After opening up the shop, Magellani rushed up a set of stairs that led into a compartmental loft. Tasìa paused for a moment. She listened for the lion and its prey to which she heard nothing.

No screams?

Did that mean he was already dead? Or, perhaps passed out from shock. The beast may be guarding it's acquired habitat before it feasted.

Many predators did that but Tasìa knew next to nothing about the habits of tigers.

She looked up to continue following. Tasìa was forced to step up her pace at Magellani's waving insistence.

"After I find what you need, I'll give emergency services a call. If your friend can be saved, he's probably bleeding out."

Magellani perked his lips in a frown.

"Something I said? You look startled."

Tasìa shook her head, vigorously.

"No. Self revelation. Surprised at myself, how it would never occur to me to call EMS."

Magellani continued to give his rationale.

"He'll likely need blood. Phase beast are bred to be obedient shit-for-brains with no mental capacity to even navigate a rat maze, still though, they retain some tiger instincts. Especially, the most cruel ones. Maiming and bleeding out their prey before consumption is still basic to these genetic abominations."

Tasìa smiled, uncomfortably. A lump set in her throat for a moment before she reminded herself that she wasn't a genetic abomination, but was kept alive by a prenatal correction of birth defects. Her phenotype was set in stone by her parents not by bio-engineers.

"No need to explain. I understand."

She didn't play it, her discomfort, off as well as she would have liked. Magellani was intrigued by her reaction, but let it go. He still had much to explain before she could confront the tiger.

"If you need to head out the back and split after you kill the beast, I'll understand. I didn't set my shop up here because my clientele tend to be the docile sort."

Tasìa nodded, affirmatively.

"With that out of the way, I promised you a big fucking gun. Meet Il Diavolo Artico. The Artic Devil."

She was surprised when Magellani brought out a small but stocky on its outer sides carbine. The body was a splendid poly-carbon mesh cast in an aesthetically appealing jaggedness that would comport well inside her forearm.

The barrel, however, was merely eight inches in length. Barely larger than a standard Wild West hand cannon.

The diameter of the barrel interior was what impressed her.

"What is it chambered for?"

"13.2 mm slug. Slightly larger than a standard .50 caliber round."

He handed her a slug; a hollow point with a double set of talons engraved inside its head.

"Careful with your thumb on the interior of that. Its bladed. The double talon head chews better through the kind of materials used to make armored vehicles both durable and light weight.

"Materials, like the flesh of a phase beast which is nothing more than an engineered machine crafted through genetics."

She got the impression Magellani had a personal disdain for the beast, and how they came to be.

Tasìa squinched her nose.

"Where is the full jacket for the round?"

He laughed with a coughing wheeze.

"Haven't figured it out, yet? The gun is not made for standard chemically based explosive ballistics."

She noticed the forward grip had extra functionality built into it. There was a blue LED readout.

It read: 38000psi Max. Now At 100%

Set refill at 85%. 32 pellets remaining.

"An air gun?"

"Yes. My lady. At less than half the weight and length of a Barret. Yet, as you see, the kinetic potential is nearly the same."

She gave him a skeptical, jaundice eye.

"I like airguns, but for killing anything larger than a jack rabbit ..."

He seemed to take pleasure in countering her assumption.

"I would not send you out to fight that dread beast with a small game gun. The Artic Devil would make havoc of any living thing. You see the body that comprises the forward grip? It is a distributor for CO2 pellets. It loads one each into the duel gas chambers anytime the pounds per square inch, psi, drops below eighty-five percent for instantaneous thermo-expansion. Approximately, every eight shots. Very pressure efficient.

"Surely, you can see the advantages of the design. Since the round is a simple bullet slug with no jacket, we can store forty-two rounds in the revolving magazine."

A great roar of a noise came up from below the floor. It was followed by a taunting rumble.

Tasìa turned her head to listen. Was it aware that she was there?

It did not continue. Perhaps it was just expressing its boredom as it waited for her.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Tasìa turned back to the field researcher and gun smith.

She could go back and forth for days on end with Magellani, but, as the phase beast just now reminded her, that was not why she was there.

She took the weapon off of his hands after Magellani prepped it with a full clip emptied into its fixed magazine.

"I'm sold. Now, I need to get going."

"If you survive, Ms. del Alma-Gris, consider this gun a gift from me. I owe Kutuzov many favors. He is a great and greatly misunderstood man."

Tasìa was taken aback. Her guise fooled him not in the least.

"To be honest, I had guessed from the start that you were an agent of special means but when I saw your discomfort when I cursed the beasts' genetic disposition, I knew for certain. I apologize for that. But it made me realize why your face looked so familiar to me."

Something caught her eye. She should have noticed it when she met him, but, caught up in the drama of the moment, she did not.

Magellani wore a necklace with a set of Dürer styled praying hands that concealed an all-seeing eye. He was Anewed.

He likely even knew her father. As much as she needed to question him, the suggestion behind that phrase 'agent of special means' caught her ear but there was no time left.

Tasia clasped his shoulders for a quick embrace and kissed him on the cheek before jaunting back down the stairs in a mad sprint.

When Tasìa dropped down into the basement, she wasn't sure what to expect. Two human shaped placards stood to her left.

It was the test fire range. The floor was smeared in blood patterned in rounded motions as if the beast used Petro's bleeding body as a mop or paintbrush.

Done so, as if designed to galvanize her with its macabre aesthetic.

Another placard stood approximately five yards in front of her. She needed to test the gun. Tasìa crouched to her knee, shouldered the Artic Devil, and fired.

The placard no longer existed.

Oh, shit! This is definitely the way to go.

Deeper into the basement, the beast waited patiently for her while it churred. A deeply voiced chht-chht-chht sound unique to tigers.

