Zoe’s technique wrapped around the glowing core. It felt like a heart of glass. Her technique couldn’t penetrate the impermeable surface, smooth, slick, as her mind pressed against it with fingers of dark whispers. The core throbbed with heat every time it shifted colors as though she plunged her hand into a fire. But still, her whispers chanted, and the core, flashing, cracked. [Our Hearts Toll as One] flooded the core.

Chroma Viscera jerked its mantis head back. Eyes bulging and bloodshot. It shrieked and flashed white. The light faded and left the mantis dazed on the ground. Zoe walked closer. She reached out and picked up the glowing core with hands of smooth mirror. The tap of glass upon glass as she cradled the core in her hand. A sensation of cold, rather than heat, grew in her hands.

The Chroma Viscera whispered something and Zoe nodded.

“It’s all over soon. All the pain.”

“I am the Chroma Viscera,” it said as its eyes reflected the fluorescent sky shifting from pink to the palest blue. Almost like the world were normal again. “I want color.”

“You’re going where the colors are,” she said and her technique, her whispers, made it true.

She adjusted her technique to work the core like a heart and slowed its rhythm.

The Chroma Viscera sighed, its mandibles clacking as the antennae went stiff before it fell limp. A last gurgle of slime from its jaws as the lungs threaded along the hanging organs let out a last wheeze like pathetic bellows.

A white soul bloomed above but dissipated before it could take shape. The white light bled into the air as the corpse rapidly decayed beneath.

[Epiphany of the tongue: 87%]

Zoe gripped the core and pulled it free of the last loops of guts and artery. They fell away like hoses, snapped, and leaked, but she held the crustal in her hand and it continued to flash between colors.

[Chroma Viscera Core: built as a hope for conquering the world, this shifting prism transmutes essence]

Zoe gazed at the horrorshow around her. Blood and guts and limbs from the slaughtered captives. Her heart thudded cold even as Vitality burned at her wounds. These were the people of the town. She knew it. Their decimated bodies would now join the fragments of bone beneath the ground of grass and moss. Flowers lay scattered like flecks of paint — nothing beautiful grew here now — nothing enchanting — and even the icy tube was but a growing puddle of mud in the center of the gore.

The wind moaned through the skylight like lips over a bottle. Zoe remembered a conversation, so long ago now in the dungeon, where they promised each other they would get a beer once they were free. What happened to that plan?

Everything went to hell, she smiled, her scars twitching — surrounded by massacre and monsters, she felt at home, despite the ruinous weight placed upon her shoulders.

The weight of a world.

Anton’s silver eye glowed as it bobbed her way.

“Is it dead?” he asked her.

As though to answer his question, ice water hammered through Zoe’s veins.

“It’s dead,” she gasped.

It would have been nice to gain a level from that. She supposed the Chroma Viscera hadn’t been all that powerful. Instead, flexibility let it punch above its weight class. She examined the core again. Hopefully, she could determine how it worked. She had plans for how to use it.

“Anton,” she said. “Lead me to you.”

“Aye, aye,” he said as his eye trailed toward the crack in the cliff.

Zoe hurried after, but a faint tapping made her stop and look around. Was there an invisible enemy hiding away? Lurking this whole time waiting to strike? In her condition, she didn’t want to risk another fight but fleeing irked her. Her hunger demanded to be fed, and while satisfied with what it gained, it couldn’t turn its back on anything served up on a silver platter.

The sound came from Sarah’s corpse. Her severed head rocked in the grass as the translucent mandibles clacked with laughter.

Zoe bent and picked up the severed head. A length of spinal cord hung from the neck and dangled a pendulum of spongy mass she couldn’t identify. Clear blood dripped and stank slightly of gasoline.

The bug’s eyes remained alert, the mandibles shuddered back to expose human teeth. They chattered, and Zoe wasn’t sure if it was an automatic firing of nerves on death until the tongue moved.

“You have already failed,” Sarah said.

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“I’ll kill any mantis that attacked. Just like I killed you.”

“How human,” Sarah laughed. “The good of the hive outweighs any individual. The queen shall complete her quest without me..”

Zoe frowned.

“What is her quest?”

Laughter, faint, rasping. Sarah’s wet breaths stank of blood and acid.

“We will take over the world, and you will merely feed our offspring.”

The air thrummed with the conviction of her words. Faith brimmed in the air as horror built in the back of Zoe’s mind. She fought the urge to squish the head between her hands.

“What did you do to the town?”

“The inevitable. We took what we wanted. Territory, food, souls…” laughter again. “So human that you thought you could stop us. We are learning the human ways, and they are weaker… though your bodies feel so good… a weakness we tolerate… this pleasure of the flesh…”

“What did you do to Sarah?”

The laughter rolled out like burning velvet.

“We gave her a… choice…”

The head grew still and cold, and Zoe hurled it against the wall of rock where it exploded. Her frustration mounted, and she almost wished she could rewind time so she could throw the head again. So she could kill the damned mantis again. What did it mean that they gave Sarah a choice? She had assumed that the mantis merely stole her form, or that it could look like a human and it had been infiltrating the camp as some kind of sleeper agent… but if they gave Sarah a choice… then possibly the mantis had been Sarah all along. What choice made someone give up their body like that?

