Many Years Ago…

There was no greater sin, Idra felt, than to burn a book.

A book was more than words on a page. It was the will of someone who had come before you, transcribed into an object, an eternal remnant of someone who had already vanished from this world. Books were life after death. If heaven truly existed in this world, Idra felt it surely must lie between sheets of paper.

And if that was the case, then Idra also felt he must truly be a terrible sinner.

The fire blazed before them, emboldened by the tome Idra had just tossed in as fuel. The Llliad, or something like that, although the damage the book had already sustained made it hard to tell. None of the books on this planet had escaped time unscathed… but weathering was something that could be repaired.

Fire was final.

If Idra had been alone, he'd have contemplated letting himself freeze to rescue these books from their fate, but he wasn't alone. Gathered around him were other orphans just a couple years younger than him, accursed naturalborn with no place in this world, shivering against the dark. At the bottom of a Library Tower, they huddled together tightly, as if trying to make sure the world didn't notice them.

Tetontopolis was a dark planet, the distant light of a white sun providing a dim and oddly monochrome view of the landscape. Black towers silhouetted against a grey sky -- that was the extent of it. It had once been the prized planet of Medb, one of the Origin Strain, who had devoted herself to recovering and protecting humanity's literary history. It was she who had built the Library Towers, collecting books from across the galaxy and diligently protecting them from the ravages of time and life.

When she'd rebooted for the first time, though, her successor hadn't felt nearly as passionate about the subject. He'd left Tetontopolis to rot, and rot it had. Idra and his companions had been dumped here by a passing waste disposal crew -- they'd been supposed to take the children for recycling at another destination, but some malformed pity had stayed their hand.

Better starvation than the knife, they'd probably thought. Idra couldn't see a difference. Death was death, and terror was terror. If it was up to him, he'd rather be a book.

The fire began to fade again, and Idra grabbed another book to toss… but this time he hesitated. This book wasn't like the others. It had been bound by hand, written by hand, the product of an individual rather than a press.

The word Yu was written on the cover, hastily scrawled. The title? The author? The subject? Idra couldn't say… but he felt in his chest that this handwritten thing was more of a book than the others, more precious than the others. This one he simply couldn't burn.

With orange light flickering over his face, Idra opened those old pages… and began to read.

In The Hour Of The Revolution…

Ruri watched from the battlements of the palace, her face utterly blank. The shock she was feeling was so all-consuming that a human face simply wasn't capable of expressing it. With a single punch, that man -- Azez Tazir -- had knocked the Gene Noble Alexandra down to the ground.

No, more than that. At the very moment Azez's fist had made impact with Alexandra's jaw, there had been a flash of blindingly bright flame -- and it had incinerated the entire top half of Alexandra's body. Her lower torso had just collapsed right there, like a bisected corpse.

Ruri blinked, hyper aware of every process in her body. Her heart beat like a rapid drum. Air flowed cold down her lungs. Goosebumps broke out all over her skin. What she was witnessing was impossible. She had just seen a man punch a god in the face -- and the god go down.

For the first time in her life, a certain feeling began to twitch in Ruri's chest. Hope was testing the waters, checking to see if it was really allowed to exist. The chances still weren't good. This was the first time Ruri had ever seen a miracle like this, true…

…but miracles could be such short-lived things.

Two thoughts ran simultaneously through the mind of Alexandra, the Grotesquerie Princess.

What happened?

And…

Ow.

One moment, that burning fist had been coming towards her face -- and the next, she was a bloody lower torso on the ground, smoke rising from her charred waist. There was missing time. Had she lost consciousness? Her, against mere biomass?

No. Not acceptable. This couldn't go on any further.

Alexandra made her resolution in the time it took Azez Tazir to lower his arm -- and in that moment, her body changed. Spears of bone lanced out, impaling her own nearby creations and reincorporating their mass into herself. Her remaining features, her twitching legs, softened into sludge and retracted into the blob of her squirming torso.

From bone she formed a barrel, thin but strong, bursting directly from the centre of her mass and terminating mere inches from Azez's face. Thick veins like cables wound around the protrusion, producing bioelectricity of such intensity that it would be better called biolightning. A tumorous bullet, clad in layers of carapace, gestated in her innards and was deposited into the bowels of the weapon.

