The Moon Princess came out of the building. Out of the dust cloud and through the mountain of rubble. She didn't look any worse for wear. Of course, he hadn't expected anything else. If only the energy blast had been enough to kill her, but of course things couldn't be that simple.

Sylvester kept his distance, didn't immediately jump on her. There was something he didn't like. Not at all.

Call it instinct or something else, he knew that approaching her was a bad idea. It was okay, he could do a lot even at this distance. Like what he had just done, again. Fire the energy beam.

As expected, she dodged it without batting an eye. The fight had dragged on, but he'd only managed to hit her a good few times. Twice because of the barrier, and the third time with the beam thanks to the element of surprise.

Now that she knew he could do that, it most likely wouldn't work even once, no matter the distance.

She was growing. She was adapting, just like any living thing.

Survival of the fittest. Adaptability, that was the true meaning of strength. After all, humans hadn't ended up at the top of the food chain by being the best at everything. Physically speaking, they were no match for many animals. But they had adapted and shaped the world to suit themselves. By force.

And now... Why was he thinking about this?

Humanity's time has come to an end. Sylvester grimaced.

Not if he could stop it, damn it.

She didn't attack. Not from where she was or up close, closing the distance.

Instead, she grabbed an innocent human being. He hadn't seen the poor bastard until now because of the dust, but it was too late to do anything.

She touched him. That was all.

"No..."

The Moon Princess had turned the civilian into a Remnant with a single touch. A skeleton with a rotating chainsaw at every joint, constantly turning. The end of humanity's time, eh? Yes, she was the harbinger of the end.

"Go, dog."

The monster, without a sound, quickly went after his enemy. But not her. The woman who had hatched from the egg headed for the barrier.

"Stop," he shouted such nonsense as if he thought she would stop just like that. "You said this was between us!"

He hadn't expected an answer, but he got one.

"Indeed, but we have been granted certain tools. Your side of the board has more pieces. You have no right to complain now."

Her mocking laughter danced in the air.

The biggest mistake Sylvester had made so far was letting himself be knocked down. At least while the fight took place only in the air no one else had been hurt.

The Moon Princess somehow broke the electric barrier after touching it with her free hand, exposing the syndicate agents still fighting inside. Them and any civilians who would have survived the massacre and soul harvesting. Not many, but some.

Shit. Shit.

Ryan either had great courage or he still cared rather little for his own life. He supposed it made no difference. Seeing an enemy approaching that even he was losing to, Ryan lunged after the strange woman without hesitation, jumped.... And was stopped in mid-air.

That woman had raised her hand, suspending him in mid-air. Just like that.

"Actually, I don't like dogs."

She twisted her hand, clenched into a fist, beginning to twist Ryan's neck as well. Just like that, in fact.

He needed him alive. It didn't matter that there were more hybrids, he still needed him.

Besides, that she was trying to kill him was reason enough to stop her. Nothing that thing wanted could be good for humanity. She'd made her intentions very clear.

Sylvester screamed, grabbing her and taking off. He spun her around several times and flung her upward. She stopped in mid-air, avoiding at the last moment crashing into the very building where the egg she had hatched from was. She flew after him without wasting any time.

He had barely slowed her down.

"Wow, wow. Are you that desperate to keep this high up? It's already too late to change their fates. It's just as you felt, destroying the egg before it hatched was your last chance.

What? Somehow, she knew. She knew what his instinct had been screaming at him back then.

"Of course. I've already told you, we're a pair. We're connected, like it or not."

The song of metal against metal. Or rather, metal against some out-of-this world material. The second closest thing to that, in any case sparks were flying between them.

He didn't think she'd read his mind, or maybe he just didn't want to believe it. In any case, she could have seen it in his face. It wasn't as if he had been able to hide his surprise.

Sylvester used overclocking. He attacked more than a dozen times, from all directions, in an attempt to make it impossible for her to dodge completely, so that she would have to accept some damage to escape.

But she dodged, all the same.

Spinning in the air, ending up behind him. But she didn't seize the opportunity to attack from behind. That monster shot out like a bullet into the crowd, towards the agents on the ground. Again.

She'd changed her strategy. I wish he could say it was a good thing, that at least she wasn't directly pushing him so hard, but it wasn't. Not at all.

