“If you want to kill your enemies, Rylee, you’re going to have to hit them harder than that.”.

I hate seeing him this way, so angry that I can barely muster the strength to look at him or his face or the shadow he casts over me. His eyes are like the painfully harsh glare of the blood-colored sun, but there’s a shadow hanging over us because of the cliff looming over me, and that makes them worse. Half of him is painted in a deep black. I think he wants to get closer to me and grab me and force me onto my feet again. But he stopped doing that days ago. Maybe because I would just collapse again from the pain and exhaustion, maybe because he didn’t want to keep having to touch his bloody, soil-covered half-breed of a daughter for any longer than he really has to.

I have to get up on my own now, even if that means passing out and waking up to see him still standing there in his crisp and clean regalia, his cape snapping in the toxically bitter wind, his posture unmoved by the screaming sandstorms, as if this is his way of showing me that he cares, because he hasn’t left, see? He’s right there, waiting and watching like a parent should. And maybe I do pass out again. I don’t know. Can’t remember. Head is a little fuzzy and I puked on myself after getting hit in my tummy again. It hurts, but he doesn’t care. Get up, try again. Push yourself onto your hands and knees, and try again. Gods’ sake, Rylee, stand up and try again.

It’s all we’ve been doing the entire day, and there’s nothing left for my body to give me.

So I lie there in the red soil, panting, wheezing, watching him shake his head.

And this time, when I wake up again, he isn’t there. Nobody is.

I stood on the edge of the tunnel, the tips of my boots hundreds of feet higher than the rubble-strewn bottom of the cavern below me. My muscles were tense, and my hands hadn’t been this tight in years. I swallowed past the ball of doubt that was trying to lodge itself into my throat, and spat terribly bitter saliva onto the filthy floor next to me.

I had expected to see the Kaiju right there and then on the grass, maybe with Caitlyn fighting it, or the thing trying to tear a hole through the single tunnel that led down here. Nothing. The silence was so painfully loud I swore I could hear the heartbeats of the rest of them echoing in the silence. Or maybe that was just mine, so loud and slow that it kinda sounded like a war drum in the deathly silence. I stepped over the edge and fell through the air, then flew through the cavern, scanning and searching, and finding absolutely nothing. Where is she? A better question would be: where the hell is the damn Kaiju? It should have come raging in here, shrieking for my blood.

A part of me almost wanted it to spring up on me right then and there, because a monster suddenly going silent could almost mean nothing and everything. I couldn’t even smell it anymore, either. It’s like it just vanished.

But maybe Caitlyn had done me a favor, and wasn’t going to let the damned thing anywhere near the tech or the dying Arkathians, and had stopped it somewhere in the sewers instead. I took my chances, shooting through the claustrophobic tunnel and then stairwell that spiraled upward into moisture-riddled air and moss-covered walls. My heart beat faster against my chest. My body felt hotter underneath my suit. The light from the cavern behind me slowly dimmed, and soon enough, I was in the pitch dark, slicing through the air like a bullet would a human body.

And then it was up those same set of stairs that I had found my cousin, and out into the rank sewer.

I found Caitlyn standing on the very edge of the platform above the river, right beside Daisy. I flew toward them and paused, panting a little, looking around and straining to listen to anything and everything. Daisy was oddly silent, and parts of her bubbled and frothed, then simmered down and flowed. The trash she used to cover herself, and the bits she had on her head as some hat, or across her chest as some torn shit, were the parts of her that shook and shimmered, gushed a little water, then suddenly sputtered and solidified again. The girl was like a geyser waiting to explode, smelling like sulfur and hot oil and what would probably be what rats stunk like being boiled.

“Where—”

“That man is not dead,” Caitlyn whispered. I followed her eyes.

She was staring across the river of sludge and waste at the pale gray corpse of a man caught in broken railway lines, his arm snagged and skewed right through the meat of his bicep in a short ladder, and his neck snapped at an impossibly disgusting angle so that his pale, empty eyes could stare directly at us. They didn’t blink or move or so much as twitch at my light, but they shone like dim lights in the pits of a skull that was covered by tight pale flesh glued firmly to his scalp. His wide open mouth hung loose, as if his jaw had been shattered open.

