Mia looked about herself again, and realized only vaguely where she currently was, half-picked up from Urasaria fan forums and her own obsession with all sites of violence. It was an abandoned town in some state on the east coast, urban yet decaying from lack of maintenance; one of those small towns that had not survived the initial emergence of Revenants, then attempted to rebuild it the decades since, only to undergo host-related tragedy after another until eventually everyone with sense had moved.

  There were many half-burnt buildings flanking her as she took to the sidewalk, and she sniffed vaguely the scent of bloated corpses, although she could not think of why this was; by the look of the town, no one had lived here in years, thus any corpses should have already decayed. The walls of the buildings were thin and rotted, exposed pipes and wiring, other internal organs of construction.

  She grabbed the outer pipe of a building, slicing off a segment with her flames to use as a weapon, melting and reforging it into something sharper and deadlier. She was taken by the realization that the suffocating aura loomed over this area; even now she could only recognize it through imagining how a place like this should normally feel, rather than anything she felt truly amiss here. It seemed to have no deleterious effect upon her, so she continued on nonetheless.

  There was a four-way intersection ahead. Cautiously, Mia pressed a hand to the building at her right, and she heard something like a drill starting up beyond the wall; in the next instant she swept back just in time for a man with drills for hands to burst out of the wall and hit the road burrowing, spewing out pieces of ore in his dig; Mia lashed out at him with a whip of flame to destroy the projectiles, but they slammed superheated into her and she staggered back in pain, wincing yet angered: "-WORLDWIDE!"

  A swarm of ice scarabs chased after the driller in the road as he circled & circled underground, dodging as a river of ice followed above his excavation, Mia thinking: *T-That was tungsten, has to be. Host aura to enhance, it's the most heat-resistant metal...*

  As she backed against the wall again, she gripped her pipe and saw another host at her left & 50ft away, mid-range and his eyes burst out from his sockets upon long stalks. He did not approach her, yet Mia stayed wary as the driller unburrowed up from the road and dove towards her - she swept her hands up and a pillar of ice formed that the driller crashed clear through, his drills spewing out pieces of lodestone that magnetized and sought to rip Mia's raised pipe out of her hands, but the next scene was instant.

  A swarm of scarabs superheated her pipe above its Curie temperature, demagnetizing it completely in time for the driller's shocked expression to be bashed right back into his skull with one strike to the head that sent him sailing back through another pillar of ice, slicing his body apart, sputtering and coughing blood in his landing.

  Mia rushed at him with pipe drawn, yet felt a presence making to leap upon her from behind, and as she turned, in the milliseconds it took Mia to recognize the crowning & feminist achievement of the woman leaping at her being the first enemy female host she had ever fought, Mia also attained the feminist achievement of crowning her with a superheated blow to her skull that blasted vaporized bits of brain matter out from the boiling cauldron that was formerly her head; she burnt her corpse to ash, then turned just in time to block his drills directly with her pipe.

  He pulled back, then thrust at her again to stab her; she blocked each one of his repeated attacks, her stance trained and every blow blunted. She had felt this instinctuality with a weapon since she had begun hosting Worldwide; it was not conscious thought that she revised into the correct action but rather that the action she took proved its correctness by its existence; she blocked blow after blow after blow after blow as he grew increasingly frustrated, then stabbed clear through her pipe in one vicious thrust with both drills, attempting to carve clear through as they spun faster & faster.

  In the holes his attack opened, a geyser of steam blasted out into his face and burnt clear through his eyes, staggering him back; Mia slammed her pipe across the right side of his face and sent bits of his skull spewing out, a second bash across the other end mangling him further; Mia pulled back her weapon and readied to slam down, the frenzy of gore exciting her heavily -

  - but the weight of her pipe suddenly doubled, tripled, then exponentially rose until she was forced to drop it and it shattered upon the ground, leaving her defenseless as the man tried one desperate stab at her -

  - but her fire & ice scarabs combined and she blasted herself away with a geyser of water, crashing through the wall of the warehouse behind herself, standing with a stagger, weaponless yet knowing the odd increase in weight had come from her eyestalked foe.

  Watching ahead, she saw the hole that her entrance had made grow as the walls grew brittler, and the warehouse began collapsing around her; she swept all about and reinforced the expanding cracks with her ice, but the light of the sun hit her ice wrong and its refractivity suddenly increased, blinding her temporarily; she was forced to rush blindly out of the building and incinerate it down on her exit, peeling open her eyes to discover herself in another direction of the intersection, still within 50ft of her eyestalked opponent ahead and feeling her driller foe traveling vaguely about.

  *Eyes, eyes, what the hell could that have to do with...* she winced and thought. She had no choice but to rush towards him as he turned to her, both swarms of scarabs coating her arms as she ran. *Focus? Enhancing properties of matter?*

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  She felt her step suddenly shorten, the stickiness of the asphalt road below focused upon to the detriment of all of its other properties; it began collapsing behind her, and as she tripped and staggered, she looked back to see the man's drills sticking out of the road behind, a maw of spinning drills and a whirlpool of asphalt forming that she would soon be sucked into, the center fast approaching behind as the road sloped.

  She was forced to slide turn and turn, and once she was within 10ft of him, he burst out from the road and lept towards her again, his drills coated in tungsten and resistant to her heat - but the next scene was instant.

