Her hand grew colder and colder while her veins turned blacker and blacker like she was made of winter itself. The skin of my throat burned where hers touched mine, the sensation reminded me unpleasantly of the freezing temperature resiliency test, the feeling of warmth and vitality leeching from my blood until all that was left was forlorn ice and slowing biochemical processes.

Preempting an early and unfortunate demise, I chose to punch the Servus flight attendant in the face, shattering the front row of her teeth and smashing in the bone of her skull into itself. Her head resembled more a pancake than a part of the human body now.

Still, she did not let go of me with her freakishly strong grip, the intensity of the tightening and the lowering of her body’s temperature accelerating with every passing second. The broken remains of her teeth along with those still intact fell out of her mouth with plinking noises as they struck the metal floor of the aircraft. Her face ballooned outwards, filling back in with firm flesh and undamaged bone in what I could tentatively define as regeneration but not healing, because there was nothing reparative or restorative about what her physiology was doing now in reversal of my original blow. Only something transformative, something mutagenic. Something monstrous.

Her light tan flesh was turning bright blue and facial structure resembled a bat’s more than a human being of one of the twelve Pathed subspecies. New teeth came in, piercing through the empty sockets that had remained after her previous enamel had dropped out, droplets and spurts of black blood squirting out as these hideously elongated and pointed fangs claimed their rightful places in her altered and disfigured mouth by force.

If her grip would have let air escape my lungs through my throat and past my lips, I would have said, What the hell???

I punched her again and again, seizing her by the shoulder with my left hand for leverage so I could put my full force of my fist against her, but each time I struck her, it seemed to do less and less harm and the evidence of my attacks disappeared faster and faster. The first time I had punched her, her face had flattened, the second it had smushed, the third it had bruised, the fourth the expression of hatred and manic fury on her batlike face was barely changed.

Grabbing her hand with both of mine, I wrench her freezing grasp off me with all of my muscular force in my Bronze Imperator body, breaking her fingers and dislocating her wrist in the process. I stood to my full height and stumbled back a few steps. I felt at my throat, but the nerves were unfeeling and unresponsive, and I was only able to tell I was touching my fingertips to my neck because of the sensation of my hand feeling the abominable cold. Moving my fingers away from my frozen, frostbitten throat brought with it chips of ice, frozen blood and peeling cryotic flesh and Imperator tissue.

I found that the rest of my fellow accepted candidates had unbuckled from their strapped in restraints on the walls and had assumed combat positions behind me. Which was just swell because the other flight attendants were standing up from their fallen positions. Their skin were all bright, light blue and their faces were batlike, their gaping maws were filled with razor sharp teeth, their eyes were all completely black, and the skin of their fingers were peeling back like blooming flowers to reveal the expanding and lengthening fused bone that was growing into foot long scythe-like claws. If you had showed me a picture of these turned creatures before today without any given context or elaboration, I would have assumed they were Infernal Beasts.

“The Pit of Tartaros waits for you, false idols.” The former flight attendant said in a metallic voice, his throat bulging with air like a frog’s and insectoid clicking coming from deep inside him.

Springing like amphibians, the creatures lunged into striking distance. I continued to fight the one female flight attendant. Her foot long bone claws were as sharp as monoatomic Keenblades and laced with an insidious poison that hissed in the wounds she left behind, slowing my healing and leaving a roiling, scorching sensation as the toxin crept through my veins.

I kicked her in the stomach and the door to the Pilot’s cabin dented, almost caving in.

“Everyone, be careful, don’t compromise the ship’s hull!” Caesia yelled out.

Then two of the creatures picked up Andarias and threw him out the back of the aircraft, puncturing a massive hole in the ship that threatened to suck all of us out and drop us into the North Sea of Iulius that we were flying over. He would survive the fall into the sea but would need someone to trace his wristwatch monitor or his communicator to retrieve him from the waters.

The flight attendant slashed my left eye, plunging half of my vision into darkness.

“We have to tag team them, three of us on one of them each. Go!” I yelled over the roaring wind of the burst cabin pressure.

Aurelia, Caesia and I jumped on the flight attendant I had been dueling with, the creature writhing and spitting black liquid as we collectively restrained her.

“She’s so cold!” Caesia said.

Just touching the former Servus was painful. My throat had reformed to its ideal state from her freezing touch, but my left eye and other areas wounded by her blade-like foot long claws of bone were still in a static condition of leaking blood and burning with pain. Strong stuff in whatever toxins they were secreting in their claws.

