CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN - OUTRIDER
Its coming was heralded by biomass constellations. The shifting of veins, the refining of systems, the slow harmonisation of muscle into more... optimal patterns. And she could see it already starting. Once, mutants trampled through the garden the same as everyone else, the landscape not inhibiting them, but not able to really accommodate them beyond the most basic forms of assistance. Now... the meat parted smoothly around their feet, forming perfect prints that vanished a second later. Giving the entire horde - or what was left of it - a sense of unreality, like they weren't quite in the same world Tanner inhabited. Compared to everything else she was seeing, though, it just meant the mutants had caught up with the frozen stars and the red sky and the silver axe. She could feel something twisting in her gut, something... deep-seated. A feeling that what was slowly shambling over the horizon was... it was something she wasn't meant to see. There was a feeling of entering a religious sanctuary, being caught with her nose in the deeper secrets of the lodge, investigating cases the judges kept inside locked books. Shame, embarrassment, clawing fear, and a strange, perverse thrill. She might had never done any of these things, she was a good person, but...
It was the feeling of loosening her restraints. It was exerting her strength to its fullest. It was pulverising a Rekidan nearly to death in an underground river while thinking about how to connect punching and lovemaking, philosophically speaking. Once, those thoughts had ashamed her. Now... she just saw them as keys the state of mind she needed right now. And looking at the constellations shifting...
She felt exactly the same way. Her breathing tightened in her chest. Her back stiffened. Her hair seemed to be sharper, each graze against her scalp painful with its intensity. And somehow, the weariness in her limbs, which had built up so consistently that at this point it was practically an old friend, washed away in a loose, warm haze. She could feel her stomach shrinking to the size of a charred acorn, and... her buffalo cloak hung heavy and black over her shoulders, her leather armour had gradually become putrid and black as well, yet long stripes of livid silver lay across it all, the scouring winds that played over the seal leaving their marks. The muscle wrapped around her bones was tightening, tightening, infusing with a martyr's energy, the will to give everything.
Black-and-silver. Non-existent stomach. Muscles pulsing with power.
If her face wasn't paralysed, she'd be moving it into a wide, wide smile.
She'd done it.
She'd become a silver eel.
And no-one else knew. No-one else understood. But she'd done it. She'd spent her entire life swimming from one place to another to another to another, a pillow taking the shape of the person who sat on her last, never developing inner structure... now she had more structure than she knew what to do with. The great impulse had entered her brain - the command to change, to abandon all loyalties and move, damn it all, move. Lived her whole life an aimless shapeless thing, and now... a pilgrimage had grown into her mind like a brain parasite. A purpose which denied all objections, fuelled by self-belief, obliterating whatever petty layers of reason still lingered in her mind. She was a solar being, she was a seeress, she heard the hungry growls of the earth, she'd been sent here to feed the ground with all it could handle and more, she'd always been meant to come here, always, this was why she was so large, why she'd been so awkward for her entire damn life, because it would bring her here. And she had nothing else.
Down this road lay an ending. If she passed it, she lived, and everything she believed about herself, about her life, was correct. If she didn't pass it, she was dead, and was a fool. Her stomach was gone - either she powered through to her goal, or she died. The silver eels swam across a whole ocean to whatever beautiful place they bred in, to do their martial duties in the last moments before the closure. She could feel that same urge building in her now.
Oh, gods, yes, yes, yes...
A droplet of spit ran down the side of her mask - she was foaming at the corners of her mouth, and the rattling of the filters concealed how she was wheezing with terrified excitement, her throat too tight for anything else. Her eyes were bulging. Felt like they'd never blink again. Tanner the human was gone. She'd built herself a new body out of leather and fur and gore and metal and glass and dust.
This was who she was now.
And the tiny voice that ought to be screaming right about now was being... oh, so terribly quiet.
Might even be gone for good. Lost in the shrinking of her stomach.
Wonderful.
A shadow appeared. Several shadows, moving close to the ground, fast and delicate as dancers. They... most had the same pale, hairless, strange demeanour of most mutants. Unrecognisable - their old forms lost under layers of mutation. A kind of personal guard, perhaps. Not dredged out because the situation was that desperate - dredged out because the one they were guarding was coming. And at their head...
