CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN - BANNER OF THE AXE

Arrangements were made.

And Tanner was barely aware of them. She just... existed. Maintained a placid state of mind as the theurgists scrambled to find a few devices to destabilise, much as they had with the cold-house generators. They were panicked, of course. Their base was sealed away by layers of mutants, their bunker was clearly imperfect, they had nothing to do but worry and work. No doubt they spent half their time helping her, and half their time building up more defences. An odd thought - she had every reason to pity them. They were academics, really. Dry functionaries of a system much broader than them. They stood above everyone else in the colony, but in their own order might well be the subordinates upon whom all ugly duties were foisted. Like, say... going out to a snow-blasted colony. Her mind's gyre had expanded, and she felt like her thoughts could swallow others whole, contain them inside herself - the hollow soldiers with their straw-filled heads, the panicking bouncers and their selfish longings that allowed for no loyalty to a culture or an ideal, the nobles and their crushing suicidal urge manifesting as pleasure in the face of death, Tom-Tom and her combination of simplicity and aching insufficiency that manifested as ambition which stumbled before it could even begin to walk.

And the theurgists... in the panicked tone of voice from Mr. Mask, she could imagine a Lord of Appeal, albeit a theurgic kind, sitting in a grand office and commanding a bunch of petty researchers to 'go and do what you can with that river before it fills back up'. Go on, go out to the wasteland and have at it. Enjoy the dark. Enjoy the isolation. Enjoy the constant threat of being contaminated - and of course, enjoy coming up with results in these conditions. Come to think of it, maybe she'd disliked them because they reminded her of the judges that should've been here. These people had sat at the top of the colony, yet outside of it. The colony relied on them, conspiracies bent to them, yet they had no desire to rule. They had a little isolated community of their own, and liked it that way. The judges should've been that, for her. Above and outside, a cloistered bubble in which she could lose herself.

All for them. And none for her.

Petty. But... evidently stress brought out one's pettiness. Who could've imagined.

She waited for some time as they worked, sitting on some rubble, leaning on her axe and watching the sun march slowly across the sky. The mutants weren't attacking yet, they would wait until it was utterly dark. Then, of course, the assaults would start, when visibility was down and terror was high. They had no idea what she was planning. Wonderful. She waited patiently - the hours held no fear for her. She'd been wrung so completely dry that there was nothing left that could fear the hours, the movement of the sun, the dread that she might not succeed in time. All that remained was a dull acceptance of each second, a forgetfulness once it ended, and never did remembrance come. She waited and stared ahead, not even lost in memories. Mother, Father, Eygi, Algi, Halima, Yan-Lam, Marana, Lantha... all the people who had either flitted out of her life or were currently sealed away from it. Their faces came and vanished without emotion tied to them. She felt distant from the world, distant from everything but the rhythms of her own body, the slow thump-thump of her heart and the rasping intake of her breath.

She hadn't taken her armour or her mask off for some time. Sleep rarely came. Food was small and tasteless. Maybe if she removed everything, found herself another bath, she'd become... nothing at all. The idea of tomorrow felt ridiculous, anyway.

And she was content.

Because she couldn't really think of a time when things were different, to gauge the current moment against. No other time had held such... burning thoughts, such vibrant motion, such despair and such fear. Nothing else had ever come close, and all her yesterdays felt small and pale by comparison. Such a blazing present denied any past.

And so she sat. And she waited. And she thought of how once upon a time she'd have envied the theurgists their little community, and their isolation, and their detached power that floated beyond hierarchy. But the notion vanished from her mind. And she just focused on the sound of her own breathing, and the beating of her heart, and the way the wind made the warmth of her skin shift around like clouds in the sky. No-one spoke to her, because she didn't speak to them. That was all.

Then it arrived.