One second, Azez had been looking down at his broken opponent -- and then he'd blinked. When his eyes opened again, they were looking right down the barrel of a biological railgun.

It fired.

He dodged.

As the bloody blast of annihilation scorched through the battlefield, missing its intended target but vaporising everything behind him, Alexandra did not curse the failure. It wasn't like that had been some ultimate, no-holds-barred attack or something. More than anything, she'd used it to test the parameters of her target -- it was a stick with which to prod the situation.

The strange electricity crackling around all these bodies was definitely the source of the rebel's power. Not only did it enhance the durability of their bodies, but also their physical strength and reflexes. The way Azez had dodged that shot just now confirmed it.

It wasn't like the power was omnipotent, though. Many of the rebels had already fallen, even with the sparks protecting them. More than a few had been reduced to a fine mist by the attack Azez had dodged -- and the fact that Azez had needed to dodge was only extra confirmation.

Hardy, to be sure, but far from invincible.

If that was the case, then Alexandra simply had to measure just how much more durable this biomass had become, and adjust her strength accordingly. It wasn't really a big deal at all. In fact, it was a little exciting. The hearts within her body were thumping in ecstasy -- inspecting a strange phenomenon like this was just the thing to liven up another boring day.

The barrel twisted, becoming one of many spiked tendrils that lashed out at Azez, driving him backwards -- even with their blinding speed, he continued to dodge, flipping and sliding between the swipes. It was like trying to swat a particularly annoying fly. Clearly, the potency of this newfound power wasn't uniform -- some of Azez's comrades that were standing too close were easily sliced apart by the whipping onslaught.

Alexandra stood up.

Her humanoid form reconstituted itself from the feet upwards, her face already mildly annoyed even as it bubbled into existence. The roots of the tendrils had taken the place of her left arm -- and she reconfigured her right to vent out the excessive heat that the railgun transformation had produced. The escaping steam poured over another rebel squad trying to attack from behind, scalding the skin from their bones.

The many tendrils fused into just three, and Alexandra struck at Azez with them all at once. One struck with Alexandra's casual strength, the second struck with twice that, and the third with twice that. Which one ended up killing Azez would be very informative…

…or at least, it would have been.

Azez simply caught one tendril in one hand, caught the second in another, and drove his heel into the third to trap it against the ground. Then, looking up at Alexandra -- at his better -- he grinned impertinently.

"How's it feel?" he asked.

Alexandra turned her right arm into a blade and calmly sliced away the trapped tendrils at her shoulder. "How does what feel?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.

Azez's grin widened. "Losing your place at the top of the food chain."

Alexandra sighed. It wasn't that she was mad. She knew they didn't make Pugnants for their brains, but it was still sad to see biomass with such fatal levels of overconfidence. She wasn't mad, but it was still unbelievable that this man would say such a thing and mean it. A vein bulged on Alexandra's forehead -- a momentary side-effect of her regeneration, not a symptom of emotion.

"I'm going to make you eat your own face," she calmly hissed.

As she lunged forward, her entire body became an engine for one purpose and one purpose alone -- the elimination of Azez Tazir. She'd been inspecting the other members of his command with additional eyes as they'd been fighting. Their increase in strength was noticeable, to be sure, but Azez was clearly the strongest of their number. Eliminating him would cut the head off the snake.

Just like all Gene Nobles, Alexandra's entire body essentially served as her brain -- but now she ballooned the secondary ones within her frame, expanding their capacity until she could achieve three seconds worth of approximate precognition. That would deal with his dodging.

Then, white-feathered wings burst from her back and -- with a single flap -- launched herself up into the air, avoiding another torrent of golden flames Azez unleashed from his hand. That was another ability she didn't fully understand yet, but the time would come. Whatever the case, she'd just proved her speed was sufficient to dodge it, so it was immaterial.

The only remaining matter was the method of attack. For the first time in years, a bead of sweat formed on Alexandra's forehead. This would be the tricky part. Even if she dealt a lethal wound, she couldn't take the chance that Azez would survive it for a time and keep fighting. She had to make sure.

It brewed within her… the Venom. The adapting poison that could kill anything that lived, even a Gene Noble… especially a Gene Noble, if she wasn't careful handling it. A third limb sprouted from her chest, tipped with a stinger, ready to deliver the payload when the time came.

