To be accurate, the explosion was something April was only able to later surmise. In the present moment, she was aware only of a startling flash of light from the direction of the stairs, preceding a bodying wham of a shock wave hitting her hard across the chest. Shards of glass rained down across the landing, breaking apart on the ground in a chorus of clattering shatter-sounds and crashes with an intensity that a bull in a china shop would have been jealous of.

One of the shards whizzed past her face, cutting a shallow gash in her cheek. She put one hand against the wound, unconsciously. Looking up at the source of the blast, she saw that there was now a neatly circular hole where the far-side wall of the stairwell had been.

She twisted in surprise, leaning back towards Kroakli. "What was that!? Another earthquake? A- one of those fucking lightning bolts? Or-"

"No, it was neither, not this time," it chittered, voice oddly clipped. "An attack! We are hunted!"

"Hunted!? Wh-"

Something flew through the hole and landed hard on the floor, clattering amid the strewn shards of glass. It looked like a small grey orb, slightly smaller than a football, with a dark black divot recessed into its surface. It rolled to a stop, the dark spot pointing towards April, and then, startlingly, sprouted four stubby metal legs, jumping up onto the curved limbs as they unfolded out of the smooth surface of the ball. It now looked like a very large, very round spider, adorned by a single eye. A burst of static came out of the thing like a radio tuning into a station, followed by a clamour of voices that, in under a second, had been culled down to just one, a harsh male voice that barked commands in her direction.

"Stand down, April! Back away from the creature, exit the building, and enter into our custody after it has been dealt with. Act calmly, cooperate and there may still be a case for leniency-"

The sound was interrupted, in turn, as Kroakli took two running steps forward on its fluid limbs and punted the thing back out of the hole.

"RUN!"

It grabbed April's arm with an elongated pseudo-arm, and half-pulled her off of her feet as it sprinted for the stairs. She let it pull her along, breaking into a sprint herself as best as she could. They reached the stairs and April relied on Kroakli to pull her into the turn, half jumping down the stairs two steps at a time. They reached the next landing and whirled about again to make the turn, Kroakli still leading the way, pulling her forward.

The creature was not going as fast as she knew it could, probably as a concession to her lesser agility, but even so there was a significant risk of tripping and falling as it pulled her to her limits. If she did not have its limb to steady herself, she would have face-planted onto the next landing. As it was, she stumbled over herself to keep up, panting raggedly, not even noticing the fresh blood dripping from her face where she had been cut.

Another blast hit the side of the building behind them, blowing a hole in the wall that only narrowly missed April as she trailed behind. The sharp kick of force in her back did make her stumble over, though, and Kroakli was forced to pause, sprouting another limb to catch her and set her upright, still moving forward all the while. April made haste to get her feet back under her and follow it.

"That thing- that thing knew my name!"

"It is the metal man!" screeched Kroakli, "he yearns for my death still!"

"Wh- Tavistre!?"

"Yes, and accompanied by others, too, all of similar form!"

"But why- why now?!"

"Recall the words that It spoke," Kroakli shouted in a half-retch while rounding another corner, "that It had placed a blockade, now sundered alongside this world's very bones. We intuit they hold most displeasure, April of the- too-slow-running-!, -at being stalled in their entry to this projective. Then afterward, in the finding of it shattered, too… pah!!"

April tried to speed up. "But why are they after me again!?"

Kroakli barked out a guttural, inhuman sound that might have been intended as a laugh. "Kauh-hark! Who else have they to blame, naive April?! We made flight from their clutches floating atop a river of their shed blood, and you upon it with us, the sole known source of this world's breaking!"

"Fuck!" gasped April, rounding a corner, and then, "r- river of blood? What-"

Kroakli stopped very abruptly, and April had the air knocked out of her as she ran straight into its body, the blue flesh inflating to cushion her impact and then set her down behind it before retracting again. After a second or so of wild disorientation she realised the reason why; they had rounded the landing of the fifth floor, and below them once again flowed the jagged line of the crack that had blocked their path earlier, stretching from wall to wall across the stairwell. It had faded slightly since their last crossing, but not enough that April wanted to risk ploughing straight through the intangible barrier.

It seemed like Kroakli had come to the same conclusion, slipping quickly through the gap between the stairs and the bottom edge of the obstruction. It flowed back up and into its upright shape on the other side.

"Quickly!"

April tried to flatten herself down on her stomach again, but quickly discovered that it was far more difficult to crawl down stairs on your belly, facing downwards, than it was to crawl up them. She flipped herself around and started an attempt at shimmying down backwards, peeking back over her shoulder, but before she was able to get very far another blast struck the wall just above her head. Her ears were set ringing as a cascade of plaster, glass, and chunks of displaced brick rained down around her like hailstones. Another circular crater had been excavated in the side of the building, and was now allowing a cold breeze blow through from the outside, tugging gently at the loose strands of April's hair.