Tanner knew this one.
Captain Kralana.
The woman who'd brought her to this colony in the first place, in her boat of metal and bone, full of dying widows who had nothing left to do but bring fire and justice to the barren hordes of the mutant. A horde they'd since joined. Lantha had the fortune to run before her mind was taken. The captain hadn't shared in this fortune.
She towered above any normal human. Even Tanner was dwarfed by her height. And yet, she was wispy thin, all extraneous organs removed, all tissue dissolved in favour of... near-gelatinous matter that swirled and gurgled underneath layers of mottled skin, harder than metal, softer than silk, pliable as melting butter. Her face was unaltered. The same hard features, scarred and sculpted by years of conflict and mutation, a gradual slip into insanity that had been... considerably accelerated. Long, yellow tubes of bone extended from her shoulders, running down her arms, tied in place by quivering white ligaments that strained with the effort. Her mouth was gone, though. Nothing but a vacant black hole surrounded by long metallic fibres, that crackled with strange green sparks as she strode along, the meat parting before her. Her legs were uncanny in their jointlessness, and the feet were nothing but undifferentiated sludge that reshaped as the gelatin inside contracted or expanded. Sometimes the skin pushed into claws, or hooks, or wide-spreading pads, or differentiated entirely and became multiple slender limbs that danced smoothly across the bleeding soil. Her hair moved without reference to the wind, and glistened wetly in the light of every sun, delusional or otherwise, shimmering like a pool of spilled oil, squirming with tiny, near-imperceptible lifeforms.
She looked like something that had squirmed in some primordial rockpool of the ancient world.
She looked like something that would ooze from a pulsing sphincter of mud in the Tulavanta, some horrid issue of the ground's churning, of underground fermentation...
She slither-jumped-ran across the garden towards Tanner.
Her eyes were utterly, utterly dead.
Tanner braced herself. The General at her side. His face was turning... innocent. Years washed away from it like wax down a melting candle, like how Sister Halima shed all her layers of the outside world the closer she came to the immaculate reality of the law. All the General's authority was vanishing, the air of confidence and command... he was alone, unobserved. The other Rekidans... were they any others? How many yet lived, who were still sane? She could... maybe see two? Off in the distance, though. Could be someone else. The chaos of the battle had been such that she just didn't... she couldn't... there'd been the last stand of a bold and terrible aristocracy, and she'd been too lost in the petty drama of survival and breakdown which dominated her universe. They'd faded into the dark with roars that only a few heard, and fewer would have been able to identify. Yet somehow, she thought that this wouldn't be a fate they'd have particularly disliked. Death in silence was death without another witnessing them at their weakest. All she could remember was them as blood-drenched revenants, mutated and mutating, madness creeping through their veins towards their skulls, bodies twisting beyond belief... and that was all. She'd only seen a few going down. And their deaths hadn't been kind. Hadn't been done with gleeful smiles on their faces.
Death was still frightening to them.
And to die in silence was to vanish from the world at their highest point. Like flinging oneself from the top of a mountain, scraping the sky...
And never hitting the ground.
Kralana was here. The constellations of meat were shaping into patterns of ever-increasing complexity, red ground merging with red sky merging with red sun until it seemed the whole world was drowning in the shade. Tanner could even see mists rising from tiny geysers, red, cloying, almost-real mists, in which lurked vaporous circulatory systems, formed from air carefully moving where it was meant to. A world being born around her, ground first, then atmosphere, then...
The General flung himself into the captain, his mouth opened wide in a howl his throat was no longer capable of producing...
Tanner was alongside him, axe in hand, horn in the other, the metal so hot it was starting to fuse into her gauntlets, yet she felt almost nothing...
And what followed was...
Tanner wasn't trained at war.
