I slipped into the shadows of the alleys as bullets snapped past my head. My Neural Integration System's implant routed power from my armor's power-pack to my boots, magnetizing them to metallic prefabricated walls as I scaled the wall with ease. My prey's security detail didn't see when I crawled onto the roof of the three-story apartment block as they rushed the terrified woman to the promise of safety that was her luxurious car and its glossy black armor. They were too focused on the empty alleyway to see me brandish the heavy ten millimeter caliber Onyx-III pistol as they opened the door for her, only a few meters from escape, just a stone's throw from salvation. Neurochemical receptors tingled and buzzed with anticipation in my skull as she slowed down to lower herself into the car.

The Onyx-III roared in my left hand and the terrified brunette shrieked in unbridled terror as the bullet whizzed snapped past her ear and punched through the premium leather and lodged itself in the car's undercarriage. Armed men flinched, equally terrified by the near miss and turned to level their sub-machineguns at me. One men dropped his gun and clutched at his bleeding throat and the other cried out as his knee exploded and folded inward when the Onyx-III kicked another two times in my hand before they could even get their weapons trained on me. I was on the move before the first man could even open fire, already jumping across the narrow gap to slam my magnetic boots into the prefabbed commercial building. I sprinted up the wall to a forth floor window as bullets pinged and snapped into the metal beneath me and smashed through the glass with the ease that my Revenant armor and augmented strength afforded me.

Flabby men and women screamed in shock as I crashed through someone's desk and landed a with a floor-denting thud in the middle of an office, showering them in glass and synthetic wood splinters. I stood to my full height and towered head and shoulders over the nearest man - himself probably six foot flat - and turned to fix my gaze on him specifically. He paled and his pants darkened as his bladdered emptied itself, which put a smile on my face and filled my orange eyes with sadistic glee.

I raised the smoking barrel of my gun to my fang-masked helmet in a shushing gesture as my prey's security team screamed panicked orders and tyres screeched.

"N-n-n-nosferatu!" An effeminate looking man spluttered as he fumbled for his phone and shakily started recording me.

Slowly, I turned my head towards him and he whimpered. In a corner of my helmet's visor the words "Tracker-001 link established: location coordinates transmitting to live SatNav system." As the prey's vehicle sped away, the tracker embedded within the warhead that struck her vehicle faithfully relaying her location to my visor. I waved at the man before sprinting past them all and slamming through the nearest door into s stairwell and making my way down to the second floor. I burst into another office, my NIS implant deploying a pair of serrated eight-inch claws from their sheath in my left vambrace and I superficially sliced through a dark-skinned girl's shoulder and pounced across the room to put a shallow stab between the diaphragm and intestines of a balding and obese man without hitting any important organs or blood vessels. Really, he was so fat that I would probably have to sink my entire arm into his gut to actually do any life-threatening damage.

The girl's hysterical screams whipped everyone on the floor into a panic and the man cried in agony as I tore my claws out of his stomach and allowed him to stagger away like a walking, leaking bag of blood and meat. I snickered at them as they stampeded like a flock of screaming lambs downstairs. Their wounds were non-lethal but they were terrified to the point of non-reason. I made my way to a window to watch as the stampede flooded out onto the colony's street and clogged it like a sickly artery, just in time to block the nine-man security team's vehicles from following their principal. I holstered my Onyx-III on my right thigh and reached behind my back for my Conquistador-Pattern Plasma Blaster.

I thumbed the weapon's plasma coils active and they hummed with power, glowing as I slowly brought the weapon to bear on the first vehicle, its driver honked and shouted for the panicked herd to get off the road. I smiled as the Conquistador's coils hummed with power and squeezed the trigger.

The heat of a miniature star lanced through the glass of the window and easily tore through the windshield, steering wheel and right arm of the vehicle's driver. The driver loosed an animalistic scream of agony as his right hand and forearm were atomized and superheated and melted plastics dripped onto his lap as the steering wheel melted off the dashboard. Another man stuck his gun out the window of the SUV while the second vehicle's driver slammed the vehicle into reverse and started a J-turn. I shifted my aim and squeezed the trigger that put another bolt of plasma clean through the roof of the second vehicle and simultaneously melted the armored panel and bore a super-heated and partially-melted hole through the driver's skull. The SUV swerved as it reversed full-speed into a parked car and tore off its bumper and then smashed into a wall. The security team quickly abandoned their steel coffins and returned fire with an accuracy that would have killed a normal man. Sadly for them, I was gone before they could even squeeze their triggers, already watching from an angle they couldn't see at another window.