  A swarm of fire scarabs shot through his drills and heated them as far as they could; a swarm of ice scarabs chilled them as low as they could, and in an instant the vulnerability of tungsten to themrmal shock broke his drills apart into pieces, spewing blood in all directions; Mia slammed her elbow into his face and sent him back another three feet as he shrieked in agony, desperately burrowing with what little he had left as he dug past Mia and in the direction of his compatriot.

  Mia rushed up the road, the excavation at her side outpacing her. She shot a geyser of steam underground that would melt the flesh off from him if he remained; he was forced to unburrow beside the eyestalk host, at whom Mia blasted a dozen fireballs that scorched through his skin and melted several holes clear through; both screamed in agony and began running, and Mia rushed in pursuit as the frenzy of blood claimed her, the intensity of her scarabs chattering growing in the promise of corpses.

  Rushing in pursuit, Mia felt the road grow stickier below; a carpet of ice formed and she ducked and slid, quickening herself, 40ft within range of them both ahead; 30ft within, and as she came 20ft within, all sound collapsed into a single "FTL." and the dreadnought was there standing only a few feet ahead from her initial foes.

  She halted herself and backed away, though his focus was not on her but of the two hosts. The movement of their limbs dimmed, then moved of their own choice, then dimmed once more, their senses drowned but forced to acknowledge their being drowned. Their interstices of consciousness were brief and filled with begging prostration, staggering heavily about and unable to rudder themselves back ashore their own wills.

  "Y-You won't deny me their blood." grunted Mia. Worldwide's scarabs swarmed her at a deafening pace. "Don't take away my pleasure in killing these disappointments."

  The dreadnought laughed. "You have grown too well into your Revenant. But you are wrong to call them disappointments. They were never expected to be more than what they are. The curve of evolution, Mia, produces far more men like this than those like you and I. They are content with their weakness; you are not. Perhaps nature should be different, but this is not so.

  Take Rayaka, as example. I plucked him from prison before he was to be executed for a number of murders. He had been caught in such a stupid manner that his name had been reduced to a synonym for criminal idiocy in the circles he ran.

  Once in France, now in America.

  Thinking it a bit of retributive torture, the government never told him the date of his execution. Yet, his case had been delayed, appealed, delayed again, his execution stayed, for political reasons and otherwise, then restarted again. Caught in a web of subjugation that reduced his life to political whim rather than his will, he nonetheless believed himself able to control it all. He told me once, in his ineloquent and stupid manner, that he believed it was his continued lack of guilt for the crimes he had commit that caused the universe to continually delay his execution; that so long as he did not repent for his crimes, he would never be made to repent.

  When I transported him from his cell, he believed me to be a mere agent created by his mind to free himself, though he latched upon and served me regardless for nothing else but my strength. Ethics or morality do not matter to this man. He cannot conceive of the world in anything but hierarchies of power. Knowing he cannot ever reach the apex of it, however, he settles for his own position within it, beating down those lower than himself while graciously accepting the abuse visited from those higher. He is readily humiliable because of it. Never once has he risen against me, regardless of how tortured or demeaned he has been.

  Imagine then, Mia, the comedy of this man's delusion that he is in control of his fate. A man who has always been pushed about and blamed by others, yet believes himself to be the axis upon which the world turns. Imagine hundreds of these men, pushed about by forces that they do not understand, only wishing for an identity to be beaten into them. Thug; henchman; enforcer; kidnapper; murderer. They do not question, only destroy. They do not resist, only fight where they are told. They are functionary, essentially rote. If biology permits free will and consciousness, then they are not possessed by it, not how you and I are. They do not see their lives as a thing to make worthy. Subjugation becomes comfort to these men; hierarchy and its methods their identity."

  The control relinquished from the two husks. The burrower attempted to run, and the dreadnought's aura slipped from him as he made it ten, twenty feet. The other's eyes flailed against the dreadnought to strike him, yet no damage registered.

  "Only now trapped between two spectres of death do they attempt to act for themselves. But I will alleviate forevermore from them the burden of decision."

  The dreadnought did not raise his hands, yet from him emanated that stifling aura, one which no longer crashed against Mia but enveloped her mentality with familiarity; this was not so for the soon-husks ahead of her. Their mouths did not move nor scream; no suffering could be vocalized or perhaps even felt as they stood unmoving, while with a crinkling of breast-bones, a crunching of sinew, their hearts burst gradually through their chests until they sat, still-beating and barely attached, half-beached upon a dune of flesh and half-gulped by the outside air.

  The two husks turned again to her, the burrower fifty feet away and the eyestalked thirty feet away. Before the dreadnought was gone in a cloud of scarabs, he raised his second hand; a bolt of lightning burst from it that blasted the burrower apart into a geyser of gore that grew into a rain of blood in the wink of his laughter.

  Mia backed away as the eyestalked shambled towards her, for a second pair of stalks now grew from his back, drawn to the falling eyeballs of the burrower and affixing itself upon them. No illumined interior in him replied as he continued to shamble towards her; he was but a corpse animated by the controlling aura that seeped into every pore of his bacterial colony still attached, in the most functional but dead sense, to his still-beating heart. He had become that which the entirety of his former life had prepared him for; his apotheosis was to be nothing but function for someone else, risen into a form of human machinery.

  30ft = Close-range: most student Revenants are this range and can kill, can close gap in a second.

  50ft = Mid-range: generally out of range of student Revenants, can close distance in a few seconds.

  100ft = Long-range: fully out of range of student Revenants, pursuit range.

  200ft = Super long-range: extended pursuit range.