The transport slowed as it approached the Observation Platform, the shift in momentum pressing Blake forward against the seat's adaptive material.

Only a few minutes ago, Caprea had reached out through her weakened connection to Kitt with an offer: A slight detour that would have them overlooking one of the largest hangars she possessed. That was where the battle between the Outsider's forces and those of the rogue Puppeteer was already underway. The Leviathan couldn't provide tactical details at this distance—her consciousness stretched too thin between active Loci—but the opportunity to observe the enemy forces in action was too valuable to refuse. Blake and Kitt had agreed immediately.

Blake wasted no time climbing out of the car the moment it stopped. He had barely reached the large viewport window when the deck started shuddering under his boots.

The vibration traveled up his shins; a bass note that rumbled up his chest and settled in his molars. He braced a hand against the viewport frame and felt the cold bite of unnaturally cold metal through his glove. There was a rime of frost on the glass of the viewport that shouldn't have been there.

Below, the vast hangar stretched out like an open wound.

Two armies ground against each other in a churn of meat and metal. The lesser hunger-spawn, undead of twisted muscle and exposed bone, surged against the puppeteers' own reconstructed forces.

Bile burned the back of Blake's throat. He swallowed the sour taste, forcing his shoulders down from where they had crept upward, and pushed mana into [Warden's Insight]. Heat flared behind his eyes, and the familiar burn of the ability sharpened the entire world. The dull roar of combat on the other side of the viewport window became coherent. The wet sounds of tearing flesh and muscle intermingled with the scraping of bone against metal and the meaty thud of the mindless dead throwing themselves against one another.

'Working on sorting the visuals for you,' Kitt spoke into his mind. His HUD had begun flickering with life as he empowered Insight, but the visual overlays he had come to expect were absent. 'It's chaos down there. Energy fields get warped when even one of these "prime" spawn show up—this is a shit show.'

"Yeah, I'll bet," Blake agreed. The situation had evolved from his initial briefing. They had expected one of the prime hunger spawns to be warring against the puppeteer, but it had apparently called in backup.

Blake tracked movement in the center of the southeastern quadrant of the battle. Twelve feet of biological impossibility shoved its way through the fleshy ranks of the hunger spawn. Its legs and torso mimicked a humanoid shape, but the chest and shoulders were grotesquely overdeveloped, slabs of striated muscle rising toward a scarred-over stump where a head should have been. The arms were swollen, hypertrophied nightmares ending in grasping hands the size of beach umbrellas.

That might have been fine, were it not for the extra mouths.

Each palm was split by a cross of flesh and fang. The horizontal maw chattered with piranha viciousness; the vertical ran deeper, perpendicular through the wrist and up the forearm to the elbow, opening and closing in slow rhythm as if merely breathing. Both glowed from within—a sickly lavender-green light.

Four mouths per creature. No head required.

'That just isn't right,' Kitt commented. Blake didn't even want to know what her senses were telling her, but on reflex, he spent the mana required to examine the creature himself.

He regretted it instantly.

[Warden's Insight] responded. A tenuous, resonant connection opened between himself and the creature. Knowledge passed through that tether, like toxic runoff into a stream.

His inner ears rebelled. The cardinal directions became suggestions, and it was only another purely reflexive flaring of [Unfettered Stride] that allowed him to control his body. Barely. His weight shifted left when he had meant to center himself, and he caught himself on one knee, palm flat against the deck plating. His sense of touch was off, too. The floor was too soft, too yielding under his hand to be metal.

Poisonous understanding tried to drown Blake's mind. Kitt was calling for him, but her voice was distant. She had retreated to her end of the bond, erecting defenses to prevent the spread of the outsider's influence. It was the right play. Between them, she was the more vulnerable to this vector of attack.

Under normal circumstances, at least.

His defenses rallied, but they were slow. Too slow. The enemy wasn't at the gates; Blake had opened the door and let it inside.

He didn't have the vocabulary to describe the way the abomination felt. "Hollow" was too small a word, but it was all his struggling mind could make stick. It was a black hole. Every cell of it a void shrieking to be filled. For the length of a single hammering heartbeat, Blake felt that emptiness in his chest, in his bones. The very shape of him, the skin and muscle and boundaries that made him Blake, was stretched over an absence that would never be made whole.