And he wasn't going to be able to stop her.

Even as he chased after her, he knew he wasn't going to be able to stop her. There were simply too many people here and it was too easy to do what she wanted. One touch, that was all it took. And with each transformation, everything would become more difficult.

Until they reached his inevitable defeat?

The surviving citizens ran.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Many of the agents did too, knowing they couldn't stand up to this enemy.

It didn't matter.

The Moon Princess ripped off a manhole cover and threw it with enough force to break a poor bastard in half. He thought she was going to kill him before she could transform him, but he was wrong.

Apparently the 'touch' of the cover splitting him in half counted.

The two halves of his body each transformed into a different Lunar Remnant. A three-headed black dog, drooling blood. A creature that was all tentacles.

There were two surprises here.

That she could transform people without the need to touch them directly, of course, but mostly that. Lunar Remnants were supposed to be born from a single person. Even though their appearance would change drastically, they still had their original personality and memories. People didn't die, they transformed.

So how did this work?

Would those monsters share that man's consciousness? Was one of them, or both of them, nothing more than a wild monster?

It meant she was even more dangerous than he thought, and he had thought she was dangerous enough to make him despair for the first time since he had stopped being a normal person. That was all that mattered right now. The Moon Princess transformed three more into Remnants, which, of course, immediately attacked the nearest humans before he arrived.

Before he collided with her, before their blades crossed again.

Uselessly. He wasn't making any kind of progress. This is my fault. I allowed this to happen. But most of all...

It's your fault!

They collided again and again it was the same as before, the same as always. She wasn't overwhelming him, she was far from defeating him yet, though she had every chance of winning.

But he wasn't making any damn progress. Which meant that sooner or later he would lose miserably.

Sylvester would fail everyone, as she had always feared.

Suddenly she stopped transforming people, stopped defending herself. In fact she threw aside the sword and hugged him as tightly as if trying to crush his ribs, only to take off upward, tearing through the clouds.

Carrying him up to where the air was thin, at a similar altitude to where the fight in the plane had taken place, or rather around the plane.

Like then, his wings didn't last long.

And then she let go of him.

Fuck.

The PM bar had dropped too low.

Fuck.

It hadn't emptied, just dropped enough for the wings to disappear on their own, unable to maintain their shape without the necessary energy.

But that was enough. All of his abilities were powerful and required quite a few of those points.

Fuck.

So what did he have at his disposal? How could he avoid ending up looking like roadkill in the middle of the main square, nothing but a huge blob of blood and guts, unrecognizable, when he'd hit the ground? When he'd crash and his body would explode?

Fuck.

He launched a claw of darkness at a building when he saw it at the right distance. It was a good shot, the claw buried deep into the facade, but as inhuman as he had become he couldn't ignore the rules of physics.

His fall didn't stop instantly, ignoring the momentum provided by the thousands of feet he had spent falling.

In other words, it felt as if his arms were being ripped off as his body was pulled towards the claw by the momentum of the fall, which couldn't stop just like that but had to find a place to go and something to do with him.

He hit the front of the building hard. He bounced backwards, accidentally released the claw and kept falling. An image that would have been somewhat comical except that it was real and he was experiencing it firsthand.

Next thing he knew, he was on the ground. He had no memory of the landing, he must have lost consciousness on impact. His head was cocked to one side over a pool of blood, he guessed his own. He noticed blood on his lips, too. Oh. He must have vomited up blood.

In itself it was a miracle he had survived the fall. He said that, when this started, that woman had hugged him as if she wanted to crush his ribs.

Now they felt well crushed. Shredded.

Like shards of glass stuck in his chest, sliding further in each time he took a labored breath. As if he was slowly killing himself with the act, but it wasn't as if he could stop breathing in any case.

Sylvester struggled to turn around. He vaguely processed the chaos that still continued around him. The howling, the blood flying, the victors and the defeated.

I have been defeated.

The Moon Princess landed unhurriedly in front of him. And she walked closer. There was no longer anything or anyone who could stop her.

She bent down so that she could look into his eyes. There was something strange there.

Something akin to fondness.

“Don't get up now. And sleep. We have plenty of time left.”

