The army, despite what media would have one believe, had actually fared well against the Gagambuhala. While small arms fire and even machine gun fire hadn't seemed to affect it (which was all sort of added bullshit, in Sanny's opinion), rockets and mortars had. They had needed to be sparing, surgical even, as even a single miss would get them on the bad side of the Makati community, since most of the nearby condos hadn't been evacuated, their residents either too stubborn to leave or not seeing is as necessary because the Gagambuhala had never come near their building. So while the operation, shown only in snippets on TV and online, had been slow, each rocket and mortar and other sorts of propelled explosives had unerringly struck the Gagambuhala directly.

So the Gagambuhala had retreated into its nest, hanging ominously above the streets of Makati. There it had hidden, unassailable no matter how heavy the weaponry the army turned on it, the silk and various materials acting as ablative armor and shock absorbers. It had been heavily secured to the buildings around it, such that the army would need to blow off the tops of the buildings to destroy the webs, which they were not getting permission to do because the companies who used those buildings had a lot of money to throw around. So did the owners of the buildings. There was speculation that napalm was going to be used as the nest seemed to grow bigger with each passing day, somehow swelling from the inside. The only entrance into the nest was a round opening on the underside that seemed to curve immediately.

All this, of course, inspired a lot of memes, like how the army needed insecticide, or to use the giant shoe in Marikina to squash it, or about how the Gagambuhala had been declared a terrorist or a communist sympathizer or a religious extremist by the government under the new anti-terrorism law to justify the army being sent after it instead of animal control, etc. The army had started amassing artillery, cannon and tanks on the street, all aimed at the nest, either to wait for the Gagambuhala to come out or to blow up the nest with concentrated fire. Helicopters and outposts on taller building kept watch in case it came out of the nest some other way. They didn't notice Sanny watching them. He was just one of the birds.

Maybe we should go there and help, Tammy suggested over the messaging app.

You want to show up in front of a group of heavily armed men hunting a giant monster while looking like some kind of monster?

I'm a cute plant girl! They wouldn't shoot me!

Are you seriously relying on hentai logic?

What can we do then?

Other than staying out of the way? Deal with other things.

Because of the military operations, most of the area surrounding Makati had been locked down, creating lots of knock-on effects. Like traffic. Lots of traffic. The kind of traffic where people turn off their engines and nap with the window open because they'd be there a while. Tammy had told Sanny she and her cousin had been getting up at 4:00 AM in the morning just to get to school on time. It had used to be 5:00 AM.

A lot of people had started walking or biking, which… well, had merely changed the nature of the traffic, since a lot of people still had only cars, and the usual disregard for… well, everyone else on the road. It was enough to interfere with Sanny's attempts to find more monsters, since social media was seemingly too inundated with other topics for new monster sightings to show up on his searches.

He really needed to learn how to do this better.

The military had finally put an armed presence all along the Manila Baywalk to discourage… whatever it was taking people and cars and dragging them into the water to eat them (the cars were starting to pile up). The charm dog in Pasay was still roaming about and Sanny, Tammy and Willy (?) had all been unsure if they could take on something that seemed to be able to affect minds. They exchanged messages discussing what to do, and Sanny could feel Tammy's frustration as real life made it difficult to live her heroic aspirations. Like most of the city, they settled back into the frustrated routine of life, waiting for something to change, one way or the other.

A few days later, he got a message from Tammy.

Did you see the posts about the giant mosquito in UP? she'd sent. UP Diliman, she clarified.

He looked. He did.

Yeah, he answered back with his at-home body. Just saw it. Attacked a lot of people, UP being evacuated, students accusing the government of censoring them.

He'd deployed flying drones, shaped like large birds, as soon as he'd found out so he could try to track it, but he was pretty sure it was already going to get away. Apparently, a giant mosquito had risen out of the water of the university's Sunken Garden, whereupon it had found some students and… well, it was a giant mosquito. According to the social media posts and the news articles that were only just coming and were pretty much quoting all the top trending social media posts about it, the thing had stabbed people with its proboscis, sucking up organs and internal fluids before it had gotten the hang of going for the heart and sucking up blood. It had then proceeded to go on a rampage, attacking people for the liquid.

