Mylena crept swiftly through the winding manmade passageways, making sure to keep her head below the lip of the trench. It was oh, so tempting to leap from the cramped space and make a mad dash into the vast expanse of battered land between the warring factions. Her heart raced at the thought. Mylena paused every once in a while to sniff the air; the great influx of oxygen rejuvenated her, and with it, the smells of smoke and spent Cordite, the pungent odor of burning wood, and the sweet, alluring smell of spilled blood. Try as she might, though, she couldn’t pick up the scent of any actual soldiers. Alive ones, that is. Plenty of cadavers littered the trenches and the areas surrounding them. Most of them were missing parts—some arms, some legs; feet, hands, heads…

For the first time in what could have been centuries, Mylena could see for herself the enemy which she’d cowered from for so long. She crouched beside a corpse she found slumped against a wall. Her snout prodded the side of his face, leaving a small wet mark where her nose met his soot-covered cheek. No response. The dead soldier looked just as if he were simply napping, propped up against the charred timber. His thick, curly brown hair hung in clumps over his eyes, plastered with mud.

He is dead , Mylena thought. Yet, he looks so peaceful.

She dug one of her claws down his cheek, drawing a line of dark crimson. If the soldier was alive, he would have cried out in pain, but he remained still, serenely in an eternal slumber.

Mylena moved on from this particular corpse, having found it too beautiful to deface by eating it. She knew that the birds of the sky and the worms of the ground would coalesce in short order to bring the young man back to the Earth whence he came, but something in her was happy that she’d at least left her mark. After all, there were better meals to be had. Less… boney ones.

Continuing her stroll through the abandoned trench, Mylena came closer and closer to the prize she’d come here for. Some hundred meters away lay a group of young soldiers, each excitedly chattering amongst themselves about the battle that had largely concluded by then. She heard their voices in her mind, echoing about like an empty chamber. Their voices grew louder and louder, more and more forceful, until the clamor melted down into a simple command: hunt them down.

Mylena was a victim of the instincts she’d been imbued with. As long as she lived, they were always in the back of her mind, prodding at her very neurons with every thought.

Hunt them, Mylena. End their miserable lives so that you could deliver them to a better place. You are superior, you have no challenger. Hunt them. Hunt them. HUNT THEM.

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

Unable to contain the urge any longer, Mylena bounded forth, catching the soldiers completely unawares. She landed on one of them—gripping both his arms—driving him back into the mud. A sickening crack of bone rang out as both appendages were torn violently from their sockets. He wailed obscenities in his native tongue, all the while his compatriots froze where they stood.

Eat him, Mylena. Claim your reward. You are deserving of this. Her inner thoughts declared.

She snarled and her tail wagged wildly behind her, sweeping the muddy floor of the trench. The soldier continued his incessant screaming, made worse by Mylena’s slow tugging of his agonized arms. Then, with an even harder pull, his arms completely sloughed away and the rest of him sank to the floor. The screaming grew louder; he pleaded with her. His torso lay in a spreading pool of his own blood—it mixed with the mud, it ran in little streams into the trough created by the soldier’s falling body. His screams were blood curdling. Finally, Mylena rested her foot on the back of his head and leaned into it with all her weight, crushing the man’s skull completely. His arms lay dangling from her grasp; she took a bite out of one, savouring the sweet and salty taste.

The remaining soldiers looked on in horror, their weapons drawn. The bayoneted tips of their rifles jutted humorously into Mylena’s face, almost as if they were jesters daring her to attack. She could almost hear the soldiers’ ghoulish laughter, egging her on. The adrenaline rush within her body still hadn’t subsided; she could practically hear her heartbeat and feel the blood pump through her veins and arteries. It clouded her mind, it fogged her vision. Everything went dark, save for the four helmeted silhouettes before her.

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It wasn’t very long before five brutalized corpses lay on the ground, stuck in the agonied positions they’d been in when they finally succumbed. Mylena sat on a nearby firestep, licking clean the fractured bone of what was once an arm. Scraps of cloth hung from the bone; Mylena simply pushed these aside and neatly did away with the inedible portions.

The bombardment started up again as she sat here, and with the falling shells came Mylena’s time to move on. It wouldn’t be too long before the deadly missiles would begin to fall into the trench in which Mylena hunkered down, and not even her robust body could survive such a concussion. Before she left, however, Mylena stooped over one of the bodies. Its head had largely survived her vicious assault unscathed, but on it—hanging askew—sat a peculiar thing. It was some sort of head covering, made of a thick type of metal. Its top was shaped like a bowl, and as it sloped downward toward the back of the head, it flared out and curved around to form some sort of lip, jutting out from the forehead. Mylena took it in her clawed hands, undoing the strap that attached it to the soldier’s head. She looked it over, sniffing it just in case.

Then, she put it on her head. It fit awkwardly. Her ears no longer had the space to move, being pressed down against her head. The securing strap wasn’t quite long enough to fit around her snout, but otherwise, it balanced nearly perfectly. She managed to form the remnants of a smile before slinking away, leaving the trench—and the bodies—to be pounded to dust by the incoming barrage.