Throwing away all caution, you leap to the side with abandon as the Chimera flings a powerful Telekinetic wave at you. The wave smashes into the rest of the storefront and utterly crumples the front side’s framework. The relatively fragile front collapses inward, causing what’s left of the roof to cave in. Everything inside becomes buried with steel and concrete within seconds, and dust blooms out and billows into the air as a result.
Thankfully, the garage portion stays standing for the most part, thanks to its sturdier concrete walls. Only the wall adjacent to the storefront collapses partially.
You hope your stuff is safe.
Not that you have much time to linger on that - you quickly pick yourself up off the ground and run to the side, away from the service station. You go around the Chimera in a half-circle, hoping to shift her focus away from Noir, or the rest of the service station. The last thing you want is for another of her Telekinetic waves to take away everything you’ve got left in the world.
Your heart pumps madly in your chest as your fear and anxiety and excitement and anger and worry all sweep through you at the same time. But for some reason, this doesn’t hamper you in the slightest. You subconsciously take a page from the Chimera herself, and focus yourself into a more heightened state through your need to survive.
Though your psionic energies swell as a result, you hardly notice.
Instead, your thoughts turn to the Chimera’s Surge, how she can turn it inside out and backwards in order to Devour you. You wonder about it for about a fraction of a second before you realize that you can do it, too.
In fact, you did it some time ago without really realizing it, when you and the Watch faced off against those Crazed. You turned your Telepathy into an Interrupt and stopped them in their tracks. More than that, you often do the same with your Scan - you invert it into a Cloak to hide your psionic presence.
And you recall just how easy activating those powers are to actually do. It simply didn’t occur to you that they’re basically the same pattern of energy, only inverted. At least, until now. You’re certain you can do it again, but not through your Surge or Scan or Telepathy.
No, you’re going to Sever the Chimera’s Network.
You stop running and turn to face the Chimera, who has begun to advance on you. Her steps are aggressive and heavy and deliberate, while her energies lash out hungrily in your direction. But her wild energies and her predatory disposition hardly fazes you. You’re simply far too focused on concentrating, and on calling up the energies of your Network.
Those energies swirl around you protectively, even as you shift and turn and invert them purposefully. Though your connection to Noir ends, you end up with a mass of Sever energy at your disposal. They swirl around you with devastating potency, more than enough for the Chimera to sense your intent.
You see her stop in her tracks, hesitant to continue advancing. Simply, your energies are a clear threat to her, even if she doesn’t fully understand your intent. A twinge of fear runs through her, causing her to take a half step back as a result. You feel her immediately lift up a Telepathic shield to protect her, followed by a continual channeling to strengthen and reinforce it.
But you’re ready for her. Instead of flinging the amassed Sever at her in its pure, raw form, you emit numerous Surges at her. You focus each one in her direction, to ensure that she takes the majority of the energies, to ensure that you eradicate her defenses and unbalance her powers.
More than that, you stack the Surges onto each other, and fling them at her one after the other after the other in quick succession. They drum at her so intensely that her aura is pushed aside over and over, threatening to just about extinguish it.
She screams as she struggles against your barrage, even as her Telepathic shield cracks further and is chipped away with every strike of your relentless Surges. Just as the shield begins to crumble, you inject your Sever into your powers with decisive precision. They assault the Chimera in between each of the Surges, and dig into her defenses with ease. Your Sever slips through between the cracks, digs deep into her aura, and assaults her directly..
Your Sever is quick, efficient, and to the point. The energies latch themselves to the Chimera’s Network through its Thread, and take over the links between the splinters. Once they have full purview of the Network and all its connections, Sever activates and utterly annihilates the Network itself - the two opposing energies quickly negate each other and vanish with an echoing psionic SNAP.
The Chimera dies almost immediately and painlessly. With all of her splinters separated from each other, her energies dissipate without much of a fight. Each of the splinters once again becomes benign and relatively harmless as their individual psionic auras deplete.