I heard Caias Fulvion wail like a wolfish banshee, his canine fangs bared in grief. I looked over to see Lucias Fulvion, the baseline Imperator clone who had been made unaltered as a control experiment compared to his mutated and augmented brothers, keel over. He was covered in blood that refused to coagulate due to the batlike creatures’ strange poison in their long claws and pointed teeth, his throat flayed open from one of the former Servi’s bite, the skin rotting and blackening where the beast’s fangs had ripped into his flesh. With my hearing pushed to the point of superhuman enhancement, I heard his heart dim to a stop as a sufficient dose of toxins introduced close enough to his brain ended his life. He had only been three years old, would have lived hundreds of years as a Bronze Imperator even without advancement to Silver Rank or the intercession of modern medical technology and House Fulvion’s wealth extending his lifespan and longevity far beyond that sizeable amount. A literal child, despite his appearance, leaving the realm of the living behind for the Corpsefather’s realm after only taking a few steps into the journey that would have been his life.

Caias roared and crushed the bat monster’s head in his grasp, seething and raging, bloodlust and sorrow in his eyes. With his wolf teeth and the deranged look in his eyes, Caias looked nearly as monstrous as the beast that had killed the clone’s baseline brother and that Caias had finished in revenge in turn.

“Crush their heads! Crush their heads!” Clodias shouted out to the rest of us. “Destroy their brains and they will die!”

It was a solid and sure idea, only a Golden Imperator would survive a tribulation like decapitation or fatal brain injury, all other cultivators of the twelve Paths would succumb to death and have their regeneration cease when brain function ended, and the neurons could not be rapidly restarted by a moderate amount of healing. Even a Silver Imperator would descend to the Underworld if you could find a blade sharp enough and an arm strong enough to cut through their skulls and leave it to exhaust its physical and metaphysical resources in an attempt to heal.

Unfortunately, Clodias’s plan was not as easy to put into practice as it had been for him to suggest it. I had already tried to punch off the Servus flight attendant’s head and that had been less effective each time I had tried it. With Aurelia Nerion and Caesia restraining the batlike woman’s limbs, I hammered blows at superhuman rates into her head, but every time I lifted my closed fist from the Servus’s face, her head uncrumpled and restored itself to her bestial, malformed visage. Whatever insane strength the tragedy of losing one’s brother was able to invoke in Caias, I was unable to call forth.

“What the hell was in that syringe?” I asked her again, not expecting her to give me an answer.

“Liberation.” She growled up at me in a metallic voice, staring at me with those all-black eyes.

I tried a new avenue of attack to approach killing her, sticking my thumbing in one of her midnight eyes, popping it in a burst of dark fluid that stained my hand and started to dissolve the top layer of skin. I was trying to force entry through the back of her eye to gain access to her brain where I could try to give her an impromptu lobotomy. I wrenched at the bone of her eye socket to make more room, but it was determined to maneuver its way back into its newfound place whenever I shifted it apart.

“It’s not working, Clodias!” Kastor Gallion said as he tried to rip the leader of the flight attendant’s head off brutally. Helping him hold his target still while Kastor tried to finish the job was his sister Pollixa and Thorania.

The wrist communicators on the six flight attendants suddenly beeped in unison again as they had before to signal them to begin the injections and start their attack on us Bronzes. The six Servi went berserk under all of us, fighting like devils to get out of our grasps or to inflict more wounds upon us. What had that signal meant? Were we approaching the Scholarium’s decoy site and the alerts were to tell the assailants that their time was running out?

Moments later, I got my answer as the batlike monsters’ skin bubbled with royal blue blisters like a boiling pot and dark smoke rushed out of every orifice on their faces: ears, nostrils, mouths, and tear ducts.

Then the creatures dissolved into black slime, their flesh and muscle and bone melting beneath us to a fraction of their former mass, their clothes unwinding and shriveling at contact with the vile, acidic ooze.

“What just happened?” Aurelia said.

I shook my head, having no answer to give her.

Clodias dipped a finger into the slime and rubbed it between his fingers.

“Suicide bombers, effectively. They planned this; knew they were going in here today to die.” Clodias mused as the substance evaporated further.

“Why would they do this?” Artia Celion, one of Helias’s, the boy with the smuggled in lighter, friends said bewildered.

“Because they hate you more than they want to live.” I said heavily. I had known that tensions between Imperators and Servi were heightened on the capital planet, but not how far. Not until now.