Princess

I gave Diaz a ten-minute head start before stepping off. He must have one hell of a mob behind him, because every boulevard, alley and street we traveled was devoid of intelligent life. Between Jhordan's fists and my shotgun, we made quick work of the street toughs we did encounter. I'd rather they just run away instead. It seemed pretty backwards to be killing the people we were tangentially trying to save. Focus! I gave my cheeks a mental slap before hefting my shotgun higher as we walked. I wouldn't let that monster kill half a million people just to get to me— even if they were just a bunch of backwater norms. One way or the other, this would be settled within the hour and the people we saved would outweigh the people we killed to do it… Probably.

It took us the better part of forty minutes to reach the edge of Ghost's target cube. We'd been less than a kilometer from it to start, but we'd easily traversed closer to six clicks between all the detours. The fact that the station still had any breathable air or heat left was nothing short of a miracle. Given enough time, the station's citizens could repair or replace what was lost, so long as Talfryn didn't end it all this cycle.

"You are now within my initial projection." Ghost stated via my speakers. "Remain alert for Liber Dawn's presence."

"Good thing this station was built after the war." Jhordan said. "Almost everything is analogue."

"Not enough to keep that psycho from opening it all up if he doesn't get his way." I growled.

"I'm more grateful to the vandals who didn't leave a single surveillance camera intact." Tony chimed, pointing out the shattered units dotting the grubby alley we were passing through.

"That's just part of the spacer charm. You'll grow to love it. Give me another year and I'll make a voidsman out of you yet, Antonio old chum."

"Still not my name, you amazonian she-devil."

"Slow up," I ordered. Once Jhordan's suit stopped moving, I strained my ears, listening for something I couldn't describe. Whatever it was, it wasn't there, but that didn't alleve the nagging headache I could feel building. It wasn't so much a sound as it was a magnetic pull coming from further ahead.

"Are you pissing?" Tony asked after a few seconds.

"No, I just… feel like I should take point."

"There are faster ways to fulfill a death wish." Jhordan said.

"He wants me alive-"

"So does every other roughian and brigand on this station." Tony interjected.

"You can fit a lot of nasty in while leaving someone alive." Jhordan added. Her words had a terse edge, it sounded like she was speaking from a place of grisly experience.

"He wants me for some freaky black site science experiment. As soon as the Shadow dropped in-system, he asked for me."

"He probably asked for the guy in the box too," Jhordan said. "You know, the one he stripped naked and sent to kill us last cycle?"

"I can't explain it."

"I can. Rather easily, in fact. One word," Tony stated. "Stockholm."

"No, that's not it. I'm not going to flip sides and I'm not marching to my death." A pang of smothered regret tugged at my heart as my thoughts flicked to Diaz. "I… It's… fuck it. Tony, shut up. Then push right into those offices and wait for a clean shot. Jhordan, hang back. The second you hear gunfire come and support us." They exchanged a quick look. "That's an order mercs."

"Fine." Jhordan sighed. "It's your funeral."

"For the record," Tony checked his pistol's chamber and loaded a full mag. "I think this is borderline, if not fully moronic."

"Noted. I'll be sure to pass that along in my debriefing when this is all over."

I didn't wait around for any of us to change our minds. I left Jhordan where she was while Tony climbed the office's rickety access stairs before disappearing through an open window. I let my feet lead on, practically swept along by something more potent than gravity.

"The concerns of your colleagues are valid." Ghost whispered in my ear.

"I can't explain it as anything other than a gut feeling. I just know this is what I have to do."

"And should you fail?"

I didn't want to think about all the ways this could go wrong. I knew that Talfryn wanted me and in his twisted mind, there was more to it than just material desire at this point. From his broadcast, I'd gotten the feeling he was the type to pick the wings off of flies. If Ghost hadn't woken me up during the flight in, I might have a different impression, but that was neither here nor there. Something clicked in my mind.

"How were you able to fly the Cat? Now that I think about it, I've barely plugged this stupid rig into anything but that never seems to stop you from helping out."

"The 'rig' is connected to your helmet." Ghost explained.

"Which still has an in-built radio." I realized. "So you've been able to jump around this entire time."

"That is correct."

"But you said you couldn't."

"You asked if I could 'jump around from it,' referring to the tech suite. I answered your question honestly, informing you that I could not. You have still not answered mine."