Was Petro still alive?

At a side entrance, the door was obliterated. Wood, metal and glass twisted around one another in a most unnatural manner.

She tried peering down the length of the hallway behind the doorway, but a ceiling light had been smashed-in.

Most of the corridor was concealed in shadow.

Deliberately smashed for a tactical advantage against me?

In the center of the hallway, just before light gave way to shadow, a heavily mauled arm lay on the polished wooden floor.

There was very little blood, either beneath it, or surrounding it. By the time the tiger ripped the arm off, Petro was pretty much drained out of blood.

It was placed there, deliberately, as a trap. The phase-beast, as Magellani put it, and she could so testify, was a shit-for-brains. It could not have come up with this set up that she was walking into on its own.

She wasn't going to give in to the terror the spooks aimed to instill in her. She was unbreakable, so Tasìa laughed, uproariously.

"Hey Tabby, you are just a regular draw-n-quarter execution machine aren't you? I guess I'll have to hunt down your masters one after the other once I am done fucking you up, eh?"

The churring stopped, abruptly.

"Yes. I know you can hear me, Fodor. I understand your vendetta against Petro. But going against me? You have got to be one dumbass motherfucker to give me a reason to hunt you down."

The spooks. What happened to cause the escalation of their intentions? They went from chasing her away with hornets, albeit potentially lethal ones, to trying to isolate and kill her.

Perhaps, now that they have seen her in action, they know how substantial of a threat she was to their operation if they stood between her and her goal.

Or, perhaps the mugging she pulled off got them super-annoyed with her.

It happens. People have the tendency to take that shit personally.

Tasìa took a moment to press her fingers against the floor and she felt for vibrations. A slight rhythmic pattern became apparent as it made her thumb twitch. She phased into her meditative state and focused on the twitch.

The source of the twitch revealed itself.

The beast held near stationary in one place, but it rocked back and forth, shifting on its paws.

The densely heavy beast could not help but make its presence known when she practiced the ancient scout technique of her indigenous grandfather.

It stood, in its chameleon form, just behind the severed arm.

There was no sign of Petro in the vibrations that she felt move up her hand. Machinery and beast was all that she could discern.

She could aim the Artic Devil through the door now and she would most likely hit the beast, but if Petro was still alive, a wild off-kilter high caliber bullet anywhere within the potential ricochet spray was too high of a risk to take.

He's dead. The only thing you are accomplishing by not spraying the damn thing with bullets is putting yourself at grave risk.

Still, she could not confirm that Petro was either living or dead. She needed to lure the tiger away from his body that it hid somewhere further down the dark corridor before using a gun of that high caliber.

The bullet would not stop until it smacked into a few feet of concrete.

If there was even a quanta of a chance he still lived.

She stepped inside the door. A shadow on the wall six feet to her left seemed oddly wavy. She only noticed it, however, because she expected it.

"What's it gonna be, boy?"

The waves along the shadow lengthened. It was stretching its vertebrae just before a pounce.

Tasìa clinched her gut and threw herself upward in a vertical jump that allowed her legs to kick towards the ceiling. Her free hand and the inside of her knees gripped the ceiling light supports where she clung for a moment.

In her heightened sensory condition, the paws of the beast sounded like the thudding of the hooves of a clydesdale when it attempted to overrun the space she had just inhabited.

Now, it could not stop its momentum before it hit against the shredded door, and it found itself twisting in knots out in the field test shooting range.

Tasìa dropped down as the beast turned back around to face her. Before she had her feet planted on the floor she had three shots lined up.

One shot for each eye-shaped tattoo on its striped forehead, and then dead center for the third shot in between. Once her feet planted down, she executed the plan

The beast became a dense spray of red mist that hosed down the floor and wall behind it in minuscule chunks of meat and bone. It was no more.

Tasìa found the tiny flash-light she kept in her purse. She walked up the corridor, passed two sets of closed doors. At the end of the corridor, she found Petro's limpéd corpse.

As she rolled it over, the head nearly separated from the body. The tiger had bit into the side of his neck and face. An ear was torn off in fierce shreds.

The blood along that ghastly wound had already congealed. There was nothing she could have done. Even if she understood perfectly what was occurring after the tiger disappeared and she charged through the shop with her little .22 revolver, it would not have made a difference.

The tiger gave Petro the coup de gras as soon as it got out of her reach.

Even still, as she thoroughly processed that she was not at fault, tears swelled in her eyes. Guilt riddled her now blubbery lips.

"Sorry. I failed you, Petro. I'll never know how we would have gotten along in normal circumstances, but in the end, you were my asshole buddy."

She heard sirens blaring away near by.

"I have to get going. So long."

She looked back at Petro for one last glance, and he had one last thing to tell her in turn. The bloodied pulp that remained of the trigger finger she shot-off pointed at a key set attached to a belt loop on his pants.

She flashed the light on it. Two keys held on a chain with an emblem tag attached. The emblem was silver trimmed and platinum white in its background coloration.

A silhouette of a motorcycle with the words: FTR 1200 Big Indian emblazoned on it.

The same bike that caught her fancy when she left the bar. There were many pretty bikes lined-up that evening. Why did that one strike her so? Perhaps, her subconscious mind noticed the keychain on Petro's belt when she robbed him and the other spooks.

That use to be the kind of detail she noticed readily not so long ago before the brain fog of the Manifest transition nearly consumed her mind.

She assumed she was back to normal after the LSD treatment, but clearly she wasn't one hundred percent in her right mental faculties.

Feet treaded in the shop above her. Voices echoed, as well. Tasìa snatched the keys and retreated into the darkness to find a way out of the building.