Uhoh

My backpedaling is as instinctive as it is fierce—I refuse to perish before finding her, and I'll not balk from any bumbling beast. Correspondingly, I engage in tactical retreat, entreating the humanized Genesis-Org. service robot: "LET ME IN!"

No matter what level of technological innovation, even a human with average empathy can detect the cold, calculating indifference hidden plainly within those silicone pupils; nevertheless, its coded aptitude for monstrous disaster shall initiate my fate. And...

It's frozen. "Shiitake mushrooms." Behind me, the beast becomes increasingly pustulous in its constitution as its previously, at least somewhat, human-shaped posture degenerates into four-footed savagery, shrieking that guttural, blood-curdling, throat-ripping cry. Blood is literally spraying from its elongated jugular, all across the windows—wait.

A hero. Hero. A tier-3 HERO! Dressed in magnificent royal blue, marked with that distinctive 3-pronged Genesis emblem, is our city's wind-howling hero: Zera. Will this disaster finally be over? I try to avert my gaze, but - the gleaming maroon and orange of various entrails, skulls crushed halfway yet still half-covered with dwindling skin, and a child oh-so-violently disemboweled and fragmenting - it entraps me with its sickeningly deathful illustration.

But, She. She is at once, elegant with her confident, arrogant even, formulation of bladed wind; beautifully savage, with her roaring yell, as she provokes the monster, drawing its attention for the ultimate, inevitable rectification: Death.

But I knew it back then, and I know it now. "Fudge. Fudge." In those sparkling eyes, I perceive her true emotions: a twisting, inevitably surfacing fear. Fear. She is filled, overwhelmed with fear: power is derived from the unified amalgamation of literal power, but also one's mental fortitude—she lacks it. As do I, as do most, I am entrapped, but this time not by the rapturous, captivating glimpse of the Underworld; instead by our similarity.

Even as she manipulates dark matter, manifesting her strength through a refined launching of passenger vehicles, Foundry-born knives, and even her personal weapon, a NewSteel wind-Chakram, I know she is weak. And it shows. For in her upright machinations, it lends itself to her subtle, yet infinitely apparent hesitancy and foolishness: why not simply collapse a building? She fights essentially head-on because only through personal engagement, might she repress her insecurity. And, now:

She is pierced.

Her intestines are stabbed, innards are laid, dripping upon a tanged tendon of malice. Her face is that of utter, no, not utter. She is not filled with shock, but a wistful reluctance. She knew her fate was death, regretting not, her incompetent failure, but that fate did not change itself.

She bleeds heavily, her ribcage ever-so-slowly, savagely ripping apart about the weight of that lifted tentacle.

Her entrails dripping, its void-like eyes staring past her sallowing countenance, into the depths of a defeated soul. A real tear for her gleaming distress, an insincere lamentation towards my own: I must flee, but I cannot resist.

The degeneration of her former confidence, like the greedy grasp of virtual gambling towards so many corrupted, is a poisonously tangy elixir that engulfs my perceptions: my failed transcendence above the murky, purpling mash that is the remnant of many once-human, human souls.

And she dies.

Her death was shallow to me; in no way, did it evoke some emotional catharsis of any form—but my eyes were once again apprehending: She CHANGED.

Even from a hefty distance, I could detect the magmous, fiery warmth of her ligamented corpse that manifested its terrible breath through such spastic twitches, and it changed. Though still elevated, no barriers prevented vision: a glowing red. Within the core location of the hence-incurred penetration, it fizzled: POP. It grows, I imagine dividing nigh instantaneously in cancerously reckless abandon and grows.

The gaping hole within the interior of her stomach became filled with chaotic red, the hanging flaps of epidermal skin became supplemented by that monstrous texture. Her head was as if parasitized, her eyes sinking deep into blackened infinity, a mouth conniving into cannibalism-fangs, those ears jaggifying, a nose thinning, and two devilish, fiendish horns, surfacing once more.

She changed, IT spreads: I flee.