"So if I lose my helmet, that cripples you."

"For your purposes, yes."

I bit back a groan at the thought. Ghost could have stabbed us in the back a thousand times already, but he'd chosen not to. I wouldn't have made it this far without him, and now I couldn't imagine making it through this without him either.

"Can you um, backdoor into Jhordan's suit without her noticing? Would that even work?"

"For your purposes, yes. And I could, provided you stop evading my inquiry. What happens if your 'gut feeling' is wrong? Tell me precisely what happens should you fail."

"You'd probably know better than me." I grumbled.

"Indeed, but I still request an appropriate answer."

"You don't think I realize that half a million people are depending on me to not fuck this up?! That my team and everyone on the Shadow—my whole family—could be dead in the next ten minutes! That this whole spiral shit-show is my fucking fault because I took this sketchy job in the first place. Because I didn't kill Talfryn when I had the chance and I couldn't just walk away without getting back at him!"

"I made no such assertions." Ghost said defensively.

"You didn't need to! If I screw this up, it'll be worse than fumbling a nuke. The galaxy might get a second synthetic revolution if I can't stop Talfryn here and now." The weight of my words forced a nervous snorting chuckle from my lips. "I'm surprised I can still walk, considering I've got the whole fucking galaxy on my shoulders right now. So yeah, I know what happens if I fail."

"Yet you still plan to proceed with this 'gut feeling' of yours?"

It was either that or I could find out what a mouthful of pellets tasted like at muzzle velocity. There was no guarantee that Talfryn wouldn't be a sore loser if I ate my gun, but at least I could keep him from winning. Mutually assured destruction was a personal victory and all that.

I gave my faceplate a slap. I couldn't be thinking like that! I wasn't going to let half a million people die because Talfryn wanted a pissing match. Losing the Shadow and the family that'd taken me in wasn't something I could humor, even for a second. I had to keep them alive, no matter what it cost me, and that meant Talfryn needed to be stopped.

"Yes, I do." I said, conviction filling my words as I marched towards my journey's end.

I found myself drawn to an open bulkhead just off the main boulevard. I resisted the urge to tear off my helmet, but I couldn't shake the sensation of being swept along by a strong current— no matter how many times I checked my surroundings. I was so caught up in my own head I hadn't realized I wasn't moving anymore; I'd reached the threshold only to stop short. I looked at the door and somehow knew that if I crossed through, something would change forever.

"I hope to stars I'm right about this." I muttered before reluctantly slinging my shotgun over my shoulder and crossing the tubular threshold, unarmed.

Pandemonium had come and left the octangular plaza, no doubt caused by its most recent addition. The massive hollow-bodied rocket had battered its way through the buildings at a shallow top-down angle before embedding in the plaza's mirrored left side. The sight might have been moving if I didn't have nearly two and a half decades of demolitions experience under my belt. Broken bodies crushed under scattered rubble, personal effects thrown to the wind and millions in property damage didn't faze me in the slightest.

The overhead rocket reminded me of a derailed train I'd seen in a run-down tenement complex half a lifetime ago. Only instead of spewing bodies across the space, broken helper bots had been forcefully disembarked into the walls, floor and even the plaza's centerpiece statue with terminal effect. I didn't recognize the statue's likeness, it was just some guy in a voidsuit holding up a stick— which was currently buried to the elbow in the plaza's uninvited guest like some massive ocean beast held on high. Movement pulled my mutated eyes back to ground level, two helper bots were still scuttling through the wreckage, and so was their owner.

Talfryn looked like a man on the verge of exhaustion, the dark bags under his glowing green eyes contrasted the sickly complexion on what was left of his skin. Other than his face, he fit the crazed reclusive scientist stereotype; lab coat in tatters from his dynamic entry, blue button-up collared shirt, suspenders holding loose grey slacks and a noticeable absence of shoes on his robotic feet. Cybernetics bulged from under his clothes in more places than not. He was already facing the entrance when I arrived, his cyber-eyes flickered icy blue for an instant of recognition, but there was something else too. He looked at me like I was his salvation from all the woes in his life.

"You came." He said, awe, disbelief and something I couldn't place, all plain in his tone. I bit back a crude remark about how he probably said that to all the ladies. I held up my open palms and slowly approached.

