Lord Brusque howled.

Amy raised the giant belt again. “Stop mentally calling yourself that.”

M-Mr. Brusque howled.

She rolled her eyes and let the belt evaporate, but he was convinced it hadn’t gone anywhere. He still felt it! That residual sting was as bad as the real thing! The pitch of his yowls grew positively feminine as the aftermath’s agony somehow escalated. Saliva dripped from his lips as he heedlessly howled his lungs ragged.

“I’m surprised no one’s ever called you ‘Jack Russel’,” Amy commented impassively. “Well, not to your face at least …”

The burning pain stoked his wrath. How dare she? HOW DARE SHE!?

Mr. Brusque reeled to punch her. She flicked up a claw and it bounced off. Did … AMY JUST DEFLECT HIM WITH A FINGER? It didn’t matter! He’d punch until her defenses shattered!

Amy barely paid him any mind. Clicking her tongue, she casually blocked his blows with her finger as she shook her head at the frozen face of his titan avatar, comically warped. It should have been his body, but here he was floating next to her in the form of an avatar that matched his original size. Titan or not, she’d made the mistake of giving him another body.

Because of that, he could still punch her!

She sighed and turned towards the burning river of dim bomb heading their way, courtesy of John Crow. At the back of his mind, he realised it wasn’t frozen, but approaching very, very slowly. After all, she hadn’t stopped time, merely sped up their perception. The world still moved, though it crawled.

“I hand you the steering wheel for, like, five seconds, and you get John Crow to launch a finisher,” she deadpanned. “If you wanna be my guy on the inside, you gotta at least last ten minutes without getting merked. Sound reasonable?”

He stopped punching. “Wait … you accepted my offer?”

“Something like that,” Amy smirked slyly.

Mr. Brusque deflated. “This was a second chance.”

“Yup,” she nodded, “but I’d say you’re pretty far past second chances, don’tcha think?”

He wasn’t sure what to make of her mischievous tone, but for the moment, she was cool and collected. It was a far cry from the bloodthirsty abomination who’d menaced him.

“That’s a rather disrespectful way of putting it,” Amy lightly protested.

Even so, she didn’t feel dangerous at the moment. She seemed … casual. Sure, his nerves were still on fire, but he’d pick this over a bloodthirsty Amy any day. However, her vibe was very different from what he’d seen in the news. Amy’s resting persona was warm but jumpy, bordering on ditzy. This was calm but cold. She even used her voice a bit differently, lower and smoother. He felt like he couldn’t get her to raise it even if he punched her in the face. It was hard to say what Amy was supposed to look like. The cameras never got a clear shot, but he was pretty sure she was pinkish raspberry. Now, she was closer to purple. Was that normal? At least the predatory irises didn’t dance madly anymore. Maybe he could talk to her.

“This is the default me, actually,” Amy explained. “Besides, I tend to calm down after I’ve eaten something.”

That didn’t sound good. What had she eaten?

Amy grinned, subtle little fangs on full display.

“You’ll find out soon enough, sweetheart,” she purred.

Amy descended towards his fallen building. An invisible force tethered him to her, dragging him along wherever she went. They floated past the great mass of his titan. He mourned the loss of it, although he supposed he never had it in the first place.

“Honestly, it’s not fair of me to say you did horribly,” Amy reflected. “You kept Crow duped and busy while I did my thing. You could have been more prudent about getting him to bring out Norman, but I suspect he would have seen through it under most circumstances.”

Mr. Brusque stared at her. “You … knew I’d ask him to do that?”

“I planted the idea in your head, after all,” Amy stated, before quoting her plead in a squeaky voice. “‘Mr. Brusque, please! I just want to save my boyfriend!’ Heh heh. Classic reverse psychology.”

He mentally kicked himself.

Amy continued: “Seeing as your titan made a ridiculously large target, my biomass is gonna take a blow, but I’ve been well-compensated, so it balances.”

He glanced at the titan. As far as his eyes could tell, it hadn’t moved since they started their descent. If she could accelerate her mind like this, why didn’t she bullet time all her battles?

“Ever tried running in slow mo? It doesn’t work,” Amy explained. “If your mind doesn’t align with the capabilities of your body, your actions start to fall apart. Our current ‘bodies’ aren’t true avatars. I can’t fight like this. They’re basically augmented reality: POV projections within my biomass. Here, we can watch the world without interacting. It’s like observer mode in a videogame.”

Her eyes flicked to Mr. Brusque as she sensed him spook. Staring at the wounds in his titan, he noticed something coming out of them. Red … was it filled with some kind of blood, or ichor? No. The red … things had structure.

