The Wastes had never seen such a sight. Hundreds of skinwalkers stormed the roads in broad daylight, their giggles and howls filling the air. The hostis humani generis paid no attention to the shocked travelers; their claws tapped the roofs of occasional trucks. Some skinwalkers leapt, covering wide swaths of land, often landing in the middle of a populated center or close to dilapidated refueling stations, waving to the stunned populace who expected instant death. New Breeds and soldiers sprang into action, reading their weapons and preparing their powers.
Amusement, and not her own, threatened to drown Alpha as the warlord gnashed both sets of fangs, firmly in control of the wave of fear. The restoration of her psyche made this task almost impossible; excruciating pain pulsed through her body, starting in her brain, exploding down and hitting her heart the hardest, shaking her insides and bones. The lack of callous coldness shattered her concentration, and the warlord growled, using every reserve of her body to keep herself from passing out. Not yet. She had to keep an iron grip on the wild rabble, lest they cheat.
The skinwalkers shared their vision with her, already figuring out how to take full advantage of the psychic connection. One beast paused for a moment, pointed to a smuggler at the station, and told a village elder that the man was ripping him off by overcharging him for simple mining equipment by a vast amount. She then plucked a pale-skinned woman from among the smugglers, examined her, and set her down, exposing her to the shocked crowd as an Iternian.
Alpha focused on the fallen sister’s brain, puncturing a vessel there to a satisfied grunt from the creature, accompanied by a whiff of disappointment at the interrupted bargaining on behalf of the villagers. The killing machine stomped, racing toward the wall faster than most known aircraft.
In a wave of contorted limbs, spinning torsos, barrel-rolling bodies, and graceful leaps, the ultimate predators surged toward the Wall, oblivious to any dangers and inviting retaliation. The Dynast had long since contacted the officer in charge and ordered him to stand down, but several soldiers still fired reflexively at the army of madness nearing their positions. Some monsters ran on their arms, others deliberately limped on a broken leg, never falling behind their ranks. Sensing their growing boredom, Alpha increased her influence, struggling to assert her authority.
In reality, she had little of it. The Fallen obeyed her out of kinship and love, and such notions were less than fleeting to these beings. A trickle of blood dripped from her nose.
Do not harm our allies!
We have allies? Wow! Want to meet! Me first. No, me! A cacophony of malevolent joy elicited a groan of pain from the warlord. So potent, so noisy!
The crazed crowd streamed into the minefield, never stopping. Soldiers in the bunkers and those on reconnaissance were too slow to react and stopped, praying for their lives or saying goodbye as everything around them erupted and dark shadows, larger than most Wolfkins and Orais, flickered in the dust.
A skinwalker lacking an arm stomped out of the rising cloud, sniffed at a group of soldiers, and caught a fired bullet in her jaws. She swallowed it and stroked a young boy’s cheek, advising him to confess his feelings to his friend before another girl snatched up such a delicious hunk. Then she patted the man on the back and disappeared as he weakly tried to explain that he wasn’t gay. No one in his unit was calm enough to tease him about the revelation.
Wounds and injuries closed in on the perfect bodies, lost limbs pushed back from stumps and in from the horizon covered by detonated mines, and jaundiced eyes locked on the humans as the creatures scaled the wall, reaching the top in seconds. Their mindless chatter and greetings filled the air; briefly shaking hands with their allies, the skinwalkers made themselves at home and hurried into the bastion’s depths, pursuing their own ends.
Operators in the command center jumped as the reinforced doors crumbled and a pale thing appeared inside, berating the commanding officer for such meager defenses and pointing out the smugglers’ routes on the map. Confused and panicked, the cooks found themselves pushed aside as another skinwalker concocted a disgusting cuisine to her taste. Glancing at the men and women vomiting from the intense stench, she swallowed the resulting soup in one gulp, belching and releasing a stream of greenish mist that eroded a hole in a stone wall.
But in the ensuing chaos, the skinwalkers had not forgotten their goal. A group of them tinkered with the artillery above, dismantling batteries and reassembling them into larger, less dependable versions. Then the madwomen climbed inside, and the cannons fired them south before falling apart as their sides inflated and burst. A smaller gathering of self-mutilating horrors treated themselves to the relics found at an excavation site.
They cleared out a hangar, callously hurling away APCs as if they were mere children’s toys, and told the enraged engineering crew not to worry. In the center of the hangar was placed a round, shiny silver disk, twenty meters in diameter, and around it rose towers of interconnected machines from abandoned laboratories. Scientists and company officials pleaded and shouted into the smiling muzzles that they hadn’t catalogued the findings yet, and no one knew the extent of the danger.