She wasn't trained in the slightest. She was strong. She was brutal. She was unyielding. But untrained. She could barely follow what was happening as the three met in battle. The General was a rock, Kralana was a river, Tanner was a swooping buzzard who just hit what looked hittable at the time. Kralana never remained in one place for very long, always flowing, always undulating. Her back was non-existent, she simply flipped and twitched out of the way of most strikes. Tanner swung like a barbarian, her mouth so tense she couldn't even growl, her eyes seeming to bulge out of her head. All around her were dead bodies being devoured by the hungry earth. All around her were empty, grey eyes, staring up as they sank, slowly, slowly, into mouths still growing their teeth as their prey was ingested. Her boots crushed the teeth to splinters, kicked aside loose limbs and splashed through pools of still-warm blood. Kralana was at home here, her face was flat and blank as she slithered over the hills and the mouths, sometimes entering the earth and emerging several feet away, glistening with residue. The General...
He refused to move more than he had to. This was her world... but it was his city.
He forced Kralana to come to him. Where his long, powerful arm would crush her like an insect... but he never quite managed it. Tanner couldn't even level the horn at the captain, it was too lengthy to aim, by the time she'd done so... the mutant was somewhere else entirely. A blizzard was brewing. Flakes of snow were beginning to fall with remarkable speed, each one light as a feather, wide as an autumn leaf. The cold was growing. But the snow only clung to the city - the meat was too warm, it steamed too much. The walls were starting to be weighed heavily by the snow, it made the chains creak as it built up more and more...
Midwinter's grim face had finally shown itself.
This cold would remain until spring. Until the thaw. Tanner's fight gained a frenzied air to it - she was swinging wildly, slipping on the ground, tearing herself out of mouths that formed to snap at her heels, until she was heavy with gore and so warm the snow couldn't touch her... but the cold made it freeze, the cold turned the gore to rubies, the cold was starting to seep through the meat... and as if on cue, the meat began to be percolated by tiny holes, tiny black holes from which emerged long, fibrous hairs. Thicker than any animal she'd known, rising high, high, almost to her waist, making the other soldiers vanish utterly from sight. In seconds, they were surrounded by hair the pale shade of moonlight, delicate and tough at the same time, moving to the rhythm of winds she couldn't detect...
And the air remained heavy with red mists, now sparking with tiny connections, little impulses firing over a wide, wide, area...
Tanner shed all restraint.
She fought with all the strength at her disposal. All the hideous strength the gods had forced into her when they decided to make her the altar on which the earth's hunger was sated. Her axe was a whirling comet of metal, swinging, swinging, swinging, a pendulum operating to no sane rhythm, swinging, swinging, so fast she saw it becoming a flawless ribbon, metal merging to metal throughout time, the entire life of her axe painted in the air...
Kralana was doing things Tanner struggled to describe.
When Tanner tried to hack at her torso, the torso flowed with the wind, and a limb with a long bone blade would lash at her, forcing Tanner to retreat, if she didn't wind up with a long pale scratch over her protective gear. The General would try and crush her with his own weapon, and she'd pool beneath it, her legs losing all consistency and sending her torso impossibly low to the ground... before she slithered with immense speed to rake a long red line across his bare thigh. The General was a mass of them at this point, wounds that oozed matter thicker and darker than blood, but his face remained broad and childlike, strangely untouched by injury, so that it seemed a great pale moon over a map of sharp red borders. Tanner would swing, Kralana would dodge and retaliate, the General would await her attack, then try and retaliate... only for her to dodge and strike back with deadly speed. She was killing them by inches.
It was minutes before they landed a single hit on her, no battle cries filling the air, nothing but the crude smashing of body against body, as the midwinter chill grew more and more intense... she was hunching her shoulders involuntarily against the cold, but the mutants were immune, profoundly immune. The cold clung around her, each flake slowly becoming sharper, faster, crueller, filling every last crevice in her gear, creating exoskeleton outlines that shattered once she moved a certain way. Her own heat was melting the snow, and it trickled down her until it froze once more, the cold reaching fine, wicked fingers through the tough leather and into her flesh, wrapping around her bones...
The red mists were burning with neuron stars.
The General's mouth was wrenched wide as he silently roared at the mutant-hunting captain. Kralana wove around his strikes... but he managed to hit her.
