Chapter 65: The Perfect One (Patreon)

The giant came toward her, one slow step and then another, with that smile back on his face. It was the same one he had walked onto the floor with, except now there was nothing behind it. His muscles held it without meaning to, a smile stuck over a face that wanted to do something else, and the rage was all in his eyes. Then he started moving faster.

The fanatic with no hand saw it coming, and he knew what was about to happen, so he screamed from the floor with the blood still in his mouth.

“Nero! Nero, stop! She is sacred! Don’t you dare touch her!”

But Nero didn’t hear him, and the floor shook under every step while dust came down from the cracked ceiling, so the Operator understood this was going to happen whether she wanted it or not.

He’s too big. If he gets hold of me, I’m done. I can’t win this straight up.

Napoleon was across the corridor trading blows with the black thing that moved almost as fast as he did, neither of them giving ground.

Then Nero broke into a run.

She moved on instinct and tried to drop left, to let his weight carry past her, but she was too slow. The huge hand caught her along the ribs and threw her into the wall. That should have snapped her spine. It only knocked the air out of her, and she pushed off the wall and got back on her feet.

Any other day, a hit like that would have put her on the floor screaming, but her new body took it. The skin and the muscle held, so all she got was the dull pressure of it and nothing else. The laughter was something else, though. Whatever the nanobots had dumped into her during the change still hadn’t cleared, and it came up before she could stop it, so she put a hand over her mouth too late. It came out anyway, low at first and then louder, and she bit down on her lip to stop it, but it kept coming.

What the fuck. Stop. Stop laughing.

She couldn’t.

“It doesn’t hurt,” she got out between it, half choking on the laugh. A snort broke through, then more of it, her shoulders shaking with it. “He threw me into a wall, and it didn’t hurt. Ha. He threw me into a…“ and the rest of it dissolved into laughing she couldn’t get under.

She ran a hand down her side where he had hit her, and there was nothing there, no scrape and no blood, only that dull pressure, which set her off again. A naked woman standing in the middle of a corridor, laughing while a giant turned around to come back for her.

“And I’m still naked,” she said, because the stupidity of it pulled another laugh out of her she didn’t want. “Goddamn it.”

See? I told you that you couldn’t take damage. Your skin and your muscles are resistant, but he can still break you from the inside if he squeezes hard enough, so don’t get confident. The laughter will pass. Try not to look so deranged while it does.

The laugh did something to Nero that her punch never could have done. The pinned smile pulled tighter at the corners and began to shake, fighting the rage behind it, and his chest heaved. The fanatics on their knees stopped praying and started shouting at him instead.

“Nero, brother, stop! She’s the perfect one! The Father sent her, please!”

But he didn’t look at them. He kept his eyes on her, on the laughing, and his voice tore on the way out.

“I threw her into a wall and she laughed!” The smile stayed locked over the words while he screamed under it. “It doesn’t even hurt her. I hurt every day, every single day, and she stands there laughing at me. Why is she different? WHY IS SHE DIFFERENT?”

Then he ran at her again, and this time she didn’t dodge blind.

[Predictive Planning activated]

The read came back before he reached her, his weight rolling onto his right foot with the swing already committed toward her stomach, so she broke right, off his line, and the fist passed through the air where she had been. She turned with the motion and drove a punch into his stomach with everything she had, but it landed like hitting concrete wrapped in rubber. Her hand bounced off without leaving a mark, and he didn’t even flinch. He was huge, and yet his hands were quick, so the back of one caught her across the jaw and put her on the floor. She rolled with it and came up on her feet, the laugh still going, smaller now, hiccuping out of her.

I’m not hurting him. He doesn’t even feel it.

No pain on my end, though. Still nothing.

Across the corridor, Napoleon and the four-armed thing kept slamming into each other, and the black shape stayed with him through every motion, all four arms answering each strike before Napoleon could even finish it. But something had changed in it, because its white eyes were no longer locked on Napoleon. They kept drifting off him, over to her, then back, and a low voice came out of it while it fought.