Desperation pushed them further away from their vehicles, directly into the panicked crowd toward the building I was currently in. An ear-to-ear grin spread across my face as my altered neurochemistry buzzed, Sinodyne's psychoconditioning spurring me to indulge in such titillating acts of brutality. And for once, I was going to allow myself that indulgence. I grabbed a chair as I darted across the second floor and plunged the second floor into darkness, one shattered ceiling light at a time. The wait was so desperately long as I listened to their footsteps cautiously trailing up the echoing stairwell. Not one of them spoke, not even to issue brief orders or direct one another, but I heard them all the same.

Step, step, step. Slow, measured, careful. Step, step, step. I deactivated the Conquistador, the glow of its coils dimming as it cooled. Step, step, step, just outside the door as I mag-locked the Conquistador to the small of my back and quietly unsheathed the claws sheathed in my right vambrace. The doorknob turned and the door creaked so loudly in the empty darkness I almost cringed. The click of flashlights accompanied the piercing sweep of cones of light as the security team slowly entered. I counted six men, my helmet's visor highlighting their silhouettes, a redundancy to aid my enhanced vision as I tracked them through the inky darkness. Their individual breaths were easy to track and betrayed the experience and training they relied upon to mask their fear. Broken glass crunched underfoot as they crept forward and swept across the darkness with their lights.

I sprang from the dark and slammed my claws into the small of a man's back and twisted the jagged blades, his spinal cord snapping as I heaved the screaming man off of his feet.

"Fuck! Open fire! Open fire!" Another screamed as they all spun around.

I laughed and lowered the still screaming man into their lines of fire and the five of them stared in terror and frustration, panic pulling at their frayed nerves like a cat batting at yarn. None of them saw my other hand pull a grenade from behind their friend's flailing arms and face, none of them heard the pin bounce off the floor as he screamed and screamed. It wasn't until I tossed the grenade between them all that they realized it was there.

"Grenade!" Someone else screamed, already throwing himself behind a desk.

I shoved my victim off of my blade and darted after another man as he turned on his heels to sprint away from the grenade. A muted gasp of pain escaped him as I slammed a pair of claws between his ribs and skewered his left lung, and he whimpered uselessly as I ran into the darkness and dragged him like a hapless child. The office was illuminated by the blast of the grenade as my victim finally mustered the adrenaline-fueled strength to kick and scream.

"Help! Heeelp!" He screamed as he tried to aim his gun at me.

I snatched the gun out of his hand and tossed it aside as his friends got up and shakily cast their lights across the office on my body. Gunfire erupted in a hasty staccato and bullets sliced through the air around us and deflected off of my armor as the skewered man screamed and whimpered.

"Fuck! He's got Lushae!" One of them screamed when I broke line of sight.

"Help me!" Lushae sobbed. "Don't let him take me!"

Lushae's screams ratcheted up to a nauseating whine as I hefted him up to eye-level and pressed my other claw to his throat.

"Lushae, you are too noisy. Let me fix that." I whispered softly, blood welling around my claw as it pierced skin and slowly bit through the flesh of his throat.

"No! Nooo! Help me!" Lushae threw a heavy fist at my face and I dipped my head to shatter his knuckles against my helmet.

His shrill screams worsened as the blade bit deeper, and his face twisted with agony under the sharp pain of jagged steel piercing his trachea as it sliced, hooked, and sawed through his vocal chords. What came out of his throat was a gargling wheeze as his own blood spilled back into his windpipe and was simultaneously pushed out by his attempts to scream. I shunted him off my claws, brain buzzing with simultaneous bloodthirst and satisfaction as he fell with a wet thud. I drew my Onyx-III and waited as glass crunched under rushed footsteps. The first man to pop around the corner blinded me with his flashlight and I almost flinched.

The Onyx-III barked in my hand and the light jerked away from my eyes for an instant as he reflexively ducked under the shot. I corrected my aim and put two rounds into his chest in that brief moment of relief and he dropped to the ground and writhed in pain, saved by the concealed armor fitted beneath and woven into his clothing. I lifted the Onyx-III as another man came around the corner just behind him with his flashlight aimed at his squirming friend. I put a bullet through his skull before he could turn his gun on me, and then turned the gun back on the man on the floor, who had tried and failed to beat me to the shot.