I can’t fucking believe it, I thought, feeling a pit growing wider in my gut. Is that Cadaver?

“Shit,” I whispered, then turned to Daisy. “You found him here? Like this?”

She shook her head, then fiddled with her watery fingers. “He spoke.”

The pit inside me nearly consumed me whole. “Fuck, he’s playing an act. Drown him and toss him.”

“I can’t,” she said, her voice shaky, almost ethereal. “I…I cannot touch him.”

“What?” I asked. “Why the hell not? This guy’s bad freaking news. He’s almost unkillable.”

“Actually,” a voice said—a voice that I had wished I would never, ever have to hear again. It echoed through the sewers, disgusting like the vile black sludge he vomited. “I’m a lot more unkillable than last time, T.”

I didn’t waste time playing superhero chit-chat with him, and slammed my shoulder so hard into his body that I left a crater in the wall opposite where Caitlyn was standing. The tunnel shuddered. Rubble fell and skittered along the floor. Dust filled my mouth and nose, and I coughed and sputtered as I flew backward. I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand, and watched as the dust cleared and the sewer water receded back into the river. Fuck me.

Cadaver was slouched over himself, only kept up because of the writhing, barbed, purple tentacle that stuck out of his chest like a hand. Another slid free from a gash in his stomach cavity, angling his head at me and making sure his broken neck had the chance to snap itself back into place, vertebrae by vertebrae. He was smiling that garish smile at me, with those black teeth and that bubbling black saliva that reeked of bad memories. I watched, heart in my throat, backing away in the air as he slowly rose to his bare feet—watched as his gut moved just underneath his pale papery skin, like a hive of snakes had burrowed deep into his innards. I wanted to puke, maybe from the smell, maybe because this was the last godsdamned thing I would ever want happening right now, but I didn’t have time to really think this through. He was here. He was alive. He was all kinds of freaking deadly.

And now he was also some kind of vessel for that gods-forsaken Kaiju. Fuck you, fate. Fuck you.

“Wait!” he said, putting his hands up before I could plant my fist through his skull, and hopefully right through the tunnel wall, New Olympus, and half the fucking planet. “I came here because I was sent here, alright?”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said, but I doubt he had the time to hear it, because I was in his face before—

A tentacle lashed out from his mouth, latched onto my fist, and threw me so fucking hard against the ceiling I thought I’d snapped my back when sheer agony exploded through my entire body. I fell like a sack, and it was a bed of vines that caught me. The tentacle slipped back down his throat, and then Cadaver wiped his mouth.

“Now that you’re seated and listening,” he continued, as I wiped blood from my mouth, and tried very hard to get the fuzz out of my head. He’s stronger, a lot stronger. Gods, now what, Ry? “I come here with great news!” He grinned wider, and I only felt sicker. If it wasn’t for Caitlyn whispering for me to wait, I would have tried again. “My employer knows that you’re here, and he also knows that you really can’t do anything to save your friends down there, so he’s given you an alternative: you give them up to me, and I let you—yes you, Olympia—go home.” Cadaver paused, tilted his head, hummed, then snapped his fingers. “Oh, right! And we won’t kill Bianca Ross.”

I stood slowly. “You’re Caesar's dog, right?”

“I’d kinda say vessel, it’s a whole thing between me and—”

“I’m gonna skin you if you touch her, and I’m gonna make you wish you could die if you speak again.”

“Ooo,” he said, hands on his hips. “He was right, that name really does get your blood flowing.”

“What the fuck did I just say about you talking?” I snarled.

“Olympia,” Caitlyn said, stepping forward on a platform of vines. She looked at him. “It’s an attractive offer made by a foolish man, so I’m going to decline, and you’re going to leave. Nobody here is yours to take.”

The tunnel rumbled again, and this time, I was sure it was because of her.

“Are you sure?” he asked, his voice leveling out. Drying. “I’m warning you, if you think you can hurt me, then you should see what I did to the witch. Oh, man, she’d tell you about it if she ever finds where I left her head.”

