“GHRAAAWR!” Cut that out, you flying piece of shit!
The floor and ceiling trembled from my roar. Cubicle dividers, tables, and chairs tumbled away, anything glass shattered, and papers scattered in the air. The smell of burnt hair and flesh tickling my nose was infuriating. My own burnt flesh! I tried to look over my shoulder to check the damage but my boulder-sized muscles crowded each other and my really long snout was in the way. Searing pain. But I wasn’t suffering.
Just annoyed. Really annoyed.
I sensed with my super sensey sensing sense the remaining metal man flying outside, his burning intent to kill me reeked from his armor, a grossly mistaken prey thinking he was the predator. Or did he want to avenge his comrade I tore apart? Whatever his desire was, he continued to pester me.
The BID agent—yes, at last, I remembered what to call that flea—didn’t want to follow me inside the building, afraid of getting caught. All he could do was send annoying hot light my way—my mind on the brink of going absolutely ballistic could barely find the word ‘laser’ to describe it. Shoot lasers! That was what I meant! Fuck, it was so hard to think straight.
Although I could predict where he’d shoot, I was too big to evade in time. I didn’t know my exact size now, but I had to be on all fours to move or I’d break straight through the ceiling if I stood. I was more comfortable in this position anyway, with all my claws on the ground.
I ran and continued my hunt. The entire floor was a huge office space, so it didn’t have any concrete walls dividing it into rooms that could slow me down. All drywalls, office panel partitions and dividers; I easily went past everything as if I was running through a field of grass.
Explosions lit my way like I was a rock star making an entrance in a concert. Painful spots blossomed on my body where the lasers hit. It took all of my willpower to keep myself on track hunting my original prey. The flying asshole outside could wait. He couldn’t hurt me much even with his powerful lasers. My flesh rapidly healed and a fresh layer of fur immediately covered it as if nothing happened.
Where the fuck are those two?
My wide ears twitched, facing whichever which way to detect their movement, my nose vigorously sniffed the air to follow their smell. Auron the smug bastard—I should eat him before anything else—and the old man with the parasite canisters. It was becoming harder to track them because of the fires and spreading smoke. The sprinklers also came on and gave me a bath. I was more annoyed with my drenched fur becoming heavy with water than the lasers.
They couldn’t have already left, could they?
While fighting the BID agents, I spotted Auron and the old man escape the wreckage of the crashed helicopter. They headed into this building to hide. To my surprise, the BID agents detached boxy metal thingies from their backs and dropped them to the ground. The two boxes sprouted legs and guns, scuttling after the 2Ms’ Adumbrae goons.
Scuttled, scampered, skittered…Skitter! That was right. ‘Skitters’, the name of those frickin' spider robots that nearly killed me when I escaped the tunnels below the Eve club. These couple that the BID had deployed were smaller though. And why were they also chasing the 2Ms? Did the BID know about them?
Whatever. Those Skitters better not mess with my food!
Faint pops. It became an angry droning sound. Gunfire? The floor vibrated from the explosions below. I paused. Lasers found their mark. The fallen cabinet beside me burst in flames and the sprinkler above activate. Huge lesions formed where the lasers burned my flesh.
I didn’t care.
I dug at the floor with my claws. My hands were like excavator buckets scooping out chunks of concrete. I growled as I reached the reinforced steel frame. I tugged at the rebars and bent them out of away, hoping it’d be a huge enough hole for me. I crawled down the hole to the floor below while the BID agent relentlessly tried to kill me.
As soon as I dropped down, I wrinkled my nose.
Trace scents of my Adumbrae prey. The sounds of gunfire became louder, and two male voices were yelling. I bounded in their direction. I hoped those fuckers hadn’t died yet to walking scraps of metal.
I swept a row of cubicles out of the way and spotted Auron and the old man running to the side of the floor. A Skitter burst into view. It dug its spiky legs into the ground to stabilize itself and the gun mounted on its back whirred into action. The two Adumbrae dropped to the floor and laid flat as the robot spider strafed the windows and walls.
