~We... will break... the sky.

  The-interdimensional… horde!

  …of hung-er finally rise.

  We-will-go-make-epic-fight!~

  ~Deee dooo dee-doo-dee-doooo…~

  Running at full tilt in the direction of the incursion had me wishing for an epic, high-energy soundtrack to back me up. I was definitely going to create a banger theme song for myself at some point, and right now, I was beginning to work out the lyrics and some kind of melody in my head. They were dogshit lyrics, but that was part of the charm. Trust me bro, it's only bad because I totally want it to be. I think it was called irony or something like that.

  Regardless, I'd really gone and fucked up the pavement this time. My running jump carried me all the way to the other side of the street, and with the full 'armor' increasing my weight by a tremendous amount, I reached a much higher final velocity. Ultimately, I downright shattered the particular slab of sidewalk I landed on. The violence of the impact even kicked up a small cloud of concrete dust. It was pretty cool, especially because my metal exoskeleton was completely unharmed.

  It rattled up my insides quite a bit, but I felt like I made a convincing impression of being utterly unhurt to anyone who might have witnessed it. My regeneration didn't take long to kick in, and now I was running close to as fast as I could in my current state.

  Much like when I lost control of my hunger, I ended up taking immense leaps. Having now experienced firsthand what it was actually like to walk around under lower gravity, I could confirm that my high-speed gait was pretty much exactly like how a normal person would run on the moon, sped up. I might be stupidly strong compared to a normal human now, but the speed at which I could flex my muscles hadn't grown by nearly as much. That meant I had to leverage the strength aspect to shove myself against the ground harder to move faster—hence the long, arcing strides.

  Along the way, I passed a few Guardian teams who were also heading towards the incursion. A couple of times, someone else passed me in turn, and there were also some Civil Guard detachments rolling up from who knew where. Each of those probably had at least one enlisted Guardian along with their special-purpose, anti-Anathema equipment.

  It took me about two minutes to reach the edge of the incursion. In that time, I was able to fully hash out the lyrics for the intro of my epic soundtrack. I also slowed down a bit as I got close, mostly because I wanted to take a closer look at the boundary.

  While there wasn't a literal barrier in the air, it wasn't hard to tell where the world transitioned from the way it normally was to being part of an incursion. Even at night, there was a marked difference in lighting. It was far darker within than without, and any light sources weren't dimmed so much as they failed to cast the proper amount of illumination onto their surroundings. It was as if most of the light was simply devoured, with only the most direct beams cutting through without issue.

  There were also the violet streaks, of course. The violet glow intensified towards the center, where the breaches themselves were. Also, even in the short time that I took to look at the border, it was clear that it was expanding. The edge of it had to be moving at about a foot per second.

  It took another thirty seconds or so for me to spot my first Anathema. Being on the very edge, there wasn't much this far out yet. Most of the Anathema would be closer to the center of any incursion. If enough of them made it to the edge, the edge would just expand, or a whole new breach might even form. For that reason, the edge itself was usually pretty vacant, almost by definition.

  Unfortunately, someone else managed to engage the smasher before I got my own chance. The Tier 1 brute didn't go down immediately, though—so I took the opportunity to contribute as I approached. Throwing one hand backwards, I called out to my sword—and the weapon answered.

  I ended up leaving the sword just sitting around in the crater left in the sidewalk by my dramatic exit. I wasn't worried about anyone stealing it, since the whole point was that I was the only one who could literally summon it back to myself. That was something I wanted to test at a longer distance than the little I'd done back in Dad's living room—and I also wanted to see if there was a way to weaponize it. So, I positioned myself such that me, the sword a dozen or so blocks behind, and the smasher up ahead were all roughly lined up.

  Sure enough, I felt something take hold. An arc of violet lightning snapped into existence between my trailing, outstretched hand and another point now far out of sight. With it came a vague sense of how close the weapon was—and it was now approaching fast. I was also closing in on the wounded smasher, and all of its attention was on the lone Guardian hacking at it with a—wooden axe? Whatever. Just before the sword could snap into my hand, I cut my connection to it.

  Now tangible again—and hurtling sideways at tremendous speed—the weapon blew past me hard enough to create a concussive blast of air. Along with kicking up a veritable gust, the sudden drag forces also send it tumbling end over end, and I doubted it hit the smasher tip-first.