The resulting engine, shoved out through a cautiously unscrewed vent that swiftly closed behind it, was... hideous. A mass of pipes that flowed into themselves and out of themselves, knotting into an interminable sphere where there was no obvious structure, no obvious rationale, nothing remotely logical. And it was breathing. The pipes exhaled gouts of warm, cloying air from their interior with the steady reliability of a human at rest, and with each puff came little flickering of an ominous burgundy light. When Tanner held it, struggling a little under the weight and the size, she could feel it pulsing, could feel the warmth that rose and fell in regular cycles, could detect a stink of metal and... other things. Not sure what, exactly. Maybe a hint of whale oil, maybe a trace of liquorice, maybe a slight, slight hint of a chemical acridness that defied description and simply told the nose 'this is not natural, back away slowly'. Funny that there was such a thing as a 'chemical' smell. All smells were chemical smells, they were produced by chemicals, carried by chemicals. But there was some internal switch which said 'artificial' and 'natural'. And as the smell of rot inspired panic and disgust - understandable, given the risks - the artificial carried an air of slow-dawning unease. Not sure how to respond.

But aware it was probably wise to move. Not really an option for her, and she inhaled the acrid mist over and over like she was huffing from a cigar, until her head was swimming with gas, and buzzing with the hum of insects, the hum that seemed to reproduce itself in her skull, resonating over and over like sound in a bell...

The bomb would work.

It wasn't meant to melt the foundation stone. It was designed to create a highly noticeable explosion of rock, a geyser soaring into the air. The theurgists said the rock out there was unstable, something about 'fossilised unclefting womb', which sounded alarming, and was in fact one of the few direct quotes Tanner was bothering to remember. Probably a slip of the tongue - she probably had dwelling in her a sequence of three secretive theurgic words that could get her killed if she spoke them to another soul. Idly, she thought that maybe they'd get rid of the person she'd told, too. Meaning, she effectively had a magical spell living under her tongue at all times. How miraculous. Anyway, magic aside. The foundation stone was... whatever the theurgists said it was, and it could be destabilised quite easily. This wouldn't break it open. Wouldn't even come close to disrupting the stability of the thing, the seal was designed to last. But it would cause a visible geyser, and a dispersal of dust. The bomb itself was basically... well, it was the pebble to start an avalanche, and it wasn't meant to last. Didn't even have a trigger mechanism, the way to detonate it was to shoot it - a barely-stable instability that would be destabilised in order to trigger further instabilities. So, she had a bomb that was ready to go off when hit with a bullet.

She also had a trumpet.

A very loud one.

They'd managed to get their emotions under control inside the bunker when they handed this little number over. Enough to not tell her any sensitive names. But it was... well, it was a trumpet, pure and simple. Long, grey, and riddled with metallic veins and arteries carrying gods-knew-what. Warm to the touch, and with a straggling number of tubes extending out of the back, ending in strange metal baubles that faintly resembled the glands of some monstrous animal. The baubles went over the back, and inhaled air in long, straggling, metallic gasps... before the trumpet concentrated that air and blasted it out as a solid wave of sound. Loud enough that they'd politely told her that extended use, even without the trumpet pointed in her direction, would result in deafness later in life. Fine. Tanner could work with that. Ms. Blue was carrying it around at the moment, while Tanner staggered down the street with the bomb in her hands. Another Tanner would've politely said that she was being... unreasonably hasty. She wasn't planning out enough. She should be saying tearful goodbyes to her companions, should be making a dramatic speech, should be planning things out more slowly and deliberately, considering the opinions of others. Talking with Bayai. maybe, asking for his advice.

...then she thought of him sitting opposite his uncle's suicide in the snow, talking calmly about how he'd been asked to spy on her, make sure she wasn't a dissident.

Only reason they'd met before the crisis started.

Only. Reason.

