted down from the permacrete floor and send them hurtling toward Sadea.

Pure instinct alone caused her to throw up a shield of lightning and every ounce of telekinesis she had. A steel floor plate careened off of her shield, staggering her. Then another, causing her to sink down to one knee.

And then the sonic wave hit her. It shattered her shield, making her shriek out loud from the agony of psychic backlash, and it hurled her into a rolling tumble across the floor.

Sadea fought to remain conscious during her flight. She knew that if her shield hadn’t absorbed as much of the chimera’s sonic attack as it did, she would be lying in literal pieces by now. Spitting and coughing blood, she tried to stand and call forth her lightning once more.

Only a spark answered her summons, barely enough to singe someone’s hair.

The chimera advanced. Its lion head inhaled once more.