“What does this place make anyway?” Sadea said, as she walked down yet another endless hallway lined with doors. She’d pushed open a few, just out of curiosity, but all she’d seen were rows of assembly lines and stacks of unidentifiable machinery, all now silent. Some of the rooms actually contained the mauled corpses of hapless workers, the permacrete walls stained with dried blood and splattered viscera.
The psychic trail the creature had left behind was now useless. Sadea could sense its malevolence everywhere, haunting every square inch of the building and lurking in every pool of shadows cast by the flickering amber radiance of poorly maintained wall lamps, but she couldn’t pinpoint the creature’s location. Not that it really concerned her. She’d see it when she saw it, and then she would kill it.
There was another psychic presence that interested her. It laid down the next hallway, past a right turn, up a wobbly steel stairwell, and… behind double steel doors. She rapped on a door with her knuckles.
“Hello? I know you lot are still alive there,” she called, her voice echoing eerily down the ceramic, steel, and permacrete innards of the manufactory. “Open up!”
Frantic whispers arose from the other side of the doors, muffled to the point of intelligibility. Eventually, a wavering voice arose from the tumult of shushed voices.
“Who… who is it? Help from the authorities?” The voice was unmistakably female, and it carried with it depths of exhaustion, starvation, and fear.
“Yes. I’m a freelancer. Saw the bounty notice at the town hall. So I’m here,” Sadea replied. “Now, will you open up?”
Subdued cheering arose from the other side of the doors. The woman spoke again. “Thank God you’re here. We’ve got a working tap here, but no food at all.”
“Let me guess, you lot ran from whatever attacked the manufactory and locked yourself inside here, hoping and waiting for help to arrive.”
“That’s right. My name is Leal, fourth shift forewoman. Thank you, Great Lady, for slaying the beast.”
“Oh, it isn’t dead. I haven’t found it yet.” Sadea yawned. “Now, are you going to open up, or not?”
“You… you haven’t killed it yet? But…”
“Well, I’m going to. Now, come on. Open the doors.”
Frantic whispers arose again, and when they died down, Leal’s reply was adamant. “We’re not opening the doors. That thing is still out there!”
“So am I! Open up!”
“No! Are you insane? I just told you why we can’t open the doors. As long as they stay shut, it’s not getting in here.”
“And you’re so sure about that?” Sadea growled. “This is a manufactory, ridden with vents and maintenance tunnels, and you geniuses have chosen the one room where the only entrance is a set of steel doors.”
“Well… I…”
“And I, hunting whatever this thing is, want the doors open simply so that you peons can be underfoot, useless, and in my way. There’s absolutely no possibility I would want in because the thing I’m hunting isn’t there already. Does that sound right?”
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“Uh…”
“And there’s simply no way, utterly unthinkable, that you lot have been left alone for the time being by the creature while it killed everyone outside because you’ve all corralled yourselves in a figurative and hopefully not literal slaughter-pen?”
“But…”
“Open the doors, Leal.” Sadea took her war-staff in both hands. “Or I will.”
“But…”
Sudden screams arose from behind the doors. A strange, unworldly roar arose, the likes of which Sadea had never heard before and loud enough to rattle hinged steel and dirty floor tiles. Then there was the unmistakable sound of tearing flesh and breaking bone, accompanied by more screams striving toward a crescendo.
Sadea sighed. The figurative slaughter-pen had now become quite literal. “Open up, you moron, so I can kill the damned thing before it kills all of you!”
Her only reply was a chorus of further screaming, what seemed like bleating and hissing, and more roars.
“Goddamn it.” She looked closely at the doors. They were plate steel, nearly an inch thick, and they were probably reinforced by bolts on the other side. She didn’t have nearly enough telekinetic ability to smash her way through. She could try cutting her way through with plasmic lightning, but everyone on the other side would be dead by the time she was done. That left her only one option, which she hated.
“Ugh. This is going to feel bad.” Sadea clutched her scarf and let the lightning within her soul course through its copper embroidery. The fine metal threads within the fabric blazed with cobalt light. The radiance then extended beyond the bounds of its physical vessel, forming a luminescent web about her body.
“The things I do for money,” she muttered, before the web of light wrapped itself around her, turning her flesh, blood, and bone into pure crackling lightning. It hurt on a level far beyond the physical. Her very soul burned with agony, and she would have been shrieking from the pain if she still had vocal cords.
Frantically, Sadea molded her lightning form into an incandescent bolt and hurled it at the door. She blazed through its molecules, riding its electron stream until she emerged on the other side. There, she dismissed her scarf’s enchantment, allowing her body to resume its corporeality. As her bootheels clicked onto the ceramic floor tiles, she wanted nothing more than to collapse into a sobbing, anguished heap, but instead, she gritted her teeth and tightened her grasp on her war-staff.
The Catechism of Discipline fell into its accustomed cadences within her mind, and with every mentally recited word, the pain receded further from her awareness.
Thanks, Doctor Horatius. Sadea blew a silent, mental kiss to the memory of the beloved doctor who’d taught her everything: how to read and write, how to be light on her feet and quick with her wits, how to seize the Ethereal Tides and bend them to the will of what had once been a very young, very frightened little girl.
And most importantly, how to slay the enemies of mankind.
Psychic lightning blazed into existence around the head of her war-staff, casting the entire room in its cobalt radiance. And she saw the beast for the first time, as it rooted around in the spilled innards of a screaming manufactory worker.
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Two of its three heads reared up and returned her gaze. The first was serpentine, diamond-shaped, gray-green scales framing yellow eyes and a purple forked tongue, which preceded nightmarish hissing. Further back, jutting from the beast’s rear, was a goat’s head, black-wooled with burning red eyes, bleating with idiotic anger.
The closest of its heads, right where a quadruped beast would have one, raised its whiskered muzzle from the ruins of its latest victim’s abdominal cavity. It was leonine, brown-maned, green eyes that spoke of unnatural cunning, with razor-sharp fangs.
Its forepaws were those of a giant feline’s complete with claws, while its hind-legs were hoofed and wooly. Its entire body was an undulating coil of green-scaled muscle, thrice as long as a full-grown man was tall, and twice as thick.
Chimera. Read about this in Horatius’s bestiary, but never did actually expect to run into one. Sadea’s gaze flickered to an open maintenance vent in the ceiling. It was just large enough for the beast to have squeezed through.
All around, the manufactory workers were shrieking and scattering from the chimera. Several of them were already dead, slashed open by what could only have been sweeping blows from the beast’s massive claws. There were several corpses bereft of open wounds, though. Instead, they were twisted into unnatural shapes, and their skin carried a deep, grayish pallor that bore no resemblance to the paling brought upon by death.