Her jaw clenched a little under her mask, and the rattle from the filter almost sounded like a growl. The sun was staring to set behind her. The Breach framed it perfectly, the red light spilling through the gap and turning her shadow into something enormous, city-spanning, so distorted as to be inhuman. Ms. Blue was behind her, and there were... soldiers all around her. Soldiers on either side, their coats flapping around their ankles, their armour clinking and clanking as they shifted, everything stained with gore. They were pungent, each and every one of them had been soaked in blood and entrails, had waded in shin-deep slush composed of yet more gore and yet more ash. They were barely human. Hollowed in body and soul. Some of them moved their gas masks in a way that suggested beard growth, others remained absolutely still. Their guns were blackened with heat, their weapons were lacquered with the bloody issue of their prey. Some of them had pieces of mutant clinging to them - a necklace of unnatural teeth around one man's neck. A man who notched his rifle with the acidic discharge of a severed stinger. Strips of skin and leather and scale, peeled free and worn like mayoral sashes, like bandoliers of ammunition, like skirts and like strange arm and leg bands commemorating an unknown event. One had a belt where ears from mutants had been stapled, each one completely unique. Another had been so sprayed with contamination that the leather of their coat was starting to reanimate, slowly and sporadically, twitching and puckering as dead skin attempted to breathe. Their masks rattled and wheezed, sounding barely human, and behind smoked lenses their eyes were sallow, bloodshot, and utterly dead.

They were hollow men and hollow women. Every near-death encounter left a scar on the soul, a little place where they made contact with the otherworld, and at this point the entire delegation of soldiers was scarred inside and out. Death made life feel brighter - but they'd all nearly died so very often that the brightness of survival outweighed everything else. Memory. Identity. Agency. All of them washed away in the blazing tide of I Am Alive And They Are Not. A tenet which allowed for... just about everything. Constant unexpected survival had left them dead in every other sense.

And they tracked her movements like moths tracked a flame. They stood in serried rows, their stink rising high into the air, their eyes moving as one. The bones at their feet were... numerous, and empty skulls stared at Tanner alongside the bloodshot eyes of the soldiers. Once, she would've quailed under this. Been terrified of dropping the bomb. The Rekidans clambered onto the roofs, watching her with interest, and... she realised she wasn't afraid any more.

That had been squeezed out. Piece by piece. This place had drained her restraint, her relative existence, her fear of gazes... and what it left behind she was still trying to name. Bright calm was a mood. Connection was a state of being. Resolve was something that only existed in a given situation. In terms of a single, definable personality trait, she came up a little short.

And somehow, she didn't care.

The General carried her axe solemnly on one side of her.

Ms. Blue carried her horn.

And Tanner carried the bomb.

This gathering had emerged spontaneously - she hadn't planned any detail of this, just done her business, and when she went to walk for the pale she found these people waiting for her. Staring with naked devotion, this crowd that seemed to have been spawned out of the mud and the slick gore, born from war and destined to fight it. The spontaneous generation of soldiers from the red haze of war. Only took a war for her to finally organise a social event without panicking for weeks in advance. Behind her, the sun was setting. Ahead of her, the pale was waiting. And in her hands, the bomb was breathing. Sky was red. Alabaster walls. Bloodshot staring eyes. Her face was warm, and her head was buzzing. Her shadow reached the pale before she did...

And once more, she gazed out at the graveyard of blackened mutants, destroyed by the sight of white fire.

Tanner considered walking forwards. To find what they were looking for - maybe her armour would protect her more than their armour had ever managed.

...no. Maybe not. Her shadow was already touching the centre - and that was enough.

The bomb clicked as she set it down.

And she stepped backwards from it, letting it breathe softly on the ground. Quietly, without ceremony, she gathered her buffalo cloak around herself and marched away, boots cracking bones underneath in a regular tempo. The sun was now staring her in the eyes, and she was convinced that it was the eye of the intelligence, watching her, studying her, curious as to what she was doing. The insects were light now, moving in small dust devils across the city, self-sustaining coils that nibbled at anything that remained. The General nodded... then extended his nod, turning it into a kind of bow. Presented her with the axe, lacquered edge turning to liquid fire in the sun's glare. Silence. Ms. Blue saluted with her free hand, gauntlet clinking against her helmet, eyes swimming with emotions too intense to be contained in her skull, too passionate to ever emerge from her mouth. She presented the horn, which Tanner easily took. Silence.