For whatever reason, that struck me in the stomach, freezing me for a moment. Then I shook my head. He’s lying. He’d lie to get under my skin, lie to make me angry, but what made me believe that Bianca was in trouble? Simple. It was him saying it, and a dead man talking about someone I loved was an omen just as good as any black cat. Witchling would be fine. She was fine. Gods, you damned supervillain, you better not have died to someone like Cadaver. I had first dibs on her head, and this freaking guy said he just killed her. I wasn’t going to believe that until I saw her body with my own eyes, and even then, knowing Witchling, I’d have to search every hovel and hole and back alley in Lower Olympus to make sure she wasn’t hiding somewhere. All Cadaver had was a mouth on him.

And the information that Caesar knew I was here with them, too. He wants to let me go, just like that?

I had been fighting someone I’d never even seen before for months, and now he wanted me to walk?

“Why?” I asked him. “Why wouldn’t you bother capturing me, since you’ve got that thing inside you.”

“Any more of that and I’ll blush,” he said. “But I can’t tell you that. Not ‘cause I want to, but because he never really tells me anything.” He shrugged, and a tentacle slithered just over his ribcage. “Sorry about that.”

“So you’re just going to listen to every order Caesar gives you?” Caitlyn asked. “Don’t you have—”

I lunged and had Caitlyn in my arms the next second, skidding to a stop a few meters away from the shard of bone shrapnel that erupted right where she had been standing. Cadaver lowered his arm, and the hole in his palm slowly shut again, like a mouth that had just been fed. He shook his head. “I don’t care about what you’ve got to say about freewill, and little less about you. You’ve got a bounty on your head, you know, you both do—not you, water girl, I don’t know what the fuck you are—but I also don’t have any use for Uncle Sam’s almight dollar.” He stepped forward. I dropped Caitlyn and tensed, now right in front of the tunnel. “So, what’s it gonna be, Tempest?”

“An hour,” I whispered to Caitlyn. “That’s how long they’ve got left until they’ll be entirely healed.”

“What can get through the chamber?” she asked quietly.

“Nothing,” I muttered. “Not unless he’s Arkathian, or until it opens on its own again in an hour.”

She tensed her jaw. “Would you manage to beat him in that time?”

A better question is wondering if I can survive the next minute.

“All I need you to do is seal up the entrance and make sure—”

“If you’re asking me to strategically run away, then I decline.” Caitlyn dusted herself off, then shed her heavy black coat. She rolled up her sleeves, then flexed her fingers, tensing the muscle along her forearms. “In case you forgot, Olympia, I also have my own objectives, hopes, dreams, and whatever else you want to call it riding on the murder of the man standing opposite us. I’ve hidden away too long, and now a man who took my father’s keep comes down here demanding I give this up as well?” Caitlyn spat on the ground next to her. “Fucking idiotic.”

I think I liked this Rivera a lot more, and I couldn’t fault her one bit as I stood beside her.

Cadaver nodded slowly, his eyes flicking from me to Caitlyn, and then to the tunnel behind us. There wasn’t any file on this guy, and I hadn’t thought about him ever since Knuckles put him through the business end of a sewer system and into the ocean. But he was a creature of objectives, of things he needed to get done. The dog Casear sent to do his dirty work to make sure things get done by any means necessary. He had been put in that sewer tunnel months ago to slow us down before, maybe because Caesar wanted to learn something about me long before I even knew he was watching. Cadaver would go directly for the tunnel, and if we got in his way, then he’d fight us.

It’s a good thing that’s exactly what I wanted. Just slow him down. What he wanted from the rest didn’t cross my mind as I lowered, making wind gust around my boots, just enough to make the rocks skitter in circles.

Cadaver moved like a man who hadn’t been dead at any point in his life, almost flickering from view when I shot toward him, my fist sailing over his head as he ducked, stepped back, and planted his knuckles so hard into my side I vomited when I stumbled to a stop. I turned, spinning around. His foot smashed into the side of my head. Blood erupted in my mouth, and before I could react, a tentacle erupted from his chest and wrapped around my throat, snatching the air right out of my lungs and throat and fuck me, get off of me! I dug my fingers into the meat, ripping and tearing, using my flight to buck away, but Cadaver clutched onto the tentacle, grinned, and yanked me close enough to smack his forehead into my nose. Hot liquid iron. Couldn’t breathe. My head pounded a storm.

