At the very moment that Momo made up her mind, she found herself shoved aside.

Two heavy boots crunched the stone pavement as they passed her by. There was a woosh of blonde hair, and a pale neck spotted with two tiny red dots, gleaming in the moonlight. The woman, in her glinting steel armor, with an enormous halberd strapped to her back, looked like a regal dragonslayer. For a moment, Momo saw two of her, her vision splitting, before it merged back to one—one woman, all too familiar, with her hand wrapped around Nia’s wrist.

It was Vivienne.

“Nia,” Vivienne said, her jaw clenched. “Stop it. I told you—”

“Get away from me, Viv,” Nia cursed quietly.

Momo knew she only partially meant it. With the power that was currently coursing through her, she could make Vivienne disappear in an instant.

When Vivienne’s grip on her sister only tightened, Nia bared her teeth. “Why are you getting in my way? I’m doing this for both of us. I just need to consume enough of these stupid, pea-brained idiots, and then—”

“Pea-brained idiots? Nia, those are people. Helpless people.”

“So? Since when did you care?”

As the two went back and forth, Momo shuffled begrudgingly into a standing position.

“Look, if you want to make yourself useful, help me into these boots again,” Nia said icily, gesturing towards the skeletal shoes she had abandoned. “Those squeamish little worms I just ate are helping me to regenerate the Husk’s legs. Once I can stomp down on the ground, it’ll be a lot easier to get to the worms underneath.”

With a look towards the southern border of the city, Momo’s eyes confirmed Nia’s claim. The bones in the pelvis were reforming more quickly than Nyk could blast them apart. The Husk could seemingly regenerate bone through soul consumption.

Damn it.

Momo had considered using her rapiers’ infinite blades to cut off the bones near the Husk’s shoulders, rendering its hands useless, but at the speed of regeneration the skeleton was apparently capable of, that would—at best—only be delaying the inevitable.

At worst, it would mean the death of several more of her citizens. She couldn’t allow that.

There was no other course of action.

She had to use [Soul Cannibal].

It’s not really alive, she reasoned. It was a bastardization of life. Opening her third eye only further proved her point. Everything fell to black and white, all of Morganium’s debris fading to bleak gray, except for one thing—an enormous chain, erupting from the skeleton’s chest, constructed not of shiny metal, but of black, corrosive claws. The same ones that Sera had melded to Lione’s chain. This soul was not made of life; it was made of death.

She wouldn’t be eating a life; she’d be devouring an insult to it.

But one problem remained: Nia. The skeleton’s chain spiraled and spiraled through the air until it ultimately fell upon the girl’s shoulders. It twisted around her neck, then her wrists, where she held the weapons. That seemed to be the magic of the Wraith Artifacts: they allowed her to siphon the lifeforce absorbed by the Husk, and use it to power herself.

But, in exchange, the connection—like a noxious umbilical cord—was corroding her own soul. Her chain was turning a putrid black, decaying by the minute.

“I don’t care about the people, Nia,” Vivienne said, tightening her grip on her sister’s wrist so it was momentarily immobile. Momo could see the skeleton’s hand freeze in the air, mirroring the movement. “I care about what coldblooded murder does to you. The Nia I grew up with liked collecting the wilting daisies in Dad’s garden. You’d nurse them back to health in little water pots. I can’t count how many times you cried when you couldn’t save one of them—”

“Don’t call him dad. He’s not our father,” Nia said. Her pupils were turning the same corrosive material as the soul chain, black and murky. “Sera is our only true parent. She saved us from a life of paralysis. That plague took over the town, but she stopped it. It would have consumed us otherwise. She grew us into who we are, Vivienne.”

Vivienne’s voice rose, her temper burning.

“That’s not what happened,” she said, tugging at Nia’s arm. “That’s what she told you happened. It’s all lies. Lies she fed us so she could shape us into her perfect little monsters. That’s what she’s doing to you right now, Nia. Isn’t it obvious? Why do you need this kind of power? The answer is obvious, you don’t. It’s a ruse that’s costing you your life. Without the Wraith artifact as a barrier between you and the Husk, you’ll die.”