Kroakli let out a discordant rasp of exasperation, then dived back down underneath the intangible crack, reinflating itself and yanking her to her feet. It looked up and down her body, giving her a once-over, then peered out of the hole in the side of the building, its pose calculating.

"Hold rigidly your extremities," it muttered.

"What-"

A tentacle burst explosively from Kroakli's chest, a stumpy pad of flesh a foot across unfurling at its tip before slamming into her own upper body, latching on hard with an adhesive grip. April wheezed from the blow, but before she had a chance to draw back in a breath, it had yanked both of their bodies together, reeling in the prehensile protrusion while folding its whole body around her. For a disorientating moment April saw only murky blue, felt the slightly warm stickiness of the creature's flesh against her skin, and then realised that she was suspended inside of it, fully enclosed with only a small bubble of air around her face to allow her to breathe. She had time to gasp in a single shallow breath before Kroakli jumped.

April's stomach flipped as they catapulted out of the building and entered into free-fall. Through the translucent blue haze, April had a sense of rushing outside motion as the out wall of the block of flats raced past them on their way down. She yelled out in alarm, but even as she did so she heard—almost felt—a wet sucking sound, the gel-like flesh around her shifting and dilating, and then she felt acceleration going in the opposite direction, their descent beginning to slow. She clenched her fingers tightly into the enclosing flesh-stuff, bracing herself as Kroakli had recommended.

When they hit the ground it was with a hard, juddering jolt, but between the cushioning of the full-body gel padding and whatever Kroakli had done to slow the fall, it failed to inflict any injury more severe than a sore jaw and perhaps a light headache. Kroakli cracked itself open like a hatching egg, disgorging April onto the ground outside of the building amid a spattering of thin, greasy slime that lingered for a second or two before flowing back into the creature's body. She flipped over, wiping off her face, just in time to watch the thin bungee cord-like tendrils of its own insides that it had attached to the building's outer cladding disengaging and being reeled back in.

"Trafis!", shouted someone incomprehensibly from somewhere behind them. The voice was amplified, as if coming through a megaphone.

April pushed herself to her knees, then fell forward again as another blast struck the building just behind where they had landed, the shockwave punching her across the back. Kroakli jerked her back to her feet as she attempted to stand for a second time, and then they were running, sprinting diagonally away from the side of the building and towards a cluster of parked cars in the complex's adjoining car park.

The rows of cars seemed comparatively untouched by the unfolding cataclysm that had struck the city, and so the dark red Subaru they dived behind for cover was unblemished. April hoped that meant that it was also at least slightly projectile-proof. They crouched down low behind it, April hoping the shadows of the sparsely streetlamp-lit car park would conceal them.

They held there in the darkness for a moment, listening to a hushed babble of voices from the direction from which the shots had presumably been fired. The voices paused for a moment, and then a single, more familiar voice called out, once again amplified as if by electronic means.

"April! Let's talk!"

It was Tavistre.

"Do not comply with these protestations!" hissed Kroakli, which had balled itself up beside her like a very sick armadillo. April hesitated a moment, then decided to ignore it for the time-being, sticking the top of her head out warily past the side of the car.

Tavistre was standing in the middle of the small plaza at the front of the building. The cluster of residents who had been standing there earlier had—quite wisely, given the flying projectiles and explosions—made themselves scarce. He was armoured once more, the bulky metal suit standing heavily, but poised, its prow-like chest plate jutting out in the direction of her hiding place. He had removed the helmet, though, and so she could make out his face in the dim light, surveying the intervening patch of rough concrete, coated with the scattered rubble and broken glass of prior impacts. Navique was perched upon his shoulder as usual, hanging sideways from the metal collar-plate of his suit with one delicate paw.

Behind him were four other people, all of them wearing similar suits. Two of them were holding large, blunt-nosed projectile launchers, their design similar in style to that of the gun April had previously seen Tavistre use against Kroakli. The other suited figures had their two-tiered helmets firmly sealed in place, though, whereas Tavistre himself was both unhelmeted and appeared unarmed. It seemed that he had deliberately come forward ahead of the group to negotiate.

"You're trying to kill me now!?" April shouted in his direction.

"Before anything, I am trying to kill the orgoane you have, once again, brought back here!" He shouted back to her, voice echoing across the empty space. "Although seeing as you don't seem to concern yourself with the collateral damage you are causing, I can hardly ask my colleagues not to take a hard line in kind!"

"None of this is my fault!" she yelled. The words sounded hollow even to her ears, even despite her knowing them to be broadly true.

"See, Tavistre!" chimed a male voice from the back row. It took April a few seconds before, with a jolt of recognition, she realised that it was Merinte. "She lies, and lies again, even to the point of absurdity. Look what has been done to this projective!"

"I thought you trusted me!" April aimed her words at Tavistre, ignoring the row of suited figures standing behind him.