Then the wall behind him crumbled, and vines of thorns shot right through his body. Maybe it was the surprise, maybe it was the, fuck, I don’t know, and it didn’t matter—he let go of me, and I fell, rolled, and flew away as I watched the thorns suddenly, and very quickly, explode like barbed thorns, ripping him apart and showering his surroundings—myself included—in a geyser of blood and gore and body parts. Cadaver stood motionless, blood bubbling in his mouth and dripping down his chin as he clawed at the spines of thorns and the barbs that had torn chunks of his rotting body clean away from him. He reeked, his insides were vile, and Gods, now I know what I was smelling, because his body wasn’t there to keep him all together, and suddenly, the hive of tentacles was a heaving mass of squelching flesh and bone and hooked barbs squirming around Cadaver, like a snake coiling around prey.

His blood began to burn away at the barbs, and his harsh laughter cut through my mind. “Ha!” he yelled, stumbling free as the vines burned and he forced slabs of his torso back into place. “No, really, let’s just skip the part where you get surprised, and the part where you come up with a plan, and then act surprised again when that doesn’t work too, because incase you were wondering”—he looked dead at me, just as a tongue of the meaty, fleshy tentacle broke free from the side of his skull—“I was made to be something that you just can’t kill, and you? Oh, you should have killed me the first day we met, Olympia, and I’ll give you credit, ‘cause you actually did, too.”

I backed away, watching as the tentacle slathered half his face in slime, as it picked at his flesh and fed on it. “What the hell are you talking about?” The tunnel was darker. The golden flowers were rotting because of his blood and his stench, getting chewed away by nothing at all except his essence. By the aura of death around him.

Cadaver stopped in front of me, just beneath me, right there atop a slab of rubble. “You don’t remember me, and I don’t really think you would, either. But I remember you. Three years ago, near the washdog slums area.”

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

“Am I supposed to remember a damned name?” I said, trying to sound tough, angry, but Gods, I wanted him to talk more, waste more time, but these were seconds in the whole hour I needed right now. Caitlyn, unless she had something else up her sleeve, wasn’t going to be any good now. This was down to me and him and the Kaiju.

But for once, Cadaver wasn’t smiling, and that was almost just as bad as seeing those black teeth.

“No,” he whispered, twitching. Then he stilled. “No, you’re right. You wouldn’t. Why bother?” He shrugged, and now his smile came back, but it was different. Colder. Emptier. Dead. “But when Bianca dies, you’ll start remembering names, and you’ll come and find me, and you’ll try to kill me, but I cannot die. Will not die.” He lashed out, this time without the tentacles. Bear meat and bone smacked into my chest as he punched me square, knocking the wind out of me as we both slammed hard into the opposing wall. He was on top of me. I tried to force him off, tried to get my legs underneath him or my fist through his stomach—it was like God himself had his fist pressing me into the rock. “And I thought for a very, very long time that my hate for you would keep me alive, that all those experiments and those tests and—and—and those things, the things they burned into my body would be enough to keep me focused on wanting to do nothing but see you dead!” He was shrieking, shrieking so loud it hurt to hear. Then his fist met my face. My head smacked rock. I tasted blood, and he recoiled, as if he didn’t know what just happened as I spat at him. Cadaver clamped his hands on my shoulders and brought himself closer, so close that I could smell nothing except his hot, vile breath and the tongue he slid along my throat, my cheek, and stopped at my ear so he could whisper, “Then I realized I don’t hate you. No. All I want is to strip you down naked and hang your body off your father’s statue with your own costume so you can bleed right there on the same hill he died.”

Cadaver swallowed saliva, his face garish in the darkness covering us. I wanted to be sick, to puke.

“Let me guess,” I said quietly, grunting to turn my hands toward his thighs. “Someone you loved died.”

His eyes narrowed. He remained silent. I could hear the Kaiju gurgling for my blood inside him.

With blood on my teeth, I smiled at him for a change.

“Fate really does find the pieces of shit that deserve her most, doesn’t she?”

I stared into those hollow eyes, at a face that moved with those sick, tiny little worms crawling just underneath the skin of his cheeks. His fingernails dug deeper into my shoulder, so deep that his fingernails bit through my costume. “I can see it,” he whispered, his voice almost child-like. “You think I want to kill you, right?”