She had her ritual instruments, then. The cloak. The horn. The axe. A shrivelled heart in her breast pocket. The governor's tie, now an unrecognisable rag, wrapped around the axe's handle. Garlanded with all that she hadn't scraped from herself. Mind filled with bright calm. In front of her was a long, long street, crowded with rubble and bones, leading straight to the Breach. Her shadow was non-existent now, extending behind her, out of her vision, and thus beyond her concern. The entire world was awash in red. Red-stained soldiers. Red-haired Rekidans. A glaring red sun in a boiling red sky. Rekida had somehow become the place where she lived and she died. The place where her status as a judge had been sacrificed to keep this place going. The land hungered for a sacrifice. Maybe that was it - maybe the bear Tal-Sar killed had brought her. She remembered seeing him bringing it in when she first met with the governor. Maybe he'd awakened the bloodlust of the land, awakened the demand for warfare... and to assist this, she'd come along. The land cared not from where the blood flowed, after all. Only that it did. Bring mutants, yes... but bring a giantess to stand against them and crush their skulls into pulp, to burn their bodies, to soak the earth with enough blood that it was still pooling around her feet, slightly-alive - the earth itself rejecting the feast, such was its quantity. Maybe that was why buffalo could be compelled to jump into canyons en masse. The earth hungered, it opened a mouth, it called to them, and they came unthinking. Willing to satisfy the urge.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

The buffalo were gone, now. Fleeing the snow, fleeing the mutants, becoming the mutants in some cases. Parallels spiralled in her mind, none of them fitting quite perfectly. They stood on a pillar of the earth surrounded by a red tide, and just as buffalo jumped into box canyons and crushed themselves to death, the mutants were crashing against the immaculate foundation stone. The earth hungered for a sacrifice, for all the sacrifices that Rekida ought to have made over the years since the war, and so it brought all things, it lured, it tempted - the entire purpose of this place was to be an altar, and the top of a pillar might as well be an altar. The pale sprawled behind her, immaculate and smooth, ripe for the red.

She wasn't sure what she was. Priestess. Giantess. Painter. Killer. Commander. Governess. Pseudo-Judge. Judge of her own law system, committing the cardinal sin of her order. The eyes of the soldiers told her, at least, that was in charge.

Maybe that was all that mattered.

She kept walking, the soldiers falling in behind her. Following silently.

And when the time came...

Gods, this felt right. This felt right. Like Ms. Blue had said, the world felt brighter. The bloody attrition of the last few days had been so prosaic, the only sacred part being the competition between human and inhuman... she was back into the insubstantial, phantom landscape of the unreal, she was back in the lands of myth, she'd shifted, and everything made sense again. If her mouth felt capable of smiling, it might've. But she was locking into place, piece by precious piece, into an engine. A raw, unfathomable engine driven by its own furious momentum, even when every other fuel source ran out. The mutants were seething above the walls of the barricade, a living ocean, moving counter to the progress of the sun - as it went west, they came east, like the end of some cosmic pendulum.

Her axe felt like it was melting into her hand.

The horn felt like it was made for her.

And she barely managed to whisper through her tense lips:

"Do it."

Ms. Blue turned. Raised the gun to her shoulder. Aimed...

And fired.

The bomb detonated immediately.

And glorious, immaculate light filled the world. The mutants fled the sun.

So she built another one.