"I heard you were giving away another AI for me. I'm here to collect." Talfryn shook his head and clucked his tongue before speaking.

"I'm afraid it doesn't work that way, my dear."

"Changing the terms on another agreement, that's a bad habit, Doctor." I said, slowly walking closer all the while.

"So it would seem. That's close enough for now." I halted. The distance between us was less than ten meters. "You didn't seriously think I'd actually turn over yet another AI to you, did you? Why did you come here?"

"I want answers."

"And you assume I have them?"

"Am I wrong?"

Talfryn spent a half second thinking it over before arriving at some internal eureka.

"Throw down your arms and remove your helmet."

I obliged, dropping my rugged shotgun. My all-concealing black helmet followed suit after I'd disconnected it from my loaned hard-back. I couldn't stop myself from squinting my eyes in the station's harsh lights. Overheads, underfoots and all the walls in between seemed to be shining bright and fighting for my eyes' hyper-sensitive attention. Even Talfryn's own glowing cyber-eyes were a glaring spotlight focused directly on my face. Just looking at his face gave me a serious case of multi-hued lens flare, that set my enhanced eyes watering.

"The rest too, madame demolitionist."

Before I could start with any of those, I had to painstakingly extricate myself from my borrowed tech suite. My empty non-lethals bandoleer came off my shoulder next, followed by my belt with its attached low-yield frag grenade and anti-personnel mine. I peeled off my corset webbing, pouches loaded with loose shells of pellets and slugs clattering off my refilled box magazines.

Now that I was down to my equipment's base layer, I started unclipping and unstrapping the assorted pockets, pouches and packs attached all over my body. Fuze setters, the slagged remains of my kinetic shield pack, ration bars, glow sticks, batteries, first-aid supplies, compact signal mirrors and a multi-tool all fell away from me into the growing pile of tactical supplies. All said and done, that pile would be close to thirty kilos at standard gravity, plus whatever the tech suite weighed. Despite the situation, I clasped my hands overhead and stretched out my back and shoulders, feeling like I stood a foot taller.

"Just as I've come to theorize," Talfryn grumbled, his eyes hadn't left my little strip show for a single second. "The aura is stronger now but still in need of focus. We must give it shape. What more can I do to provide it direction?"

"Trust me Doctor, you've got my full attention."

"You think that's true, but it's not. You possess greater faculties than you know. You all do. It is those which I require from you."

"Care to explain, or are you just going to keep muttering?"

"It would seem I must simplify things for you." Talfryn's two escorts slithered apart at some unseen signal, giving their charge some extra space. Space he used to start pacing before me like an academic would in front of a class. "Tell me, are you familiar with the concept of magic?"

"It'd be pretty hard not to be after you sicked those…" My tongue faltered around the word things. "People, on us."

"It would seem you've failed to grasp my meaning. You are familiar with magic as the masses know it, yes. What they dub as arcane or esoteric phenomena is merely one end-state of the greater sum. But the concept of magic is no more than the programming of energy by a sufficiently developed mind to achieve the desired end."

"So what? Is this the part where you tell me I'm a wizard then?" I pictured him bursting into flames. Nothing happened, but I kept trying just to be sure.

"As the masses would name it, no. You would be an adept, specifically a novitiate."

"You're serious?" Talfryn threw a stern gaze my way, his lifeless expression answering my question better than any words would. "So what now? Are you going to teach me magic and let me turn out like those… like the other ones?"

"Hopefully not. Those were merely the byproducts of the creation of something of far greater value." His glowing eyes flickered to the hollow rocket above us, specifically the buried warhead lost somewhere in the building to my left.

"AI." I uttered. "This whole time, I thought you wanted to—I don't know—put me in a blender and turn me into AI goop or something."

Talfryn didn't react, save to spare me a pitying look as he paced.

"What purpose would the blender serve? We need only create a brain-map and relocate your essence to its surrogate vessel."

I remembered the hollow eyes and slack motions of the people he'd thrown at us. The entire encounter was something of a blur in my memory, but I recalled the aftermath all too well. The surgically mutilated bodies we'd left behind were probably the only thing that could still be called human about those unlucky mutants. I could almost feel the pull from that hollow divot of nothing calling out to me in my memory.