“Don’t fret, dummy.” A skinwalker distracted herself from connecting the disk to bastion’s generators. “It’s a teleportation station. Banned because of its dramatic side effects on the human body. Museum exhibit. See? Simple!”
“Wait, but about the rest of the stuff…” The chief scientist overseeing the transport of the lost technology started, and in that second, the bastion went dark, its energy briefly drained into the disk.
A white light blinded the humans temporarily, and when it disappeared, there was no trace of the skinwalkers. The disk glowed, becoming the sole source of light in the room; its edges melted, and the structure collapsed in on itself to the angry cries of the scientists, who mourned the loss of such valuable equipment. The scientists wept as they watched the molten pool widen and consume the rest of their precious discoveries.
The remainder maniacs simply jumped from the wall and traversed the ground, scaring everyone they came across. And the strongest of their kind, a woman fit to be a warlord if not for an unfortunate curse, had spent an entire minute in the command center reading all she could about the Gilded Horde. Then the skinwalker broke away from the crowd, heading somewhere to the southwest.
Stop. Alpha demanded, and the strain busted her eardrum.
Unclench your tits, sis. The skinwalker replied, sending a ripple through the warlord’s stomach. No foul, promise. I have another morsel in mind.
It was impossible to control or restrict her. For the first time in her life, Alpha understood how one-sided their relationship was. The creature slipped out of the web of her fear wave, severing the connection and denying any information with a single push of her psyche. Alpha left her alone, wary of her eroding control over the rest of the host.
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Bleeding from every orifice, Alpha witnessed the horror she had unleashed upon the Core Lands and prayed to the Spirits that she would have enough strength to send them back. The front row of her fangs shattered, and a new set appeared, piercing the twitching palate. Cold sweat covered her shaking body as she endured the devastation.
The Gilded Horde forces had already seized several farms on the outskirts of Magoda, mercilessly shooting down policemen who tried to negotiate a truce. The invaders ransacked the captured buildings and lined up their prisoners for future interrogation. Beautiful vineyards stood abandoned and broken; greenhouses lay destroyed by the passing hoverbikes, and bees buzzed in the air, stirred by the flattening of their hives on the meadows. War came to the region.
New images flashed in Alpha’s eyes, a family of four trying to escape the jeering hordemen who took their time toying with them, cutting off the group by racing past them, and cruel blades wounding the husband who held two small children high, trying to keep them safe. Finally, unable to walk as deep cuts reached the bones of his legs, he handed the children to the woman and prepared to buy some time for his family.
His valiant sacrifice was interrupted as the wet giants translated into real space. Blinded, flayed, muscles twitching in the wind, bones glistening and nerves seared away, the skinwalkers growled and laughed, enjoying and hating this new experience. Without a mistake, claws caught the hoverbike aimed at the man, and the rider yelled in terror as he looked at the bud-like eyes forming in the skull. The gruesome fingers took the man apart, first the skin, then the muscles and ligaments, followed by the organs and finally the bones, spreading this horrible, still living tapestry on the ground for his comrades to see.
Skinwalkers rained from above, breaking from the craters and ramming into the ranks of the hordemen. Alpha knew many of them from their days as Wolfkins, but now she struggled to identify a single one. Once they had been proud and loyal soldiers, trained to excel, veterans of countless skirmishes and wars, trusted comrades and revered protectors. No trace of their former selves remained. Each creature fought as an individual, often dancing amidst the bullets, calculating their trajectory, or deliberately letting bullets fired by panicked hands pierce their bodies. Then claws would collect said hands, and gleeful smiles would widen, soothed by the screams of panic and pain spilling around them.
This was the true horror of skinwalkers. Their bodies regenerated most wounds, their intelligence almost rivaled Ravager’s, and when they tasted flesh, they became their victims, down to the last thought. But it was malice and innate selfishness that caused them to be a danger to everything. They cared nothing for self-preservation and had no clear goals on the battlefields except to satisfy their own decadent desires. Even the skinwalkers’ willingness to obey Alpha’s restrictions stemmed in part from their joy and loyalty to Ravager. But even that would not last forever, and already they were casting hungry glances at the rescued civilians.
The smallest skinwalkers stood four meters tall. To them, the hordemen were prey, and one pointed a finger at the enemy leader, whose face was concealed by a skull mask. The woman laughed, amused by a snort from the thunder bull, and the raider pointed his axe at the nearby captives. The laugher died, and the skinwalker lunged to stand tall before the prisoners, slapping herself in the chest in challenge.
An energy discharge, meant to be used against fortifications, left the blade of the axe and slammed into her chest at the speed of light, blowing up everything above the woman’s waist and leaving her legs standing. The skull bastard laughed contemptuously and prepared to hurl another bolt when the legs took a step and he froze in confusion, much to Alpha’s delight.