All of this had taken place so quickly that Azez still hadn't reacquired Alexandra's location. As his head snapped up, finally realising where she had gone, Alexandra grinned with bleeding gums and launched herself towards --

-- one of her wings went flying off.

An eye opened on Alexandra's back, and so she saw. Bieshu del Mar had suddenly appeared above her, scimitars in hand, and had severed Alexandra's wing in one smooth motion.

In the end, the precognition of a Gene Tyrant was just highly advanced prediction -- and those predictions were based on an understanding of how the world worked. With an unknown factor like this strange power in play, it was no surprise that the precognition hadn't seen this coming. Bieshu del Mar had slipped between the seconds.

Snarling, Alexandra spun around -- but as she did, four shots from Granba the Maker slammed into her body from the side, opening great gashes in her flesh. The four-legged man had planted himself against the ground like a tank, four shotguns aimed squarely at Alexandra while he fired from a distance.

It wasn't just him, either. Roland Nebula had leapt up into the air, too, his exoskeleton shining with a pale light -- and before Alexandra could react, he'd slammed his greatsword into her, spiking her down into the ground with a great plume of dust. Her stinger limb, severed, went flying off into the distance.

Zarakhel Baras was there waiting for her. His grin widened gleefully at the sound of her impact, and -- black sparks concentrating around his foot -- he struck her in the head with a devastating kick, destroying Alexandra's second skull of the day.

Her mind raced.

Seriously? They're jumping me?! What kind of duel is this?!

They weren't done. All of them were closing in, this upper echelon -- the rest of the army holding off Alexandra's creations. Azez, Zarakhel, Bieshu, Granba, Roland, Idra… all of them were running towards Alexandra at full speed, eager to deliver a finishing blow. The arrogance. The absolute arrogance of this biomass.

Still headless, she picked herself up and remedied that situation -- sprouting a new head in seconds. Her new hair extended, becoming prehensile and twisting together into corkscrew-shaped implements. Seven weapons, enough to deal with her incoming opponents.

Six blades of hair lunged out, each in a different direction, each aimed for one of Alexandra's enemies. These strikes were faster and stronger than anything before, blows intended to turn human bodies into slurry… but even those weren't enough.

As one, the Zeilan Morhan reached out -- and the energy shrouding their bodies flowed directly into their hands. As one, they seized hold of the tendrils just before they struck true. As one, they held them in place, even as they thrashed and writhed.

But Alexandra smiled.

There was the sound of ripping flesh.

There was the sound of pouring blood.

There was the sound of air forced out of lungs.

As one, the Zeilan Morhan looked.

Idra was dead.

His death had been instant. He didn't even have time to realize he was about to die. His expression was slack, jaw hanging open, eyes staring into nothing. A machine had been turned off. Biomass had ceased function.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

That was all.

The seventh tendril of hair -- the one Alexandra had sent through the ground like a worm -- had lanced out of the earth and impaled him from behind. It held him up high, protruding from where it had destroyed his heart, waving him this way and that like a trophy. As the Zeilan Morhan watched, struck by that sudden despair, Alexandra let the garbage drop to the ground in an undignified heap.

"It's as I thought," Alexandra smiled, luxuriating in horror. "You usually cover your bodies in that energy evenly, but you can concentrate it into certain areas for a greater effect. If you do that, though… the rest of your body becomes vulnerable. You shouldn't have kicked me like that, Blindman. That's what gave it away. Look what you did to your poor friend. Oh… wait."

Zarakhel's teeth were still bared, but his grin had disappeared -- replaced by an expression of utmost fury.

"Alexandraaa!" he screamed, spittle flying from his lips.

"I'm standing right here," she smirked, her hair-tendrils waving through the air defensively. "You don't need to shout."

Her crimson gaze swept over the remaining warriors, scanning them for weaknesses -- and there were oh so many.

"It looks like you thought you'd picked up an advantage with this stuff," she put a hand on her hip. "It took me by surprise, I'll admit. You people actually made me sweat. But once you understand it, it's just the same as anything else."

With a single thought, Alexandra's entire body changed, shifting from the mammalian to the arboreal. Her hair-tendrils congealed into sturdy vines, and her face opened like the petals of a flower -- revealing layers upon layers of shining teeth within. The Maven's favourite red spider lilies bloomed all across her back as it bulked up with monstrous muscle.