“Ah, you spotted them,” Amy noted. “There’s a pretty cool answer to what those things are.”

He looked at her. “… And?”

Amy shrugged. “And nothing. I’m not some villainess who feels the need to explain every detail. You’re not gonna remember much of this conversation anyway.”

“You’re a better person than I am, though,” he flattered in his most sincere-sounding voice.

“I know,” Amy replied smugly.

“I’m sorry I turned on you,” he continued, “but … you were gonna devour me! Surely you understand that I’d be angry!”

Malicious mirth darkened her eyes. “‘Were gonna’, huh? You’re funny.”

He didn’t think it was very funny.

They phased through the wall of his fallen building, arriving in the control room.

Mr. Brusque stilled at the sight.

The neurological tissue filling the room was scorched extra crispy. Apparently, that’s what happened when you left a ravenous avatar in what was essentially a giant brain. Her feeding tentacles were spread everywhere, searing the grey matter as they aggressively consumed its energy. It looked like a twisted mimicry of that thing John Crow did to sync up with the control room. In retrospect, John Crow’s version was plenty twisted as it was. Every second he spent flaunting his so-called power over her A.M.E., she must have been feasting down here.

However, what held his attention with an iron choke hold was the sight of the avatar’s tentacles engulfing … something. From the head down, they smothered almost every inch of it like snakes in a feeding frenzy, but he knew what it was.

His own body.

Amy leaned in, staring alongside him. “Maaaan, I feel sorry for the sucker who’s going through that. Well, not really, but I’ll get all weepy when this is over and I put back on my goody two shoes. It’s like a psychological hangover.”

He blinked away from the sight and looked around. If she’d eaten his control room, why hadn’t the fail-safes activated? Wait … why couldn’t he remember what they were?

“Fail-safes were the first thing I looked for while snacking around in your memories,” Amy shrugged. “Naturally, John Crow’s paranoia-addled mind drove him to hide a number of unmarked dim bombs too. Joke’s on him: my paranoia is like a jealous ex who still thinks her old BF belongs to her for some reason. Found ‘em, ate ‘em. They were nasty. Need a palate cleanser. You’re it.”

Mr. Brusque thought fast. “Does your boyfriend know you’re a killer?”

A chuckle bubbled out of Amy’s throat as she slapped him on the back. Surprisingly, it didn’t hurt. Maybe she was saving all the hurt for later.

“Who said anything about killing you?” she laughed. “Ever heard that you can’t have your cake and eat it too? Well, here’s the catch: if you eat half the cake, and leave the rest behind, you can do both!”

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

He blanched.

“Anyway, back to your body!” Amy cheerfully declared, dragging him towards the figure buried in tentacles.

Mr. Brusque pulled and wrenched against her grip. She didn’t budge. He felt like a kid, no, a baby, wrestling the casual power of a father. He heard the shrill screams of a woman, followed by what sounded like ugly crying. It took him a second to realise they were coming out of his own mouth. He could feel and see the tears and mucus splattering everywhere. Amy didn’t seem to care about the mess.

“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened,” Amy crooned, before grabbing his cheeks and pulling them face to face. “… Well? Where’s that smile? Show me dem nasty teeth!”

She shoved him back into his body, but he knew he’d never really left it. Never stood a chance. He felt those tentacles locked around him. Their icy hot touch was a skin-crawling paradox. Every nerve in his body screamed and retched as those tentacles seemed to burrow beneath flesh, beneath bone.

Then he experienced something new.

In the absence of stimuli, the human body could not be felt. No one felt their skin unless it was touched. No one discerned their internal organs until they were damaged. It was the same with the mind. Who could imagine that the psyche had form, anatomy? Mr. Brusque didn’t, but now? He felt it with a sense he didn’t know he had. There was no frame of reference for what he perceived, so his mind offered up four metaphors.

An atom … a planet … a plant … an animal.

The first was a speck circled by layers of particles. However, they weren’t really particles, and it wasn’t truly tiny.

The metaphor collapsed.

He saw a great orb wandering through space, orbited by nameless things he could best compare to moons and rings. They never quite rotated the same way. The core was no orb any more than a circle was a sphere. There was an aspect they bore that didn’t exist, and yet it existed.

The image imploded.

It became a tree. All those orbiting forms floating in space had left behind trails, but those trails were solid: spiral branches made of past rotations … It was beautiful … He looked further down the tree. Russel Musk looked back. He looked higher, and witnessed the birth of Mr. Brusque. Higher still, at the peak of it all, the spirals twinned and echoed their own movements. He felt himself looking at himself. Plants couldn’t move or react like this.