"What do you mean by my essence?" I asked.

"Ah, a most elusive topic indeed. One scholars and theists have pursued for millenia. To term it as you would understand… your ki, your thread of fate, your aura, perhaps even your very soul— though such religious connotations are difficult to parse in a scientific context."

"But without a soul-" What the hell did that even mean? Was Hell real? Was all of it real?

"Try not to get caught up on the semantics. It should suffice to say that I require gifted, exceptionally-skilled individuals to create true simulacrum of humanity perfected. You are one such individual, perhaps the key to my greatest breakthrough yet, one which would return humanity to its former glory and cement their right to rule the very stars themselves!"

"But I'm not special or gifted or skilled or any of that crap. I'm not even that good at math! I've never done anything magical in my life. If I'm some, some novice wizard or whatever, then why don't I know this already? Why didn't something click when you told me?"

"The masses have twisted your conceptualization of magic to fit their ignorant mold to the tee. The programming of energy is something almost anyone can do with enough conviction— enough, faith, if you would. Have you never done something you thought impossible? Sensed something before you aught have," Talfryn smiled wickedly with his eyes alone. "Seen things that others couldn't?"

Dozens of examples flew to mind, but none of them were magic; it was all just luck or my mutations. When I dropped buildings on myself in training, I was always lucky not to get smooshed flat. When bullets flew and I got hit, it was always gear, training and my teammates that saw me through. When I saw things others couldn't, it was the pentachromatic color cones in my mutated eyes.

But how many times did luck come into play before it went beyond random coincidence? God or gods constantly fudging the dice rolls of my life and tipping the odds in my favor. Or if not the gods, then some widespread cosmic power, like mojo or karma.

Or magic.

I still had my doubts, but thinking it through, I was a little too lucky to have survived all the flak the universe had tossed my way on chance alone. It didn't matter how lucky someone was; no one made it out alive in the end. Our number always caught up to us at some point. There had to be something bigger than me at play and the idea of my own, whatever it was, seemed a hell of a lot more comforting than some all-powerful cosmic thing toying around with my life.

"Let's say I maybe believed… some of that. Why aren't there like, wizard cults and magical secret societies everywhere?"

"Oh, but there are. Though all humans hold the potential, most will never amount to anything of consequence. You might say they are lacking in talent. Those such as yourself who might one day manifest are often ignorant of it. Some awaken—if you would term it as such—in extreme circumstances. Others are aided by… external influences. This knowledge has been repres-"

A chunk of broken stonework started clattered from the ferrocrete rubble in the building to my right.

"It sounded like you were going to say repressed?" I frantically prompted.

"I think you've heard enough of the theory," He smiled with his eyes instead of his mouth, his face as cold as the void. "It seems I find myself starved for a willing student these days."

I flicked my eyes to the pair of killer machines that had me at gunpoint. This was what he called willing? Talfryn didn't seem to notice my dubiousness.

"If that's the case, why not advertise the truth about magic? Your partner said something about White Light and a bunch of other projects I'd never heard of before. Why keep it all secret?"

"There are several rather intimidating factions who horde the knowledge and its practitioners for themselves. Creations such as myself were deemed far too distressing for humanity at large. From what I've uncovered, these tactics dates back to the failed governance of fallen Sol. Some nonsense about a complacent populous and spiritual enslavement from the days when faith and state were-"

A bullet ripped through Talfryn's head from my right with a puff of liquid. I shut my eyes, waiting for the dead man's bots to gun me down.

Three seconds later, I opened my eyes to see Talfryn facing the building to his left while a disgusting black-grey runny mass lit by sparking cybernetics dripped from the bullet's exit wound. I watched a glob of pulsating not-brain-matter fall from his head to the floor, only to wriggle its way to his foot and disappear up his pant leg. I dropped to my hands and knees, heaving up the non-existent contents of my stomach. Twelve more bullets flew at Talfyrn, less than half ripping through his more-metal-than-meat torso with pinging impacts.

"Find the interloper and make an example of them like the rest." Talfryn ordered, utterly unfazed by his body's leaking contents.

His twinned guards slithered towards the office with their disturbingly fluid stride and unnatural mechanical speed. Talfryn slowly slid his fingers upwards to probe the liquefied innards of his skull. His brow furrowed as if the supposedly lethal wound was a minor inconvenience. He then turned back to me and the piece of ordinance I'd set up instead of vomiting. His eyes widened as he read the four words stenciled on the little box's face a second before I clacked the detonator.