“Pick a number and join the fucking cue.”

Cadaver’s back bulged, and a slew of tentacles gushed out from his spine and draped onto the floor and the rubble, spilling his black blood down his ribs and dripping onto my chest, making burning through my symbol, and deeper than that and right onto my skin. Fuck, fuck it hurts. I ground my teeth, balled my fists. My heart leaped into my throat as they slithered along the stones, grazed my legs and sides, their barbs nicking my costume and cutting right through it like a hot knife to flesh. “Oh, God, no. I don’t want to see you die. I want to see you suffer.”

“I thought,” I said through my teeth, “that Caesar gave you an order to let me go.”

“He said you could leave, but never in what state.”

Before the tentacle closest to my hand could grab me, I dug my fingernails into it, so deep that it spat blood onto my hand, and then I sent a shockwave of golden electricity coursing through it. It was desperate, it was quick, and all too suddenly, Cadaver shrieked and lunged away. I coughed and stood up, getting onto one knee, watching as the tentacle I had charged full with lightning erupted in boils and tumors and spat hot puss onto the floor as it tried to heal itself. But it couldn’t. The tiny worms that gushed from every single one of his pores rushed to coil around the gash my fingers had made, but as soon as they touched it, they fell to the floor at his feet. Dead.

I glanced at my hand, at the electricity that leaped between my fingers. I made a fist, then stared at him.

Right, I thought. Lucas isn’t here to fuck with my powers anymore.

The realization was just as disgustingly delicious as the haunting, angered, raging look on Cadaver’s face. Hit hard, hit fast, and for the Gods’ sake, put the bastard right through hell if you have to—just fucking kill him. Titan had never been one to talk to me nicely, or at all, but if there was one thing he put in my head, it was that nobody—not dad, not the emperor, anyone—was going to make me think twice about dying. I would like to say I smiled, to say that I had a moment when I realized that yeah, that look in those eyes, the flicker of dread that crossed his face, made my stomach uncoil and my electricity flow brighter. But none of them did. It was the fact that Cadaver took one step backward, hesitated, then ran directly toward the tunnel so fast that he was a gust and a blur.

He should have been the one to kill me the first time we met. The Kaiju should have, too.

Because the humans had a saying, something about whatever doesn’t kill you.

It’s a little different for us, because whatever doesn’t kill us doesn’t have a chance in hell.

I rocketed toward him, blowing apart the platform and showering Caitlyn and Daisy in dust and wind and debris as I got closer and closer to Cadaver, so close that I saw the moment when he glanced just over his shoulder, looked me dead in the eyes, and then I saw the golden fist reflected in those hollow black orbs. Saw when my knuckles ate into his cheek, then his jaw, warping them so terribly that the bone shattered underneath my fist as it went right through his brain and messily out the other side, like the exit wound of a sniper round. Gore vomited onto the wall, splattering onto the rocks. His body took two steps, then slumped over. I wasn’t finished. I knew he was just pretending, getting ready to quip. I spat, then walked to his body, watched as the tentacles squirming out from the stump of his head began to shriek, to move, to squelch and rage and whirl around like whips snapping at the air. Wait. I stopped, and heard something happening around him. Around my feet, somewhere in the rubble…

I leaped backward, somersaulting through the air and bounding off my hands as bony shrapnel shot through the air, pinging off stone and metal and fuck, catching me across the face and arm, along my side, and I swore, grabbing Caitlyn and shielding her as they peppered, one after the other, into my back like blow darts. Then they suddenly stopped. I could barely move myself off Caitlyn. I panted hard, breathed even harder as I sat up. My entire back felt warm, felt like I couldn’t move it faster. Fuck, he’s gonna make them expand. Some had just cut me, but most of them were in my back, in the muscle, feeling like sharp, tiny little fingers digging around my spine for something they could attach themselves to. Panic erupted through me as I shot into the air, then did what I could.

And sent electricity coursing through my body, like I’d just touched a billion volt socket.

The tunnel burned bright as the shadows leapt away, vanishing as the electricity enveloped me. Just as quickly as it started, it vanished. I hit the floor like a sack of bricks, panting, but my back didn’t feel warm any more, and the things moving inside me weren’t there anymore. At least, I prayed and prayed hard they weren’t.