“She’s perfect,” Orof said.

Near the back wall, Lessa pulled her eyes off the fighting long enough to look around her, and every monster in the corridor was locked onto something else. She found her partner’s face, and the two of them understood each other without a word.

“Go,” she said.

They brought their rifles up and put rounds into the cult soldiers standing behind the kneeling fanatics, and both men went down before they could even lift their weapons. They had stood there the whole time as if nothing in the corridor could reach them, not with two monsters in the way. Then Lessa swung her aim onto the men on their knees.

“Dan, drop those bastards. Now. There’s nobody left to protect them.”

But Orof caught it from the edge of his fight. His head turned a fraction toward Lessa and Dan, and he moved. One of the four arms drove into Napoleon, a heavy blow that flung him off and dropped him on the floor across the corridor, and then Orof broke away from the fight and went straight at Lessa.

Napoleon hit the ground, caught himself, and read the line of it at once. Orof was going for Lessa, and Lessa wasn’t seeing him with her rifle still on the fanatics. So he launched, full speed, low across the floor and then up, angling himself toward the wall behind her.

One of Orof’s blade-arms swept around toward Lessa’s neck, fast and level, aimed to take her head off.

“NO!” Dan screamed her name with it, because he already saw her dead.

Napoleon hit the wall behind her and stuck, then fired his left cannon in the same instant he landed, already aimed at Orof’s skull. Orof felt it coming and threw his head to the side, but he wasn’t fast enough, and he hadn’t known Napoleon could fire that way at all.

The round took his right horn at the base. The horn burst apart and tore a chunk of the skull out with it, peeling back a flap of black scalp and leaving a hole the size of a fist open in the side of his head.

“It almost had me,” Lessa breathed. She looked at Napoleon stuck to the wall above her. “That little thing just saved my life.”

The bone showed splintered white against the black, something gray sitting wet underneath. Black blood poured from the rim, running down his face and into his open mouth. He screamed for the first time in the whole fight, a high sound, almost human, with something under it that wasn’t, and one of his arms clamped over the hole while his white eyes rolled and lost their focus.

The Operator caught all of it in the corner of her vision and couldn’t spare more than that.

How is he this big and this fast?

Nero reached her, and this time he got a hand around her throat and squeezed. The pressure climbed while the muscles of her neck held under it, air still reaching her lungs but only barely, so she kicked his leg with all her hip behind it. The leg didn’t give. She drove her elbow into his ribs, and there was nothing.

Across the corridor, Lessa and Dan turned back toward the fanatics, lining up the shots while Orof was down and nobody knew yet whether he was dead or alive. They never fired. They both felt a sharp sting in their necks.

“Ah, what the hell,” Dan said, slapping a hand to his neck and turning to find where it came from.

Orof was looking back at them, one arm still clamped over the hole in his head and another raised their way. The two fingers on that hand had no nails, and in their place stood two thin stingers, still dripping green from the tips. Green was spreading out from the punctures in their necks, fine threads of it pushing under the skin like roots.

“Lessa, my arm. I can’t feel my arm.”

“Mine too.” Her rifle slid out of her hands and hit the floor. “Dan, I can’t hold it, I can’t —”

Her knees went first. Dan dropped beside her a second later, and the two of them ended up on the floor, faces going slack, eyes still open, watching everything and unable to move.

The hold on her throat wasn’t giving, and she had nothing left that worked on him, until Nero screamed and grunted. Behind him, Napoleon was on his back, blades cutting.

“Napoleon, what’s happening,” she forced out, the words scraping past the hand crushing her throat. “Talk to me.”

Napoleon cut him, and where the blades opened him, the wound pulled itself shut.

He cut him again and again, the hot blades opening lines down his back and across the base of his neck, and every cut sealed shut behind the blade before he could open the next one. Nero didn’t let her go. If anything, the hand on her throat tightened, and he twisted his head toward Napoleon, the smile still locked on his face and the hate showing through it.

“After I kill you,” he said to her, “I’m going to grab that tin can and crush it into the floor.”