As Sanny checked social media, he found more and more videos coming in about the incident. Most were too useless and shaky, or too far away, or wasn't properly focused. The few clear ones were already garnering numerous hits, before being taken down because of policy violations, likely because of the gore from people being shown with holes in their chests.

We need to do something, the next message from Tammy read.

Already sent drones to check it out, he's sent back. Can you or Willy do the same?

Still, a few videos managed to survive the bans. One video had a student trying to calmly narrate what was happening, with the mosquito in the distance– Sanny was able to estimate it as being about person-sized, with its long, narrow limbs and wings pushing it up to look bigger– before freaking out as the mosquito had seemed to dive right for her and smack into the window she was hiding behind. The video ended there, though under the video the poster had said they'd managed to get away by running into an office and closing the door. Other videos, shot from a distance, showed people convulsing as their orifices began to bleed blood, and the blood started flowing towards the mosquito…

Those videos usually had a lot of all-caps comments of disbelief and this being the end times and some such. Others mockingly warned of the arrival of dengue season. Sigh. People.

There had been students of the heroic idiot sort who had tried to take down the mosquito monster, swinging their bags, using fire extinguishers to blast at it, or holding up chairs to try and keep it at a distance. A few even seemed to manage good hits, and one of the videos showed a wing being crippled.

The mosquito had somehow used blood to not only regrow the wing, but to make some sort of armor around itself, and then the video Sanny was watching got deleted before he got to the end, citing a policy violation. Sanny was pretty sure someone had died in the footage.

Am stuck in class, was the reply he got. Contacting you using offshoot with stylus. Ah, he was glad she'd liked that when he'd explained it! Should we cause a disturbance, get classes cancelled?

Is that something a hero should be doing?

This is an emergency! Besides, we're close to UP. I think I can hear the ambulances passing by on Katipunan.

A notification appeared, and he checked on it before replying. The news stations are reporting on it, so it's not there anymore. Witnesses say it was heading west. My drones are more mobile, and I can fly. I'll go after it, keep track of it, you two finish school and send drones up to the roof for me to pick up with mine.

He got a sigh emoji and a thumbs up emoji, and he wondered how much of this was motivated by a desire to skip school. Not that he could blame her, he supposed.

After checking with his office drone– ha ha– he sat down and slipped into one of the fliers. His awareness of his body faded away, and the senses of others rose. He could feel the wind on their bodies, passing smoothly over their feathers, felt the lift pulling them upward…

He seized control, and suddenly it was his bodies riding the wind, strange instincts kept his wings flapping even as he felt a moment of disorientation of doing the same movement in several different bodies as his small flock of drones flew over Cainta and into Marikina. After a moment, however, the disorientation passed, and he was controlling a half-dozen pair of limbs, none of which were flapping in rhythm to each other, as easily as he wiggled his fingers. It was so smooth, so natural, like his mind had always occupied fifteen different brains kilometers apart. Each was the size of a large bird of prey, though shaped and colored like a smaller bird to not cause comment– well, not much comment– from those close to the ground. They were eagle-sized sparrows, basically. Though…

He frowned, and actually looked at the insides of the drones. Fertilized eggs full of larvae just waiting to hatch, each one a sort of burrowing parasite. Venom-tipped feathers and talons, and venom glands where the stomach would be, since these bodies didn't need to eat or excrete. Some had eyes, he noticed, that in addition to visible light were looking a bit into the infrared and ultraviolet. Other bodies saw everything too brightly, and a two seemed to spot every wave of movement even at a distance.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

One of the bodies, he noted, had an oversized, saw-like, serrated tooth instead of a proper beak, and a gaping, toothy maw in the middle of its torso, like it was supposed to come down on people's head and decapitate them like a living flying guillotine. It had no bones in its talons, which were clearly some kind of claw-tipped tentacles.

Sanny hadn't designed or conceived any of it. They'd been… well, more or less normal birds– or at least bird-like things with all the unnecessary internal organs removed– meant for fast, powered, long-distance travel, their wings capable of flapping endlessly as he ignored basic aspects of biology like waste build up, the need for energy, water or rest so he could get them where they needed to be. He certainly hadn't thought of putting in weaponized eggs inside them. As a dude, he found the idea creepy as hell.

In the back of his head, there was a small, faint sensation of… satisfaction.