"I thought I did too!" he spat, hotly. "I truly believed that you had no ill intent. But then your... pet, tears its way out of confinement, slaughtering dozens of soldiers and causing the death of a Committee Seat-"

Kroakli emitted a half-hiss, half popping growl. "We attacked because we were attacked first in turn, no more than this!"

"-and then! Believe me, when I first heard, I could scarcely believe! You return here, after all that we discussed, all the danger you knew that it represented, and look- look! Now you have caused the end of this world, April! This is runaway fissuring—it cannot be repaired! You have made your own home a dead world! Child, I hope you took with you enough memories of what you destroyed here today to do it justice! I hope it was worth it for you, April!"

"Fuck you!" April shouted, hoping that making a show of defiance would help her in win out internally against the sudden flurry of grief brought on by his words. "I didn't want this!"

"Surrender yourself now," he growled, ignoring her, "and your fate can be decided by fair trial!"

"Fuck that!" She half screamed the words, a tear dripping down from her face, "fuck you people, you never fucking listen-!"

"Come out, NOW! Let us deal with the creature, and be away from here before things devolve any further!"

"I'm not going anywhere with you, and I'm not letting you fucking kill Kroakli!"

Tavistre scoffed, the sound coming out as an ugly cough through his amplified microphone. "All this sentimentality for a killing machine! Have you truly lost your mind, April?!"

"Maybe," she thought to herself, "but now this killing machine contains all I have left of Michelle, and Morgan, too."

She spared the crouched mass of slime that was Kroakli a brief glance, then dived out of cover and threw herself into a sprint across the parking lot, the creature following at her heels as she weaved inbetween cars. There was a chorus of shouts from their pursuers as their fleeing bodies caught traces of the dim light while they ran.

Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that one of the other suited figures—could that one be Merinte? She couldn't tell—had brought their weapon back to bear, training it on them as Tavistre moved to reattach his helmet, Navique darting back up onto his head before it sealed. She saw a flash as the nozzle of the weapon ignited, and dived away to one side behind a car, but the suited figure had apparently been aiming at Kroakli instead of her; some kind of bright missile streaked across the car park directly towards the centre of its blue mass.

For its own part, Kroakli didn't dodge the projectile, but instead simply dilated out of its way. At the last moment it warped its body open and apart, the missile whizzing through the newly formed hole and striking a car a few dozen feet behind it. The car lit up brilliantly for a split second, enveloped by a dazzling white sphere which rapidly collapsed, leaving a cratered chassis of smoking metal and burnt plastics in its wake. A dozen car alarms started blaring out all at once, the neighbouring vehicles having been struck by the shock wave. Kroakli, having reconsolidated itself, slid in beside her behind the new vehicle, once again nestling into the shadows.

"I can't keep this up," April panted. "Any bright ideas for how we can get away this time?"

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"We could kill them?" it bubbled almost hopefully. "Or maim!—Sunder their flesh and break the heel tendons; then they cannot follow."

"That is- that is not a bright idea! That's the same idea you always have! What happened to being smarter than all your kind!?"

"The most prudent method is oft simple and direct, and thusly apt!" it hissed. "They struck first, tried to make prey of us, this would be defence in kind!"

April almost considered it for a moment, then shook her head. She hadn't quite gone that far off of the deep end yet, she was pretty sure. She didn't want Tavistre dead.

"No way."

Kroakli clicked in irritation. "Then what is our alternative, soft-marrowed April!"

April floundered for a moment, trying to think.

Kroakli burbled again. "Travel out, perhaps? Seize upon a focus and leave to another projective, yes?"

"I don't know if I can focus with- …run!"

Another projectile was soaring towards them across the plaza. April jumped out from behind the car, but the edge of the blast still caught her from behind. She fell hard onto the tarmac, skidding to a halt and crying out in pain. Luckily, the material of the black outfit given to her by the Committee seemed to be remarkably resistant to damage; the fabric didn't split or abrade from friction against the hard surface, sparing her skin the sandpaper treatment that her leg had been subjected to earlier in the week. It did somewhat knock the wind out of her, however.

She picked herself up and threw herself forward, diving in-between adjacent cars, hoping that the Committee squad would lose track of her. She rolled behind a battered grey two-person hatchback, then crawled forward into the cover a larger family car, hoping that she was out of sight.

"Yeah, I don't think Travelling is an option right now!" she hissed out in a frantic whisper that only barely surmounted the blaring car alarms they had left in their wake, "and besides, not only do we still have shit to do here, couldn't they just follow us? They can Travel too!"

"They are following us now, April Pearce, in case you somehow are not aware-"

"Save the fucking sarcasm for when people aren't trying to kill us, Kroakli!"

"Very well, krah, but we must still make fast the mechanism of our escape. If, that is, you have not changed your outlook on being made into a red paste by the friends of your Tavistre..."

"Shush-! I, okay, I have an idea, listen."