It wasn't like he wanted to follow her orders, but he had no choice in the matter.

He had done all he could, hit his limit.

The darkness and silence brought him peace... for the moment.

——

He dreamed of the times when he was still a child.

With his friends and him throwing stones into the lake, competing to see who would get the furthest. Imagining that maybe the surface of the water wasn't just churning from the impact of the stones, but from a monster lurking in the depths, waiting for just the right moment to strike.

Imagining strange monsters and fantastic adventures. A purpose to life beyond eating, shitting and sleeping, and getting up the next day to repeat it all over again.

He dreamed of the moment when he held his mother's hand as she died and she screamed at him that he wasn't her son and he silently wondered if she might not be right after all, if he hadn't basically been replaced when his powers awakened and he began to live by different rules.

He dreamed of the first moment when he had felt alive, real.

That is, when he had acquired his powers and survived the first attack of a Lunar Remnant, wounded but victoriously bathed in the blood of the monster that had dared to challenge him.

He dreamed of many things, but every dream had to end and the dreamer awaken.

That was what happened.

Sylvester took a deep breath.

He was in a hospital bed. It wasn't as if they could do anything that his innate regeneration wasn't capable of, but he understood that they didn't want to just sit around, waiting, doing nothing. He understood the impatience, frustration and desperation.

Sylvester unceremoniously ripped off the instruments attached to his chest and stood up.

Nurses soon entered the room.

They all looked nervous, half-frightened, as usual. He was so tired and sore, despite the length of time he had been unconscious (which could generously be described as a rest), that he almost raised his voice. That he almost shouted at them what was the problem with him, when the responsibility of saving humanity was all in his hands.

Almost, but he bit his tongue. And moved on to what really mattered.

"How long have I been unconscious?" He didn't need to hear useless things. That was all.

"Four days," a nurse said, slowly and after a while. Somehow that was longer than he had expected and too short a time, in his head.

His broken body, being at the mercy of someone else. He never wanted to feel any of that again.

Had she let him live?

He doubted she had taken him to safety, so the syndicate agents deserved credit for rescuing him. But they wouldn't have had the chance if the self-proclaimed Moon Princess hadn't passed up the perfect opportunity to give him the coup de grace.

And why was that, what was the point?

He shook his head.

Point number two, this wasn't one of the bases in Kaleidoscope City. They all served the same purpose and followed the same design, but he knew anyway. No doubt about it. Over time, people made the places they lived in their own, no matter how identical they were to hundreds of thousands of other installations. To him, accustomed to that city, the differences jumped out even if he couldn't express them out loud in concrete terms.

"Where am I? What happened to my city?"

Four days with that thing running wild, with no one who could stand in her way, and the world hadn't come to an end. That was a good sign, but only up to a point.

The end of all things may not have come, but they had to be in deep shit.

How many millions of people had died while he was recovering?

He grimaced.

"We'd better show you."

Sylvester didn't argue. He escorted them into another room where they projected a video against the wall.

It showed the Lunar Princess amidst the ruins of Kaleidoscope City, its population in turn reduced to strange, bloodthirsty monsters, like a twisted reflection of the real city. It gave the impression that many years had passed, for the skeletons of the buildings were consumed by an abundance of vegetation. Had she caused that too? Who else?

Oh. And, of course, the moon was illuminating her as if it were a spotlight just for her.

“First of all, humans, I am aware of the idea, or rather naive hope, that you can end all this just by blowing up the moon. And accepting the death of millions of people who would surely have died anyway, eh? Me and mine would still be here. You would put yourselves in a worse position with nothing to make up for the sacrifice. You have no reason to believe me and I have no way of proving that I am telling the truth. But as far as I care, go ahead and do it, you'll only be hurting yourselves.”

Sylvester believed her.

If the solution were as easy as blowing up the moon, she wouldn't have wasted time making a speech, that's for sure. But fear had little to do with rationality. Since he had been indisposed for several days, he wondered if they hadn't already tested the woman's claim. With catastrophic results. He felt a chill.

“It doesn't matter what you do as long as you don't interfere with what needs to happen. Sylvester, come to me as soon as you recover. I'll be waiting for you.” She smiled and the video faded out, coming to an end.

A challenge.

No, a declaration of war.