It stung.

Something was pelting me with hot things. Many, many painful small things. I ignored it. Continued eating.

hey…

My skin hurt. But not so much. More irritating than painful really. I healed quickly, then the pain was gone. But it came back right after because that weird thing on many wheels wouldn’t stop hitting me. It itched. I wanted to scratch my body, but I was too busy eating. Bothering me while I ate. Annoying. What was it?

Hey!

Needed to eat faster. I munched on the bones, chewed the rubbery flesh. Soft pudding gushed out from the cracks of the skulls. There was something with this creamy food. I didn’t know what it was, but it had a tingly feeling on my tongue. I wanted it. I couldn’t explain why, but I just wanted it. I grabbed more of these bloody, circular things with faces, pulling them from pulsating tentacles. They twitched, they tried to speak, their mouths moved but no sound came out because they didn’t have any throats, some sobbed, a couple tried to bite my fingers. I paid them no mind, shoving each of them into my expectant, salivating maw.

Hey, Erind!

That thing that was hitting me, it wasn’t stopping. Now, another one came, moving towards me on caterpillar treads. What was a caterpillar? Those rolling things below it were also on tanks, right? A tank? What was a tank? Wasn’t a tank supposed to be big? This new thing was smaller than me.

Many of these annoying things. Some in the sky, flying, some in the ground, hitting me. This very, very small tank looked different from the other things hitting me. But like the others, it also pointed something at me.

BOOOM!!

A flash of white. Searing heat. A massive force threw me some distance. I slammed into a thick pillar. Slabs broke off, big and small, falling on me. Dust slowly floated down, settling on my exposed, bloody flesh. I growled as I gripped the corner of the square column, pulling myself up.

My wounds were superficial, my body quickly regenerated. Skin grew back, covering newly formed muscles. A thick carpet of crimson fur followed. I growled even deeper as a new wave of rage threatened to come crashing down on my consciousness. But something was fighting it back, an anchor at the back of my mind.

The anger was less pronounced.

Muted.

These things couldn’t kill me, why bother?

I should go back to eating. Then I found that those things were destroying my food. The round objects with faces were getting destroyed by the very, very small tank! Making them explode. The floor shook with the explosions. The other things were helping out, shooting my snacks with the endless burning pebbles they spouted. I snarled and dropped on my front legs, the muscles of my hind legs pumped and ready to kick back to begin the charge. I was going to eat all of these damned things.

Get ahold of yourself, you stupid bitch! That’s not even food.

The tiny voice at the back of my head was right!

I destroyed one of those flying things earlier by throwing one of my round snacks with a face at it; the rest flew higher so I couldn’t easily knock them out of the air. I also smashed one of the things on wheels. I tried eating them, but I found out these things bothering me were inedible. I munched and munched on them and they were very hard and tasted bad. They weren’t food even if they were hurting me.

I was just going to destroy them.

I charged at the very small tank that sent me flying, caught it with my claws before it could shoot, and buried my fangs into its thick armor. Both of us rolled on the floor. It whirred and spurted, its treads rolling uselessly in the air. We came to a stop. I turned it over and roared as I dismantled it.

Pain shot up in my upper right back. Just a minuscule prick. I turned and looked up. There was a new flying thing; it looked different from the other flying things already here. It shot something at my back with a long string connected to it. Other flying things that looked similar to it showed up, forming a loose circle high above me.

Another one shot me. With my fast reflexes and predator eyes specialized in tracking movement, I evaded its shot and caught it. Two long and sharp needles with strings connected to the floating weird thing.

Bzzrttt!

My body shuddered. My back muscles spasmed. More of those needles pierced my body. They weren’t able to penetrate deep, some bounced off, but most of them stayed rooted in my flesh.

Bzzz…bzzrrttt…bzzz…

I snarled as I tried to keep standing. I wanted to thrash, wildly shred anything around me, but I couldn’t. I fell on my knees.

The flying things were doing something to me. These needles…the strings. They were humming, clicking. My muscles seized up and wouldn’t listen to me. I couldn’t think…The inevitable rage that followed each time I was injured kept me conscious.

Taser! Taser? I recalled what that was. These drones were fucking hugeass flying tasers. I also remembered the ‘flying things’ were police anti-Adumbrae drones. More and more memories were coming back.

Erind…that was me. Erind.

I’m Erind!

I felt like I crawled out from the murky abyss that was the feral instincts of my beast form. As if from a deep slumber due to staying up all night binge-watching movies, I awakened after what felt like twelve hours of sleep. The tiny, conscious part of me that endured, tucked away in the fringes of the beast’s mind, was coming to the fore, fighting for more control.

Many thanks to these fucking drones electrocuting me because they scrambled the rage of my beast form.

But I was still convulsing from the electric charges passing through my body.

I willed my body to move, grabbing the needles embedded in my flesh and yanking out all of them. I pulled the strings, tugging the drones towards me to make them crash. But the drones cutoff their cords and flew higher. With a running jump, I tried to reach for one. My claws snagged its bottom plating, and I dragged it down to the ground, smashing it with a stomp of my foot.

The drones with mounted guns and rockets fired at me. They were finished with their job of destroying the remaining heads the snake mutant carried inside it. My mutant pal’s body was torn to open from the bottom of its neck, if it could be called a neck, down the length of its body, nearly to the tip of its tail—my fault for opening it like a duffel bag to get its juicy insides.