“No! You don’t get it, Vivienne. Without this power—she’ll kill us.”

A trembling finger dragged upwards through the air, then landed at Momo.

“What? Momo?” Vivienne said, letting out a rushed sigh. “Momo gave me this new power, Nia. She let me reconnect with Neculai. She has our best interests in mind.”

Nia’s pupils darted around her eyes madly. The corrosive fabric of the Husk’s soul chain was eating at her faster and faster, gnashing its nasty, decaying teeth into her chest. It was clear she was no longer in control of her own actions. She was a creature of pure impulse, held tightly in Sera’s poisonous clutches.

Momo stepped forward, fists clenched. She was ready. A small, anxious voice in her head listed off a series of what if’s—-what if the soul was too massive to consume, what if it was too noxious to eat, what if it devoured her instead—but she quieted them with a fluttering of her eyelashes. Her mortal eyes closed, her mind settling around three unequivocal truths;

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These were her people. She was their queen. And she was going to save them.

It didn’t matter what it took from her.

She stared into the soulless holes of the Husk’s eyes, and spoke.

“[Soul Cannibal].”

— -

Momo suddenly felt hungry.

As the spell settled on her shoulders, a vampiric craving overtook her. Her eyes gleamed red; her skin pricked with goosebumps. It felt as if she had been submerged in an ice bath. Her heart pumped with a supernatural fervor, pounding with an erratic rhythm.

“Momo? What are you doing?” she vaguely heard Vivienne remark, petrified, before Momo leaped upwards, soaring with explosive strength into the air. “Don’t come any closer.”

Momo couldn’t hear Vivienne anymore. She heard nothing but her own heartbeat—and this new, itching urge inside of her. It was as if hunger itself had possessed her. Consume, it whispered to her, like a ghoulish voice in the wind. Consume, consume, consume!

She was at the Husk’s center in milliseconds. She tore through the rib bones as if they were mere paper—biting through them with teeth alone—until she had enfolded herself around the colossal soul chain. Each of its links was the size of her entire body, but that didn’t scare her.

It exhilarated her.

What a feast this will be.

Her skin tingled with anticipation, her thoughts awash in a crimson frenzy.

“Get away!” Nia screamed, her voice echoing from afar.

The assassin thrust her hand towards her own chest, and the Husk’s colossal arm followed. A ginormous bony palm aimed for Momo, attempting to swat her like a fly. She saw it coming from miles away—her blood pumping like a motorcycle engine—and evaded easily. She found herself laughing, cackling, filled with an odd, terrible sort of euphoria.

One impulse in singularity haunted her mind: the urge to devour.

As she effortlessly avoided another swatting attempt, Momo giggled. “Oh no, is the pea-brained worm outmaneuvering you?”

Nia fumed, striking again, but Momo’s focus remained unwavering—fixed on the core of the skeleton’s chest cavity. Like a meteor streaking through the sky, she plunged toward it, shattering bone as if it were fragile glass, scattering splinters of marrow. In the blink of an eye, she had arrived: at the corroded, obsidian epicenter of it all. The genesis of the chain. It emitted an acrid odor akin to burnt rubber, stirring a deep rumble within Momo’s stomach.

Briefly, in a quick moment of lucidity, Momo thought: I doubt this will taste very good.

She chomped her teeth down regardless.

And it was true, it tasted terrible. Like burnt petrol. But the feeling was exquisite. Momo had never done hard drugs, mind you, she hadn’t even done soft ones—but she had gone under for surgery one time, and when she came back out, rolled out on her back with a big, dopey smile on her face—it was quite like that. Perfect and warm.

Only now, it was also addicting.

She ate and ate and ate. She was a parasite stuck to the tail of a snake, chewing and chewing.

“Get off!”

A cold, flat, thudding feeling disrupted Momo’s utter bliss. She didn’t realize it until she hit one of the tall partitions, but she had been hit dead on—slapped by the Husk’s ginormous fingers. She gurgled, unable to really make a sound. Black, sewage-like soul chain was spilling out of her mouth. It seemed like the kind of thing that would hurt, but she felt no pain. Just impatience.