Pale light erupted upwards in a calamitous geyser, a reaction as powerful as it was self-sustaining. White fire. White fire bursting from the pale, soaring high, high, high... a pillar of light that slowly expanded outwards, until it superficially resembled her axe, the spreading blades gleaming resiliently as the sun turned red. The humans turned to marble in moments, their gore fading into barely the slightest contaminants, their eyes livid and staring. The air around the pale fire was crackling with tiny filaments, the warmth spread out in a roasting wave, the air was howling louder than any animal. The momentum Tanner felt in the depths of her soul now manifested in her body, as her cape lashed at the air hungrily, powered by waves of beautiful heat... and stones rose high as well, blazing white comets that reached the atmosphere and seemed to hang there, impossibly, for several moments... she built a sun, she built stars, she made an axe from light.

The old Tanner had been a new idiot.

The new Tanner was incandescent.

Expected some part of her mind to be crying for her mother.

Gone.

She'd won the first victory. The one over herself.

Now she waited.

And...

Oh, yes.

They were coming.

The mutants were coming. She didn't even pretend to understand why. But the sight of that light, the sight of the great and terrible glow, the pale expanding to the sky... the carbonised remains of their skin shaken to pieces by the force, turned into wisps of black smoke devoid of all contamination, purged by the alabaster waves... the waves...

They were coming for her. They were furious. Like the General had said. They'd been interested in this pale mass - and now she had proof that they were. For seemingly no reason, despite the fact that it killed them on contact, they were desperate to keep the pale immaculate... she had proof. She had proof. No idea why this was the case, of course. No idea whatsoever.

But here they were.

Here she was.

Here she remained.

The soldiers formed up quickly as her voice barked a command her ears didn't hear, that her mind didn't process at having been spoken. They had the last of their fuel at the ready, the last of their ammunition. A last stand? Maybe. Maybe. The mutants were coming in... numbers she hadn't seen since their arrival. It was like she'd slammed her hammer into their collective knee, and on instinct the whole swarm had jerked to life, surged forward. A tiny flicker of trepidation ran through the strings of her heart. It was...

Tremendous.

There were so very many. The entire swarm had woken up at the sight of this pale geyser - how could she have known, how could this hunch have arrived, why had she known this would lure them from their strategy, how had she known this - because momentum drove her down a single route. Because she was on a route with only one direction to go down, the momentum denied her the choice to go back, only to go forwards. Inevitably she'd have come here. It was the only explanation. And no part of her was questioning this. Now... Tanner Magg stared at the coming tide. The entire horde had awakened. Careful planning ceased. She saw the carpet of buffalo tearing itself to pieces, spilling mutated organs over the ground that remained unconsumed by the others as they rushed for the pale, eyes bulging from sockets. The theurgic spyglass told her that some of them were trailing intestines like umbilical cords, some had too many heads, some too many hooves, some were near-paralysed chunks of meat that thrashed wetly on the ground in absolute silence. The diseased lurched forward, eyes fixed on the soldiers, mouths frothing with putrid matter, the Rabid loping ahead on all fours, slobbering from all their mouths. Cone-dogs with their glowing faces rushed forward, beginning to charge up their flashes. Tanner realised just how many they'd killed, as the red-black tide was driven forth by the setting sun. Those that remained were complex, were refined, contained functional mutations repeated over and over...

They'd been close to putting together the perfect assault. Composed of precisely the right mutants to take the bunkers.

They'd been close. So very close. Maybe this was a last stand - if so, it was a good one. The urge to self-destruction was welling up in her, the desire for a conclusive, glorious end... and it wasn't the same as last time. No, this wasn't just a pathetic whimper of 'now it'll all be over and I can sleep', nor 'now the final draft of my existence will be published and I'll be able to stop worrying', but... but something more, something better.

What that was was hard to say. But she knew it was better, and she knew it was different.