She whispered the new idea to Kroakli in hushed tones, the creature slithering along slug-like next to her as she crawled through the black shadows behind the row of cars. When she was done speaking it paused, grew itself a loosely-moulded head seemingly for the sole purpose of nodding at her, then flattened itself out once more, speeding off without a sound towards the back side of the building they had just dropped out of. April crouched down behind a particularly bulky car, waiting.

The volley of projectiles seemed to have paused for the moment, as she had moved out of sight. She heard the sound of raised voices, individual words unintelligible but carrying the impression of a brief debate followed by briskly barked orders. There was silence for another few seconds, and then she heard the clanking thud of metal footsteps against tarmac, growing louder as they drew closer. The footsteps stopped, suddenly, and then Tavistre's voice spoke up, cutting above the still shrieking car alarms.

"Are you done now, April?"

He sounded irate, and shockingly close, standing almost directly on the other side of the car. April froze for a second, wondering how the hell he'd managed to pick the one she was hiding behind out from the crowd.

"Has the creature gone? I am not detecting it, though it is skilled at slipping our sensors."

There was a soft beeping sound and he muttered something inaudible—presumably, April guessed, into an audio feed to his backup. She took that as her cue to move. Doing her best to remain quiet and concealed, she shuffled forwards on her belly, moving out from behind her current car until she was behind the next.

Something moved in the corner of her eye, catching her attention from beneath knotted mess of hanging tubing and chassis. She held her body rigid, twisting her head painfully to the side, and saw a pair of metal boots standing on the far side of the vehicle, slowly stepping along to keep pace with her.

"I know you're there. April."

April jumped to her feet and began to sprint.

There was a soft whine followed by two hard thuds, as if a jack hammer had struck stone. The car she had been hiding behind jerked, then was thrust aside like it weighed no more than a stray shopping cart, the powered metal suit pushing through under full torque as Tavistre broke out into a pursuing run, long loping strides thudding hard against the ground with each footfall. April darted between two other cars, but he pushed his way in-between those too, the metal armour shunting the two vehicles aside and leaving dents in the scratched paint. April yelped, switching directions again in an attempt to shake him off.

"Why did you have to come back here," he screamed at her, his voice venomous. "We didn't have to do this!"

"Tavistre," she gasped out, running full pelt for the next cluster of cars, "I didn't do this, but- but I can tell you- just stop!"

"Stop running and you can tell me anything you like, girl!" he spat back, whatever sensors were in his suit picking up her voice despite the background noise, "but I'm not making the same mistake twice!"

April tried to run around the hood of a car, but Tavistre, now virtually level with her, practically vaulted over it, his heavy gauntlet slapping a handprint-shaped dent into the sheet metal of its bonnet. April flinched back, trying to duck away, but he was too fast for her, a second metal hand flying out to seize her upper arm. It squeezed hard, too hard, almost biting into the flesh. April cried out.

"Enough games!" he shouted down at her. His helmet was on now, and it loomed over her, a smoothly blank mask of black glass. "Don't you realise what has happened here?! Billions will die, April!"

"Tavistre," she gasped, eyes watering from the pain, "the Sigmoid- it's dying. That's what... it's what's been causing all of this! It's- it's cutting its losses, killing off worlds one by one to prolong things, but... but it's gonna take us all with it eventually, Tavistre! People need to know what's coming!"

There were a few seconds of quiet before he spoke again, and when he did his voice was filled with disdain.

"Merinte was right about you," he spat, jerking hard at her arm to yank her out from between the cars. "You breathe lies and fantasies like a fish breathes water."

"But it's true! It told me-"

"Shut up! I have had enough. Do you realise what you have driven us to already, with this insanity?!"

She opened her mouth to shout a retort, and Tavistre reached out with his other hand to grasp for her free arm, looking to pull her into a more secure grip. Neither of them completed either action, though, because they both froze, turning their heads in the direction of a loud mechanical roar that had erupted from the other end of the car park, and which was growing rapidly in magnitude. April had just enough time to identify it as the sound of an engine, before a motorbike skidded wildly around a corner from behind a line of parked cars, its single headlamp blazing out through the night.

They both had just enough time to register that there didn't seem to be anyone actually riding the thing before it was almost upon them. The riderless bike, uncanny in its emptiness in a way that made April think of ghost ships and headless horsemen, gunned its throttle, rearing up onto its back wheel. As it flashed into a pool of dim street lighting, her eyes started to be able to resolve the lumpy shape clinging to the handlebars and the sides of the chassis as it bubbled upwards to get a better grip on the seat.

April, who had been expecting something like this, was still taken fairly off guard by the bike's sudden appearance. Tavistre, on the other hand, seemed for once completely dumbfounded. He failed to act at all as the lumpy mass spat out two sticky globs of translucent slime, loose fleshy ropes trailing backwards away from them and towards the bike. One shot out behind it and stuck fast to a parked car, binding it the side of the larger vehicle and pulling the rope taut. The other flew straight towards April, struck her around the waist, and then, using the other rope as an anchor to steady the bike, yanked her forward, hard.

