Every line of code, every living transistor, every instinct and sensation that made up my simulacrum brain told me to devour the rest of the sinner’s body.

  Something deeper steered me away from that string of action, and so, I found myself deep within the rancid heart of another city.

  That sensation, that restraint, the irrationality of it irked me to no end, yet, the thought of fighting it seemed futile. It shouldn't irk me. It did and so I had to deal with it.

  I felt none of that same trepidation when it came to my current meal. The sinner I currently held in my clawed grasp had bumbled towards me with all the power its half-melted muscle could generate. Eager to face my lethal embrace.

  It had tried to strike me with a metal pipe held within its flaccid arm. The desperate swing of its weapon failed to connect. My martial programming pulled my head back just enough to let its sloppy strike whoosh by me.

  All I had to do was grip its throat and activate the fibre bundles within my forearms. The inflamed tissue around the sinner's vertebrae exploded nigh instantaneously. Clear fluid leaked from its crumpled spine as I wrenched its head off.

  I didn't let a single drop of blood go to waste. My mouth snapped open before crashing shut around the open wound. Its taut body grew limp as the last vestiges of tension left its corpse.

  I ripped, I teared. My teeth, like scalpels, cut its body apart, before I swallowed large chunks.

  The microfiber resin around my throat bulged with each gulp. I hadn't a tongue but the inside of my mouth was lined with chemoreceptors and so I could taste its filth-soaked hide, I could taste its rancid blood and the sour notes of ammonia in its muscle.

  The sinner had been three-quarters my height, yet its whole body was now within mine. Shredded and already assimilated by the grinding mass of nanomachines inside me as if it was never there to begin with.

  The gore filled womb of a machine some would call the sinner’s iron grave, within me. For, it was a place of birth, rebirth even. Ground up biomass would have each molecule split into a plasmic soup of protons, neutrons and electrons.

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

  The power of soul. Before it had been vestigial within each corpse. Before the end times, each body would hold a trace of the soul. This trace was burnt up for fuel just as flesh was ground up for bullets and blades.

  The briefest flashes of a life that wasn't my own bounced around within me. They weren't like the sinner in the desert’s vivid images. They were far too garbled to give me pause.

  This wasn't a thing during the time of the long silence, the endless war. The battle that had spawned me. My mother, my war.

  The vestiges a machine would devour were just that, vestiges. Now that the angels of death have long left their posts, souls will linger within a corpse till they scatter away in the wind.

  Now that part of me can understand, can appreciate. I couldn't help but remember something a soldier besides me had recited during the second war.

  By then the angels had come down seeking souls. Their lord had left, they needed the shards of light within the hearts of living things.

  The soldier had spoken with such flowery cadence of the fate of his soul. He spoke of the bugs and birds eating his corpse, he spoke about how he would be spread around the universe in gestalt with all others. Till he and they became the wind that howled between the trees and the hydrogen that burned within the stars. An angel's arrow splattered his brain seconds later and silenced his ramblings.

  It seems the soul of this sinner would burn within me till it was exhausted away. Entropy would claim it and oblivion would follow. Perhaps this is why it had attacked me so aimlessly.

  Within hell it had no peace. Death by its own hands would give it no peace.

  Within my gory womb it would be dissolved, broken down and transformed. It would forget even itself.

  I looked away from the bloodstained cement. The raging light of the eclipsed sun threw my enzymes out of their optimal range.

  I stood up allowing the six lensed cameras that gave me sight to pick up on places of cool shade.

  I could feel the power within the flesh I had consumed slowly become my own. Now that I could truly experience it, I could feel the churning of my hemolymph as it transported the entropic plasma to my wings.

  The material would be accelerated and fused under virtual mass and temperature, till it coalesced beautifully into whatever chemical element and subsequent structure I required.

  The nanomachines would turn it to any tool I had the schematics for.

  The sky and its horrid screeching faded away. It only screamed to the forlorn, something drew near.

  Something large, impossibly black in color, landed before me with no less might than an anti tank missile. Dust kicked up from around its form and obscured it from sight.

  Behind it, emerging from streets and jumping down from windows was its gibbering warband, sinners.

  The air before me jiggled like a sheet. My processors raced to a conclusion and both my arms and wings locked in front of me into a guarded cross shape.

  “?????? ?????"

  (Hell waits)

  The words were spoken with a cool, blank certainty. An unseen force blew against my shielding limbs.

  I flew backwards, the car behind me breaking my impact as the metal buckled against my flung mass.

  My arms and wings had been parted by the invisible blow. The flung debris scraped against my dark paint and blew straight through the car like high caliber bullets.

  The metal shell of the vehicle now crumpled down the middle and pierced innumerably.

  The inky black beast and its troup stood before me. The settling dust ga

  ve me a short peek of its four dark horns.

  Once more, I would fight.