Napoleon kept coming. He opened a deeper cut in Nero’s left side, brought one cannon down into it before it could close, and fired inside him. The flesh blew outward, and Napoleon was thrown clear of the blast while blood and pieces of Nero came out. Nero roared, the whole corridor shaking with it, and his hand came off her throat. But the wound started closing anyway, slower this time, yet still closing.

Think. Think.

Napoleon was against the wall, his legs twitching, his eyes flickering on and off.

Before she could break away, Nero got both hands around her waist and lifted her up to the level of his face. The smile was still there, locked in place, but she was close enough now to see the rest of it, because tears were running down his face under the smile and she felt the hate coming off him. Then he squeezed.

Shit. This one I’m feeling.

The two hands closed around her waist and the pressure climbed past anything the wall had done to her. Her bones held, but the pressure was enormous, crushing everything inside her ribs.

“I’m going to break you in half, you bitch,” Nero said. “If I can’t be perfect, then nobody is. NOBODY.”

She ran through every option fast, and only one came back, the same way she had killed the parasite in the control room.

Hands free. Face close. I have an angle. Please work.

His hands held her whole waist, but her arms were loose, and his face hung close to hers. She forced her left hand up in front of her, and the rings on it lit. Then the right, on the other side.

[Disassembly Field activated]

It worked on the fucking parasite. Work on this asshole.

She opened her hands with everything she had and spread them, and Nero’s head started coming apart in front of her. The skin of his face peeled up first, lifting away from the muscle underneath and floating loose, hanging in the air with the blood running off the underside of it. Then the eyes pulled out of their sockets, both of them, the strands of nerve behind them stretching long and thin before they let go, and the empty sockets sat there staring out of nothing.

But he still had her. His hands were still locked around her waist and his weight was still up, and she couldn’t finish it like this.

“Napoleon, wake up! Cut his heels, get him down!”

Napoleon was still stuttering back online from the hit he had taken, but he caught the order and jumped and cut into Nero’s heels. They regenerated. So he started moving without stopping, side to side, side to side, never letting them seal.

Nero fell to his knees, and his hands came off her waist as he dropped.

She got her footing and threw her whole weight back into opening her hands, and the rest of his head gave. His teeth lifted out of the gums one by one, roots and all, a thread of red trailing off each as it rose. Then the tongue, the jaw, the rest of his face, every piece dragging free and suspending where the field caught it, strings of tissue and vein pulling taut between the pieces and snapping, blood dripping off all of it and spotting the floor between her feet.

But the second his hands left her, she felt her own wanting to close, and the suspended pieces began hauling themselves back toward whole, the strings of tissue reaching for each other again.

“Shit, how is he regenerating this fast,” she said. “His head’s in pieces and it’s still pulling itself back together.”

She fought to keep them open. And then Nero started hitting her.

From the floor, with his head hanging open in the field, his fists came up into her sides. One, then the other. Then again. He couldn’t stand, he couldn’t see, but his arms still worked, and he swung them into her ribs over and over with no rhythm to it, just hammering, one side and then the other, again and again and again.

“Shit,” she got out through her teeth. “I’m feeling those.”

Every hit drove the pressure deeper into her sides, and her hands wanted to close from it, the field straining against her, her arms shaking with the effort to keep it open while he beat on her.

She screamed and forced her hands as wide as they would go.

“You bastard! Just die!”

The field tore wider, and his skull came apart with the rest of it, and that was when she saw the brain, whole and pulsing in the middle of all of it.

Now or never.

She pulled one hand out of the rings. They stayed floating where they were, holding the field open on their own, so she drove her free hand into the gap, closed it around the brain, and pulled it out. The second it cleared the field, his head started reforming, the pieces rushing back together, and the rings flew back to her palm and his head sealed whole again.

But the brain was in her hand.

Nero looked at her, except he wasn’t looking at her. The fists slowed against her sides, lost their force, and stopped, and then Nero dropped to the floor, dead, while she stood there holding his brain in her hand.