The gun roared twice as bullets tore through his skull and splattered the floor and desks. I slipped away in the darkness and chuckled to myself as the last two men waved their guns and flashlights at empty air and office furniture.

"Fuck man," One of them whispered. "We're the only ones left!"

"A fucking Nosferatu!" The other performed a tactical reload while he still had the chance. "What the fuck did that bitch do to get Nosferatu thrown at her?"

"Jesus, we've got to get out of here!"

"We can't leave, we have casualties!"

The first man shook the other by his shoulder. "If we don't leave, we're going to be fucked six ways to Sunday! You can stay if you want to be the next victim but we need to get off this fucking planet or we are dead!"

They didn't see when I stepped forward with the Onyx-III raised, and only one of them lived long enough to see the muzzle flash as another gunshot propelled the bullet through their friend's skull.

"Fuck!" He jumped back as blood and brain matter splattered across his face.

He staggered back and fell over a chair, and I closed the distance between us while he was struggling for balance. I sliced through his wrist and ripped the gun out of his hands before he could hit the floor, and then I slammed my claws into his gut and twisted the serrated blades before tearing them out. He screamed as bits of intestine and what I was confident was a full liter of blood spilled out of the fleshy hole in his gut. My fingers twitched as the urge to mutilate him droned in my skull like a buzzing swarm of bloodthirsty flies. I could peel the skin off his flesh, pull his intestines out and hang him with them, pull out the bones in his legs and challenge him to walk to safety.

But I glanced at the SatNav hologram displayed in the corner of my visor and saw that my prey had gotten far enough that away that I would jeopardize the hunt if I stopped to indulge my bloodthirst. My blood boiled with a mind-numbing need for violence as I restrained myself.

"I'm feeling merciful." I whispered as I stood up. "Get yourself to a nice clinic, patch yourself up."

He alternated between bouts hyperventilation and groaning through grit teeth, and for a moment I thought he hadn't heard me. He looked up at me with equal parts terror, confusion, and hope in his eyes.

"Y-you s-s-serious...?" If he had more to say, he decided against it.

"Don't mention it." I shrugged as I walked away.

If I remember correctly, their second SUV should still be operational.

People screamed as I stepped out onto the street. I chuckled as they broke out into a terrified stampede, which saved me the trouble of having to clear out the road myself. I walked over to one of the two abandoned SUVs and peered inside. A dead man was slumped over in the driver's seat, partially liquefied brain matter leaked from a sizzling hole in his skull, while superheated metal and plastic dripped from holes in the roof and door of the car. I nodded, opened the door and yanked the dead driver out like a sack of potatoes before I climbed in and settled into his seat.

I drove off and didn't pay much attention when the vehicle briefly jerked as the rear bumper snagged on crumpled metal and was torn off. I focused on my visor's SatNav and my NIS expanded the map and showed my prey, her three potential exfil points, and myself as I merged onto the road. I highlighted the most likely exfil point based on her direction of travel and the SatNav mapped out several routes I could use as I weaved in between traffic. The most direct path would put me directly behind her, and I did not want her to see me, not yet. The least direct path would give her too much time to get to Starlink Industries' headquarters and give the security forces time to prepare buffers and obstacles. I focused on a less direct path, one that would allow me to keep pace with my fleeing prey and catch her just as she arrived at her HQ, and the SatNav calculated a route for me and minimized so I could focus on the road.

I stomped on the gas and tore through the streets with a wild cackle as I closed in on Starlink Industries.

Starlink Industries' Colonial Headquarters was the pinnacle of technological advancement on this unimportant planet. Twenty-seven floors of multi-faceted research, data analysis, and technological and biochemical innovation. And soon to be the site of some of the most grizzly murders the colony of Kordan's Hope had ever seen. I watched the road as the blip on my SatNav that was my prey's vehicle grew nearer to her salvation, blissfully unaware that I'd already beaten her here.

When the prey's vehicle came into view, I raised the Conquistador, its coils already humming as they charged the weapon to hurl bolts of superheated plasma and slowly tracked it. They would soon turn away from the central plaza to head down into a secure parking facility, but when I squeezed the Conquistador's trigger one of its front wheels was blasted off and threw the vehicle end over end. Bulletproof windows and windshields cracked as metal crumpled under each tumultuous crash until it eventually rolled onto its right side, just forty or so feet shy of the plaza. An alarm sounded, and my visor began a thirty-seven second countdown until a Quick-Response Force would arrive. I leapt down from my vantage point into an alley as people began to slowly swarm the vehicle.