Caitlyn swore, blinking furiously as her eyes teared up. “What the—”

“Sorry,” I said, still panting, and now looking at Cadaver’s charred body. At the stump of his torso and the smoke and blackened meat that was still sizzling and popping and spitting fats onto the floor. “Emergency call.”

She slowly got up, clutching her head. “You’ve already dealt with him? I thought—”

“You’re right,” I said, standing, stumbling my way toward the mound of flesh. “I’m not done yet.”

I grabbed what was probably his shoulder, if his flesh hadn’t fused together.

I froze. My stomach dropped. I swore and grabbed his other shoulder, ripping him clean in half.

Nothing fell out of him. Not his organs. Not the hive of tentacles.

He was empty. A shell. Tough flesh and loose veins and nothing.

I glanced at the tunnel, at the bloody footprints leading down the stairwell. I didn’t wait for Caitlyn, for her to ask what I had seen—she would see it, she would know what was going to happen next. I shouted for her to fill the tunnel with plants, whatever she could to slow him down. I shot into the dark, my blood a raging sound in my ears as I screamed down the twisting, dark little corridor. His footsteps got louder. The sounds of squelching muscle and pattering blood closer, stinking like rot and decay and the vileness only a supervillain can reek of filling my nose. Then I saw him, this figure at the very end of the tunnel that shot his blood and his tentacles and the shards of bone he could spare at the vines that shot from wall to wall, making me have to dodge and duck, weave and think at a split second so I wouldn’t have to slow down. What he touched, he burned. What grazed him died with black rot.

Cadaver reached the end of the tunnel, and was a silhouette in the dim light when I reached him.

Or I would have, if he didn’t glance over his shoulder at the last second, and I saw this face made from muscle and bone, eyes that had no eyelids, and a jaw that opened when the muscle attaching it to his face tightened. He was smiling, smiling without the flesh on his face to do it. Then something cold wrapped around my leg, something slimy and tough that stopped me dead, almost jerking my fucking leg right out of the socket.

I slammed into the floor, knocking the wind out of my body. I grabbed the tentacle and filled it with electricity, and then…then nothing happened. It shuddered, smoldered, and then I felt its barbs digging into me.

I watched Cadaver leap into the clearing, and I screamed for Caitlyn to do something.

But what could she do? The Kaiju, this slimy, foul-smelling shadow digging itself into me would rip her apart and fill her with so much of itself that her stomach would spill open in half the time it took her to blink. I was on my own. Fuck, not again, not like this—I grabbed the thing and dug my fingers into it, and got bony shrapnel sent right through my palms in return. I cursed, cried out, as the thing snapped me around and smacked me into the wall. I could hear Cadaver’s laughter, hear him call out my name, for my blood, for something else I couldn’t make out, and then Bianca. Her name. Her address. Where she went to school and where she worked. And then, knowing I could hear him, knowing very well that my head was filling with pain and anger as more tentacles gushed from the shadows, from places he had shed just a few to stop me, he said Ben’s name. Worse than that, he said, thanks, Shrike.

Thank you Lucas Freeman for doing the world a favor.

That was the last I heard of his voice, as the tentacles folded in on themselves, fusing into a mound of organs and bones and flesh that formed a mouth to shriek and cry and fill the dark tunnel with its harrowing bellow.

Something happened in the pit of my gut. This flush of heat, of emotion, of so many memories of the past year, of the past several months, weeks, days that hadn’t let me breathe. I was powerless to stop the Kaiju from smashing me through the wall, deep through the metal and the wires and the pipes, through concrete and back into its grasp. I screamed when its barbs dug into my skin, into my muscle, and ripped. I swore, I kicked, I tried to charge it full of so much electricity that it would turn into a pulsating purple tumor. Nothing. The heat in my gut got worse, this feeling simmering in my blood only getting hotter. Fuck me, it wasn’t the time to think about Lucas, that first day he had gotten me this costume, when we had spent hours picking out the colors, putting it together, and I had wanted to show the world, show mom and Bianca and everyone at school that hey, look, I was a damned superhero.