So, he saw an animal.

It peered into the waterhole. Therein, its reflection stared back. However, behind its eyes he saw something more than a beast: something beyond his understanding. The creature was long, like a serpent. Its tail stretched back through the passage of time. It didn’t walk. Walking was an insufficient metaphor. Instead, it dipped beneath the aetherhole and swam.

It swam for its life.

Strange particles bombarded the atom, tearing away electrons and protons. The atom began to split, unleashing energies unimaginable.

A yawning void warped the stars. Its hunger was a force of nature. Moons tore from orbit. Hypersonic winds raked across the lands as the atmosphere peeled away from the surface. Forests uprooted into the sky. Oceans rose from the seabed in a cataclysmic inversion of rain. Tectonic plates cracked, rocked, rose and crashed down like ships on a sea of magma. Landmasses split. Lava poured out and upwards to sate the hunger of the blackhole.

Vines invaded the garden, choking the life from the tree as they spread along it like a disease. Branches old and new broke under the pressure. Invisible paws ripped away fruits into the maws of chittering creatures.

From the depths beneath, tentacles snared the sea serpent, dragging it down. The beak of a kraken awaited it. Its shriek poured forth gouts of bubbles before a tentacle squeezed its jaws shut.

And so, the beast feasted.

Every metaphor collapsed and he was left with the truth: that which could not be seen, but felt. Feeding parts pierced, plucked, pealed, cleaved, cracked, scooped and sucked. He felt them … he felt them: chunks of his mind, chunks of him, vanishing, and there was nothing he could do. Mr. Brusque couldn’t even scream. The tentacle clamped over his mouth forced the air to go nowhere.

At the back of his consciousness, he felt something shatter around him. The briefest peephole opened between his tentacled prison. He saw that Amy had flown through the wall. The G forces were ferocious. Like a squirrel in the talons of an eagle, she carried him across the cityscape at breakneck speed. A fraction of a second later, his peeping building collapsed under sniper fire. Hypersonic bombardment tore his titan avatar asunder. From its injuries, out poured swift, red things that darted through the air like hummingbirds. The snipers had orders to shoot down Amy’s constructs before they finished forming, but how could they know she’d built these things inside his titan? Had his avatar been a Trojan horse the whole time?

The peephole closed up, leaving him in the dark with nothing to distract from the sensation of Amy’s … feeding.

Finally, he was dumped onto the cold, hard floor, like a bone spat from the craw of the predatory bird. His staff surrounded him, bound by webs spun from aerosol. It appeared that they were in the vault of an abandoned bank. He didn’t feel any webs around him, but … something was off … He should have scrambled to his feet by now. His cheek remained planted on the chilly concrete. Why weren’t his limbs responding?

Amy floated upside down, bringing her head close to the ground so that they were eye to eye.

“It’s like you’ve forgotten how to use your limbs, huh?” Amy asked.

Despair dawned upon him. No … had she actually-?

“I’ve eaten most of your motor skills,” Amy explained all too casually. “You literally don’t remember how to work your limbs. Twenty three years of knowing how to walk makes for a big but boring meal. Your athletic abilities were much tastier.”

She sucked her claws as though savouring the residual flavour.

Mr. Brusque’s mind spun. She’d crippled him?

Just like Ashley.

His thoughts scrambled to take inventory of what was left. He knew he’d been an ace in sports: could sling a keychain as well as a football. He knew he’d ridden a bike, and typed on a smartphone. He knew he’d walked and ran, but he couldn’t remember doing any of it. The details were gone. Had she really taken so much from him? He couldn’t even feed himself anymore!

“… You should have just killed me,” Mr. Brusque stated quietly.

Amy laughed. “Since when does the enemy get a say in his punishment? You wanna take the ‘easy out’? No. You’re going to live. You’re gonna learn and relearn it all from the bottom. There’s still hope for you, even if you gotta be spoon-fed for who knows how long.”

Mr. Brusque couldn’t meet her gaze. In every way, he was a loser.

Amy’s gaze softened. “I know it feels like I’ve violated your rights, like I’ve taken something sacred. Maybe I have. There are things that you just don’t do to another person: subhuman things. People make mistakes, but you? You embraced them, rolled in the filth, smeared the slop across your face and declared it tasty. You were not gonna stop. Not by choice. If you refuse to live up to the gift of personhood, don’t be surprised when someone treats you as lesser. The only way to stop a monster is to treat it as less than human. Sooner or later, something would have stopped you, in life or in death. You’re lucky that ‘something’ was me. There are greater things to fear than monsters.”