  It didn't miss the other Anathema entirely, though. In fact, I felt like I did a pretty good job at aiming the thing, given that the sword exploded straight through the smasher and continued out the other side, only stopping where it battered against someone's parked car. Oops. It was still only a sword, though, and the smasher slowed it down significantly. All it did was make one small, scratched dent.

  The other Anathema took considerably more damage. In fact, it seemed I'd gone and finished the thing off with my little stunt. The alien creature hadn't quite 'exploded,' but it was definitely sufficiently mangled for its measly, Tier 1 regeneration to fail outright. Hilarious that this even worked. With another bolt of violet lightning, I called the weapon back to my hand. It impacted me with almost zero force, coming to a perfect stop in my palm. So long as I maintained the connection all the way until I was holding it, I wouldn't have to worry about doing what I'd just done to the smasher to myself.

  Conveniently, the temporary intangibility meant it returned to me perfectly clean, having left all the disgusting gore back on the ground near the parked car.

  "Hey!" I turned around. I'd momentarily forgotten about the other lone Guardian, but now I remembered he was here—and I recognized his voice. "Alex, yeah?"

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  It was none other than my favorite action hero, my new Guardian idol, the one and only Maximus Armstrong. He looked just as strong and menacing as he had when he first broke me out of the cage in that shed the Anathema cultists put me in. It was funny to think that I was now way fucking stronger than him—not just as a shorthand for overall danger level, but even raw, physical strength. I also noticed that he had two arms again.

  Huh. He must have grown a new one. While limb regrowth wasn't trivial for low tier Guardians, it became a modest proposition as one tiered up. That was not what I was talking about here, though. He'd grown himself a new arm in the same way you'd grow a bonsai tree—just, way faster, and over less than two weeks.

  It wasn't just made out of wood. It was made of living wood, and looked far more like roots that had grown together into the shape of a human arm than something carved out of solid wood. There were even some leafy bits near the shoulder. I guess that explains the wooden axe, then. In the end, I spent several long seconds just admiring his new arm. "That's sick, dude."

  Glancing down at his tree arm, Max patted it fondly. "This thing? Yeah, it's super handy." Was that a pun? "Anyway," he continued, "Katherine was super worried about you, by the way. She invited me to join up with you guys a few days back, and I was just about to come drop by when she blew up my phone and," he gestured around at the incursion, "this happened."

  "Damn, talk about bad timing," I said to buy conversational time. I was mostly looking around at our surroundings, seeing what else was going on nearby. Not much, it turned out. "Wait, do you also live here in LA?"

  The new Guardian shook his head. "Nah, I live up North. Pretty close to that hospital, actually. I drove in." Walking away from the mangled smasher, he pointed at the dented car with his flesh arm. "Parked when I saw an incursion up ahead. The edge was actually a few blocks farther up at that point. Hey, wait. That dent is new."

  "Huh, I wonder what might have done that?" Walking past him, I touched a single claw tip to the dent. A quick flex of those strange, intangible muscles was all it took to make the thin sheet pop back into place. Huh, I think I did a pretty good job, actually. It looked almost like nothing had happened, aside from the damage to the paint. There was nothing I could do about that, though. I feigned looking around. "Do you see another Anathema nearby?"

  I already knew the answer, of course. There was only one Anathema within fifty yards, and it was yours truly. There was no reason to let Mr. Legally Distinct Rambo know that, though.

  "Huh?" Max also looked around, though he did a much thorough job of it. "Hmm, I don't think so. Weird." He then took a moment to study the lingering damage and my makeshift repair. "Thanks, though. Damn, that's cool."

  "Let me guess," I said, "I shape metal, you shape wood?"

  "Plants actually." I raised an eyebrow at his response. "What?" He rolled his eyes. "Most plants aren't made of wood, you know. And it's not like I can control a coffee table."

  Huh. I adjusted my assessment. That's a good point, actually, if that's how his power works. "Shame. I bet there's a lot of wood in these buildings but I'm not seeing many plants."

  "That's true," Max allowed, "but remember that plants are made mostly of water and air."

  "Oh shit." Blinking, I thought about the implications for a moment. "Does that mean you can just keep adding mass so long as you have moist air to work with?" That sounded like total cheating. To be fair, though, so does what you just did with your sword.

