Lira stretched her arms over her head, feeling the satisfying crack of her shoulder joints.

“Nngghhpfff,” she groaned, savoring the release of tension as her muscles loosened.

Honestly, she was secretly grateful her idiot brother had forgotten to grab the foreigner’s luggage.

It gave her the perfect excuse to show up a little late to what Zaspa generously called "training"—more like torture, in her opinion.

Unlike Kai, she wasn’t the type to leap from one milestone to the next. It had taken her nearly five years just to unlock her Halfshape, and she was still nowhere near reaching Fullshape. Kai, though? The way he was developing, he’d surpass her in no time.

And then what?

Wasn’t it an older sister’s job to forge ahead, to pave the way for her younger sibling?

A sharp pang of something twisted in her chest. Hadn’t Kai already left her behind?

Unlike her, he had claimed his heart, hunted it like a true warrior.

The thought gnawed at her until the sounds of metal slamming against stone tore her out of her spiraling misery.

“What’s that guy doing now?” She muttered to the empty night.

The sound came from the foreigner's hut. Of course it did...

It was so typical of him to blow something up or break stuff.

After two weeks, the man had already gained a reputation in the village for nearly setting himself on fire, almost drowning in his bizarre experiments, and making the strangest requests.

Cut me down a tree. Bring me a bucket of water from the Hungry Ocean. Fill this tree with water...

And yet somehow, the villagers had started warming up to him. Probably because his weird inventions actually worked. That didn’t mean he wasn’t an idiot, though.

She smacked her lips, hesitating. This wasn’t her business. But if he had hurt himself badly, or, better yet, needed another bucket of water, maybe she could find an excuse to show up to training ridiculously late. Or avoid it altogether.

Her mind was made up.

She would graciously dedicate some of her time to look at what he was doing.

As the chief's daughter, she couldn't have someone getting killed because of his own reckless experiments under her supervision.

With quick steps she strode over to his hut.

"Hey, moron, didn't I tell you not to ruin the clothes?"

She asked, trying to be as obnoxious as possible.

She didn't really like the guy, or rather foreigners in general.

They couldn't be trusted.

She still remembered the inferno Ruberta had unleashed during her fight with her grandmother and how the (brandwunden) had hurt all over her tiny body.

Without her heart she would no doubt still bear them.

As Lira approached the foreigner’s hut, she froze in the doorway.

The foreigner was gone.

The only sign of him was a long, metallic tail slithering out of the carved window, leaving a smear of blood in its wake.

“Fuck,” she shouted, guiding fire into her eyes to improve her vision.

The clothes she had given the foreigner only moments earlier laid scattered on the dirt floor.

A motion over her head caught Lira's attention, just in time to catch the two humanoid claws aiming for her throat.

The metal they were made out of hissed and warped as it began to melt under her grip.

But before she could send the heatwave through the rest of... whatever that was, it yanked back, its body wringing around itself as it left its melting hands behind.

It landed lightly on the clay table, crouched like a predator.

This was the first time that Lira got a proper look at it.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

It took her a moment to process what she was seeing.

It lacked the helmet drones usually had, the iconic feature of the Alchemist’s creations.

Instead, its head was a seamless alloy of bluish metal that extended down to its neck.

Its "face" was a grotesque mockery of life.

Only shallow dents where eyes, nose, and mouth should be, and the ears were entirely absent.

The rest of its body was white as snow, with unnaturally long, thin limbs.

Seeing that Lira finally realized.

What stood in front of her was a drone.

One made out of her kin.

Anger surged through her veins, and with it, fire.

Her hair ignited, fire cascading down her neck like molten lava until it reached her shoulders.

Two jets of fire burst from her back, forming blazing wings.

The creature stood tall now, a long, metallic tail coiled between its legs like a scorpion’s stinger.

Its tip whipped forward, aiming straight for her head.

Lira launched herself at it, gripping its throat with one burning hand.

The nail punctured her skull, bringing unimaginable agony, but she didn’t care.

She despised that thing's existence too much to let a little pain stop her.

If she had just walked to the training grounds, she surely would've been in more agony right now.

She exhaled a single breath, letting some of her heart's fire slip through her grasp, turning the entire hut into an inferno.

The clay walls melted, the foreigner’s bed reduced to cinders, but Lira didn’t care.

Destroying the hut would serve as her warning to the village.

Once Zaspa was here, she would purge whatever new creation the Alchemist had ripped from their nightmares.

The hole in her head sealed itself, snapping the creature’s tail in two, one piece on each side of her now-healed skull.