There was something else: a discordant static that his mind simply refused to process. It emanated from an incomprehensible distance, echoing through everything. The more Blake became aware of it, the louder and more distinct it became. He was filled with the creature's joy at that terrible sound. The spawn understood it. It was the sound of the universe screaming. It was being consumed, gnawed on, by tireless mouths that would never be satisfied and never cease—

Power flared in Blake's spirit. Every fiber of him capable of resistance pushed back against the forward influence, and with a roar of pain and defiance, he came back to himself. He was still kneeling, but his sense of balance had returned. He expected he would be shaking, but instead found himself almost unnervingly still. His body was chill, even as it felt like his mana channels were on fire.

Kitt remained distant in the bond, her presence coiled small and tight at the far edge of their connection. Blake sent her a mental thumbs-up.

Two seconds. Maybe three. Barely enough time for the bile to begin rising once more in the back of his throat.

The information he'd gained?

//------------------------------------------------/

Acephalon

Allogen Spawn (Prime)

Invariant of HUNGER/CONSUMPTION/DEVOURING/EMPTI—

//------------------------------------------------/

That was all. The system window wasn't even formatted correctly, let alone complete.

He laughed at that, surprising himself. Reassessing his state, maybe he was still a little loopy. It would pass.

'Blake? What the hell was that?' Kitt said, her presence creeping tentatively closer.

Stolen story; please report.

"It was a power, used by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," he replied, mangling a british accent in the process.

'Macbeth? Really?' She surged into full contact with him and he could sense her pouring over whatever information about his current state that Demiurge would feed her.

"When did you find the time to read Shakespeare?" He asked, reaching up to the viewport frame to pull himself up. He felt strong enough to stand without assistance, but he also hadn't planned on parodying The Bard. He'd be careful until he knew he was fully put-together.

"I don't sleep the same way you do," Kitt replied off-handedly. "The system doesn't seem to think there's anything wrong with you. I'm less certain."

"Feeling more myself every second," he promised, steadying himself and preparing to look back out over the carnage. "I'll try to be more careful."

Blake braced himself against the observation deck railing and looked back down onto the battlefield. The Acephalon—he reluctantly corrected himself—had only managed a few lumbering steps. It lifted its left arm high. The glow from within the wound-like mouths intensified.

The arm swept down in a scything arc.

The jaws in its palm caught three constructs. Piranha teeth gnashed in rapid staccato bursts. Polymer shredded. Scavenged meat sprayed. The trapped constructs tore at the palm tissue around the mouth, servos screaming, hydraulics rupturing as they tried to claw through flesh even while the teeth ground them to pieces.

The second mouth pulled.

The vertical wound in the forearm opened wider. Four more constructs slid toward it, feet scraping deep gouges in metal deck plating. Two tried to flee—limbs cycling in reverse, joints straining against the drag. The other two charged forward instead, attacking the massive arm with whatever weaponry they had left. Gunfire stitched across mutated flesh. Blades sparked off bone.

None of it mattered.

Purple light bloomed across all dozen bodies.

Blake's fingers tightened on the railing. The light spread through the constructs' frames like some kind of corrosive agent, eating through polymer and flesh.

Nasty work.

'Look closer,' Kitt said. Her voice was tight in his mind.

Blake leaned forward. Squinted.

The light wasn't corroding them.

The purple glow warped. Flared. Shapes formed in the energy itself. Teeth. Gnashing, tearing, pulling matter apart in tiny ripping motions. Mouths within the light. The constructs weren't melting—they were being consumed by another layer of feeding, immaterial and endless.

One construct clawed at its own chest cavity, trying to tear away the spreading rot. The light-teeth burrowed deeper. Faster. In seconds, the machine was gone. Just purple grit drifting in the air.

The others followed. Devoured down to nothing.

The embers hung suspended like ash from a fire. Then they began to drift. Slowly. Back toward the Acephalon. Each mote carrying stolen energy home to the source.

Blake's knuckles went white on the railing.

"Mouths all the way down," he said quietly.

Blake's fingers went numb against the viewport frame, the blood shunting from his extremities to his core. Animal instinct had him rubbing his thumb against his fingers, trying to regain sensation.

'Fractal consumption,' Kitt said. 'I'm willing to bet that, with enough targets, that ability nets it more energy than it cost to use.'