The insects tried to swarm, but the pale dust in the air was killing them, piece by piece... they fell to the ground, twitching spasmodically, and those who tried to land on the dust-covered soldiers experienced much the same fate. Gods, maybe if she detonated enough of the pale, she could drown this entire city in purifying dust, kissed with immaculate white flame, and they'd be immune to every mutant that dared break down their door. Dared even to try. The swarm was dying, yet the buzzing in her head remained... she felt a thrill of beautiful conviction. They were coming because she'd scared them. She'd found their weakness and attacked it, when all logic said she should wait. Her hunch had been right. Again.

Now... the tide.

The soldiers were lined up. There were no barricades save for heaps of bones and rubble, but that was fine - they wouldn't have had time to build any, and they wouldn't have been especially large. Exhausting soldiers by making them build barricades would aggravate losses from nighttime raids, and allow the horde more time to mutate into finer shapes. She stood near the front of the firing line, the soldiers with flamethrowers first, the soldiers with rifles slinging the barrels over and between the shoulders of the row in front, and Rekidans lining the roofs and waiting to jump down and block the stinking passage of mutants with their own bodies. Low, blissful, almost sensual roars emanated from the nobles. The General was smiling like a child. All-Name was close, standing behind rows upon rows, his face set, his aura pervaded by the stink of funerary oils, mouth full of ritual branches and sticks, held like cigarettes behind his gas mask. Ms. Blue... she was practically rabid, slobbering at the gills, eager for battle - if she could, Tanner imagined she'd be chewing on the barrel of her gun just to exert some of the tension inside her.

The tide approached... she'd drawn all of them out. Every single one. Perhaps even...

Hm.

A volley of rifle shots erupted, smoke filling the air, deafening those who'd endured the explosion. The cone-dogs were torn apart, by and large... had Tanner told them to target those creatures first, stop them from distracting? Maybe. The dogs reacted appropriately, blasting light as quickly as they could, doing all that could possibly be done with the bodies at their disposal and the distances they could cover. They destroyed their own heads in flares of bioluminescence, burning the liquid into vapour that studded Tanner's vision with dark spots, and elicited cries of pain from a few soldiers. More were coming. The Rabid were just behind the dogs, and alongside them were dogs, cats, mountain lions, all of them fused with other animals in strange, near-incomprehensible ways. Deer were behind them in turn, along with buffalo. The plant-eaters slower than the meat-eaters - the latter had the tools for sprints and pounces, and contamination gave them stamina, while the plant-eaters had always been intended for endurance. An advantage in normality turning to a weakness once mutation set in.

Tanner levelled the horn...

Waited until the soldiers were ready to launch their flamethrowers...

And pulled the trigger.

The wave of sound was beautiful. A solid wave, a solid mass, pulsing through the air, so fast and so loud she couldn't even hear it, air displaced away so that she could only see a mirage-like shimmer in the air, like a heat haze...

The front lines no longer existed. Saying they exploded into bloody chunks was inaccurate - there were no chunks, and the blood was spread so fine, so thin, that it was practically invisible. But in that second...

She saw skin flensing away. She saw bones splinter into dust. She saw organs turn liquid, surfaces rippling until the pressure became too much. She saw sound dismantle a creature until no amount of effort could put it back together, no great intelligence. If there was an intelligence in the swarm...

She hoped she'd hurt it.

The baubles on her back lashed the air like a flail, and she felt the horn heat up until it was almost boiling, recoil kicking backwards until her arm felt like it was going to jerk out of its socket. She rode the wave of recoil, relished in how it energised her entire body. And then... the sound rolled back. A deafening clap of thunder, loud enough to make her ears strain, loud enough that her vision went blurry for a moment as her eyes vibrated. No idea how often this weapon could be used, they'd said it was unstable, that this kind of pressure was the result of machinery failing, and this was a weaponised failure. And like all failures, it signalled decline in the engine, until it would either fall apart in her hands or explode and shear away half her body. She let it slump to her side, hissing like a snake as snow fell and evaporated an inch away from the metal, only the tiniest of droplets reaching it before turning into steam. Raised her axe, instead. The first wave crossed the border...