“Rhrwaaa!” My prey! If this stupid spider killed them before I—
The Skitter turned its turret in my direction, deciding I was the bigger threat it should destroy first. Auron and the old man hastily got back on their feet, bloodied and injured with several bullet wounds, and made a run for the windows. I raised my arm as the Skitter’s heavy machine gun rambled. Hot metal pellets tore into my thick skin and muscles, ripping off bits and pieces of my flesh like a sculptor chipping away at the marble.
But unlike marble, I could regenerate. And at a very rapid rate too. I rushed at the Skitter and clamped at its massive gun with my jaws. I violently shook it like an overexcited dog destroying its toy.
Sudden sharp pains on my back, hot skewers buried deep into my muscles. What the—?
A massive shock went through my body. I clenched fangs, crunching through the metal, as I uncontrollably shook. My muscles seized, my arms and limbs curled to my body. I couldn’t control myself. The other Skitter had latched onto me and was electrocuting me!
The partially destroyed Skitter on the floor jabbed its remaining working leg into my abdomen and coursed electricity to me. Sparks came out and it suddenly exploded, perhaps already too damaged to move. The blast knocked some sense into my head.
I forced my arm to move and reached over my back to grab the other Skitter. “Hroooagrh!” Get off me! I pulled it, with its spiky legs and all, and slammed it on the ground right on top of its brother robot. Then the ceiling. The ground. Ground again. Ceiling, floor, ceiling, floor.
I chucked away the postmodern metal art piece that was the Skitter before charging at the window. But I skidded to a halt before I broke through the concrete wall—no way I could fit through the window. I stuck my head outside and scanned the surroundings before deciding what to do next. I was amazed at myself to still have some presence of mind left after all this time. The burden to keep the crazed feral creature at bay inside my head was becoming harder and harder. Great was the temptation to let it go and enjoy the destruction.
No! That was suicide if I went out of control in the middle of the City.
And that’d break Rule #8.
I spotted Auron and the old man lying in the middle of the street, trapped by some kind of energy forcefield dome whatever.
Were they dead? Fuck!
Oh, wait. Nope, just stunned by an electroshock weapon. Phew. They were starting to move. The old man fumbled through his remaining canisters, the ones that contained various kinds of parasites, while Auron yelled orders and flapped his arms like a drama queen. I wasn’t sure any parasite could help them out of their predicament because a BID agent hovered above them.
Noises of a firefight filled the air. It was nearby; definitely not the battle going on over at Mushroom Buddy. What did happen to that big guy? The BID had stopped using their weird bombs for some time.
Multiple rifles shooting. More BID agents? Police? This commotion was somewhere along the part of the street on the front side of this building. It was out of my view since I was on its left. And was that another laser gun thingy? It sure sounded like it. Must be the BID agent I had hit with a rock. I damaged his ComExo and he had to land somewhere.
Maybe I should be concerned about this new fight, but all of that wasn’t my problem.
I was just going to kill this BID agent, then move on to Auron and the old man. I had to thank the agent for serving them to me on a silver platter. How to properly extend my gratitude? A big-sized helping of concrete to his face? Oh yeah, I should eat him too since he hurt me. I wanted a big bite of that flying pest.
My eyes widened upon hearing a hiss and whoosh. A missile flew into view, heading for the BID agent. He was able to react at the last second, deploying some kind of shield to deflect the missile. It instead exploded a couple of feet above his head. The blast still pushed him down and destabilized his flight.
Taking that as my cue, I burst out of the building. I had a running start along the walls, my claws burrowing deep into the sides of the building for a hold, before making a giant leap at the floundering agent.
I caught both of his legs in my mouth and dragged him down. He managed to shoot me in the face a few times as we fell, boiling my eyeball off. I crunched his legs in retaliation. He screamed. We both landed; I stayed on my feet while his upper body bounced off a few yards away. I chewed swallowed parts of his legs, including his metal armor, as I crawled after him. My gaping mouth closed in on him.
There was ominous beeping.
And the agent exploded.
KABOOM!
White filled my vision. I got blasted backward, my back and head hit the ground hard. The blast forced my mouth open, breaking my jaw bones and tearing my muscles. Flames burned holes through my cheeks. The heat scorched my whole mouth and my throat.