They all drift away from each other, now completely their own individual minds, unable to link themselves back together. Your Sever has completely eradicated their ability to form a Network, thankfully. You watch as they all fade out and dissipate into the ether, some faster than others, and never to be seen again. You realize that each of them simply don’t have the energies to sustain themselves, that they need each other to survive.
It’s like separating the brain’s ability to breathe in from its ability to breathe out. No way could they function without the other.
Another part of you realizes that these might be the remnants of other psions like yourself. Ones who couldn’t defend themselves against the Chimera’s Devour. Probably the reason why they could just barely get along - they actually might have been different people at some point or another. Or at the very least, their psyches.
The Chimera’s body simply stumbles a step or two, then falls right on her face. She twitches as the last of her splinters drift, then stops completely once they all vanish.
You can’t sense any of its psionic energies any longer, nor any lingering hunger. Whatever tension that filled the air is no more, and you find you’re able to relax your shoulders again. The Chimera’s suffocating presence has all but vanished, and the only thing that remains is your memory of it.
Your hands shake slightly as your adrenaline begins to fade and as your psionic energies scale down. You take a lungful of air, which somehow still feels fresh despite the air being warm. You stand there for what seems like an short eternity, as you ponder the Chimera’s ultimate fate.
Noir pads over to you, her steps shaky and unsteady. You notice that she has a slight limp, and you immediately go and tend to her.
Stolen story; please report.
“You okay?” you ask.
I think so, yeah, she replies. Still kinda achy… but I’ll live.
“Let’s take a good look at you.”
I’m alright, just shaken up a bit. I poured everything I had into my Temperance, soaked up that blow.
“I saw, I saw. Still, lay down so I can check you over.”
Fine.
Noir lays down on the ground, then rolls slowly onto her side. She psionically groans as she does so, clearly in some kind of pain.
With a sigh, you run your hands on her body, searching for any broken bones. Though you’re applying light pressure, she winces here and there as you pass over her chest and ribs. She certainly is bruised, maybe some light internal bleeding. Otherwise, you don’t feel anything broken. Then again, you’re not exactly a veterinarian. You’re no expert, and you only have basic medical knowledge.
You exhale with slight exasperation on realizing that there isn’t anyone out here who could even help. All you can do is hope that Noir hasn’t been seriously hurt, and that she can heal naturally.
Quit worrying about me so much, Noir tells you. I’m tougher than I look, alright?
She clambers back onto her four feet - carefully, and with another pained groan. She does seem to be alright, as far you can tell. You even Scan her to see if she’s hiding any pain, but it becomes clear that she isn’t.
She very audibly and psychically telegraphs every spike of pain she experiences, but seems to recover as time goes on.
“We need to be a whole lot more careful from now on,” you say after your worries ebb slightly. “Either of us could have died then, and I think we’re kinda lucky we made it out alive.”
Oh, I definitely agree. That coulda gone waaaay worse. And also, we gotta practice breaking you outta your nightmare. At least once a day.
A part of you immediately hesitates. Of course you don’t want to end your dream, your only remaining connection to Kaja. You don’t want to lose that.
But then a stronger part of you refutes yourself. The entire reason why you’re here in the first place, why you’ve left the Settlement, why you’re going westward - it’s to rid yourself of this dream. It’s making you insane, more and more as time goes on.
You glance over at the Chimer’s corpse, suddenly acutely aware of your own budding splinters.
“Yeah,” you say after a moment. “Definitely once a day. I mean, I hate having my sleep interrupted for any reason. But I can’t sleep as deeply as I always have, can I? Not if I don’t wanna get eaten while dreaming. I mean, imagine if we went up against a strong Chimera - one that wasn’t starving.”
The two of you then walk over to the Chimera and roll her over on her back, curious as to her corpse’s state.