He shuddered in his chair, and in all of his bird bodies, and in his office and in the one bird he'd left to watch in Makati in case the Gagambuhala made any moves.

Picking two bodies that had the least visible offensive changes, he sent them to fly to Tammy and Willy's school to pick up their offshoot and… and droplet as he sent the rest to go mosquito hunting.

––––––––––––––––––

He managed to find the two on the roof of a building. Judging from the sounds coming below, class was still in session.

Both were sized small, since he'd have to carry them. Tammy had done this before, so she was basically a coconut shell with black dots for eyes, to better deter any 'accidents'. Their powers really wanted to eat each other, which they found mutually exasperating.

"Hi!" Sanny didn't know how she still managed to talk like that. It was honestly a wonder she managed to get any air flowing through some kind of vocal chord-like structure when she was… well, a coconut. Probably substituting airflow with pure enthusiasm. "Are you our ride, or are you some other weird-looking bird?"

Willy was a piece of ice. Literally. It was easier than trying to put water in some kind of container. Tammy's coconut was resting on top of her, roots extending into the ice and held in place. She also didn't say anything, but that was nothing new. Sanny tended to forget Willy was there, since she let Tammy do most of the talking. His perverse hunger for Tammy tended to forget she was there, for that matter.

Sanny replied on the app instead of trying to rearrange bits of his body. It's me, he sent. Ready to go?

"Yup," Tammy said, a pair of gnarled loops growing from the coconut. "Can you carry us?"

We probably won't reach the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow, but I think I can manage it, he sent back. Spreading his wing wide to glide, he reached his talons forward and caught the loops, then began to power upwards. If he was any judge, between the two of them they actually did weigh about as much as a coconut. He aimed upward, flapping for lift with deep, powerful movements, pushing the air down and his body skyward. A normal bird, no matter how big or well rested, couldn't just keep full-power flapping nonstop. Even small birds, no matter how much they flapped their wings, could only do it in short bursts measuring in seconds.

He wasn't normal.

Soon they reached an altitude where updrafts would keep them up, and followed after the rest of his bodies. Three of them had managed to catch sight of their quarry, weaving through the trees of Quezon Circle and terrorizing the people there. Fortunately, the trees, such as they were, were letting people evade the giant mosquito, since it kept striking its delicate wings on them and getting sent off course. The sack of blood on its underside was visibly deflating as blood kept being used to rebuild the wings, and the less blood it had, the more intently it hunted after people. already there were people fallen on the ground, some next to fallen bikes. His other drones saw more bodies on the road between the park and the university, with dropped bags and fallen morotcycles. Some of those bodies were–

He clamped down on those thoughts, eyes looking forward, focusing on the large, hemophagic predator. He couldn't think of that. If he did…He focused on the sensations coming from the back of his head. There was always something there, even if he only became aware of the strong ones. But there was always hunger. Always, hunger.

He let himself sink into that hunger, as he always did when it was time to fight, when he wanted power to fill him. He let himself focus on that desire, to hunt. To feed.

To devour.

He let that feeling in him, let it make him one with the body he was in, with every body he was in. He let it reach out, feeling the animals in the park. The stray dogs and cats. The untainted, smaller insects in the ground, in the trees, on people's skin and clothes, on garbage and on plants. The worms burrowing in the dirt, the rats hiding in the dark. He could feel the bacteria on everything: in people's hair, on their clothes, in the trees and soil and garbage, in the air.

He put himself into everything around the hemophage, put them all under her control, and gave them one order.

Attack.

The ground exploded with movement as spiders, insects, birds, cats, dogs and rats all over the park suddenly charged, all converging on the same location. That made people scream as rats came from seemingly nowhere. Even the decorative fish in the ponds tried to leap out onto land before Sanny dismissed them…

He realized the changes in his airborne bodies barely in time to arrest them as his head came down like a woodpecker and slammed three times into Tammy before he managed to stop himself, the new hard, pointed, wood-boring beak on it managing to mark her smooth outer shell.

No!

He tried to hold his urges back, tried to stay on the target of the hemophage, but it was suddenly so much harder, much harder to control his urges than they usually were. The urge filled him, surrounded him. His power, whatever it was, controlled this body. And the power wanted.

People are friends, not food.

He felt… dismissal. Hunger. Everything was food. Everything was meat, everything was edible, everything ate or was eaten…

Devour.