A strike she found impossible to dodge. Either accept a lesser blow from the General, or a worse one from Tanner. They'd not outmanoeuvred her. This wasn't a product of skill. This was just the slow, painful erosion of a body under conditions of combat, the infinite fluctuation of variables until finally, finally, it played out in their favour.
The body was a mass of liquid held together by a slippery membrane.
When they sliced it...
The skin parted... and a bony cylinder immediately thrust itself through the glossy flesh.
And a jet of matter erupted from the wound, thin as a knife and twice as sharp.
The wound which emerged over the General's chest was a bloody canyon, deep enough that she heard bones snapping.
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The General staggered back, his face still plain with happiness... but his bones were snapping, his spine had been damaged, his organs were visible - dark red and sitting in glistening sacs that shied away from the blast of white liquid like slugs afraid of salt. He felt no pain. But his body needed time to knit back together... already he was plunging his hand into the spongy red matter all around, gorging himself on meat that he integrated into his own mass, contamination that strengthened him...
Leaving Tanner alone for a terrifying minute.
Kralana was inconceivably fast.
Tanner's brutality suddenly turned against her. Her clumsiness became hazardous. All the unrelenting aggression she demonstrated in combat meant she wasn't used to being on the back foot, and she found panic rising up in her stomach, clawing around her lungs, for a second disrupting the immaculate bright calm she'd broken herself into accepting. Tanner, in her defence, did her best. She blocked what she could, but had to give up on attacking after a few near-disasters. She was constantly retreating, but she never fell to the ground, slipping in the endless gore. She soaked up hits without complaint... but soaked up too many. Each time Kralana's translucent hand smashed against her axe's haft, she felt the vibrations run through her entire body. Kralana attacked with mechanical boredom. With the air of someone who honestly, truly, didn't care about the body in front of her. No memory lurked behind those dark eyes.
The first true wound was along her thigh.
A long, red stripe. Much like the General's. Deep enough that she could feel certain strands of muscle come close to breaking... and some very much did. Moving her leg became an effort in and of itself, and with it, every other motion became harder, more cumbersome. Couldn't even rely on her knee.
She blocked what she could. She did her best.
Her best wasn't enough.
Kralana next plunged one of her bone-blades through Tanner's left arm, clipping more muscles, and... and her fingers went through endless paroxysms, some going numb, some sparking with fire, all of them going out of control as a clumsier puppeteer. Barely managed to lunge backwards... and a strange crackling sensation lingered in the wound.
Contamination.
Her body was being redefined.
Kralana was moving faster. She could smell the kill yet to come. Had sized up all Tanner's capabilities, and proven her ability to exceed them. Just a matter of mechanical removal at this point. Tanner was on the back foot, she was barely managing to avoid running into a wall. Kralana wasn't mocking her or trying to use her for entertainment, like Lyur had. Just... taking her apart. Each crack of her fists and blades against Tanner's axe was enough to numb the one arm she had that was functional. The horn couldn't be angled at her, and even if it could, it wouldn't be able to fire. Not with her fingers half-dead. She'd been neutered, and...
And she wasn't sure if she was terrified, excited, or furious. Or simply some awful middle-ground between all three. It felt like all her emotions were forcing their way out, as if every memory was embodying itself into her flesh and her motions, a spreading tattoo of recollection. Her entire life culminated here - and that meant her entire life was manifesting. Kralana whirled, and sometimes she seemed to have a judge's cape, or the tattooed eye of Ms. vo Anka, or the hard lines of her aunts and uncles in the lodge. She'd brought her here. Ushered her up near-frozen rivers and uninhabited mudlands until she reached this place. Her purpose being fulfilled, she'd changed. The meat beneath Tanner's feet was shifting ever-more, her movements were becoming harder and harder. She was struggling even to do more than an ape-like shuffle at this point, back bent near-double to shield her body from blows, axe clumsily lashing out, sometimes impacting the ground and sending up sprays of red clots that clung to Kralana like spiral barnacles. Tanner was shrinking down and shrivelling. Kralana was only growing taller and stronger, scabmatter armour forming over her protoplasmic body, long stems of blood vessels latching into her legs and fuelling her higher, higher, higher...