There was a whirling flurry of spinning lights and roaring engine sounds as for a moment April was lifted bodily into the air and tumbled towards the bike along an uncontrolled trajectory. She yelped, flinching away from the coming collision with tarmac and roaring bike, but at the last moment, Kroakli—who had enveloped the bike in a thin film of itself, rigged with clenching tendons to actuate the controls—seized her out of the air and lifted her aloft atop a knot of weightier limbs. It set her down in the saddle, jerked her arms forward to stick her hands to the handlebars, then slid itself up onto April's back, extensions of its body still piloting the motorcycle while April caught her breath and tried to stop her head from spinning.

"Number that as fourfold instances of us saving your meat from its own incompetencies, April," the creature hissed from behind her. "Or is it fivefold? Yes, we should count at least five, we think."

"I- Fucking shit! Okay, I'm grateful enough for this that I'm not even going to be pissed at you for saying that."

"Good. It is appreciated that we are recognized for our accomplishments. This vehicle is a crude mechanism, but we shall make proper use of its swiftness once we have infested these metal bones and their petroleum heart."

"As cool as you made that last part sound, don't you dare tell Fabian you called his bike crude," panted April. "In fact, stop talking. I can't- I need to catch my breath. We can have the witty repartee once we're not getting shot at."

The line of armoured Committeemen had renewed their assault, a flurry of streaking rocket flames blazing over the car park, curving towards them in neatly arcing trajectories. The first few rounds fell sluggishly short, the dull booms punching holes in cars or in the tarmac behind them, but then one of their number had the bright idea to switch over to some kind of homing round, and the next volley twisted horrifically mid-flight, re-orienting towards them like a flock of airborne bloodhounds.

April swore. Kroakli growled, and extruded several limbs in quick succession, its innards disgorging themselves to fill out the twisting tendrils. Seen from a distance then, the two of them would look like a lone rider balanced atop an eldritch blending of motorcycle and giant squid. As the volley of rockets rounded on their tail, Kroakli thrust its arms down, and—in a manoeuvre that April was fairly sure was not described in the bike's owner's manual, performed a running jump, throwing itself, April and the vehicle into mid-air.

The projectiles whizzed beneath them in narrow proximity, the required turn to follow the bike proving too sharp for them to correct themselves. They began a shallow, arcing curve back upwards and around, but before it could be completed sunk into the surface a brick wall at the edge of the car park, unable to fully deviate in time. The structure was engulfed in twin balls of yellow light as April, Kroakli and the bike slammed back down against the ground, hard.

April's breath was knocked from her yet again, but found that, amazingly, they were still upright with two wheels placed squarely underneath them. The spheres of light slowly faded, and the tires spun in place just long enough for April to take in the twin circular holes excised from the brick wall in their wake. Before she could fully take that in, the rubber bit against the asphalt, and Kroakli twisted the accelerator under her fingers once more in order to jerk the bike around and accelerate them hard towards of the rear face of the apartment building.

April let out a shrieking, incoherent yell, while the two gun-toting armoured figures fired again in the distance. The fresh round of missiles streaked towards them, but Kroakli too was vibrating with a keening cry, one not of fear but almost of joy. It shunted the bike's throttle to its maximum, and they shot around the back corner of the building just in time for the missiles, biting at their heels but not quite fast enough to intercept them in time, slammed into the building's side, punching another pair of holes in one of the ground-level walls. There was a clatter of falling rubble and crumbling concrete as the already compromised building reeled from the freshly inflicted wound.

"Ah," said Kroakli, the proclamation uncharacteristically terse.

"Are- are we good?!" shouted April over the engine, trying to get herself seated properly and assert some measure of her own control back over the handlebars.

"We are good. However-" the creature paused, gunning the throttle again, turning them away from the building behind them while still doing its best to remain in the cover it provided. The car park continued on this side of the building complex, but there was an exit to the adjoining road on its far side.

Kroakli clicked irritably as the bike accelerated.

"What?!" shouted April, followed shortly after by, "oh."

The loose patter of falling stones and debris coming from the building behind them was not slowing, but had grown into a steady thudding drumbeat as larger chunks of concrete masonry came loose. More alarmingly, April was now hearing a dull groan, a distant mournful cry that spoke to her of overstressed rebar, of concrete pillars cracking as they were forced over and beyond their margins by the sudden excessive load.

The reality crack—which had been taking on a wispy quality as it continued to fade, performing belated a penance for the vivisected block of flats—had sliced downwards diagonally through much of the building. The cutting plane was between one and two metres across at its widest points, and it had inevitably severed several of the reinforced concrete supports that had held the tower block in place and upright. The structure had been saved from total collapse only because the unnaturally clean cut had left the severed supports still pressed up against one other, and those members left intact had taken up the excess lateral strain.