That asshole self-destructed on me! Was this a standard BID tactic when they were about to die? I pushed myself up, growling with anger. Since my snout and throat got shredded, I could only make an airy grunting noise.
The BID agents I fought at Eve also did this. Fortunately, the explosion here was a teensy-weensy tiny fraction of the overloaded Greaves Reactor at Eve. This agent probably didn’t have a Reactor, or those agents that led the raid of Eve were just different from the rest. If an overloaded Greaves Reactor exploded right in front of my face, I’d be gone and a huge crater would swallow this block.
My body worked hard to heal itself. I felt it push out the shrapnels that penetrated my chest and throat. There was cool relief as my internal wounds stopped bleeding. Both my eyes got rearranged into their rightful place as the cracked pieces of my skull put themselves back together like a jigsaw puzzle.
I finally saw the fighting I heard moments ago. Armed police officers were shooting the BID agent with the damaged suit who had taken refuge behind a pillar of a building. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it until the agent fried one of the cops with his laser—or the cop should’ve been fried if he was a normal human, but instead, he shattered into dozens of shards like a broken pot. Finlay versus the BID?
A police van with screeching tires braved the crossfire. The Finlays threw grenades at the agent to keep him back and let the van pass safely. It was heading straight for me. I held my hands out in front, prepared to catch it as it crashed, but it swerved, stopped, and presented its back. Its back doors swung open and a bulky machine, a weapon of some sort, manned by more Finlay puppets was pointed at me.
Noises and strange smells from behind made me turn my head. Auron walked out of the electric field with an irritating smirk and a pulsating blue slug the size of a cucumber stuck on the side of his head. The parasite’s tendrils injected disgusting stuff I didn’t want to know about straight into his brain.
Behind him, two cops, probably Finlay’s clay men too, had disrupted the BID trap with a machine they carried. They were helping the old man stand up.
“You’re still alive?” Auron said with his hands on his hips. He had trouble speaking straight and his breathing was ragged. The veins of his head were pronounced, his face was becoming blue, and his eyes almost bulged out. “Let’s fix that and put an end to you.”
A wave of nausea washed over me. It was similar to the sensation I felt at the police station. This bastard was trying to cancel my power!
I lunged at Auron. A clay man pulled him back while the other one jumped in the way. I ended up catching the fake cop, which I crushed in my grip.
“Hold this giant bitch!” Auron yelled, his voice breaking into a screech. “And I need more power! I can’t get through—”
I didn’t hear the rest of it because a massive electric shock paralyzed me. Muscles in my body twitched nonstop, even muscles I hadn’t felt before. This was the most powerful shock I’ve experienced yet, stronger than that when I fought the 2Ms forces at the docks. I burned from the inside, flesh and innards cooked, patches of my fur caught fire, smoke rose from every part of my body.
I thrashed on the ground, forcing my arms and legs to move. Then I dug my claws into the pavement to steady myself. The power of the electricity running through me increased. My consciousness barely held on.
And then the electric shocks just stopped.
There was yelling from the van. Someone was shooting them?
Losing no time to think about what happened, I ripped off a slab of concrete from the street, spun around, and threw it like a frisbee at the van. The clay men dove in front of the machine to save it, but they were too late. The slab crashed into it.
I breathed deeply in relief, but even just breathing was agonizing. My entire body hurt. But it should be over, right? I should just get Auron and—I was wrong! Auron’s power came back with the dial cranked up to eleven.
A massive migraine hit me. My vision was all blobs like some abstract watercolor painting. Colored blobs, some of them moving. Forms, details, lines, everything was blurred. And it just made my headache worse if I tried to focus my eyes.
The words I heard became garbled. All I knew was that Auron bastard was gloating in front of me. I picked that the parasite was doing something to his powers, and something about that machine Finlay gave him, but I couldn’t decipher anything now. He continued talking, but white noise gradually became the only thing I could hear.
My sense of smell hadn’t betrayed me yet. It told me he was within my reach, coming closer because he thought he won.
I extended my arm. A huge swath of red field my vision. That was my arm!
I was about to reach him…
…huh?