THIS END TOWARDS ENEMY

No sooner did I get my helmet on than the compact mine's backblast hammered into me, driving me lower onto the ground from behind my bulwark of piled tactical hardware. Talfryn vanished behind a burst of directional explosive force. I felt more than heard a few hundred heavy-metal alloyed balls tear into the bulkheads holding the room together in a seventy-two-degree arc in front of me. I took the fact that I didn't immediately get sucked through a three-millimeter hole into the vacuum as a good sign and pushed myself off the floor.

Jhordan's thudding footsteps were nearby; I could feel them up my legs while my head rang like a bell. My concussive addiction made its presence known in the hollow place between my hips but adrenaline fought it off. I dug through the piled gear at my feet and got my shotgun and corset webbing in hand. Tony came flying out a second-story window, his too-shallow arc putting him on a collision course with me before I'd heard a thing— not that I could hear a damn thing anyway.

We both went tumbling. Something connected with my head as we rolled, jarring my neck with enough force to tear a muscle on my left. My flight abruptly ended, my backplate and helmet slamming into the plaza's centerpiece statue. I couldn't breathe. My neck felt like it was on fire. In my dimming vision, I saw stars. Then I saw both helper bots leap down into the plaza and charge, straight at me.

I didn't see Jhordan in my tunnel vision until she'd already sank her wrist knife into one of them. I knew I should move but I couldn't. I'd had the wind, and what felt like a hell of a lot more, knocked out of me. A hand grabbed onto my shoulder with manic strength and heaved me around the statue.

"Switch!" Tony barked. My shotgun and webbing were appropriated, and his belt with its holstered pistol was dumped on my stunned lap. My oxygen-starved brain hardly noted that Tony donned the woman's corset without a sarcastic remark.

A deep breath finally made it into my lungs and my limbs started spasmodically working again. I tried to shake off my remaining stupor and got a searing pain up my neck in reply. I jerked the pistol free of its holster and rolled to face the fight.

The helper bots were giving as savagely as they were taking in the melee. Coiling serpentine limbs were wrapping Jhordan, lasers seared the combatants as often as the surrounding area, all while flailing arms threw desperate blows. If the sparking puffs of pellets Tony was slam firing into that mess helped, I wasn't seeing it. My eyes left the mechanized kaiju battle, scanning the black-red puddle of chunky salsa and metal bits where Talfryn had been standing. With all the stomping and shooting, the puddle almost looked as if it was doing a quivering dance to a beat of its own. Tony ducked back behind our shared cover to stiffly reload.

"Got any more bombs?"

"One frag grenade, but it's with the rest of my gear." A flailing scrap heap went skidding through my distant pile, scattering its contents across the plaza's ground floor. The second bot's remains were added to the sprawling scrapyard soon after.

"I'm glad we brought her." Tony quipped. He offered a hand and I let him haul me to my feet.

"I think the core is in the tip of this," I said, pointing upwards without twisting my head. "Can you handle it for us, Jhordan?" She took a few more seconds to thoroughly brutalize the helper bots' remains before nodding. "Come on, don't wanna miss the show."

It was a good thing the gravity here was light. Tony leaned on me as much as I did him while we climbed through the devastated office to reach the end of this job. We weren't so much supporting each other as we were mutually collapsing into each other to stay upright, but the end result was pretty much the same. Three painful minutes later, we were three stories up looking at the remarkably intact warhead, the latest complication in this unending clusterfuck of a job.

"Is it weird that I was expecting it to be bigger?" Tony asked.

"You've seen Ghost's. His is about the same size."

"I suppose. Seems like a lot of fuss for an oversized dunce cone."

"YoU wIlL kNoW DeAth a ThOuSaNd TiMeS OvEr BeFoRe ThE eNd WhEn YoUr MoRtAl VeSsEl Is AlLoWeD To PeRiSh." Said oversized dunce cone cursed in our general direction. The small tinny speaker blowing out as the rouge AI tried to force fifty kilos of hate through a five kilo hole. The end result was pathetically sad.

"Alright, sympathy revoked," Tony stated. "Smash away, slayer queen."