Sarah fought them so ruthlessly. Slaughtered humans without care. Zoe flinched at the memory. She knew the system turned humans into monsters, but she hadn’t thought it would happen so literally.

“Zoe!” Anton called. “We need to go, now!”

The air thrummed. The sound came from above, humming on the wind. It could only be one thing: wingbeats.

The cavalry were coming, and Zoe was in no state to fight them.

She hurried toward the crack and followed Anton’s light. Her body squeezed between the rough rock and she activated [Empress in Time] to help herself slip through. The jagged rock bounced off her mirrored skin and cracks ran up and down the gorge. Pebbles fell from above, but she didn’t care as they bounced off her. It was all about speed now.

They emerged on the other side, and Anton’s eye zipped away. Zoe sprinted after it. She’d thought they would pass the bodies of the ambushed war party, but Anton led her in a new direction. They entered the cover of trees as the sky above them thundered with wings.

“Hide,” Anton said and led her to a tree hollowed out by a long-ago fire.

She snuck down into its base and calmed her breathing as dozens of mantis flew above the canopy. Rough charred wood lined the inside, and snow piled the ground, despite this she almost drifted off to sleep. Exhaustion makes anything comfortable.

Anton’s eye bobbed beside her, tucked away and out of view, lest one of the overhead mantis spy its silvery glow.

“How are you?” Zoe asked. “You took that attack to the hip.”

“I lost my leg,” Anton said with ice-cold detachment.

Zoe’s eyes flew open as a shock ran through her. She didn’t know what to say. Her mouth opened, and closed…

“I’m sorry…” This was all her fault. If she hadn’t of --

“I’m joking,” he said with the same tone of voice.

“That’s not funny.”

“Eh. Should have seen your face.”

“So, how are you?”

“I’ll live, but I’ll be limping for a bit, even with my Vitality. I think my new flesh is better suited for watching than engaging. Combat feels too much like getting poked in the eye — but at least I can maintain this technique at a distance with ease.”

“How far away are you?”

“We’re still moving,” he said. “Oriz wove a boat from grass and we’re floating down a river.”

The surreality of that statement made Zoe blink.

“Careful you don’t…”

“Yeah if we go too far we’ll fall off the edge of the island. We’re not stupid, you know:? We can do something without you.”

“Didn’t mean to imply you can’t...”

“I know. Pain makes me snappy.”

“How are the others?”

Anton sucked in a breath, it was almost as though he were standing right beside her, and not just a detached eyeball of chrome.

“It’s safe to walk,” he said. “They’ve flown over.”

Zoe emerged and jogged after the eye as it floated over the landscape. While it sailed through the air, she leaped logs and ditches and charged through frozen underbrush to keep up.

“Tell me what happened to the others,” Zoe said. “I saw Skidmark collapse. Skein exhaustion right? And Bella, she got hit…”

The eye was silent for a moment, and she almost thought Anton was ignoring her.

“Yeah,” he said at last. “Skidmark’s fine, but Bella… Oriz has her cocooned up. Won’t answer questions or let anyone get close. She’s not taking it well.” His voice dropped to a whisper, and the eye came closer. “Be careful how you approach her. I don’t think Oriz would hold back if something happened to Bella.”

“You think she’ll attack me?”

“You know her better than I do, I suppose, but I don’t trust her.”

Zoe forced a smirk.

“Do you trust anybody?”

“I trust you.”

Her smirk faded, and she nodded and ran alongside the eye in silence as they wove through the forest toward the rendezvous.

###

They met at a cave a couple of miles from the town where the river curved around some rocky hills. The air roared and thundered, for though the river ran wide and clear beside the cave, not two hundred feet downstream the flow vanished into a haze of mist. Jagged stones stuck out like a bulldog's jaw and through this maze of shattering black rock, the water cascaded off the edge of the island. Beyond the mists, the vast sky stretched in color — blue fading to yellow to green and white swirling through, some kind of pattern in the colors and the shapes. There must be an augury there, some kind of knowledge to be gained if only one looked close enough….

Some way to know how to fix everything.

More islands floated in the distance, little chips of black against the vibrant sky, like blimps of floating rock. Strands ran between some islands, impossible to make out more detail at this distance, but Anton said they were roads. How he knew, Zoe couldn’t guess, unless his Epiphany of the Flesh changed his eyes in more ways than one.

The cave was a quiet place.

A hushed atmosphere, repressive, overwhelming, centered on a cocoon of grass in the dusty center of the limestone maw. Oriz sat beside Bella’s body and tended to the strands of Skein encasing her. She continuously replaced sections, wrapping them around like an anxious spider. Zoe met Oriz’s gaze as she walked to the back of the cave.

“Is Bella alright?” she asked.

“She will be,” Oriz said.

The cave descended into silence, and soon, all but Oriz were sleeping. After a few hours of rest, Zoe stirred. The sky was still light.

She approached Oriz while Skidmark and Anton slept in the shadows.

“How is she?” Zoe asked Oriz.

Oriz stared at her.

“I know your intentions,” she said. “The answer is no.”