The pain had disappeared as if it was all a bad dream. Instead of a red blob, I could finally see my arm, my human arm.
I also saw Auron was less than five feet away, and I could clearly hear his maniacal laughter. The blue slug attached to him had grown twice in size; his head also appeared swollen. He held a circular machine with blinking lights. Wires extending from the machine connected to spikes jammed into his arms.
“Not feeling so strong now?” he said.
I touched my face. Yep, I got forced back to my Erind body. I still had the balaclava mask on I wore before I transformed into Blanchette. It was smelly as fuck from the blood and guts from my previous battles. And my day wasn’t done just yet.
“You’re alone," Auron said. "Surrounded.”
I pulled my mask down over my mouth. I gritted my teeth and clenched my fist. I'm super irritated and tired of everyone's shit right now. And I'm not even a plumber!
“You don’t have your powers. So, you better surrend—hey, what—?!
I rushed him and punched his jaw.
Temple
Amber Deen is nearby; she was the one who interfered with the electroshock weapon. So, in answer to the question you're probably thinking, yes, she saw what happened. A small recap of what Deen knows (or thinks she knows) before this chapter: 1) Erind is an Adumbrae, 2) Blanchette is a separate Adumbrae trying to help Erind for some reason, and 3) Blanchette is the giant werewolf; Deen saw her transform in the Eve arena. In Deen's mind, Blanchette transformed into the giant werewolf to save Erind at the docks.
Only Myra and Johann know Erind's secret identity. As for the BID, these agents are hunting both the suspicious helicopter (they are investigating the 2Ms in this city) and the werewolf Adumbrae (priority target because it's more dangerous). The BID also has information that the werewolf and the 2Ms are enemies - in Arc 2, Lt. Hall obtained a picture of Erind as the werewolf trashing the base of the 2Ms at the docks, and he directly sent it to his BID contacts instead of reporting it to the police.
Deen may not have seen Erind's face because of the balaclava mask, but she does know Erind's clothes since she bought them for her, and she'll also certainly recognize Erind's body frame like we can also recognize a friend even if they have their backs turned to us.
“GHRAAAWR!” Cut that out, you flying piece of shit!
The floor and ceiling trembled from my roar. Cubicle dividers, tables, and chairs tumbled away, anything glass shattered, and papers scattered in the air. The smell of burnt hair and flesh tickling my nose was infuriating. My own burnt flesh! I tried to look over my shoulder to check the damage but my boulder-sized muscles crowded each other and my really long snout was in the way. Searing pain. But I wasn’t suffering.
Just annoyed. Really annoyed.
I sensed with my super sensey sensing sense the remaining metal man flying outside, his burning intent to kill me reeked from his armor, a grossly mistaken prey thinking he was the predator. Or did he want to avenge his comrade I tore apart? Whatever his desire was, he continued to pester me.
The BID agent—yes, at last, I remembered what to call that flea—didn’t want to follow me inside the building, afraid of getting caught. All he could do was send annoying hot light my way—my mind on the brink of going absolutely ballistic could barely find the word ‘laser’ to describe it. Shoot lasers! That was what I meant! Fuck, it was so hard to think straight.
Although I could predict where he’d shoot, I was too big to evade in time. I didn’t know my exact size now, but I had to be on all fours to move or I’d break straight through the ceiling if I stood. I was more comfortable in this position anyway, with all my claws on the ground.
I ran and continued my hunt. The entire floor was a huge office space, so it didn’t have any concrete walls dividing it into rooms that could slow me down. All drywalls, office panel partitions and dividers; I easily went past everything as if I was running through a field of grass.
Explosions lit my way like I was a rock star making an entrance in a concert. Painful spots blossomed on my body where the lasers hit. It took all of my willpower to keep myself on track hunting my original prey. The flying asshole outside could wait. He couldn’t hurt me much even with his powerful lasers. My flesh rapidly healed and a fresh layer of fur immediately covered it as if nothing happened.
Where the fuck are those two?