The bone blades lashed out.
Tanner's eyes widened.
Her mask was ripped away from her face with a dismissive flick.
For the first time in days, Tanner breathed unfiltered air.
...oh gods...
The stink was tremendous. The cold was ferocious. The simple reconnection with reality, the exposure of her face to all the flaying winds and shivering poison... it was a bolt of lightning into her consciousness. She felt a slow trickle of blood where the blade had nicked the skin. Her breath fogged in front of her face, a gleaming cloud of silver that stayed cohesive for several seconds, hovering there vaguely, opaque as milk. The rest of the helmet fell away.
And like that, she was dead.
The contamination fizzed in her nose, and her entire body started to react. Her face was reddening - more blood vessels to the skin, keep the contamination out by any means necessary, and she could... oh, she could feel as her pores started to weep, as her nose started to run with blood. Purging everything it could. One of her eyes was feeling uncomfortably warm. Probably filling with blood in its own right.
Tanner Magg was dead. Tanner Magg had ceased to survive.
The ambient contamination was much too high. Couldn't even remember the last reading, but it was severe. Even more so, in this field of red. She was a ruin.
And something inside her changed a little.
Something odd.
Her face was utterly flat as she charged for Kralana, who seemed... almost surprised for a moment. Paused as the giantess rushed...
Strategy didn't form.
Strategy was something for generals and experts.
She just moved. And her body flowed unconsciously into all the positions it had to.
Her axe seemed to be lighter in her hands. Each deep breath she took would be enhancing her muscles, thickening her skin, deadening the cold. She could barely feel the cold, at this point. What she felt, it... maybe this was what dancing felt like to other people. There was just motion, pure and simple, unreserved and free-flowing. Her axe was a graceful sliver again, and she fought like an animal. A wild, wild animal. She lunged and retreated smoothly, she slid on the snow and used her momentum confidently to swing around again. Kralana would strike her, and Tanner felt nothing, even as blood ran from a dozen little wounds, none of them decisive, all of them building to something decisive. Tanner was a bleeding, feral animal, she practically fell over on a few occasions, but each time she did, she was scrambling smoothly to her feet a moment later.
Kralana's first wound at Tanner's hand wasn't a matter of strategy.
It was a matter of ferocity. Denying her the time to react properly. Forcing her to make unpleasant decisions.
A wound. And Tanner knew to dodge the jet of pressurised matter that had sent the General to his knees.
Her face was completely flat. And terribly, terribly warm. Flakes all around her. Snow clawing at her bones.
Silence.
There was no point of doing anything more than breathing around a mutant. They wouldn't recognise the act of yelling as anything but a mechanical use of the throat and lungs. Tanner almost wanted to drop to all fours, to lunge around with her axe and stay low, stay out of the way of those whirring blades that continued to reap a bloody toll from her.
A strand of hair passed her face.
...red.
A strand of red hair.
She almost paused.
Almost.
Then kept fighting.
Kralana was winning. But Tanner was turning it from an easy victory to a hard-fought survival. There was push and pull over the battlefield, and Tanner was learning. No other mutants intervened with them. There weren't many left. So many had been brutalised all around them, turned into... this mass. Others were being cut apart by weary, weary soldiers. Others were being actively consumed by their kindred, matter repurposed towards a greater goal. Oocyte engineers pooled around her ankles, and failed to elicit any response from her. A near-living buffalo stared up mournfully from the ground, slowly oozing into the landscape, and Tanner calmly crushed its skull with the heel of her boot, noting how the brain tried to cling on like a leech, forming skull-matter teeth to cling on tighter. Kralana glided over the land, almost lighter-than-air, bristling with coral-like growths of bone that were ready to focus jets of matter at her, and barnacle clots of matter that supplied her with all the contamination she needed. The red mist was burning all around with the stars, with flaring connections of invisible systems.
This was madness.
There was nothing sane about today.