He had told me to take it off and go home, because that night was never gonna be the night.

It was too soon. Too early. And I’d stolen the costume, shot into the sky, and fucking worn it.

Because the symbol the Kaiju was tearing clean off my chest was mine. What the fuck did dad ever do to have it on his chest? To earn it? Family crests aren’t made or given, they’re earned, because your heritage meant everything to us. He had stolen it from our family’s crest, hell, not even his family’s crest, because guess what?

Zeus was the bastard child of the family. The half-breed son that hid amongst them like a virus.

Afraid to ever tell a single one of them the truth of what he really was.

He didn’t deserve this symbol any more than I did. And what the hell did a Kaiju, this thing of flesh and meat and screaming humans smashed together to form this godforsaken creature, have any right taking it from me?

All his life he’d treated me like shit. He’d never prepared me for anything. Humans raised me. My own people didn’t want me anywhere near them, but they wanted him? Fuck me, I only ever wanted to be like him because he was exactly like me! But he’d never seen that. It was never that way. He was better, stronger, he was the one that stood like them, fought like them, shed what his now genocide-riddled species had been and became the same fucking thing that his people had lost against in countless wars. That first night wearing my own costume had been my night. Lucas had hated seeing pictures of me pop up on the news, on social media, with the entire world wondering who the hell was this kid with the lightning and the symbol, and Gods, she looks just like him, yeah?

I had pretended to grin at that fact for a long time, how people said I reminded him of them.

I had hated it to my core, hated when all they put on every single broadcast, every single headline, was Zeus’ Daughter this and that and every other fucking thing, because they’d never seen Olympia for just Olympia,

If they wanted me to be like him, the real him, then fine—let’s start with this fucking Kaiju.

It had me with my arms spread out either side, trying and failing to rip me apart. I screamed bloody murder, wrapped my hands around the tentacles snapping away at my flesh, ripping away at my costume, and pulled it toward myself with one jerk. The tentacles came free, gushing blood onto the tunnel floor. I fell, slammed into the ground, landing in a crouch that dented metal. My suit was fucked. Half of it was torn clean off me, and the one arm it still clung to was bloody and filthy, clinging to the tattered golden symbol hanging loosely off my chest. I spat, wiped my hand across my mouth, heard it scream and rage and cry as I stood. I didn’t bother looking up at it.

I sent myself straight through the thing and out the other side. My skin burned as I was doused in blood that sizzled and hissed in every single one of my open wounds. Then again. And again. And again. Over and over until it was a perforated piece of fleshy meat that snapped a thorny appendage at me, wrapped it tight around my waist, sending pain roaring through my mind as it engulfed me in its folds. I gasped, swallowed blood and gore and what might have been fleshy bits of broken tentacle as it emulsified me in itself. Then darkness. Muted sounds. I couldn’t breathe, so I bit down on my tongue, trying not to let the pain of its blood, painfully hot molasses of its insides dig too much into my body. My hands flickered. Light made its blood boil and simmer, making it shake.

I did what I had just done, and sent a shockwave of electricity coursing through my entire body.

A chunk of it exploded, like a puss and blood filled zit vomiting into the open.

I shot out of the thing, then doubled back, swinging my fist so hard into the mass that still remained that it burst into slabs of meat that littered the hallway. I breathed hard. Sweat and blood—my own, the creature’s, I couldn’t tell—stung my eyes. I floated above it, breathing through my nose as it tried to put itself back together.

I raised my hand toward it, and sent an arc of lightning through the tunnel—through the metal, through the air, burning it all and making it reek of ozone. When I lowered my hand, it stung. When the shadows returned, the Kaiju was dead. It was a smoldering heap of flesh and bones, of meat and worms that lay black and red below me.

Then I turned around, and shot out of the tunnel so fast that its opening exploded like the business end of a shotgun, the metal peeling back, and the stairwell leading down toward the ground smashed into tiny little rocks.

Into the medical tunnels, deeper than that and around corners so fast I almost slammed into the walls.

And then the miracle chamber, where I found a meaty Cadaver standing in front of the open bay door.

I didn’t give him a fucking inch.