Scum using hostages deserved nothing less than extermination.
Bones, already coiled into muscles, shot up from the carved waist to reform the skeleton; red fountains carried up organs and blood vessels to rebuild the destroyed chest, arms, and neck. From the open stump of the neck, a new head emerged, every bit as ugly as before, smiling with several rows of sharp fangs. A single step carried the skinwalker beneath the thunder bull; the woman opened the beast’s belly and bathed in its entrails. The skull-faced hordeman tried to flee, oblivious to the skinwalker rising from the tortured animal’s back. Claws slashed at the metal mask, and soon it was thrown to the ground beside the mutilated body.
Cellular regeneration. The curse had grafted the skinwalkers with this gift, perhaps as compensation for the stolen sanity. These beasts differed from even the most regenerated types, springing back to life after a blow to the head and suffering no short-term memory loss. To kill a skinwalker for good, you had to burn through her internal reserves until she had nothing left to regenerate or destroy her brain long enough for her to accept death. Nothing less would suffice.
The mundane slaughter soon bored the butchers. Frenzied eyes blinked, plotting; paws gathered broken hoverbikes and retooled them into bombs that exploded in a shower of electric arcs, shredding enemies and skinwalkers alike. Instead of absorbing blows, some skinwalkers turned blurry, performing feats of speed and precision worthy of Sword Saints. Bullets and pulse rounds no longer even touched their bodies, and a flick of a paw sliced enemy soldiers into a dozen pieces. Next to them were butchers, slowly pulling out legs and arms and arranging them into unholy sculptures before impaling the limbless cripples on found iron poles.
It wasn’t a battle. It was never a battle. This was a carnival of horror, where monsters devoid of even a shred of morality or decency indulged in every possible form of degeneracy. Caught in the middle of pillaging, the enemy’s forces never stood a chance. Alpha blinked, worried for the safety of the captives as a skinwalker tended to the rescued family, bandaging the man’s wounds, then mounted the thunder bull’s head and used its carcass as a couch for the humans to sit on.
“Now, why do you assume you’ll never get over this?” She addressed the woman, gesturing at the carnage around her and catching a bullet before it could hit a kid. She gave it to the boy and closed his unresponsive palm around it. “A gift.”
“I… I…” the woman stammered. “This is madness! It’s inconceivable!”
“It is very inconceivable,” the skinwalker assured her, crossing her arms. “To your left, one hundred and fifty-one are dying; to your right, a graveyard of screaming bodies. See, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing you can’t understand. And the act of dying is not madness; it is the natural reaction of a human body under the influence of sufficient trauma. People have been dying for millions of years…”
Stop pretending to be a soothsayer! Alpha’s kidney flattened inside her body.
“The correct term is a therapist, sis.” The skinwalker waved her arm at the confused looks. “Ignore it, ghost talk. Regardless, you, my friends, are too fixated on the here and now, misinterpreting the potential future as a result, thinking that that bother…” She rolled her eyes and stomped on a crawling raider dead. “No manners at all; respect the session, please! Where was I…”
“You were talking about our future,” a little girl dared to say before her brother wrapped his arms around her for protection, crying at the skinwalker’s wide smile.
“Thank you. See, you mistakenly think that today’s unfortunate event will last forever, which, let’s face it, it will not.” A rivulet of blood splashed over the skinwalker. “Don’t be alarmed by a temporary panic and depression; considering the circumstances, it is more than natural, but what you must understand is that our lives move on and memories tend to fade, lessening the burden you feel now. You have wonderful children and the need to care about them…”
I will murder you with a spoon! Alpha’s mental roar caused the creature to blink mid-speech.
Tease. Came the wordless reply. You can’t hold a spoon.
Alpha wasn’t sure what to do. If she pushed, the skinwalker could have verbally torn the family apart. The skinwalkers’ lies and half-truths were known to drive people to suicide. These beasts did it for no other reason than fun. Sisterhood, duty, obligation, and simply being human no longer existed for these creatures; there was only them, for now and forever, and the world was their toy.
Ravager was an exception to that rule. They collectively viewed her as a mother, amused by the madness that gripped the Commander. Alpha was the second exception. The skinwalkers wanted to see her fall. And Zero... she served as their treasured adversary.
The slaughter continued, and Alpha shuddered in intense pain. A lung. She had just lost a lung. The vision darkened, breathing became harder, and she held her dominion over the skinwalkers to the end, whipping them from feasting on the corpses and reminding them of their deal. After the remnants of the Horde army turned tail and ran, she slipped into a restorative coma, issuing orders not to harm the civilians even as most of her body failed.