I maneuvered through the alleys and positioned myself so I could shoot through the crowd and raised the Conquistador again. One member of the security team was stood atop the vehicle, legs wide as he reached down into the SUV to pull someone out while another knelt on the street with his gun held at low-ready and a third yelled at people to get back. Up and out came the prey, her brown hair matted with her own blood as her wide eyes darted around in a futile search for me. I waited for the man to reach back into the SUV before blasting the car's undercarriage.

Multiple people screamed as the plasma bolt flash-burned skin and set hair and clothing ablaze just by passing the air between their shoulders and heads. Two men screamed as a plasma bolt tore through the car and vaporized their interlocked hands. The one who'd been on top of the car fell and cracked his head like an egg. The two on the ground made an executive decision to abandon the rest of the team and threw themselves over my prey in an attempt to keep her out of my sight as they pulled her away.

The Quick-Response Force burst onto the scene a full seven seconds early, decked out in fully powered combat armor and SMGs as they sprinted across the plaza and took up formations around my prey and her team. I used the chaos of the burning pedestrians to weave closer through the alleys until I had a straight shot at the parking garage. Normal power armor would be easily picked up by the recon suites in most power armors, but Revenant-pattern armor was made to evade such systems.

My hyper-enhanced speed and strength was further enhanced by my armor's synthetic muscle-netting and servos as I dashed across the road toward the parking garage.

"Con...!" One of the QRF pointed at the alley I'd emerged from and I leveled the Conquistador.

Before he could even finish his warning or turn his head to track me the Conquistador roared and blasted through his helmet and skull. My prey and her team turned, only ten feet from the main door and locked eyes with me, desperation and terror so deliciously displayed as I aimed the Conquistador at them. One of her security team turned and his body crumpled uselessly as the Conquistador roared again and tore his head clean off his shoulders. My prey and her remaining escort screamed as the bolt cooked their flesh just by proximity of the near-miss and the QRF began to turn to orient themselves.

"Contact left! Suppressi...!" Another QRF operative's shouts were cut short by a plasma bolt that punched through his helmet's visor and bore a steaming hole where face should have been.

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I was already inside the parking garage by the time that the QRF team had begun to open fire. The snapping of bullets against concrete halted as I sprinted for an elevator. I pushed the call button and to my surprise the elevator's doors opened immediately. I stepped inside and pressed the button for the thirteenth floor, Biological and Genetic Engineering. I deactivated the Conquistador and let it cool before I mag-locked it to my back.

Somewhere between the seventh and eighth floors the elevator ground to a halt.

'General lockdown in effect. General lockdown in effect.' The words blinked to life on the elevator's control panel while hazard signs flashed. 'Please remain calm and await assistance.'

I clicked my teeth. "I was hoping I had a couple minutes before this happened."

No matter, I found the access panel to the shaft and broke through it to the shaft. I activated the mag-clamps in my boots and just walked the rest of the way up to the thirteenth floor.

The doors to the elevator door tore open with a grating snap as I overpowered the locking mechanisms. I stepped into the hallway and absent-mindedly shot a security guard with my Onyx-III as he fumbled for his own pistol. People screamed from somewhere around a corner and wept loudly, despite an AI-generated female voice repeatedly advising personnel to stay calm and remain where they were.

"Must be the lab." I smiled.

I rounded the corner and found the lab was separated from the rest of the floor by a combination wall of impact-resistant glass and solid steel, and inside were several technicians and researchers, several of which quit their sorry sobbing and held their breaths when they saw me.

I took off my helmet and gave a charming, toothy grin that showed my slightly elongated canines. "You wouldn't happen to have keys would you?"

No one moved. I frowned.

"I don't have time to wait all day, you know."

Someone noisily ran down the hallway headed towards us so I readied my Onyx-III. On a second listen, I realized it was actually three people. It didn't matter, I timed it and shot all three in the throat as they rounded the corner. The first security guard dropped face first and simultaneously knocked herself out and broke her nose, the second jerked back and stumbled to the ground, hands clutching at his throat while the third tripped sideways over his own feet and split his head open on a wall.

"If I have to open this door myself you're going to have a very bad time." I warned.

"W-w-we can't! General lockdown! We can't bypass security measures from here!" A particularly brave young woman with a nose ring answered.