I dashed towards the wall. One of the bullets clipped my calf. I stumbled a bit and wasn't able to jump as high as I wanted, but I nearly reached the second floor. I hung on with my claws and pulled myself over the floor railings. Some of the bullets hit me, but the guns of the police drones didn’t have the firepower of a Skitter’s gun; it might be a war crime to use a Skitter on a normal human.

I ran without thinking about my destination.

First order of business: get away from here. I weaved through stores, trying to shake off the drones. Some of them were able to keep up with me.

At least the drones with the machine guns and rockets were stuck on the first floor. They only had wheels and caterpillar treads; they didn’t have the sophisticated BID technology the Skitters had with their spider-like legs that could navigate any terrain. I seriously doubted the police drones could use the elevator.

Second agenda: return to my base form, my Blanchette body.

I was partially transformed, parts of my body covered in fur, my hoodie melded with my skin and turned into a fierce mane of blood-red hair. My snout had elongated, my mouth grew large enough to fit a whole human head inside. Arms and legs lengthened and became extremely muscular.

Turn back to normal!

Normal as in my Blanchette form, which wasn’t normal at all I suppose.

I didn’t exactly know how to reverse my transformation, but I just focused in my mind as I ran. If I met cops in this state, I might not be able to stop myself from attacking and eating them if they shot me, which they probably would do if they saw me. It'd be a downward spiral from there. I’d just keep eating cops as they came, and then finally complete my transformation. If that happened, I wasn’t sure I’d get lucky again that something would jolt my mind back to rationality.

And I couldn’t risk losing control in the middle of the city. The BID and National Guard were here, well not exactly here, they were probably at the crater or searching the tunnels below the city. But they were surely on their way here.

My fur slowly receded into my skin. I was getting smaller. In my vision, I could also see my snout becoming shorter.

Phew. I was getting the hang of this.

Just needed more practice.

Why did I lose control anyway? It was just one opponent.

Mr. Snake wasn’t a threat to me; it didn’t have the strength to hurt me enough to trigger a full transformation. Which was why I didn’t have any reservations about fighting it because I was sure I’d be able to control myself. Was it the heads? When I ate the heads? Hmmm…my memories of that point were still hazy.

Third on my to-do list: Escape.

Where? Where should I go?

I hid inside a furniture store. Not exactly hide because the drones knew where I was. But they didn’t try to get inside the store.

With some breathing space, I had a teensy-weensy bit of time to think. Should I go to the front of the building? I peered at the corridor to check what shops were around my location, trying to reorient myself with my memory of the layout of this place. I was too far away from the entrance, and I’d have to go through the rest of the drones to get there. Since the drones came from the front of the building, tons of cops were already waiting for me to come out. If they had the anti-Adumbrae drones, then some of the city’s Combat Exoskeleton Units would also be there. I’d be serving myself on a silver platter to them.

I wondered why they hadn’t stormed the Serenade Bazaar to attack me.

At first, the drones they sent in only attacked me. Then they switched to the heads. I was just taking a stab in the dark here, but I think the BID took over command and told the police to prioritize destroying the heads.

The BID might’ve found traces of the peculiar Cocoon that formed in the arena beneath the Eve club. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it was obviously dangerous as it forced their agents to overload their Greaves reactors to destroy it at the expense of the lives of dozens of people aboveground. I recalled that weird Cocoon was collecting heads. They’d be on the lookout for something like that.

Seeing the number of heads I was consuming, I surmised the BID was concerned I was going to turn into a dangerous Cocoon as well and told the cops to chill out unless they wanted to add their heads to the pile. That was the only explanation I could think of why this place wasn’t swarming with police ComExos.

Whatever the real reason was, I had the space to escape now.

I exited the furniture store and headed to the side entrance. Circular shadows on the floor told me that the drones were high above, keeping up with me. I retraced my path back to the entrance of the bazaar that opened to 17th street, but as I approached it, I could hear police sirens in that direction.

Ok, that was the wrong place to go to.

I continued running, hoping the back entrance of the store that led to the huge parking lot along Whiskers Drive might be my ticket to freedom. From the semi-circular balcony at the end of the second floor, I jumped down to the smallish garden-atrium right in front of the Whisker’s Drive entrance. A few meters away from the glass doors, the police had set up a barricade with their cars. I also saw a huge armored truck unloading policemen wearing Combat Exoskeletons bristling with heavy weaponry.

For a couple of seconds, we all stared at each other—the cops behind their cruisers, the ComExos in front of them, the anti-Adumbrae police drones.

Shit.

I ran back into the building as the police opened fire. I turned left and rolled into the nearest store as the atrium and the lobby leading out of it became a killing zone. The glass windows and doors shattered as I dove underneath a table with bottles of scented body wash on top of it. Endless bullets entered the building like a horde of shoppers on Black Friday.

The food carts along the corridor and the other stalls in the lobby were torn to shreds. The tiles were broken, dug up out of the floor by the sheer force of the bullets.

Fuck. Fuckity, fucking fuck! Was I trapped here?

Despite my dire situation, I was only mildly panicked. Think quickly. Serenade St., 17th St., Whisky Drive, all of them were a no-go. How about the last side? An office building, wasn't it? There were no doors on that side, so that also wasn’t an option.

Where else? Down?

Go to the basement of this place and hope for an entry to the sewer system? I wasn’t so sure of that. And if there was an exit there, the cops would have that covered.

Or….

I crawled to another spot in the store to get a better view of the outside, taking care I wouldn’t accidentally expose myself to the line of fire of the cops.

There! A tall white column that branched out at its top supported the transparent roof, an architectural depiction of a tree that blended with the environmental motif of this marketplace.

My way up.

My way out.