That was all very well and good, and luck had been on April's side enough that the damage to the building had so far landed it on the "unstable and unsafe" side of the equation, rather than "actively collapsing". That was, it had, until they had started punching yet more holes into the base of its structure.

April heard a series of screeching metallic twangs as if someone had cut the strings of a giant's guitar, followed by a thud, and then an ear-splitting crash. It was hard to make out amid the dim light the exact moment when a fissure raced up the building's side, eating through cladding and masonry, but it was very hard to miss when one half of the building sheared away, calving off like a concrete glacier as the greater part of the building dissolved into an expanding cloud of brown dust. The remaining half teetered upright for a long moment, pointing jaggedly up at the sky as if considering its options, then followed suit, spilling over into the expanding cloud of dust to land bodily in a pulverising reunion with its shattered twin.

"Fuck!" shouted April. Then she felt that that exclamation was probably lacking something and so tried, "What the fuck!?" instead. No, that wasn't better.

"Be glad our business there was concluded," buzzed Kroakli, yanking at the handlebars and twisting April's arms as the bike shot out of the car park and spun left to align itself with the road.

"The entire building!" April's words hissed through teeth gritted against the wind, her helmet having been unfortunately left behind.

"Perh-kah-, It is in good company amid its many fellows, be assured of this...!" shouted Kroakli, finally relinquishing its grip on the bike's steering mechanism. April let herself take over, guiding the bike down the mostly empty street as she looked at the city around her.

The creature certainly wasn't wrong. There seemed to be almost as many buildings collapsed now as there were still standing. Intermittent street lights, where the poles had not been uprooted or otherwise severed from the power grid, illuminated the shadows of crumbling husks and heaps of unidentifiable detritus slumped at the edge of the road. It was hard to tell if they had been felled by the earlier earth tremors, or else by one of the unholy lightning storms that had passed through the area since, shunting the cracks through empty space in burning streaks of vivid gold fire, followed moments later by the smouldering black void. The collapsed tower block that still loomed behind them was only the latest such structure to fall into such a ruin.

April weaved around fissures in the roadway, slowing as they approached fallen traffic signs and the scattered metal beams of street lights laid out across the road, which Kroakli deftly plucked from their path. It had the feeling of a scavenger picking at an iron corpse.

"It…" stammered April. "Christ!"

"What is troubling now, April of the many exclamations—krr, what is the newest, freshest-grown source of your gnashings?"

"It really is the end of the fucking world!"

"Yes, and we have been through this matter many times already-"

"They're trying to kill us with fucking- with missiles!!!"

"Most helpingly for us, this way... they shall find ammunition to be a limiting resource in this way of hunting. As such-"

"And-! And everyone is just- they're all dying, Kroakli!"

"This is also true, and we should-"

April interrupted the creature's warbling with a kind of mournful, howling scream. Kroakli flinched slightly at the sound, stiffening itself until she was done.

"Was this necessary, April Pearce?"

"Honestly, I think it's actually the least that I'm fucking owed, thank you very much!"

"We suppose…" the creature considered, "we suppose there is a certain elegance of truth made manifest through the unspooling of such base instincts from your limp flesh. We smell the blood rising within your veins, oh-so-anguished April. It is a refreshing scenting, not obfuscating the- Duck."

"What?"

"Duck!"

It jerked her head down just barely in time for a bright red-orange star to streak above her head, accompanied by a terrifying hornet-wing whine. The missile continued down the road for another hundred or so metres, before veering into a partially-collapsed petrol station, enveloping it in a sphere of light from which it emerged fully-collapsed.

After her brain and sphincters had unclenched themselves from shock, April twisted herself around in the seat, trusting Kroakli to keep the bike moving straight. Neck straining, her eyes found the array of red-white lights spattered across the vehicle that was chasing them. It was hard to make out details through the gloom, although it looked bulky, angular, and was ploughing directly through the same debris that she and Kroakli had had to circumvent. An armoured figure was just barely visible, shouldering their weapon again through an opening in the vehicle's roof.

"What- they're still after us!?"

"Most astute!"

"How are they still following us?!"

"Have you considered," shrieked Kroakli above the noise, its burbling strained into a high pitched buzzing-clacking melange, "that perhaps they are following your electromagnetic emission? The one contained within your left upper limb?"

"What?" April shouted back, dumbly, "what are you talking about?"

"The emission there. It would be received easily to be traced by their devices, kreh, making us an easy scenting."

"What emission, Kroakli- what fucking emission!?"

"You have a device implanted there, one that is making signals. Are you not aware? It has been present since your return to this projective!"

"I don't-" April had a sudden flashback to Tavistre visiting her in the quarantine room, and taking a sample of her blood, Navique wielding the little handheld device that had pricked her skin to draw from her left inner elbow. But that was not all that it had done, it seemed.