I smiled at her and her blue eyes went wide with fear as her bladder emptied itself. Such uncontainable fear is so cute. I holstered the Onyx-III and set my helmet down, then I deployed my claws and jammed them into the micrometers wide gap in the air-tight door, wedged it open wide enough to get my armored fingers in, and then made a show of slowly prying the door open. The blue-eyed girl began to hyperventilate and a frail looking young man stumbled back and another of his colleagues caught him as he passed out. With a grunt of effort I slammed the doors open and metal grated as they deformed under the force.

I grinned as I kicked my helmet into the air and caught it. "Now, I need access to some very important information."

The girl with the nose ring was wheezing now as she desperately looked to the men on her team. Each of them in turned cast their cowardly eyes away to avoid being dragged into the terror of facing me. I chuckled at this and approached the trembling girl.

"Relax, I won't harm you, so long as you tell me who here has the highest clearance level." I leaned in conspiratorially and lowered my voice to a whisper in her ear. "None of them are helping you, are they?"

She sobbed, quietly at first, and then loudly as she raised a trembling hand to point at a diminutive figure. A short and wiry man wearing boxy glasses and silver-dyed hair trembled furiously as he stared at her in disbelief. The girl flinched as I gave her a pat on the back and stood to my full height.

"I want two things," I held up a datadrive as I spoke to the man. "I want the data you have been using from your latest prototypes, and I want you to plug this into your system when you are done. Am I understood?"

"But, but that's corporate espionage! I could be fired, or worse!"

I presented my still bloody claws and let him stare for several long moments at the serrated red-coated blades. "I can think of worse that will happen if to you if I have to ask again!"

He didn't answer immediately, but I allowed him enough time to snap to his senses and do the right thing. He jumped to the nearest computer, logged on, and began transferring files and applications en masse to a single datadrive from somewhere in his desk. It took a few minutes to transfer all the data, at least a few terabytes I think, but as soon as it was done he placed it on an empty table and swallowed nervously. I graciously accepted the gift and smiled as I put my helmet back on.

"Thank you, my friend. Now this." I handed him the datadrive I'd brought.

He opened his mouth to whine as tears welled in the corners of his eyes. But he shook his head and grit his teeth before he went back to the computer. I leisurely strolled over and watched as Sinodyne's crawler malware activated and combed through their system, finding every single one of the files and applications he'd transferred to the first chip. The crawler copied every byte of data and deleted it all as soon as it was stolen. I squeezed his shoulder when it was done and gave him a pat on the back. With that, I slotted the first chip into my tablet as I walked away. I quickly browsed through the chip's folder to satisfy my belief that he had done as I instructed, and then stepped back out into the shaft with magnetized boots.

I used the elevator shaft to ascend Starlink Industries until the elevator started up again. I looked down and quickly deduced it was about to slam into me at full force, so I jumped and aimed feet first for the still open hatch. The elevator's floor dented as I landed in a deep squat and contemplated what this could mean. Lockdown disabled the elevator mid-lift, and it was still active, which likely meant that they were either trying to crush me or to pull me up to a trap.

The elevator slowed down and slid to a halt at and around floor twenty two, so I jumped and pulled myself back up through the hatch. I readied a grenade and waited for the doors to open. When the doors opened I tossed the grenade through and it clinked as it bounced along the floor.

"Grenade!" A man shouted.

They had exactly two seconds to react before the blast of the grenade's detonation hit them with dozens of pieces  of shrapnel and enough concussive force to rupture internal organs. Screams accompanied the deafening blast of detonation and I slipped through the hatch and deployed my vambrace claws.

The five-man ambush had been scattered by the blast, two men slumped lay against the walls and dying, while the other three were struggling back to their feet with light wounds and a machinegun emplacement had collapsed, the weapon damaged cracked and bent in several places. I pounced on the first man and he cried out as I sliced his arm off at the elbow with my claws. Despite being disoriented by the blast, the other two men brought their weapons up but I was faster.

The second screamed as I paled his gut and spun him around in time to shield myself from his friend's gunfire. His power-armor held up against the short burst, and when his friend quickly ceased fire I shoved him aside and pounced again. He'd anticipated this and ducked under my first strike with the aid of his power-armor. I lifted my foot and slammed my heel down on his knee and he screamed as the first man reached for his gun with his good hand while the second lifted his own.