Jhordan took a small step forward. The entire length of her triangular wrist blade gleaming in the room's light, machine fluids dripping onto her curled knuckles in a slow rhythm. My ears had recovered enough that I could hear her ragged breath over her suit's loudspeakers. She cocked her bladed arm back. Her quivering fist froze overhead while its owner steeled herself.

"My termination will end nothing of consequence." Liber Dawn uttered, somehow sounding victoriously smug. "Your actions have long since been predicted, you inferior-"

"Shut up and die, you heartless piece of scrap!"

Jhordan's bladed fist buried itself into the machine like a comet. The core's contents flash-froze before they could spill out, drenching her arm in a coat of neon-colored, icy slush. Her limbs spasmed in place and her loudspeakers cut off with an audible click.

"Good riddance to bad rubbish, I suppose." Tony said.

I stumbled off of Tony's shoulder and stepped closer to Jhordan, vividly recalling her reaction from the last galaxy-spanning threat she'd ended. It was stupid. I couldn't even offer a shoulder to cry on in my current sagging state, but I couldn't do nothing either. Even if I couldn't do anything for her, she just needed a little help, same as everyone else. Jhordan's head stiffly turned from the sputtering core her bladed fist was still buried in to face me.

"This suit has-" Ghost started.

Her up-armored offhand swatted me square on the breastplate with a jarring backhand. The wind was knocked from me again as I flew, then a third time when I hit the ground three stories lower.

"-been corrupted by Liber Dawn, engaging CEW measures." Ghost finished as I flew. I barely heard him in my ringing ears. The stabbing pain in my chest hinted that a couple of my cracked ribs had finally gave or were damned close. Under less pressing circumstances I might have responded with something witty and sarcastic.

"Uurrgh." I groaned as what little air was still in my battered lungs escaped me. I heard my shotgun firing and something heavy moving around, but my dazed attention was pulled to something much closer.

"Why must you humans always reject progress so violently?" I craned my neck to find the garbled speaker, the searing pain lost amidst the tide of agony already flooding my brain.

That something was straight out of a nightmare.

Millions of wriggling black larval blobs were attempting and failing to create the shape of a man. Half a hundred perforated cybernetics ranging from throbbing organs to writhing limbs to gnashing teeth to floating eyes swam in the black slime, all memory of where they were supposed to be wholly forgotten. Everywhere the cyberware should have been, I saw something wrong.

The mass's single sprawling foot was an undulating blob of spreading carapace, as if someone had used a half-melted wax candle to crush and drink a fat beetle at the same time. Five noodly tentacles replaced its arms, only instead of shoulders, the being had impossibly rigid yet flexible proboscis-like tubes connecting the limbs to its main body with no rhyme or reason across its mass. There was a narrowing that I thought was a neck, but the proportions were too top-heavy. Sliding around above that narrowing was an overlarge replica of Talfryn's face made of ropy grey tendrils and mirror-black scales that reflected light I knew no one but me would ever see. Waves of unnatural, inverted light radiated from him on the upper range of my enhanced vision while the living mass drew in the ambient heat around him, creating a sort of thermal whirlpool in my infrared spectrum.

A pistol was in my hand and its magazine emptied into the living mass to no effect before I regained my breath. My teary eyes were open wide, no matter how much I tried to squeeze them shut. This thing was WRONG, but I couldn't stop looking at it.

My boots skidded and scraped across the ground, my helmet and shoulders plowing through the scrapyard as I put distance between that thing and me. Yet that distance never came. I didn't see the monstrous mass move, but it remained a meter away from me.

>"You can't escape us."

I slammed into something spheric, my flight stopped dead. I slapped a fresh magazine into my pistol, blasting eleven rounds clean through the ungodly thing inching closer to me.

>"You cannot destroy us."

My eyes wouldn't close. I couldn't look anywhere but this thing's face while it loomed nearer to me. Tears poured from my open eyes. Something broke in my clenched teeth. I pulled my aim from the living mass and put the searing muzzle to my chin. Eyes wide open, I pulled the trigger and felt the gun buck in my hands. The bullet never reached my chin.

>"Death will not come so easily for you, our darling Princess."