"That- that motherfucker chipped me! Kroakli?! Why the fuck didn't you tell me before!"

The creature whined, twisting the handlebars to navigate a partially collapsed pedestrian bridge that had—until recently—spanned the road. Another flash of light streaked out overhead, but seemed to go wide.

"We thought this a deliberate adornment! Your kind is liberal in its employment of such inanimate mechanisms. Keh! It seemed most plausible that you sought to augment your flesh in compensation for its limitations. This would be an understandable melding, if primitively ineffective."

April groaned in wordless frustration. Something pinged off of the tarmac to their right, and then again, as Kroakli veered left. Belatedly, April realised that their pursuers were now aiming at them with a rifle. The hair on the skin behind her neck prickled uncomfortably, and she could hear the roar of the other vehicle, milky red light from its headlights climbing up her back as it slowly gained on them.

"Then we've got to fucking get it out of me, Kroakli, or we'll never be able to shake them, will we?"

"This is why we offer the pertinence of retaliation in kind... We could still dispatch them, in all likelihood. They remain dull flesh! Meat."

"They are meat sealed inside five sets of full-body power armour, and they have guns, rocket launchers, and what I'm seriously starting to suspect is a tank!"

"Even given this- they know of our potency in killing, hence their precaution-taking, but we still judge that it would not match us in dispatching our vengeance."

"Are you- are you fucking sure?!"

The creature paused for a moment, and April was forced to swerve the bike herself to circumvent the upper half of a toppled road sign, fallen to the tarmac after having a support pillar bisected by a since-faded crack.

"Krrrrrr…" Kroakli was buzzing, softly.

"You're not fucking sure, are you!?" April shouted back at it. "You don't know if you could do it, you smug bastard!"

"There is some uncertainty in our decisive victory, yes. Their raiment is extensive, and it crowns their softness with bands of iron… but fear not, worrisome April, if intercession is required you should have faith in our ability."

"Fuck that," she spat, jerking the handlebars abruptly to start a 90-degree pivot onto a side road, "we're not trying our luck!"

"What then, meat thing, what?! Your own self could not stand in barest defiance of their hunting!"

The bulky, angular shadow of the vehicle behind them barrelled into the turn, slightly undercutting the corner by ramming through a metal barrier, its engine roaring as it jumped up onto the slight incline. Both vehicles were now climbing a low hill, with quaint suburban residences lining the road in uniform lines, excepting the occasional gap where one had collapsed in on itself. April shunted the throttle, gunning for the next turn, then spun the bike into it, relying on Kroakli to compensate for her reckless movements.

As they passed behind the shadow of one of the buildings standing sentinel at the corner, the roar of the pursuing vehicle quietened a little, but it was going to be a short reprieve if they couldn't find a way to lose it fully. Which seemed like it would be next impossible, unless…

"Kroakli?!"

"Yes?"

"Get it out of me. The tracker."

"Get it out? Pah, your fizzing cells reject our intrusion still! We cannot reshape your flesh to excise the device, as much as you might will it!"

"I didn't ask you to 'reshape' anything, I told you to get it out."

"We cannot do this without prying apart your viscera the old way, tearing our ingress by tooth and claw alone! Know what you are asking for, April Pearce…"

April steeled herself. "Do it! Make sure you have the bike steady and fucking do it!"

Kroakli hesitated for a moment, then shifted, sliding more of its flesh down onto and around the body of the bike, and more tightly around April, fixing her in place upon the saddle.

"Very well."

Steering all the while with an array of translucent, blue—but still gruesomely fleshy—lashings, tying into the mechanism of the bike like the vehicle had grown its own rigging of tendons and muscles, Kroakli inflated two more probing limb-tentacles, suspending them quiveringly at April's side. She watched in trepidation out of the corner of her eye as Kroakli re-ingested several of its spines, and they swam down the length of the tentacles like a fish up a waterspout, re-emerging at the palp-end and flexing—less like fingertips and more like brandished knives.

"Hold still," it croaked.

It was a moot point. As it said the words, it clamped down on her at every point where its body touched against hers, the soft flesh pressing up against her skin and tightening with the rigidity of the flexed bicep of an Olympic weightlifter, fixing her squarely in place. Simultaneously, the fistful of poised spines dived for April's left arm at the inner elbow, and there was a blissful second of cold shock before the pain hit her, during which her nervous system hadn't yet fully realised what had happened.

And then she screamed.

Kroakli had reached through her skin with the same ceremony that she might have applied to yanking open a kitchen cupboard at Sporks, and was now riffling about in the way that she might have searched for the bottled oregano. The nimble tips of its spines rooted around between her exposed tendons with a casual, almost professional disinterest, scraping unceremoniously against the white of her bone, ignoring the upwelling of her crimson blood that splattered onto the road behind them.