My left-hand claws tore through the third man's neck and spine as I turned and backhanded the second's weapon with my right. Two rounds pinged off of my right pauldron before the weapon went flying from his hand as the third man's corpse folded in on itself like a failed origami attempt. The first man grabbed his gun and raised it, but his wrist shattered like fragile glass as I stomped down on it. I grabbed the SMG and turned it on the second man, already crawling for his weapon, and loosed a burst that slammed no less than three bullets through his spinal cord and sprawled him out on the floor with a cry of helplessness and agony.

"Ambush failed!" I looked down at the first man as he shouted into his radio. "The Nosferatu has destroyed the ambush!"

I grinned and tossed his gun aside. "If only I had more time to play with you, my friends!"

My prey was no doubt still on the move, but I could easily beat her to the landing pads on the roof. Starlink's security forces would have kept her grounded in her elevator or tucked away in a safe little room, but she would have known better. Hearing that the ambush failed would send them into a panic and rush her to the rooftops for extraction. If they tried to hide her somewhere in the building, it would only be a matter of minutes before I found her.

A solid kick to the head dented his helmet and knocked him unconscious. I went back to the elevator and resumed my ascent to the twenty-seventh floor where air traffic control linked to the landing pads. It was a simple thing to muscle the shaft doors open and step into the halls, and along the way to air control I crossed a window and glanced outside to see that an orbital shuttle had landed on one of the three landing pads and was being rapidly refueled. I smiled and made my way to the astonishingly unsecured doors to air control.

They'd prematurely lifted the lockdown protocols for air control in the hopes that my prey would have beat me here. Several people screamed when the doors slid open and I stepped in with my pistol raised, but thankfully none of them were stupid enough to try and call for help or reach for a panic button or weapon.

"Everyone wants to live, yes?" I tilted my head and gun in opposite directions as I asked.

None of them could muster an answer, but I felt charitable. I lowered the Onyx-III, but kept my vambrace claws deployed.

"I'll take that as a yes. Tell me how many armed personnel are out on the pad."

Again, they could not speak. I sighed as I realized I would have to motivate them. I glanced at all of their name tags until I found the highest-ranking person and smiled to myself.

Their untrained and unenhanced eyes were utterly incapable of tracking my movements as I weaved between them and stopped with my claws pressed into the middle-aged Senior Air Control Officer's dark neck. The woman shrieked as the claws split her skin and drew trickles of fresh crimson and she instinctively slapped my helmet.

"Ow, fuck!" She spat and shook her hand as she turned away from my claws.

Caught off-guard by her recklessness, I laughed before I gently pressed the claws between her shoulder blades. "I won't ask again. How many armed personnel are there outside? You have cameras, show me."

She trembled, but acquiesced and pulled up the security camera feed. A ten-man squad decked out in power armor. Something clicked and I spun around, the Onyx-III raised and aimed at a young man of oriental descent who had his hand wrapped around a radio that he'd just slipped off the charging station.

"Bring it to me, while I'm still being nice."

He glanced at everyone else, who in turn gestured for him to do as I said, and he saw the light of reason. He inched his way over and eventually handed it over to me. I smiled and took it from him. I tucked the radio away and pulled a grenade out and removed the safety pin and stuck it in his hands.

"When my prey arrives to board that shuttle, you're going to toss that out the door I came through and call for help." Droplets of blood welled up from where I pressed my claws to his throat. "If you say or do anything else, I'll hear it, and you will die horrible deaths. Understand me?"

He nodded desperately. I lowered the claws. "Good, do your part, and you will all live."

Everyone screamed as lightning blasted a nearby rod with a deafening explosion of sparks and sound that reverberated through every square inch of the building. I slipped outside under the cover of the storm while they screamed and hid from the lightning storm.

The blackened clouds of Kordan Hope's infamous lightning storms had rolled in almost instantaneously, as if a jealous god had emerged to personally smite the unfaithful. The temperamental clouds hammered out their fury against lightning rods that had been affixed to the pre-fabricated building of the colony as storm lighting systems flicked on in response to sensors detecting the almost supernaturally dark storms.

The light illuminated the obvious paths, but it left the corners and edges obscured by the darkness. I slipped away from the well-lit walkway before the lights could expose me, and then I lowered myself over the edge of the building and activated my mag-clamps. The magnetic thunk of my boots on the prefabbed steel walls was offset by constant bursts of lightning that created a constant ambience of explosive thunderclaps as I shimmied my way across to the shutttle. From there, all I had to do was wait.