Sometimes she realised that. And understood why the Great War had left such a scar on the minds of its survivors.
What was normal life, when you knew this was entirely possible? This wasn't just reserved for cautionary tales and fevered paintings?
What did you do when you knew this was out there, behind the corners of the world?
Her axe was wriggling with life that refused to die. A pale eye looked up from the red-black matter, blind and unseeing, nerves forming like delicate embroidery. When she smashed it into Kralana's bone-blades, she saw huge chunks peel away and fall, still growing more eyes, more teeth, more mouths, and the basic instruments of movement. One chunk had a chain of stomachs, like a ruminant animal, tiny purple pearls that glinted wetly in the unyielding shine of the snow. Kralana was winning.
Tanner was holding.
The strand of red hair lingered in her vision, though.
Never swayed away. And she had no time nor ability to remove it by force - one hand paralysed, the other had occupied, and her attention monopolised by the thing which had grown inside the captain.
And then...
She saw the constellations shifting. Her muscles were burning, yes. Her eyes were aching, yes. Her skin was unseasonably warm, yes. And the blood running down her body was thick and dark. But... she could see the meat shifting.
It was reacting to a new presence.
And out of the red, burning mists...
The General came.
He was... almost entirely gone.
The chasm in his chest wasn't healed. Not truly. It had just been... repurposed. Rib-teeth had begun to poke through muscular gums, a long, red, leech-like tongue was staring to coil out from around his pulsing heart, and his flesh was adapting to this new appendage. His eyes were wide with happiness. His mouth was stretched into a smile so wide that the lips turned the pale of driven snow. And his arm was extended in front of him, clutching eagerly for Kralana...
Who turned swiftly, bone-blades singing in the air...
Tanner lunged with her axe...
The three met together. Around them were heaps of pale oocyte-engineers, their huge black eyes swimming vaguely at the corner of her vision. Piling up higher to bind them together, to force confrontation, to get this all over with. The General wrapped Kralana up in a hug, squeezing tightly, even as her blades tore great bleeding chunks from his muscular body. His chest-mouth, weeping saliva the colour of pus and the consistency of syrup, latched to the woman, digging deeper, even as it was torn apart by the pressurised jets of matter she released from each wound. Tanner slashed and cracked, her axe had long-since turned dull as ore, and she was more or less pounding the creature thin, tenderising her. Could see her internal structures shiver, swell... burst like so many overripe fruits, releasing floods of odd-coloured liquid into her protoplasm. The oocytes flowed into her in a pale river, eager to repair, but the damage was done.
The General held her close.
Two people broken by the Great War. Mutated beyond humanity. One just slightly further advanced than the other.
If the General had left this city, he would've become the Captain.
They embraced. Ignorant of the parallels between them. Ignorant even of each other's names. Finding each other because the land wanted them to.
Because the sacrifice of twins was a more pleasurable thing for the blood-hungry soil, she supposed. Treasured for its rarity.
That blood fell. Thick and dark on one side. Milky and translucent on the other. Mixing... and consuming one another. Thick coils of red-clear matter, cords that gnawed toothlessly, gnawed without the need for mouths, adsorbing their rivals in a struggle more primordial than any other. Their blood warred onwards as their bodies
Kralana was starting to deflate. Her struggles weakened, weakened... ceased. Her eyes were dull. The oocyte engineers were fleeing her wounds, widening them in the process. Her body was beginning to devour itself, every organ working to save itself and the contamination it carried. Terminal. The General sagged to his knees, burying his head in her shapeless shoulder and clinging like a child as his life ran out. As madness entered his eyes. A cloudy layer of film over his eyes, as some greater intelligence asserted itself. His mind had been held together with willpower and delicate arts for the last few decades. And all that balance was gone.
Tanner knew what she had to do.
Without thinking...
She planted the axe through his head. Crushed so quickly that he wouldn't feel any pain. Not that he was probably capable.
And like that, the last General of Rekida was gone.
The last of the mutant-hunting crew was gone.
Tanner remained.