I snapped his spine with a foot to the base of his pelvis, smashing him so hard against the computer that he nearly split in two. He slumped to the floor, a puddle of organs and flesh and bloody muscles beneath me. This time, he was real. This time, I grabbed him by the throat and lifted him upward, digging my fingers into his stomach cavity, into the hive of tentacles mingling and frothing and gurgling around his body, trying to grab hold of me.

Then I paused, because he’d begun laughing. Laughing so hard that it became a shriek.

He didn’t have to explain why, because there were bodies on the floor around me. Dead bodies. Bits and pieces of meat and bone and organs, and then I dropped him, stumbled backward as I saw the shattered open pods, the innards that spilled over their sides, and the storm of gore that had washed over half the place. I wanted to vomit. I vomited in my mouth, swallowing the harsh bile. Noise rang in my head, a whistling sound that drowned out his laughter. Thalia. Andreas. Icarus. Their pods were filled with blood and tentacles, filled with appendages that reached over the sides with their purple flesh and barbed ends. What did you do? I stepped on his head, anger filling my body, my brain, then I raised my foot and caved in his skull. What the fuck did you do?! I stepped on him again and again, so many times that his hands stopped grabbing for my foot, trying to stop me from showering my leg and the pods and the floor with more of his blood. I threw his body to the ceiling. To the floor. Smashed my fists so hard against it, lacing my fingers and locking my hands together, that he was nothing more than a mangy torso.

I was covered in blood by the time I stopped wailing on him, and then I screamed, digging my fingernails so deep into my palms that they cut through the flesh. Then silence. A long, dripping, squelching silence that stank like death. I shuddered, my chest convulsed. I struggled to breath without them coming out as shaky gasps of air.

I forced myself to glance at the end of the chamber, where my cousin’s pod was shattered. Open.

Blood trickled down the side of her capsule, pooling on the floor.

With hollow eyes, this deep, emptying hollowness spreading through my chest, I looked down at Cadaver.

His head was partially back together, at least enough for his jaw to pull into a grin. “Suffering yet?”

I stood, and dragged his meaty, mangled corpse toward the machine. I bent scrap metal around him, impaled him with pieces so large, even if he got free, it would take him days to find where I left the rest of him scattered around the rooms far around the cavern. Tiny, tiny bits of him that I could barely see on my fingers. And then I charged the machine full of electricity, and did Cadaver the favor of not making him stand up from the bent over position he was in (his laughing, cackling mouth forced deep between his legs, kept there by metal that speared right through his chest and into the floor—I shattered his arms and tied them around his back, then used the heat burning the blood clean off my skin to weld together his flesh and the metal, trapping him in a ball of steel), and stabbed him through the skull with the metal appendage that came out of the machine. Then I waited. Standing.

Not able to look around me, or anywhere near me. Not even at my bruised and bloodied self in the reflection of the machine’s screens. It felt like somewhere else was controlling me. Somewhere else had the reins.

I was half-naked, hurting, and something stung my eyes and cut through the grime on my cheeks. I swallowed, choked, cleared my throat, and waited for the machine to synthesize a cure for the Kaiju. No point now.

The world needed saving, right? The humans needed me, right? They would have hated them, right?

I collapsed, maybe from exhaustion, against the machine, pressing my head against it, and listening to Cadaver groan and mumble, froth at the mouth just beside me. I shut my eyes, and wondered what my life would have been like if I had just gone to graduation instead, because now my chest ached, and I could hardly breath, and the smells, the sounds, the echoing tap-tap-tap of blood dripping onto the floor was like an orchestra getting louder and louder and I just wanted it all to stop for a second, so I clamped my hands over my ears, shut my eyes, squeezed them closed, dug my fingers into the sides of my head and fuck, fuck, fuck, Rylee, what the fuck did you just do?

I failed them, that’s what I just did, and the humans were going to love me for saving them.

For finding a cure.

The machine went silent, and I glanced to my side. A single vial was full of blue liquid.

But all I could see were the reflection of my golden eyes, and even then, I could hardly see it through the blood I covered it with when I grabbed it from its slot. It weighed nothing, felt like just another glass of water.

There, I thought to the silence, to the creature that was making the symbol on my chest ache, that I could feel watching me from a space just beyond time and the shadows lurking around me. I saved the world, happy?