Need more.

She wobbled to her feet, uncrumpling her wings. She saw Nia staring at her in disbelief.

“How did—how did she survive that?” she said to Vivienne; she was nearly foaming at the mouth. “That was a direct hit!”

“Seems you’ve picked a fight with a very persistent mosquito,” Vivienne offered.

Momo lurched onto her feet, dragging them forward.

Not enough. Need more. Tastes so good.

With a heaving jump, she got into the air again. Despite getting hit by a truck-load of force, she felt even stronger than before. She had eaten roughly a third of the creature’s soul chain, and she felt its soul burning within her, as if it was feeding an internal furnace.

She saw Nia thrust her arm up again, but it seemed incredibly taxing. The girl was breathing heavily. Her own soul chain was smoldering now, almost burning away from her chest.

Nia—and thus, the Husk—swatted at her again. Momo evaded the attack easily. The hand missed her and slapped into one of the partition walls. The wall was nearly as hard as the skeleton’s fingers, and some of the bone shattered on its own, fracturing at the knuckles. Momo could see the creature’s pain reflected in Nia’s whimpers.

“Let go of the artifacts, Nia,” Vivienne barked at her sister. She was standing a few feet away from her, unable to get closer. The area of magical pressure around Nia was too strong, it was like trying to fight against a wind tunnel. “Drop them before they kill you!”

“No,” Nia choked out. Her voice had dropped several octaves, and sounded suspiciously like another voice; like Sera’s. “I’m not stopping until that pest is dead.”

She’s completely lost it. I don’t know why I’m even bothering to save her.

Momo shook her head and dove once more for the corroded soul chain. Gripping it firmly with both hands, she bit down hard on the corrosive metal. She tore at it like a wild dog, her tongue burning like she was devouring a raw saucepan straight off the burner. It was beyond taste, though, now—she knew it was noxious from the way bile built in her throat, but the delicious euphoria of power she felt coated over every other sensation.

The Husk made another attempt to swat Momo, but since she was at the center of its ribcage, it only caused more damage to itself. Colliding head-on with a sharpened rib bone, the beast’s hand was severed from its wrist. The massive hand dropped like a dead fly onto the ground, falling through the cracks of the pavement and into the system of tunnels beneath.

Nia fell to her knees and screamed. The hand had already begun to regenerate, but it seemed to be taking as much from her as it was from the souls it had consumed.

An easy target. Defenseless. An appetizer, really.

The small, still lucid part of Momo’s brain, now shoved in a dark corner, rang alarm bells as the thought floated across her head. But her body was still mindlessly consuming, now three fours of the way through the chain; she had effectively become a landfill. A mindless machine of industry. The icey chain slid down her esophagus with ease as she got closer and closer to the end of it—nearer and nearer to where it clasped around Nia’s throat.

It’d be easy. I just have to keep eating. It’d be harder to stop, really. And why should I? Sumire’s right. Some people just deserve to die. Nia’s done nothing but kill and destroy. She’s Sera incarnate. And me? All I’ve done is serve—serve other people—and to what end? Don’t I finally deserve something for myself? It’d be a good deed. A great deed. Fitting for a queen.

Momo envisioned herself as the bringer of justice, a herald of peace.

The thoughts swirled through her mind as she drew nearer to Nia. Before she knew it, she was hovering just above her, enveloping her like a dark shadow, wings outstretched, mouth agape.

She’s going to taste so good.

Momo hovered hazily in and out of self-control. In her mind’s eye, Momo envisioned herself as an angel of justice, a harbinger of peace. With a single bite, she would be purging this world of a tremendous evil. It was a good thing to do. The right thing to do.

Momo delicately pressed her teeth to the side of Nia’s neck, not yet clamping down. Her skin was cold like near-death. Nia was on her knees on the damp ground, her limbs shaking, completely drained.

The only strength she had left was being used to hold desperately onto the Wraith Artifacts.

“Momo, don’t!” Vivienne cried out. “Let her go!”

Momo pressed her teeth down.