She didn't feel anything. She'd destroyed so much. She could look into those cloudy eyes, and could see less humanity than even Lyur possessed. So very much death...
Was the earth happy, yet? Was Rekida happy with what she'd given it?
Was this enough?
The meat-earth shivered. The intelligence lingered.
Tanner groaned, and leant on her axe for a moment. The General was dead. His head was a bloody crater, squirming with half-lives. Kralana was just a cloak. There'd been no words in that entire struggle. And she couldn't say she'd known either of them. Not truly. The General had looked happy when she crushed his brain into pulp. Kralana had just looked dead. She'd died a long time ago. Nothing left but to kill the thing desecrating her corpse. All around her was carnage. And she realised...
Tanner Magg was alone.
The soldiers were staring at her like she was a goddess. Their eyes hollow and idiotic behind their lenses. Blood-drenched, silver-tinged apparitions, who seemed to float in mid-air, their bodies below the waist concealed by red, burning mists. They watched her, silently. Their bayonets dripping with gore. Their gun-barrels warping with heat, steaming in the air no matter how cold it became. She knew, knew, just by looking at them, that they'd all killed a few of their own comrades. They'd been united by it, by the guilt of killing people they were familiar with because of the poison creeping into their veins. Ms. Blue was visible. Shivering like a leaf, hunched over her rifle until she was almost bent double, staring enraptured at Tanner. Staring without a single sign of blinking. They'd weathered the tide... but so many were dead.
A few more mutants, a few more days for the other side to prepare, a few more pieces of bad luck, and the line would've died. Could even see a few that had broken through, frozen and carbonised on the great pale wasteland of the seal, staring dumbly at the goal they'd reached... and now could never escape. Bleak memorials to the simple pointlessness of their entire war here.
The mutants were actively keeping away from Tanner. What few of them remained were parting around her like water around a rock. Unwilling to die against someone who could easily kill them. Against whom there was no reason to waste themselves. Better to go for the troops. Better to do something useful. Unwilling to die against someone who was already dying. The poison slithering into the black matter of her skull.
The Rekidans had had their last stand, and she'd barely noticed.
The General had died to her axe.
Sersa Bayai was a spy. Canima was dead. The governor was dead. Rekida's last day had come - the last holdouts of the old aristocrat's culture had vanished. All that remained was All-Name... maybe. Maybe. Couldn't see him anywhere. All-Name, who knew but could never perpetuate. And Tal-Sar, who knew and hated knowing. Would never teach. She was alone. There were no other companions. No superiors. No peers. She'd just crushed the skull of the last general of Rekida, killed him like a slaughterhouse worker, and...
And she was so very alone out here. Leaning on her weapon. Staring sightlessly as her breath came back, and the pain of her wounds became more apparent.
Her face was exposed to the bare air, and she felt it playing along... along features she didn't quite remember having. The lock of red hair lingered in her vision, adhering to her skin with sweat and locking tight. She was changing. Be like the General, soon enough. Her life was on a time limit. She slowly peeled the hair free, staring at it as best she could. Red. Rekidan red. The girl... the mutant girl she'd been associating with, the one wailing away in a bunker. And the General. She'd been surrounded by too many Rekidans. Marks had been left. She was turning into one of them, and... no, no, it was just a small grafting. A small scion plugged into her scalp, nothing more. Ignore it. But... her lungs would be starting to corrode, soon enough. She looked around quickly, hunting for a mask. The battle must go on. The General was slumping to the ground, body twitching as organs started to break out towards the sunlight. Like a shark's young devouring one another in the womb. She could barely process what was happening to her. Something was wrong with her face. She knew something was wrong with her face. Maybe a growth, or a distortion, or just the mottling which characterised all the mutant-hunters... gods, the entire course of her life had been determined by a mutant-hunter who failed to maintain their harpoon properly, and now she was looking more and more like them. After killing a mutant-hunting captain.
For all she knew, Kralana had been the one to captain the ship which killed her father's mind.
For all she knew, this was revenge.
...no. Most likely not. And even thinking that it was didn't exactly relieve her... not sure. Guilt? Maybe. Maybe guilt.