The empty pistol fell from my numb hand, bouncing off the slimy not-tentacle wrapped around my throat. The weapon clattered to the ground, toppling scraps to reveal my discarded belt in the corner of my vision. Talfryn's cyber-eyes boiled to the surface, accompanied by dozens more. The longer I looked the more the metal orbs took on a milky, pus filled appearance.

>"Focus your terror. Through it, we will perfect you."

The tendril of wriggling sticky mass coiled tighter around my throat. My hand tried to tear the flesh-goop off, but it was like grabbing a squirming lead-coated weasel covered in runny shit and fatty grease. Another of the thing's not-tentacles reached forward to caress the visor of my helmet before reaching under its lip and tearing it off.

>"What miraculous eyes. What can you see, we wonder?"

Without my tinted helmet, the living mass was like looking into a black sun in full supernova. For all the light it hid and drank in, ten times as much blazed around its edges. A stellar corona of blinding proportions during a solar eclipse mere centimeters away. I would have given anything to be blinded. Every second I spent unable to rip my gaze from this thing, I watched stars burn cold and empires fall. Centuries slipped away, all while I failed to so much as blink. My rebelling lungs wanted to scream, but I could only whisper.

"I see everything," Red-tinted tears were pouring from my eyes while my numb fingers danced in familiar motions at my side.

>"Then join us as we mock the infinite beyond the ken of mortal men."

In the span of seconds, I saw the end of all things. The uncaring cosmos were no exception to the indifferent passage of time. I saw a darkness beyond the simple absence of light. I saw what Nothing looked like, the shape of it burning itself into my mutated eyes as blood poured from my face. My brain was simultaneously exploding, reeling and begging for more at the impossibility of what it failed to completely process as the mother of all migraines ripped me apart. With nothing between my mutant eyes and the unfiltered truths of the cosmos, I also caught a glimpse of something incomprehensibly massive prowling around the edges.

And whatever it was, it looked hungry.

"I'll join you…" I croaked. The thing around my neck withdrew in a slithering instant, lapping at the blood gushing down my cheeks as it did. I coughed in a lungful of air, finally breaking eye contact with the unknowable mass while clenching my fist at my side. The visions faded, and a familiar splitting headache raced in to take their place. My pentachromatic eyes burning as mundane light flooded past their seared surface.

>"Excellent."

"… In Hell."

I drove my fist—and the cooked, low-yield fragmentation grenade it held—into the thing's torso. It was like smashing my knuckles through a ceramic plastered foam wall that hadn't set yet. Every bone in my hand broke on its brittle exterior before my mangled hand sank into the mass's pulsating core. A perverse sense of wrongness overwrote the pain, though I'd desperately hoped the opposite would happen. I knew that no amount of scrubbing would be able to make my hand feel clean again after that thing idly wriggled and licked and crawled around my mangled limb.

The thing recoiled from me, its ropy limbs slammed into its deceptively solid, rubbery crystalline hide in an attempt to save itself, but its blunt digits couldn't copy my feat. My outreached arm wasn't as lucky. A single unintentional hammer blow snapped my forearm just above the wrist like dry straw. The imitation of Talfryn's ungodly face locked on my own while I screamed, a freezing cold jolt of something electric tore through my brain and set my limbs twitching erratically.

>You mutant bitch.

I might have offered a witty comeback if I had any control over my body. As it was, I settled for catching glimpses of that abominable black mass inflating from within, as if I was blowing a bubble with discarded oil. Then the bubble popped, ejecting cyberware, shrapnel, meaty bits, shreds of clothing and entirely too much wriggling black tar throughout the plaza. What little of the eldritch goop that splattered onto my exposed face was mercifully inert and lifeless. Whether it was luck or gods or magic or whatever, none of it got in my open mouth or eyes, something I'd be eternally grateful for.

"What. THE FUCK. Was that thing?"

I regained enough bodily control to stop screaming in pain, limply lolled my gore-splattered face to the plaza's entrance and saw the combined force of local peacekeepers and the Stalking Shadow's vastly better equipped strike team.

'Where the hell were you assholes' and 'I didn't need the help anyway' raced to be the first thing off my tongue, but neither made it. I was too tired and confused and brain fried to be petty.

"Ghost!" I shouted. "Fill them in. I'm done dealing with this shit."

And then, as befitted any heroine at the end of her harrowing journey, I passed the fuck out.