Seconds dragged into minutes as the security forces idly chatted about my seeming disappearance, and occasionally let slip my prey's progress to the shuttle, whose pilot had now started pre-flight checks and started her engines. A door opened and I heard her sigh of relief and a soft prayer of thanks to God before a lightning bolt slammed repeatedly into a nearby rod in a divinely timed show of sparking explosions. I waited still, half expecting the crew to reveal that I was actually here.

To my delight, an explosion rocked air control, as I'd instructed, and the security team all begun to orient to face the threat and exposed their backs to me. The prey's sole surviving escort grabbed her and ran, an effort that quickly pushed the woman to her limit before she even made it halfway to the shuttle. Patience, patience.

"Team Three-One!" A man radioed. "Advance to contact and open fire!"

Half the squad advanced toward the danger while my prey made her mad dash for the transport, and she made it. Or so she thought. As she climbed up the ramp, I launched myself up and over the building's edge and deactivated my mag-clamps before jumping onto the landing pad with my claws deployed. Two of the security detail turned when they heard my boots hit the metal walkway and I in turn launched myself at them. The first hadn't even gotten to look at me when my claws tore through his neck and left his head dangling by strips of sinew and torn meat

"What the fu...!" The second was raising his sub machine gun when my claws punched clean through his neck.

He choked pitifully on his own blood as I turned to the shuttle and darted onboard and hit the ramp controls. Servos whined as they began the work of entombing us in the shuttle, my prey and her guard turned to face me with the eyes that rabbits reserved for wolves. He raised his pistol and blood fountained from the man's newly-severed wrist as my claws effortlessly parted his flesh and sliced through bone. The gun clattered uselessly on the ground as he staggered back with a primal scream of agony that infected my prey with a womanly scream of terror.

"What the hell is...?" The pilot looked back in a panic.

I drew the Onyx-III and aimed it at the terrified woman. "Take off, or I'll peel the skin from your chest and feed it to you in little strips."

"Don't do it!" The amputee screamed through violently clenched teeth. "Open the ramp, now! It's our only chance!"

"Start. Flying. I do not like having to repeat myself!" I ordered.

Seconds passed as she searched the shuttle with her eyes for a solution and I made a show of placing my finger on the trigger of my own weapon and taking the slack out of the trigger. The woman grimaced and faced forward and resumed flight preparations.

"I, I'm sorry!" Was all she could offer them.

She engaged the throttle and the shuttle began to lift. I holstered my pistol and approached the amputee.

"Get away from me!" He slammed a heel upward at my face.

I slipped out of the way and grabbed his face. "So very noisy, allow me to fix that!"

I pried his mouth open as if he were a dog trying to swallow something he should not have eaten, reached in and took firm hold of his tongue. His confused sputtering became pained yelps as I pulled harder on his tongue, and then they transformed into frantic screams as his tongue began to tear. At first he tried to pry my hands off, but as his tongue continued to tear and snap he wailed like a banshee and drove his heels into my chest and they bounced uselessly off of my armor.

"Maybe, if you had power armor, that might have worked!" I chuckled as I tore his tongue out of his mouth.

His eyes snapped open and his hands simultaneously reached for his bloody mouth and the mutilated tongue, his screams now harshly gargled and choking coughs as the blood overflowed into his throat. My prey screamed in terror and skittered back like a frightened cat as she covered her own weeping mouth. The tongue hung limply between my thumb and forefinger until I tossed it at the screaming mute with a wet little thwack against his forehead. He openly wept between choking gargles as his own tongue slid down the bridge of his nose and slipped off his cheek into his lap.

Bullets began to ping off of the shuttle's hull as the ground team realized what was happening, but the shuttle lurched forward as it began its ascent to orbit. I turned and pointed to the pilot.

"I am sending you some coordinates, you will fly there!"

She was calm, all things considered, and I felt the shift in gravity as she changed her flight path to comply.

I turned to my whimpering prey and took off my helmet with a malignant grin. Her face paled and her lips twitched and curled as she fumbled for words.

"It has been so long, Doctor Salana." My heart rate spiked with joyous excitement as I idly caressed my bloody claws. "Do you remember what you said when I begged you to help me?"

"I, I didn't have a choice!" She unconsciously stepped back and to her left and I followed. "Sinodyne entrapped me! They would have killed me if I didn't contribute to the Nosferatu project!"