"Must be nice," Blake said, scanning the area around the Puppeteer. Something had caught his attention from the corner of his—there! A faint flash in the air, followed by bodies of hungerspawn being scattered into pieces. This time around, it seemed that the rogue outsider was using its threads much more aggressively.

Precision lines of mana cut through the air. They punched into a Hunger spawn, and the creature seized. Dark veins webbed out from the impact sites, overwriting the purple corruption with black control weaving. The spawn pivoted, muscles locking in tetany, and drove a claw through its former ally's throat.

'Energetic conversion,' Kitt murmured. 'Everything down there shares the same base. They all came from the Outsider. The puppeteer is using that to its advantage. Elegant.'

Puppeteer's forces swarmed the mouth-armed brute. They died in droves, crushed and consumed, but they bought time. Threads wrapped the giant's arms, snapping taut like rigging in a gale. The monster thrashed, tearing free, but more threads took their place.

Sawing. Cutting.

A forearm, heavy with gnashing mouths, hit the deck.

A swarm of small, agile constructs surged forward, lifting the bulky limb off the ground. Threads burst forth from their bodies, wrapping tightly around it.

Within moments, bundles of silvery power from the puppeteer had woven their way into the knot of threads the constructs had created, with a sudden jerk. The severed arm and all six of the constructs who had seemingly unwoven themselves to secure the prize were lifted a dozen feet off the ground. Another jerk and another dozen feet, and then the limb began to move steadily in the direction of the puppeteer.

'They're harvesting it,' Kitt warned. 'We saw similar behavior with the Puppeteer converting undead into its own specialized minions.'

Blake's reply died unspoken. The last week had been a crash course in refining his ability to sense spatial and gravitic anomalies, and his gut was telling me that something was about to change on the battlefield below.

The air pressure in the corridor changed first, a subtle drop that was palpable but not enough to make his ears pop. It was the same sensation that he felt when Ulta opened up her wormholes.

At the same time, the last of the Prime Hunger Spawn began lumbering into the fray. Since they had arrived, the creature had been idle, but now it strode out into the melee like an animate landslide. Blake guessed that it was probably twenty feet tall if it were to stand up straight, but at the moment, it was walking like an ape on its knuckles. It had thick legs, stout and heavily muzzled, that shook the deck plating slightly with each grinding step. Huge clawed feet gouged metal in its wake. It moved with the inevitability of a collapsing building.

Dark scales covered its back and shoulders in overlapping layers, each plate as thick as one of Blake's knuckles. Between the scales, leathery skin stretched over rigid muscle, cracked, gnarled, and leaking a faint violet light through the stress fractures.

Blake narrowed his eyes, attenuating his focus with [Warden's Insight].

The thing's head sat atop a thick neck, crowned with jagged horns that twisted upward into double prongs. They were made of dark chitin wrapped around exposed tissue that pulsed violet-blue. It had four eyes on its head, and they scanned the battlefield, predatory and aggressive. Its mouth was stretched far too wide, lipless, with teeth fused to bone in a permanent snarl.

Like its brother, the beast's arms were disproportionately long and ended with hands large enough to crush a vehicle. These arms were not split into one natural mouth, however. Instead, they were cracked like cooling lava, more of that sickly lavender light pouring out from within. The scales lay thick around the creature's fists, and more of the dark chitin that made up its horns was found here in the form of vicious spikes that emerged from the backs of its forearms.

As it crossed over into enemy lines, it was swarmed by the puppeteers, metal-infused undead. It took several more steps, even as a dozen of the minions assaulted it from each side. Finally, ponderously, it reared back, rising up to its full height. That was when Blake saw its chest.

The creature's abdomen and lower chest were studded with a colony of smaller eyes, yellow and reptilian, blinking in a stuttering, staccato rhythm. There were dozens of them, each moving independently, tracking different targets across the battlefield. The real horror began once that chest began to split open widthwise. Bulging hydraulic muscles contracted, seeming to nearly split the behemoth in two, as a second massive maw yawned open easily large enough to swallow Blake and the cart Caprea had provided for him whole. A ring of teeth lined the mouth, but they were indistinct and dull-looking, only visible in silhouette. The interior of the being's second mouth was that of a superheated furnace, blue-violet flames licking hungrily at the air.

Blake knew in an instant that inside that mouth was the source of the energy he was feeling. Masked behind those, the light pulsed twice like bellows stoking a flame.

And the world began to fall inward.

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