My wide ears twitched, facing whichever which way to detect their movement, my nose vigorously sniffed the air to follow their smell. Auron the smug bastard—I should eat him before anything else—and the old man with the parasite canisters. It was becoming harder to track them because of the fires and spreading smoke. The sprinklers also came on and gave me a bath. I was more annoyed with my drenched fur becoming heavy with water than the lasers.
They couldn’t have already left, could they?
While fighting the BID agents, I spotted Auron and the old man escape the wreckage of the crashed helicopter. They headed into this building to hide. To my surprise, the BID agents detached boxy metal thingies from their backs and dropped them to the ground. The two boxes sprouted legs and guns, scuttling after the 2Ms’ Adumbrae goons.
Scuttled, scampered, skittered…Skitter! That was right. ‘Skitters’, the name of those frickin' spider robots that nearly killed me when I escaped the tunnels below the Eve club. These couple that the BID had deployed were smaller though. And why were they also chasing the 2Ms? Did the BID know about them?
Whatever. Those Skitters better not mess with my food!
Faint pops. It became an angry droning sound. Gunfire? The floor vibrated from the explosions below. I paused. Lasers found their mark. The fallen cabinet beside me burst in flames and the sprinkler above activate. Huge lesions formed where the lasers burned my flesh.
I didn’t care.
I dug at the floor with my claws. My hands were like excavator buckets scooping out chunks of concrete. I growled as I reached the reinforced steel frame. I tugged at the rebars and bent them out of away, hoping it’d be a huge enough hole for me. I crawled down the hole to the floor below while the BID agent relentlessly tried to kill me.
As soon as I dropped down, I wrinkled my nose.
Trace scents of my Adumbrae prey. The sounds of gunfire became louder, and two male voices were yelling. I bounded in their direction. I hoped those fuckers hadn’t died yet to walking scraps of metal.
I swept a row of cubicles out of the way and spotted Auron and the old man running to the side of the floor. A Skitter burst into view. It dug its spiky legs into the ground to stabilize itself and the gun mounted on its back whirred into action. The two Adumbrae dropped to the floor and laid flat as the robot spider strafed the windows and walls.
“Rhrwaaa!” My prey! If this stupid spider killed them before I—
The Skitter turned its turret in my direction, deciding I was the bigger threat it should destroy first. Auron and the old man hastily got back on their feet, bloodied and injured with several bullet wounds, and made a run for the windows. I raised my arm as the Skitter’s heavy machine gun rambled. Hot metal pellets tore into my thick skin and muscles, ripping off bits and pieces of my flesh like a sculptor chipping away at the marble.
But unlike marble, I could regenerate. And at a very rapid rate too. I rushed at the Skitter and clamped at its massive gun with my jaws. I violently shook it like an overexcited dog destroying its toy.
Sudden sharp pains on my back, hot skewers buried deep into my muscles. What the—?
A massive shock went through my body. I clenched fangs, crunching through the metal, as I uncontrollably shook. My muscles seized, my arms and limbs curled to my body. I couldn’t control myself. The other Skitter had latched onto me and was electrocuting me!
The partially destroyed Skitter on the floor jabbed its remaining working leg into my abdomen and coursed electricity to me. Sparks came out and it suddenly exploded, perhaps already too damaged to move. The blast knocked some sense into my head.
I forced my arm to move and reached over my back to grab the other Skitter. “Hroooagrh!” Get off me! I pulled it, with its spiky legs and all, and slammed it on the ground right on top of its brother robot. Then the ceiling. The ground. Ground again. Ceiling, floor, ceiling, floor.
I chucked away the postmodern metal art piece that was the Skitter before charging at the window. But I skidded to a halt before I broke through the concrete wall—no way I could fit through the window. I stuck my head outside and scanned the surroundings before deciding what to do next. I was amazed at myself to still have some presence of mind left after all this time. The burden to keep the crazed feral creature at bay inside my head was becoming harder and harder. Great was the temptation to let it go and enjoy the destruction.
No! That was suicide if I went out of control in the middle of the City.
And that’d break Rule #8.
I spotted Auron and the old man lying in the middle of the street, trapped by some kind of energy forcefield dome whatever.
Were they dead? Fuck!