And they unleashed the last of their flamethrowers.

Tanner stood. She knew what was about to happen. Simply did.

The mutants burst through the flames, a living tide that ignored all injury in favour of fighting. They thought their ultimate target, their reason for being here, was under threat. That the humans had figured it all out, and had developed the resolve to actually hurt what mattered. Not an individual mutant, but something grander, something significantly more precious. A lie, of course. And a wretched one. They didn't have the resources to detonate the pale... but maybe the mutants didn't know that, or feared irreparable damage, or a silver bullet that could do... something, presumably. Either way. They'd gone for a bear's cubs, and now she was roaring down the hillside with all the fury nature endowed her with.

A gorgonopsid-thing lunged through the fire, and immediately slithered to Tanner. It was hideous - tank-like, scaly, plastered with warts, stance eerily wolfish, head bristling with whiskers, tail lashing and spreading fire around itself by accident. Someone had been on a long journey - hadn't seen one of these since the Tulavanta. It snapped, and Tanner knew not to block - the captain had said that these things could bite a person's head clean off, and a mutant would be even worse. She instead stepped backwards, expecting soldiers to stop her... nothing. They were automatically backing away reverently, even as their hands moved to their guns, their flamethrowers, their swords. As another pulse of flame rippled around her, she sprang at the creature, her axe descending...

It weaved away, slithering smoothly, snapping once again while dead black eyes stared at her. Tanner felt fangs scrape against armour, leaving long scratches in the reinforced material... then her axe swung round once more, and she batted it back, back into the flames, which were continuing to consume its mottled flesh. Another swing, and the head became a crater. Tanner almost smiled as ichor sprayed in all directions from the ruined canyon where a brain had once lived. The body was still thrashing on instinct, desperate to reach her... but Ms. Blue was at her side, firing a rifle into its limbs, severing tendon and bone, dismantling the creature however she could. Another shove from the axe, and it was in the fire for good, burning away into ash, contamination wailing as it tried to escape the corpse.

More.

Give her more.

The Rabid, those few who survived the flames, rushed for her, their poisonous spit turning to vapour in the heat, and she crushed them completely - her axe turned faces to craters and canyons, she remade flesh into geological formations, and with her boot she slammed them down into the ash and mud and ground them into pulp. She was unrestrained, she was unrestrained. Some thing were most beautiful behind glass, and some things were only useful when outside of them, and she was utterly useful. Wasn't she? A pig-like creature waddled through the fire, the flames licking at its flanks, igniting wiry strands of black hair. The tusks were grotesque in their complexity, and represented... it was a tooth farm. Some were hollow, threaded with tubes that carried venom. Some were thick enoguh to be swords. Some were serrated, some were long, some were short, some were so convoluted it was hard to imagine what they were meant to be, some bristled with fangs and stingers and proboscises... a walking armoury, meant to equip the ravening legion that surged odwn the street, clambering over one another in their eagerness to reach the front lines, only barely avoiding crushing their own to death. This creature was something the intelligence wouldn't waste unless it was driven to desperation.

Good.

Eyes hidden underneath swelling matter twitched vaguely, and... she saw the flanks start to peel under the heat, peeling like the petals of a flower, unfolding to reveal... reveal the contents of a butcher shop. The internals of the pig were basically empty. There was a spine, and some ribs, but the organs were reduced to a shrivelled black pouch. Everything else was used for equipment. Human arms hung from the spine, animal limbs clung to the ribs, the floor of the torso was absolutely stuffed with an uncoutable quantity of insect parts, all of them wired into a dense network of veins and arteries that kept them alive. The creature couldn't even make a sound if it wanted to - the mouth was wired shut with tusks, and filled to the brim with more parts. It wasn't a pig - it was a pig's head, wired up to a hollow bag.

Tanner lunged...

The pig simply swerved.