She towered over her opponents, the central fixture in the garden of carnage.

"There's no such thing as a magic bullet," she growled, her voice a rumble. "Here. Let me show you again."

Edgar watched the battle from orbit, safe in a nearly-empty command room.

It wasn't that he'd be helpless in a fight, but given that he didn't even know if the ability he wanted would work correctly yet -- and given that he was the one who understood Aether best, they'd decided it was best to keep him out of the direct line of fire. So, for the time being, he waited and watched how his discovery operated in the field. So far, the results were extraordinary.

Enemies that would have wiped out entire squads had become afterthoughts. Before, they would have long since lost this battle by now. Even Alexandra herself -- even a Gene Tyrant -- was being pressured by the combined efforts of just a few people.

Alexandra was a good first target for this campaign. Her ruthlessness was well-known, and her demise would bring with it the adoration of the people. To tell the truth, Edgar had originally wanted them to go after the cruelest Gene Tyrant, the Maven in Red himself -- taking out one of the two remaining Origin Strains would have been quite the achievement… but the Maven never strayed far from the capital, and they weren't ready to extend their reach quite that far yet.

They --

"Oh," Edgar blinked.

Josephine looked up. She'd been assigned as Edgar's bodyguard again, watching the door while he observed the battle. To tell the truth, she hadn't seemed too impressed by Aether over the last six months, but then again she seemed like a person who put more stock in the physical world.

"What?" she grunted.

"Idra died," Edgar replied casually.

Josephine's golden eyes widened in surprise, but Edgar's attention had already returned to the videograph feed. It had been inevitable that not everyone would make it out of battles like this, even with the benefits of Aether. Many of the rank-and-file had already fallen on the sands of Mionaught, but he hadn't expected one of the leaders to go down so easily -- especially not Idra, who had displayed remarkable compatibility with the development of Aether.

But these things happened. He didn't know if Alexandra had targeted Idra with utility in mind, but they'd need to have more people develop teleportation and obfuscation abilities to compensate for his loss. Among the medic teams, there were three people who were --

Edgar blinked. This time, as he leaned in towards the monitor, he wasn't nearly so casual.

"Huh?"

A corpse was standing up.

Like a puppet on invisible strings, Idra's broken body rose from the ground. His dead eyes still stared into space. His limbs were still twisted and broken. His entire body had an oddly weightless quality, like he was moving underwater.

And, of course, he was crackling with furious red Aether.

All of the Zeilan Morhan looked on in shock. Even Alexandra had been distracted from the upcoming massacre. A corpse was standing up by its own power. Even for a Gene Tyrant, one who could achieve limited reanimation via depraved means, this was a sight to behold.

"Idra…?" Azez whispered, a faint hope in his golden eyes.

Idra's lips moved, but they said nothing -- or at least, nothing most of them could perceive. To most, it was silence. To others, it was a burst of painful noise. And, to a very few… it was something far more profound.

One rebel -- having stopped mid-skirmish -- was staring at the revenant, tears of awe streaming down his face. He nodded vaguely along as those lips continued to move.

"What an eyesore," Alexandra hissed, drawing a whip-vine back. "This time, make sure you --"

Idra moved.

The caution of a living thing had been lost; he launched himself off of the ground with such force that it surely shattered the bones in his legs. Before Alexandra could so much as react, he was already upon her, his hand upon her throat -- and with strength beyond the mortal veil, he slammed her into the ground. Vines and tendrils and claws lashed out from Alexandra's form, puncturing Idra's cadaver in dozens of places, but pain was nothing to a dead body.

Still speaking wordlessly, Idra ran with those shattered legs, dragging Alexandra across the ground as he went -- leaving a long crimson smear behind them.

Before he could fully scrape her into slurry, however, Alexandra freed herself -- her tendrils merged together into one bulky tentacle and seized hold of Idra, lifting him up into the air and constricting tightly to restrain his movements.

Alexandra morphed to her feet instead of climbing. A foot became a head, a head became a foot, the limbs switched places and the torso spun like a wheel -- the configuration of her body changing so that she was already standing upright. Narrowing her eyes, she continued to squeeze Idra tight.