Oh, wait. Nope, just stunned by an electroshock weapon. Phew. They were starting to move. The old man fumbled through his remaining canisters, the ones that contained various kinds of parasites, while Auron yelled orders and flapped his arms like a drama queen. I wasn’t sure any parasite could help them out of their predicament because a BID agent hovered above them.
Noises of a firefight filled the air. It was nearby; definitely not the battle going on over at Mushroom Buddy. What did happen to that big guy? The BID had stopped using their weird bombs for some time.
Multiple rifles shooting. More BID agents? Police? This commotion was somewhere along the part of the street on the front side of this building. It was out of my view since I was on its left. And was that another laser gun thingy? It sure sounded like it. Must be the BID agent I had hit with a rock. I damaged his ComExo and he had to land somewhere.
Maybe I should be concerned about this new fight, but all of that wasn’t my problem.
I was just going to kill this BID agent, then move on to Auron and the old man. I had to thank the agent for serving them to me on a silver platter. How to properly extend my gratitude? A big-sized helping of concrete to his face? Oh yeah, I should eat him too since he hurt me. I wanted a big bite of that flying pest.
My eyes widened upon hearing a hiss and whoosh. A missile flew into view, heading for the BID agent. He was able to react at the last second, deploying some kind of shield to deflect the missile. It instead exploded a couple of feet above his head. The blast still pushed him down and destabilized his flight.
Taking that as my cue, I burst out of the building. I had a running start along the walls, my claws burrowing deep into the sides of the building for a hold, before making a giant leap at the floundering agent.
I caught both of his legs in my mouth and dragged him down. He managed to shoot me in the face a few times as we fell, boiling my eyeball off. I crunched his legs in retaliation. He screamed. We both landed; I stayed on my feet while his upper body bounced off a few yards away. I chewed swallowed parts of his legs, including his metal armor, as I crawled after him. My gaping mouth closed in on him.
There was ominous beeping.
And the agent exploded.
KABOOM!
White filled my vision. I got blasted backward, my back and head hit the ground hard. The blast forced my mouth open, breaking my jaw bones and tearing my muscles. Flames burned holes through my cheeks. The heat scorched my whole mouth and my throat.
That asshole self-destructed on me! Was this a standard BID tactic when they were about to die? I pushed myself up, growling with anger. Since my snout and throat got shredded, I could only make an airy grunting noise.
The BID agents I fought at Eve also did this. Fortunately, the explosion here was a teensy-weensy tiny fraction of the overloaded Greaves Reactor at Eve. This agent probably didn’t have a Reactor, or those agents that led the raid of Eve were just different from the rest. If an overloaded Greaves Reactor exploded right in front of my face, I’d be gone and a huge crater would swallow this block.
My body worked hard to heal itself. I felt it push out the shrapnels that penetrated my chest and throat. There was cool relief as my internal wounds stopped bleeding. Both my eyes got rearranged into their rightful place as the cracked pieces of my skull put themselves back together like a jigsaw puzzle.
I finally saw the fighting I heard moments ago. Armed police officers were shooting the BID agent with the damaged suit who had taken refuge behind a pillar of a building. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it until the agent fried one of the cops with his laser—or the cop should’ve been fried if he was a normal human, but instead, he shattered into dozens of shards like a broken pot. Finlay versus the BID?
A police van with screeching tires braved the crossfire. The Finlays threw grenades at the agent to keep him back and let the van pass safely. It was heading straight for me. I held my hands out in front, prepared to catch it as it crashed, but it swerved, stopped, and presented its back. Its back doors swung open and a bulky machine, a weapon of some sort, manned by more Finlay puppets was pointed at me.
Noises and strange smells from behind made me turn my head. Auron walked out of the electric field with an irritating smirk and a pulsating blue slug the size of a cucumber stuck on the side of his head. The parasite’s tendrils injected disgusting stuff I didn’t want to know about straight into his brain.
Behind him, two cops, probably Finlay’s clay men too, had disrupted the BID trap with a machine they carried. They were helping the old man stand up.
“You’re still alive?” Auron said with his hands on his hips. He had trouble speaking straight and his breathing was ragged. The veins of his head were pronounced, his face was becoming blue, and his eyes almost bulged out. “Let’s fix that and put an end to you.”