The General was dead. So was Kralana. So was Canima. So was... most of the garrison.
Those who remained were practically a single brotherhood and sisterhood, a united mass that could never, ever engage with the world normally again. She knew this, because she could feel the change lurking in her own mind. There was no world where you escaped this hellish place. Red sky. Red sun on one side. Silver axe on the other. A great pale plain full of carbonised, paralysed statues that shattered when they were shot. Streets lined with festering meat, crawling with alien life. Their uniforms clung to them tightly, plastered in place by gore and sweat and snow. Locked around their bodies like second skins. Impossible to remove. Even now, she was finding it hard to imagine how they looked without masks, how their breathing sounded without the rattle, what their eyes were like under the lenses.
She was the only living person on this field of battle with an exposed face.
The crackling of contamination wafted over her skin like warmth on a too-hot day, heat that moved like liquid, that sank into the skin and nested there.
All she could do was tear off a length of cloth that seemed fairly unstained, soak it in the high-proof alcohol they were using instead of fuel, and wrapped it tightly around her mouth. A black gag that made her few locks of red hair seem near-luminous.
Her eyes were dark.
The constellations had reached a final state of refinement. She could sense this, and her head felt... so terribly heavy. She could hear buzzing in her ears, an endless, endless buzzing that seemed to only grow louder, no matter how few insects there were in the air. A thought of sudden terror ran through her. She was being contaminated. Not just to the point of being a mutant - being an enemy of the colony. The intelligence was approaching. Lantha had felt this thing's thoughts, plans, everything. Barely managed to escape. Now the same intelligence was starting to intrude, climbing up her spine, from the deepest limbic to the highest cognitive, to the very peak of her mind. Surmounting and supplanting.
The bodies of the General and Captain were starting to disintegrate, and their organs... they weren't just merging with the landscape. They were moving with unnatural precision. She saw as long, dark liver-pieces ripped themselves apart with smooth tearing sounds, and began to slither onwards using muscles they spontaneously grew. Saw thick skin begin to thin, over and over, layers peeling away until they were thin enough to float on the wind in certain directions, minute adjustments sending them towards... towards whatever was coming.
She could feel it coming. The buzzing. The hum. The slow pulse of orders from the depths of her mind. Not... explicit. Nothing explicit.
She stared at the body of Kralana.
Tanner Magg should not have survived against her. The General had been torn apart. She'd barely survived an onslaught. The wounds she took should have inhibited her more. There should've been no comeback, none at all.
...she'd survived longer than she should've in general. Ambushes that should've killed her had been barely avoided.
Sixth sense.
The buzzing of the swarm had been so constant... when had this buzzing started?
She could feel it coming. The red fog was burning brighter than ever. No fanfare. This wasn't the emergence of a king to the field of battle - this was a simple expulsion. The general came last because he was at the back of the line. They'd torn apart so many... if the mutants had been more cunning, less driven by insane, pointless priorities...
This siege rested on the edge of a razor. Could still all be lost. Even with the mutants driven to insanity, their mass remained. Only so much could be burned. If all the soldiers here died, if the bunkers were undefended, if the intelligence resumed some kind of normal control of its troops... that was it.
They'd been intensely lucky, and they were still a hairs-breadth from losing it all.
Tanner gripped her axe, and swung it up on muscles she knew hadn't been this strong before. Even her injured arm was feeling better than it ought to. Much, much better.
She was becoming like them.
Her dulled mind barely processed the fact as the buzzing grew louder and louder. She was contaminated. She was mutating. Becoming like the General. Lantha. Kralana. The red-haired girl in the cell. The poison was in her.
Somehow... somehow that was good. Right?
Not sure how long she wanted her life to be after this. She'd survive to see the end, survive to see peace... in a best case, she'd live just long enough to see her work yield fruit, then vanish into madness before those fruit began to spoil.
That wasn't so bad.
Was it?
The buzzing increased.
It was coming.
The burning stars were all in the right places. The constellations of meat had formed up.
Her little priesthood stood behind her, red-drenched and silver-stained.
And she waited.