The creature's attention eschewed any particular care, but its motion was innately precise. It avoided severing any important arteries and nerves, and instead deftly parted her fat and the strands of her muscle, its spines holding them aside while three more reached in, carefully pinched at a tiny sliver of metal that had nestled itself deeply under a fold of flesh, and flicked it aside like something it had picked out from between its teeth.

April wasn't particularly aware of any of this, but in her defence she was dealing with her arm being stabbed, and then pried apart. She kept on screaming, only dimly aware, hovering beyond the far side of a star of blazing pain, that the creature was completing its grim impromptu surgery. It released its grip on her innards and pinched the sliced skin back together, a thin film of blue slime sliding down over the wound before hardening, solidifying swiftly to hold it shut.

She groaned, head lolling. As it fell back, she looked up at the bulbous, balloon-like false head of Kroakli, quivering above her.

"All done!", it said brightly, as her vision swam.

There was a dull thud from behind them, followed by a bright flash as something whizzed past the bike a moment later. Kroakli was forced to throw them to the side in a staggeringly abrupt manoeuvre to avoid a blast that had bloomed in front of them, like an unfurling orange flower catching the light of a desert morning. It grabbed hold of a lamp post with an extended tentacle, and used it as an anchor to swing the vehicle around, itself and April in tow, as it vaulted a slab of loose masonry and careened along another side road.

From April's perspective, there had been a loud sound, then lots of bright colours had buzzed through her vision in a way that made her head spin. This was followed by a dizzy vertigo that made her really want to throw up, and she was only able to fight the reflex off by focussing on the stinging pain in her arm, the heat lessened now, but having hardened into a steady, throbbing glow.

Kroakli ignored her as she flopped about in the seat. She might have ordinarily thought that being a sort of amorphous blob of slime would be a disadvantage when riding a motorcycle, but Kroakli, having melded its body fully with the mechanism and back once more in full control, was handling the vehicle far better than April ever could have.

Well, it wasn't like she was an expert, but then again she was fairly sure that no amount of practice would impart upon her the ability to make the bike jump.

Kroakli had no such limitations. It was more than just a thing on a bike now—the vehicle was a dual-wheeled extension of its being, the only incongruity to that sleek form being April's mostly limp body, flopping around at the saddle. Under Kroakli's attention, the bike's engine sang. It wasn't even bothering to go around obstacles now, but was simply thrusting one of its limbs down, sending the whole apparatus flying into a rolling leap before landing on far other side.

The street they were on had levelled out into a long residential avenue, houses on either side. There was a roar behind them, followed by a series of sharp pops that, in her delirium, April almost mistook for fireworks. That impression was dispelled by the accompanying peal of shattering glass, as windows positioned diagonally across from them—those that had not already been shattered by the ongoing apocalypse—exploded, rifle shots skewering them through.

Not giving the marksman another chance to make the shot, Kroakli bounded the bike forward, then sideways, flying off the side of the road and onto a narrow footpath that ran between two houses. As it threaded the needle along the tight band of tarmac, winding between parallel wooden fence slats that quickly gave way to tall metal bars wreathed in overgrown hedgerows, it seemed for a moment that the bulky vehicle in pursuit could not possibly follow.

This was true for approximately fifteen seconds, before the car—or was it a tank? It was sleek, metallic, and was peppered with sharp edges and unpleasant looking protrusions—smashed through the side walls of the two houses and began ploughing over the hedgerows on either side of the footpath. As April struggled to hold onto consciousness, Kroakli pushed the throttle, but there was a limit to the bike's speed, and they were reaching their maximum before their pursuers. Dimly aware, April listened to the growl of the vehicle behind them rising louder, a deep dread settling in the pit of her stomach at the sound.

Kroakli hesitated for a moment.

And then it jumped again, swinging the bike up and over the hedgerow as it stabbed outward with five different limbs to find anchor points it could tug upon. Swinging wildly like the world's ugliest incarnation of Spiderman, it threw itself in an arc over the top, and landed heavily amid a field of neatly trimmed grass. A garden? No, it was a golf course. The treads of the bike tore up the perfectly manicured turf as they spun for grip, and then, finding it, they shot away from the hedge. Kroakli coaxed the bike a half dozen metres, just enough to reach a small rise sheltering a sandy bunker, and then dived over the top into the hollow, throwing both April and the bike to the ground.

April spat sand out of her mouth, confused, still dizzy from the pain and only loosely aware of her surroundings. She heard the purr of the bike's motor stutter as it stalled and ground to a halt, and then she felt Kroakli expanding out over the top of her, blanketing both her and the bike with its body as it melded them to the sandy earth, a protective cloak of intelligent cells that, it knew, could replicate the structure and ambient radiation of the surface beneath them in a near perfect mimicry.

April heard the roar, five seconds later, as the tank ploughed past them and onward down the path, crushing hedges beneath its wheels and knocking metal fenceposts askew, none the wiser. It was the last sound she registered before she blacked out.