A wave of nausea washed over me. It was similar to the sensation I felt at the police station. This bastard was trying to cancel my power!
I lunged at Auron. A clay man pulled him back while the other one jumped in the way. I ended up catching the fake cop, which I crushed in my grip.
“Hold this giant bitch!” Auron yelled, his voice breaking into a screech. “And I need more power! I can’t get through—”
I didn’t hear the rest of it because a massive electric shock paralyzed me. Muscles in my body twitched nonstop, even muscles I hadn’t felt before. This was the most powerful shock I’ve experienced yet, stronger than that when I fought the 2Ms forces at the docks. I burned from the inside, flesh and innards cooked, patches of my fur caught fire, smoke rose from every part of my body.
I thrashed on the ground, forcing my arms and legs to move. Then I dug my claws into the pavement to steady myself. The power of the electricity running through me increased. My consciousness barely held on.
And then the electric shocks just stopped.
There was yelling from the van. Someone was shooting them?
Losing no time to think about what happened, I ripped off a slab of concrete from the street, spun around, and threw it like a frisbee at the van. The clay men dove in front of the machine to save it, but they were too late. The slab crashed into it.
I breathed deeply in relief, but even just breathing was agonizing. My entire body hurt. But it should be over, right? I should just get Auron and—I was wrong! Auron’s power came back with the dial cranked up to eleven.
A massive migraine hit me. My vision was all blobs like some abstract watercolor painting. Colored blobs, some of them moving. Forms, details, lines, everything was blurred. And it just made my headache worse if I tried to focus my eyes.
The words I heard became garbled. All I knew was that Auron bastard was gloating in front of me. I picked that the parasite was doing something to his powers, and something about that machine Finlay gave him, but I couldn’t decipher anything now. He continued talking, but white noise gradually became the only thing I could hear.
My sense of smell hadn’t betrayed me yet. It told me he was within my reach, coming closer because he thought he won.
I extended my arm. A huge swath of red field my vision. That was my arm!
I was about to reach him…
…huh?
The pain had disappeared as if it was all a bad dream. Instead of a red blob, I could finally see my arm, my human arm.
I also saw Auron was less than five feet away, and I could clearly hear his maniacal laughter. The blue slug attached to him had grown twice in size; his head also appeared swollen. He held a circular machine with blinking lights. Wires extending from the machine connected to spikes jammed into his arms.
“Not feeling so strong now?” he said.
I touched my face. Yep, I got forced back to my Erind body. I still had the balaclava mask on I wore before I transformed into Blanchette. It was smelly as fuck from the blood and guts from my previous battles. And my day wasn’t done just yet.
“You’re alone," Auron said. "Surrounded.”
I pulled my mask down over my mouth. I gritted my teeth and clenched my fist. I'm super irritated and tired of everyone's shit right now. And I'm not even a plumber!
“You don’t have your powers. So, you better surrend—hey, what—?!
I rushed him and punched his jaw.
Temple
Amber Deen is nearby; she was the one who interfered with the electroshock weapon. So, in answer to the question you're probably thinking, yes, she saw what happened. A small recap of what Deen knows (or thinks she knows) before this chapter: 1) Erind is an Adumbrae, 2) Blanchette is a separate Adumbrae trying to help Erind for some reason, and 3) Blanchette is the giant werewolf; Deen saw her transform in the Eve arena. In Deen's mind, Blanchette transformed into the giant werewolf to save Erind at the docks.
Only Myra and Johann know Erind's secret identity. As for the BID, these agents are hunting both the suspicious helicopter (they are investigating the 2Ms in this city) and the werewolf Adumbrae (priority target because it's more dangerous). The BID also has information that the werewolf and the 2Ms are enemies - in Arc 2, Lt. Hall obtained a picture of Erind as the werewolf trashing the base of the 2Ms at the docks, and he directly sent it to his BID contacts instead of reporting it to the police.
Deen may not have seen Erind's face because of the balaclava mask, but she does know Erind's clothes since she bought them for her, and she'll also certainly recognize Erind's body frame like we can also recognize a friend even if they have their backs turned to us.