  "To a degree, yeah." For a moment, we just stood there, not sure where to take things from here. "I guess we should go find Katherine."

  I nodded. "Probably, yeah."

  We set off together. Max said he would rather leave the car, since we'd have to get out to properly fight Anathema anyway. That was fine by me, and I doubted going on foot would even slow us down much. At first, I thought he might have trouble keeping up with me. That wasn't the case, though—it soon became clear that he was also decently strong, at least by Tier 1 standards, and he had longer legs. He was also a much better athlete than me, so things evened out overall.

  He still wouldn't stand a chance against me if I wanted to kill him right now, but that was a pretty different context from the current situation.

  As we left downtown proper and entered the overall area where Katherine lived, we started seeing a lot more Anathema and a lot more chaos. There was no way around it—people were dying. It was a densely populated area, unlike the college campus had been, and even with the influx of Guardians and Civil Guard, people couldn't arrive instantly at a bunker. In most cases, the nearest proper bunker would still be multiple blocks away, and all kinds of things could try to eat you along the route.

  Even Guardians weren't safe—of course they weren't—and over the next five minutes I saw someone who clearly had esoteric abilities go down twice. Ironically, the Civil Guard grunts seemed to be doing the best on average. Or maybe that's not ironic. They're disciplined and strictly overseen professionals, after all. They also had a lot of fancy tech that the average low tier, independent Guardian didn't, and in many cases it looked like it more than made up for the lack of esoteric abilities.

  It also helped that most squads did have at least one Guardian with them, and the soldiers were doing a great job at methodically sweeping the streets.

  While it would have been faster to go at it 'bare handed,' at least with my current skill level, I wanted to experiment with my fancy new sword. A skinner tried to pounce on me, but I'd learned how to deal with that over a week ago. This time, instead of grabbing it out of the air and slamming it to the ground, I ducked, twisted, and flicked the sword up from underneath. By first lightening it, only to suddenly ramp up the mass, I was able to strike with enough speed and force to cut the Tier 1 in half in a single stroke before it even hit the ground.

  It was an efficient, simple way to deal with the common, Tier 1 variant. More important, though, was that it made me feel really fucking cool every time I did it.

  Rising back to my full and impressive stature, I looked around to see how Max was handling things. He was super distracted with a particularly large, van-sized grabber that was crawling its way towards him. Swinging multiple wooden blades around like a complete madman, he hacked off a tentacle with every swing—but the Anathema had many more to throw towards him, and the Tier 1 Guardian was slowly being pushed back. All the while, the large grabber slowly regenerated.

  Hmm. I didn't think he was in real danger—if necessary, he could literally just outrun it—but he was super focused, which meant now might be a good time to slip away.

  I wanted to spend at least a little time fighting alongside him because I anticipated he might be about to join our developing team. That being said, I really, really needed to eat. That was the main reason I'd rushed over to this incursion in the first place, and it was a little hard to get away with sneaking a few snacks here and there when a fellow Guardian was right there next to you.

  So, after lazily decapitating another skinner before it could even pounce, I double checked that he was still occupied. Then, I slipped away behind some parked cars. From there, I cut between a brick wall and a chain link fence until I found a good, empty and secluded area. Snatching a small, cat-sized grabber off of the fence, I finally unhinged my metal jaws and shoved the entire wriggling, thrashing thing down.

  The lesser Anathema fought back valiantly, but it could do almost nothing to stop me from chomping down and slurping up the few trailing tentacles. From there, the whole thing went down relatively easily.

  An involuntary shudder raced through me, and I almost dropped the sword. Fuck. I twitched a little as I straightened out a little and looked around again. God that was so fucking good. It was only the beginning though, and I was still so, so hungry. Alright Alex—you know what to do.

  I wasn't going to go full chamelium mode, and I definitely wasn't going to lose control of myself. But it was finally time for me to cut loose a little and

  ...eat.

  So—now that I'd gotten away from Max—that was exactly what I was going to do.

  ANNOUNCEMENT!!!

  Alright, I said there was a minor announcement, and here it is. It's basically just patch notes. There are a few very minor corrections I've made to previous chapters that are bigger than simple prose corrections but not big enough that you even need to re-read.

  That's it. That's the announcement.

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