Shiver, shiver near, and dark now, but warm close, pull closer, eat, heal, live, NEW, new warm near—

shzzzzzt

I walked past the corpses my laser gun had made as the names of the remaining combatants blared across the sky. I didn’t listen. Didn’t care who was left. They would perish and I would live, just like always.

A wall separated me from the next opponent I could hear, so I ran through it, barely breaking stride as the concrete broke around me. The man-lizard on the other side looked at me in shock, and I snapped his neck with my off hand before he had a chance to react further. A fleshborg with wings of metal strafed past then, peppering my position with bullets that I easily avoided. On its return pass, I shot it, sending its body careening off course. Perhaps thinking me distracted, a creature with countless limbs burst out of the ground beneath me. Raving. Pointless. I crushed its head with my foot.

Death was my only constant. Always, always.

No one else was near, so I sat on the man-lizard I had killed and waited, propping the large gun at my side. Why did I carry it? Why even have a weapon? I needed nothing. But it would be lonely without it. So I picked it up and shot whatever it was that flitted from window to window at the top of a building across the way from me. I shook my head, putting the gun down.

Always, alw—

Something moved in the building again, near where the first had been. It must be new. I fired a second shot and was rewarded with stillness. I rolled my shoulders and sighed, and once more saw something shift behind the windows.

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I stood, walking toward the leaning structure, stopping in the middle of the empty street, looking up. What was this?

A woman peered out the rightmost window, her eyes cold and slick and her face so pale it was nearly blue. I nodded in respect and then turned away as I pulled the trigger. There was no need to watch the kill.

Three steps and a hiss. I glanced down and saw a perfectly round hole in my breast beginning to leak blood. I spoke a word, watching my skin reknit before I gazed back up at the window—back to the woman who held a smoking rifle in her hands.

I smiled as she shot me again, the edges of my lips widening with each chunk that was blown from my body. What was this? What was she? I returned fire just for the pleasure of watching. She wasted nothing. Barely whispering to the side and back and forward to remove herself from the path of the burning beams of light my gun fired.

I laughed full and deep, using the sound to not only express my delight but also to close all the wounds she had made in me. With another word, I was standing behind her in the building, marveling at the three new shots that aired my flesh—two through my chest and the third through my cheek. She dropped her rifle, dashing to the side, and I, I almost lost sight of her. My hand shot out, catching her wrist and stopping the blade she held from piercing my heart.

“What are you?” I said, investing the words with only a question and no power. This close, I could see that her skin was actually clear, the veins and blood showing through.

“I would ask you the same,” she said. And then that flesh, that ephemeral skin, was somehow pushing past my strength. The blade I finally noticed didn’t crackle like some energy weapon or hum with an edge of heat, but instead seemed to pull, as if it was the negation of all things. As if it would negate me.

“You cannot kill me,” I said. “Not even with such a thing.”

The blade pressed closer and she smiled. “We shall see.”

I was tempted, tempted to show her, to have her see that despite all she was, despite how far removed she was from those that flitted through this space, she was still a wraith compared to me.

But I was a drifter. Such was not my nature. I began to speak a string of syllables that would move me beyond her plane of existence. Beyond everything so that I might ponder this new being.

The emptiness was hollow. It started in my back and spread, slow at first but then like black fire, like burning death.

I turned, confused, angry, and there she was. Not only in front of me but also behind. I felt a second emptiness slip into my chest and the hollowness—

shzzzzzt