"If I make a paste out of you," she hissed. "Will you finally stop moving?"

Only… she'd forgotten. Idra wasn't the one she was fighting. Not really.

"Get off my friend," Azez said quietly.

Alexandra turned to look.

Zarakhel had screamed and shouted to express his fury, becoming an exaggerated thing, almost demonic in his rage. That was the snarling face that had struck many lesser Gene Tyrants with a quiet and nagging anxiety. Azez, though?

Azez's face was a complete, calm blank as he slowly approached. It was the most frightening thing Alexandra the Grotesquerie Princess had ever seen.

She began: "You --"

There was a bright flash as Azez's fist ignited --

-- and for the second time that day, Alexandra lost consciousness.

She came back to herself after the punch had already landed, after the punch had already sent her flying, after the punch had already sent her burning body through the battlements and turned half her palace into rubble. A dozen mouths belched out smoke, gasping for breath, and a dozen eyes flicked around frantically to figure out what was going on. For the first time in a long time -- perhaps the first time ever -- the alien sense of nausea crawled within Alexandra's body.

She was feeling sick? A single punch from mere biomass had thrown off her equilibrium that much? No. This had to be a nightmare.

Tendrils -- roots -- burst out from her body, spreading in every direction. This was not a nightmare, that she knew. This was reality. In that case, she couldn't allow a single witness to this disgrace to escape. Everyone on the planet right now had to die. Everyone.

And for that to happen, she needed more clay to work with.

Alexandra had not formed her palace from organic materials for the aesthetic alone. In truth, her residence served as external storage for her own excess flesh. In a situation like this -- a situation she'd never truly expected to happen -- she could reconnect to it like so and then…

…reclaim it.

It was the work of a few seconds -- a few seconds during which Alexandra went from 200 pounds to 500 tons. Her body exploded outwards, skin flung apart, as it underwent the most outrageous transformation yet, swelling to such a size that Alexandra's previous form would only be visible as a dot in comparison.

A human skull twenty times bigger than any human being, its two massive sockets overflowing with hateful yellow eyes.

Four spindly arms like the arches of a bridge, terminating in claws that could shred buildings apart.

Leather wings that blotted out the sun, lined with repurposed respiratory sacs to absorb and expel air for extra lift.

A throat like a train tunnel -- and at its base, the smoldering organ that could, that would, produce an inferno.

The biohorror of a dragon called Alexandra let loose a roar that would have burst the eardrums of lesser men.

The man called Azez just walked through what remained of the palace calmly, eyes fixed on his target.

"Get to a safe distance," he told his comrades.

Alexandra's voice was a booming curse upon the world. "SAFE DISTANCE?! ARE YOU STUPID?!" she roared, sparks flying from her mouth. "DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT'S GOING ON?! BIOMASS! FUCKING BIOMASS! I'M GOING TO HUNT DOWN EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU!"

"Not a safe distance from you," Azez corrected her, raising his right arm. "A safe distance from me."

As Azez understood it, this power -- this Aether -- was unlocked with an emotional key, unique to each person. Edgar's was emptiness, Idra's had been awe, and as for Azez…? The desire to protect brought him more power than anything else.

And right now, there was an army behind him he needed to keep safe.

Golden Aether raged.

There was a flash as Azez's arm ignited with golden flames. A flash so hot it instantly turned the sand all around him to glass. A flash so bright it banished all shadows for miles around.

A flash so powerful it made Alexandra pause for a second.

"I THINK WE CAN MAKE A DEAL," she said.

Azez smiled, shaking his head. "No."

They both moved at the same time.

Alexandra threw her face forward, unhinged her jaws, and unleashed a concentrated beam of scalding hot blood and angry red fire.

"DIE!"

At the same time -- no, faster -- Azez thrust his fist forward and called out the magic words:

"SUPREME SHINE!"

Alexandra's attack would have been enough to utterly obliterate nearly anything in the galaxy. But right here, right now, compared to the radiance that Azez unleashed with just one hand… it was nothing but an ember.

An ember to be swatted away.

Somehow, Ruri had survived.

For a long time, she wasn't even sure that she had. If she had, it had certainly been a miracle. After her brief excursion outside, she'd retreated back into the palace, into one of the pre-existing sections -- stone, not flesh -- so she'd been safe when Alexandra had reabsorbed it.