The hollow cavity loomed. Limbs began to reach out, and the pig ignored all wounds that were inflicted by the nearby soldiers, who fought in absolute silence, imitating their enemy. Tanner saw limbs taken from soldiers in there - still with scraps of old uniform. She even saw pieces from what had once been the colony's mortuary. A pale arm that could've been the governor's. An arm slowly succumbing to rot that could've been Lam's. Maybe even the muscled arm of Lyur, fresh from its death, preserved under the snow... they all reached, all clutched, and Tanner lifted the horn, and fired on instinct.

The pig evaporated. Only the head and the hooves remained, the rest turned to a cloud of red mist, spraying the mutants behind and turning them the shade of the setting sun that seemed to drive them onwards. Tanner gritted her teeth at the heat which almost seemed to melt her gauntlets, and resolved to leave the horn unused for a little longer, just in case. Didn't want to explode. Not yet. The pig's head was still trying to get to her, writhing on the ground as eerily flexible tusks tried to move like the limbs of a crab, and... an axe through the brain put it to bed. Not dead, of course. But the ability for it to command its own muscles was gone. None of the bodies around her were dead until they burned, until then, they were just... uncoordinated. She wasn't killing infantry - she was killing officers, and watching the units spiral into disarray.

The flamethrowers spat another few tongues of flame, but the tanks were running dry. They'd been on rations, all of them. Still had reserves around the bunkers - this was an accidental last stand, and she relished in the challenge, in the certainty, as did the soldiers. At least there'd be enough for backup later. Withdrawn guns flashed, and the mutant bodies became pyres for the dead, pyres on which the horde could be immolated. The Rekidans, now, chose to jump, whooping like animals, glorifying in how different they were to the mutants they were destined to become. The General plunged into the mass, tearing and hacking with an enormous sword, brutish and blunt, his smile still childish. Ms. Sulphur was barking down gunshots from the roof, her breath accompanied occasionally with little sprays of sparks as she clashed down on the gunpowder coating her teeth. Mr. Horn rolled across the field like some monstrous crocodile, grinning and laughing as he smashed mutants under his tremendous weight, even as their blood made him lose his mind. No sign of All-Name. All she saw were mutants, fire, Rekidans diving into the carnage and ripping away with lazy ease, the mutants tearing themselves apart as they sought to get closer, to destroy every last human they could find, driven to a kind of silent madness by the way Tanner had attacked the pale. The General's voice carried over the winter wind - he was singing, loudly and happily, and the other Rekidans grinned at the sound of it. They were children, really. Returning to becoming children, when endings meant something, and it seemed impossible to look beyond them. They knew death was coming. Tanner could see it, with each splash of contamination that created mottled flesh, with each breath that made their eyes rupture a little further, with the way their muscles seemed to swell and their teeth grow, every part of them growing more monstrous the closer they came. Maybe it would feel like falling asleep. Maybe it would feel like just... drifting away. Maybe. Maybe.

She hoped they would be happy.

Tanner would've shirked this sort of thing, once. Would've hidden in the bunker and said 'let the professionals handle it'. The sight of the tide crashing into the soldiers around her, the sight of the war beginning to enter its final phase, would've terrified her. She had every reason to be terrified, really. And she'd have been cautious - preferred a slow process to a rapid solution, preferred a war of attrition to a last stand, preferred consultation to command. Now, she was just... hollow, and in that hollowness lurked confidence. Lurked self-belief. Lurked no resistance to the momentum which drove her on, on, on, on... oh, come on, stop reminding herself of what she was, what she'd become. She knew what she was. She was what she was. Stop dwelling on the past. The land had eaten it anyway.

Under the sign of a silver axe in the sky, with the sound of the newborn star still echoing in their ears, they joined battle for what might well be the last time, both sides giving their all, neither side ready to offer nor accept quarter. A lacquered axe. A buffalo cloak. A faceless mask. A blasting horn. A shrivelled black heart.

And under it all, Tanner's face was utterly, utterly flat.