Shock fills you as you look at her body - it’s almost nothing like how it looked before. Her skin hangs loosely on thin bones, and whatever luster and color has long since faded away. As though it has been years since blood pumped in her veins. Her eyes have sunk down into their sockets and blackened to a point where you can’t even recognize them any longer.
In all, her whole body seems somewhat desiccated, as though she has been dead for a long time.
“I guess you were right after all,” you tell Noir.
But she flings a quizzical thought in your direction, unsure what you’re referring to.
“She’s got… well, she had enough Temperance to keep her body alive for a long damn time. Way longer than either of us could do, anyway.”
Ohhh! Yeah, I guess. I wonder how much that took her to do… I mean, it’s taking me a whole lot just to stitch myself back together right this moment.
The two of you continue to look at the corpse, studying it while also coming to terms with what exactly that level of power portends. If she could subsist on just psionic energy for months or years, then… could you? Could anyone?
You want to ask and discuss and see if it’s possible. And you get a sense that Noir also wants to explore the idea. You open your mouth to say something, but decide against it.
No part of you wants to entertain the idea of having to siphon psionic energy from other people, just to keep yourself alive. It feels like… cannibalism.
The very idea disgusts you.
I feel like we oughta be celebrating, thinks Noir. I mean, we did just beat this… this… what did you call it again?
“Chimera.”
Right. This Chimera, whatever that is.
“It’s a mythological beast thing. From Greece, I think? Has the body of a lion, with a goat’s head on its back, and a tail but with a snake’s head on it. I recall that it breathes fire, or something like that. I don’t really remember. Point is that it’s got a lot of different heads.”
Okay, okay. I get it. My point is we beat this thing, which was waaay stronger than us. We should be celebrating. Instead we’re both kinda, I dunno, mopey.
“Well, what do you want? Want me to twirl my hands in the air, whoop out loud?”
Your hand makes lazy circular motions in the air in mock celebration.
“I don’t really have it in me,” you continue. “It didn’t feel good killing her. She was just trying to get by, like us. In the end, she was starving and needed to eat. ”
She tried to eat you.
“Just like you eat whatever it is you eat. Mice or whatever’s out there.”
That’s not the same.
“You’re right, in a way. We’re the ones that stumbled into her hunting grounds. It’s not like she came after us from the beginning. Not like when we go from place to place, and you hunt whatever’s living out there. We practically threw ourselves onto her dinner plate.”
The idea sinks down into both of you and simmers slowly deep inside. You feel Noir try to resist it, but she eventually relaxes. A solemnity exudes from her shortly after.
“Anyway, we did something good, even if it doesn’t feel good,” you say. “I mean, she would’ve kept on devouring psions, right? And we stopped her.”
We don’t know if she killed anyone, though, Noir contends. I mean, you said it yourself: no bodies. No blood.
Noir’s right, of course. You’ve also come to the conclusion that anyone who has come through here had their psionic energy ripped from them. But it didn’t likely kill them. They most likely continued on, albeit powerless.
Then again, in a world like this, how long could the powerless survive? Especially if they’re on their own.
How long could you possibly survive without any powers at all?
You suppose it doesn’t matter what the answer is. Maybe some died, maybe some still live. Either way, all you know is that you feel sad. You don’t feel any joy from having killed the Chimera, even though it would have done the same to you without a second thought.
Instead, you feel regret at having to destroy something that didn’t need to be destroyed.
And it’s possible that the Chimera also felt that regret, many times. Maybe her angry splinter was that way because of that regret, because she couldn’t help but destroy things that didn’t need to be destroyed. Maybe what you took was an antagonistic side of her might have actually been her empathetic side trying her best to save you. The rest of her splinters were only all too eager to have you stay, after all.
Silence settles in as your moroseness lingers.
I’ll dig up a little trench in the soil over there with my TK claws, Noir thinks after a few moments. We oughta bury her in it after. Can’t leave her out here like this.
You nod, unable to agree more.