My claws flashed and she screamed a half second later as blood trickled down her cheeks. "Really? I remember you smiling as my brain melted in my own skull because of your experimental serums and drugs!" I was smiling now, my breathing wild with the release of long-buried traumas and psycho-conditioning induced euphoria. "I remember you withholding water for three and a half days because I couldn't do your little tests while my skull burned like the ancient skull-fire sickness that plagued primitive homosapiens!"

I wound back with my right arm and Doctor Salana screamed as she raised her arm like a shield of feeble meat and fragile bones. My smile widened as I retracted my claws and smashed my fist into her jaw with just enough force to fracture it. The impact sent her flying into the shuttle's seats with a cry of pain.

"I...!" She gasped and gingerly touched a trembling hand to her already swollen and bloody jaw. "You were different!" She sobbed between her words. "You were smarter, had better brain chemistry! You had the ability to achieve I, you just needed a push!"

I grabbed a fistful of her hair and pressed my claws to her chest. "And when you called me a failure for struggling with the Sight my brothers were gifted?"

She sobbed as blood welled up from her chest where my claws were digging into her chest. "It made you a less effective hunter! It meant that you were going to struggle even more!"

Her clothing tore easily and she writhed in agony as I dragged my claws down her sternum between her pert breasts, down her now bleeding sternum and midriff. "And let me guess, you were trying to toughen me up when you threw that girl I liked into a pit with the other Nosferatu and let them rape and mutilate her."

She continued to sob and whimper, no doubt hoping I wouldn't force her to answer.

"And then when you kept locking poor girls in cages with me, and starved us both because I wouldn't force myself on them, murder them, or both! It was because I needed to learn to be ruthless, wasn't it?"

I stopped when my claws reached her belly-button, and I slowly pressed them a few millimetres into her soft stomach. She grit her teeth and screamed as I twisted my wrist to wedge the claws deeper into her flesh and widen the tiny wounds.

"Tell me, Doctor," I removed the claws from her stomach and caressed the unspoiled side of her face with the edges of my claws. "Do you think I still need to be ruthless?"

The silence was punctuated by her sobbing as I impatiently awaited her answer. I needed to hurt her, my disturbed and altered mind begged for her suffering, and seeing her in such hopeless distress was just as elating as making her bleed.

"We're..." The pilot thought carefully about her next words. "We've reached the coordinates you sent. There's nothing here!"

"Oh, there absolutely is." I grinned and grabbed Dr. Salanna by the hair and dragged her weeping and half-naked to the cockpit.

The two women watched with dawning horror as light shifted and warped until a black ship with silver and red trim and accents emerged from the impenetrable darkness of space. A communications link was established and video-feed appeared on the shuttle's console. A pale man with manic orange eyes and blood-soaked blonde hair smiled wickedly as a man screamed helplessly in the background off-screen.

"New Blood," the Nosferatu snarled and licked some blood off of his lips. "I didn't expect you to pull it off!"

"Oh God!" Dr. Salanna openly wept and the pilot trembled with fear.

"Ladies, and gentleman." I grinned salaciously. "The Nosferatu of Talon 33 graciously welcome you aboard our beautiful ship, the Lady Black!"

The blonde Nosferatu chuckled with grim satisfaction. "You have done well for your first hunt, Alessandro. Nightshade will initiate docking protocols in short order, and all of your prey will be yours to do with as you please!"

"Thank you, Father Leon. I will see you aboard the Lady Black."

He ended the call and I looked down at the crying Doctor. "Do not worry, you will not die right away. I will enjoy our time together, and, you will teach me everything I need to know about this!" I pulled out the datachip containing all of the files she'd sold to Starlink about Project Nosferatu, and all their prototype augmentations that they'd begun planning to derive from the Nosferatu project.

Her face betrayed her confusion to me, and I gladly took the chance to enlighten her. "Sinodyne sent me to retrieve the data you sold, and to make an example of you. I have two datadrives, one for myself, and one for Sinodyne. You will teach me everything I need to know about the project, and I may spare you the worst tortures if you comply! If not, well," I chuckled darkly. "I'll have to entertain myself with your flesh!"

She slowly lowered her eyes and stared into nothing as she broke under the weight of her despair. My altered mind buzzed with anticipation as I plotted the ways in which I would indulge the psychoconditioning Dr. Salanna had subjected me to.

The Lady Black approached us, a small hangar bay opening as her crew prepared to haul the comparatively diminutive shuttle in. Out here among the stars, no one would ever be able to hear their screams unless we wanted them to.