As for the golden light? Yeah. There was no explanation for that other than a miracle.

Ruri breathed softly among the rubble as she clutched that thing to her chest, squinting through the blood that was running down into her eyes. This tiny part of the palace, this hallway, was just barely intact, half-buried under stone and red sand. She shifted slightly, wincing with each movement -- she didn't know how hurt she was exactly, but the fact that she was hurt was undeniable.

Still, though, she'd been watching until the very end. She'd seen it. She'd seen what that man had done. Had he really…? Had he really…?

"Ruriii…"

Hope died before it could even finish being born.

Azez's final attack, his Supreme Shine, had reduced Alexandra to almost nothing. The creature that dragged itself around the corner now was a dark spider-thing just barely bigger than a hand, staring down the hallway at Ruri with a single human eye. A long, thin tail swayed in the air behind it, maintaining its fragile balance.

"Ruriii…" the high-pitched, oddly squeaky voice would have been amusing, if it hadn't belonged to her executioner. "There you are, Ruriii…"

It dragged itself towards her, leaving a slick red trail behind it, that bloodshot eye still locked right onto her face.

"Ah, Ruriii… you really are so cute… I really do such good work…" it wheezed. "Yes… you'll do fine… come here, Ruriii… come here and become my new body… you've got the looks for it, after all…"

Ruri couldn't move. She just remained huddled there, in the corner of the hallway, as if trying to push herself through the wall and escape that way. She couldn't blink. She couldn't breathe. It was a wonder her heart was even beating.

"You'll make me come to you…?" Alexandra hissed, almost upon her now. "Fine… fine… here I come, then. Here I come… RURIII!"

The creature leapt right towards Ruri's face, legs unfurled to latch onto her skull. Now she could see the mouth on its underside -- an open beak filled with barbs and squirming tentacles. It was beyond horror. That was the mechanism that would shred her apart and turn her into someone else.

Ruri

Ruri

Ruri

"Ru… ri…?"

Ruri only realized she had moved once it was already over. She let out a trembling breath, and she looked down at her hand. Her eyes widened, and her next breath caught in her throat.

Had she really understood what she was doing, when she had run out onto the battlefield? When she'd plucked Alexandra's severed stinger limb from the ground, had she truly understood what she intended to do with it? She'd just known. She'd just known that she needed to take it in her hand.

And now, with a single unconscious thrust, she had impaled Alexandra against the ground with it.

That bloodshot eye stared at Ruri as the venom was injected, pupil slowly shrinking. It seemed that Alexandra, just like Ruri, didn't fully comprehend what had just happened. In that aspect, at least, they truly were identical.

And then it began to end.

Alexandra shrieked as its body began to bubble and rot, legs flailing in every direction, breaking themselves like matchsticks in their frenzy to escape. This was not the imperious rage of a Gene Noble anymore. This was the mad struggle of an animal that had just realized it was seconds away from death.

It was inevitable. Any struggle was pointless. There was nothing in the galaxy that could survive the venom of a Gene Noble.

At the last second, as it was crumbling to dust, Alexandra realized that -- and with that last second of reason, it decided it wouldn't die alone. Alexandra changed shape for the final time, discarding any notion of dignity or even functionality. Instead, it converted its entire body into a blade of bone, lunging forward even as it disintegrated, intent on driving itself through Ruri's eye and destroying her brain.

It would have succeeded, too…

…if a final burst of flame hadn't rushed down the corridor and blasted Alexandra apart.

Ruri blinked.

One second, she'd been staring death from the face -- the blade inches away. Now, there was nothing. Now, there was ashes and a lonely wind.

"Are you okay?"

Ruri looked up.

The man called Azez, the man who had slain Alexandra, walked down the hallway towards her. His right arm, the one he had used to throw that final punch, was a charred ruin -- bloodied and blackened, but the pain didn't reach his eyes. Instead, they were filled with concern as he kneeled down and stretched out his good hand towards her.

He spoke again.

"C'mon," he said gently. "Let's get out of here, okay?"

It was funny. Ruri was sure that she was at least a head taller than this man, but at that moment he seemed bigger than the entire world.

"Okay," she whispered, taking his hand.

It was the first time she'd dared to speak of her own accord in years.