She wasn't convinced. She was there, in the back of his mind, waiting to pounce on weakness, and he had been weak, forgetting how much more control of the drones she had compared to his true body, his true meat and bone. She'd always been there, since he'd woken up inhuman. The assistant-manager who wanted his job, but couldn't get it, so she pushed and pushed and pushed…

Social animals! Pack hunting! You can hunt bigger prey with more hunters!

He got… confusion. Confusion. Exasperation. Disdain. More exasperation ash he used that gap of emotions to seize more control of the body carry Tammy and Willy, forcing it to keep flying and nothing else.

Sullenness. Hunger. Devour.

People are friends, not food. Friends help you get more food. He wasn't sure if he was arguing with himself or with something else that could understand.

Selfishness.

A little food you're sure to eat is better than a lot of food that will kill you for eating it!

Selfishness. Sullenness.

He calmed, and let the urge fill him. The urge to consume. To devour. To find monsters. To hunt them. To overpower them. To kill them. To eat them, and take in their power, make it a part of him/her.

He let his own urges out. To be strong. To be fast. To be tall. To be attractive. To be free, of restrictions, of time tables and logins, of expectations, of fees and payments, of working for money. To have all he wanted to eat, to not do anything he didn't want to do. To sleep all day and all night. To have the power to do violence, to attack to hit, to make something/someone hurt. To release a lifetime of petty frustrations with fists and claws and teeth and tentacles and horns and venoms and feeling blood on your fist and your claws and your teeth and standing over them victorious… !

Sanny tried to be a good person. He thought he wasn't a bad person, because he'd been raised right and knew hurting other people was wrong. But sometimes… sometimes… he wanted to be that guy. He wanted to be someone other than a man who had to stay his hand when other people annoyed him or aggravated him, simply because he imagined it would feel sooooooo good. Briefly. For a split second. Then they'd hit back and then there'd be laws and regulations and lawsuits…

But as he flew there, meeting the petty, violent, animalistic urges in his head with the equally violent, human urges of his own heart, there was a moment…

Understanding.

In that moment, they were feeling the same thing.

Insight. A sensation in the back of his mind. A presence in every cell, every tissue, every organ, every bone, every muscle, every fat store, every neuron. Touching everything, changing everything. Inhuman, encompassing, instincts that weren't his, knowledge beyond his understanding, capable of so much…!

Insight. A sensation all around, surrounding completely. Feelings complex, fast, changing, subtle, false. More than feelings, vast, unknowable, chaotic arrangements of neurotransmissions, complex mixes of hormones that confused and bewildered, incomprehensible and alien things linked to complex/simple sounds/shapes/ideas, so confusing, so hard, so dizzying…!

Hunger. Devour. Satisfaction. Strength. Hunger. Devour. Satisfaction. Strength. Hunger. Devour. Satisfaction. Strength. Hunger. Devour. Satisfaction. Strength.

It was probably the longest chain of urges he felt from the back of his head. It was almost a thought…

He tried to respond in kind.

If hungry, hunt. Hunt food. Kill food. Eat food. Not hungry.

Satisfaction. Satisfaction. Satisfaction. Happy.

Huh. That was new. Had he ever felt happiness before?

People are friends, not food. Hunt WITH friends, safer hunt.

Dissatisfaction. Hunger. Devour.

Hunt WITH friends, safer hunt. Bigger swarm. If hurt, protected. Food will be devoured.

Skepticism.

He hesitated. But there was only one thing to say, wasn't there?

Trust me.

For a moment, a long, long, moment, the darkness in the back of his mind was still.

Skepticism…trust… Skepticism

He was flying through the air, carrying Tammy and Willy. He was sitting in his cubicle, doing repetitive cut and paste work. He was at home, sitting blankly in front of his computer, staring at the message app window.

Excuse you. You okay?

Are you doing that? Sending animals at it?

Sanny we're going off course, the fight's that way.

Sanny? Sanny? Are you okay? Say something.

Hands in one body came up to type as another banked its wings and headed back towards the park. Sorry. We're fine. Sorry for the pecking. Had a lapse. Fine now. sorry.

Okay! Let's get this thing. Drop me!

He did. Then he folded his wings and dived after them, into the fight.

Hunt.

Hunt.