She floated upright and wagged a finger at the other landlords, who flinched away. “Sit tight and be good little boys and girls. This vault is one of the safest places on the battlefield … probably.”

“KEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

Amy paused at the sound of the eldritch shrieks coming from outside. A couple landlords lost the luxury of dry pants.

She shrugged. “Prison be soundin’ reeaal nice and cozy now, amIright? Relax. Reflect. Retrace the events that brought you here, and make sure it never happens again. Some of you were forced into this lifestyle. Others welcomed it with open arms. Quite the mixed bag, but I’ve snacked accordingly. Whatever it was that enabled you to live as landlords, I’ve taken it away. So, be happy, or mourn. Either way, it works for me. I’ll check in on you jailbirds sooner or later. If I pick your minds and find signs that you’ve changed your ways? I’ll vouch for you. If not? Go ahead: plot your escapes, scheme your revenge. Rebuild the skills and knowledge I took from you, so that I can suck them out again.”

“YOU’RE A MONSTER!” shrieked a landlady.

Amy’s head turned 180 degrees to look at her.

The landlady shrank back, her inverted bob cut bouncing with the sudden movement. However, she pressed on.

“W-WE’VE DONE NOTHING WRONG!” spat the landlady. “WE’RE ALL ANIMALS, TRYING TO SURVIVE IN THE JUNGLE!”

A few voices murmured their agreement, giving her courage to continue.

Amy smiled.

“WE-WE’VE ONLY EVER DONE WHAT WE MUST TO SURVIVE!” continued the landlady, her voice quaking with conviction. “DON’T PREACH TO US, YOU SELF-RIGHTEOUS LITTLE-!”

Amy’s tendril shot to her forehead.

“Whagh muh meveemm?!” exclaimed the landlady. “MAGUGUH AGUM! PFTAFAAAAAAAAAAAT!”

“Animals don’t care what their prey has to say,” Amy declared simply.

The other landlords looked on in horror.

“Did she just … eat Ms. Karyn’s ability to talk?” mumbled one of them.

“I think I did us all a favour,” Amy quipped, “although I’m not sure why Karyn is so upset. Did anyone catch the irony?”

Amy waited. Eyes opened across her avatar as she scrutinised each and every one of them. The landlords exchanged glances. What was she going on about?

“I’M EXPECTING AN ANSWER,”

Amy thundered.

More landlords lost their dry pants privileges. What did this psycho even want them to say?!?

“Ms. Karyn wants the benefit of being seen as an animal, without bearing the consequences,” answered one who hadn’t spoken before. “You treated her like one, and she acts as though it violates her viewpoint, when it does not. The fact is that no one wants to live it out to its logical conclusion.”

He felt the sneers of his peers. It looked like he was agreeing with her, which made him a traitor, a sympathiser. It looked that way because he was. All that time, plotting the demise of himself and his fellow landlords for their crimes against humanity. Was it for naught?

They needed someone to blame for all the shame she’d put them through, but Amy was untouchable. He, on the other hand, was not. The moment she left, they’d do everything in their power to break free of her bonds. If not there, then in prison, or wherever they ended up. Maybe a black site. They would plunge their keychains into his-

Amy clapped, interrupting his thoughts.

“Very astute, Mr. Specs! … Even if you were just saying what I wanted to hear.” She growled that last part, vibrating the air.

The threat was clear.

His fellow landlords looked upon him with eyes anew, nuanced with appreciation. Who knew what she’d have done if he hadn’t given the answer she wanted? Maybe he’d saved them, and maybe she’d accidentally saved him. If Amy hadn’t said those last few words, they would have surely … wait a minute …

She wasn’t quite looking at him, but he caught the slightest of winks.

“KEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

Another screech, closer than before. The landlords felt it in their skin, a prickling tickle. That wasn’t just a screech, was it?

A chill spiked through Mr. Brusque’s heart. What on Earth has she unleashed from his titan?

Dry pants were officially an endangered species.

Amy ignored the palpable fear in the air. “Karyn had a point, but I’m not a monster. I’m THE monster. If you ever forget that, please. I beg of you. Give me a reason to eat your dreams, and give your nightmares the breath of life.”

Her avatar vanished in a ghostly gust of vapour.

*THOOM!*

The heavy vault door had shifted shut, as though moved by the hands of an invisible spectre. Its mechanical lock rotated into place, leaving the landlords in a darkness their night vision couldn’t penetrate.

From the thick silence came a cackle. It effervesced to roaring laughter.

“YESSSSSSSS! MS. KARYN CAN’T TALK NO MORE!” cheered a landlord.

“YOBU MUKABABABABAAAA!” screeched said landlady.