The drone’s once-white skin blackened, veins of glowing blue pulsing beneath the charred surface.

Lira didn’t give it a chance to react.

Using the momentum of her leap, she burst through what remained of the hut’s roof, dragging the creature with her as she soared into the night sky.

A meter above the ground, she turned, swinging the creature and shot back down.

Holding it in front of her, the two smashed against the ground, sending clumps of earth flying in all directions.

She hadn't bothered slowing her own descent. Why should she?

It took a second for her to stand again and another until she had reached what was left of her opponent.

To her surprise it was a lot.

The burnt husk of a corpse shot upright, moving with an unnatural speed, an alien abruptness in its motion.

Its charred legs snapped forward in a kick aimed at her stomach.

Lira didn’t flinch as it tore off a chunk of her left side.

Fire burst out of her, licking at the attacker's tights as it healed her.

It was hate that fueled her fire, making it burn all the brighter.

A single look at the thing was enough.

She wouldn't allow this affront against nature to exist any longer.

With a sharp pivot, she grabbed the creature by its head, her fingers digging into the warped alloy fused with its skull.

Her free hand ignited as she punched through its torso, molten fire surging from her fist.

Her arm shattered the first time it came down, bones succumbing to the hardness of the creature.

Her second punch produced a dent, her third widened it, and the fourth finally penetrated its body.

The drone twitched violently, but Lira didn’t stop.

She wasn’t taking chances.

Flames surged down her arm and into the thing, erupting from its charred form in tiny, searing fountains.

Then she hurled it into the nearest boulder, the force of the throw cracking the stone in half.

When the drone staggered to its feet again, its limbs jerking awkwardly.

For a moment, the drone staggered to its feet, it's head and shoulders hanging in an unnatural way.

Then, like a puppet whose strings had been cut, it collapsed lifeless to the ground.

Finally, Lira thought.

But she wasn't finished.

With a single leap the woman came over to it's body, stomping her foot on the blue head of hits.

Hate.

There was nothing but hate inside her in this instant.

Hate for the thing in front of her.

Hate for the Alchemist, who had turned her brethren into it.

Hate.

She wanted it gone, bringing her feet down like the impact could erase it in its entirety.

After a few stomps, her heel broke, but it healed, and she continued.

A motion at the edge of her vision made her pause, her breath heavy and uneven as she straightened up.

She looked around, realizing for the first time that she had fought herself out of the village.

She stood at the edge of the forest, the familiar shadowy trees surrounding her.

Six more figures emerged from the darkness.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” she spat, flames reigniting and crawling over her body.

Her muscles tensed, ready to lunge, but then she saw it.

One of the figures wasn’t like the others.

Its blackened skin shimmered faintly, dotted with specks of white that looked like stars against the night sky.

Its shoulders were broad and muscular, its body wrapped only in a simple fur cloth around its waist.

Unlike the others, this one still had hands made out of flesh.

Hands she remembered vividly, because they had once held her so tenderly.

It had been most of her lifetime since she had felt them, but she would never forget the savety they had provided.

Her flames flickered, and her anger faltered, replaced by a deep, suffocating despair.

It was like falling into a bottomless pit, with your own heart dragging you down.

The feeling crushed her, overwhelming her entirely for the briefest fraction of a second.

But that was all it took.

A sharp sting pierced her back.

Lira’s body jolted, and a cold, venomous sensation spread through her veins like wildfire.

The pain snapped her out of her daze.

She tore herself free from the figure in front of her, spinning around to face her attacker. Flames roared out of her hands, traveling down the appendage embedded in her spine.

Her vision blurred, the edges growing darker, but she didn’t stop.

With a guttural growl, she tired to kill herself, to force her body to reset and thus purge whatever that thing had injected into her.

But the drones were faster.

They swarmed her, long limbs and metallic tails tangling around her like living chains, their tips piercing her arms and hands, filling her with even more of their poision.

She thrashed violently, unleashing another desperate inferno.

The heat burned hotter than ever before, scorching the ground and melting nearby trees.

The drones hissed, their skin blistering and blackening, but they didn’t stop.

Their ruined, charred bodies clung to her, refusing to let go.

Lira’s strength faltered, her flames dimming as the venom coursing through her veins began to take hold.

Her knees buckled.

Her vision tilted sideways, the world fading into a blur of shadows and orange embers.

The last thing she saw before everything went black was the familiar figure walking into her field of view.

In this very moment there was nothing she wanted more then to burn him to ashes.

To set him free from whatever the Alchemist had done to him.

But her body faulted and oblivion devroued her.