The rain of bullets barely reached the threshold of a mosquito bite; it felt like actual rain massaging my face. Couldn’t even make me bleed. Bring out the strong prey for me to eat! Adumbrae! Augmented humans! I advanced down the corridor toward the squad of Tea Party men positioned on the other end, snarling my displeasure at their pathetic efforts to stop me. Ordinary people were not worth the energy to chew.

Bullets couldn’t do the job, so grenades came. The metal pinecones lazily arced across the air. I saw the precise moment they burst open, fragmented, expanding fire and force. I was blinded for a second—idiotic to stare directly at them.

Explosions in such a compact space finally managed to hurt me. The side of my face smoldered. My muscles were sore from the blast waves. The smell of my burnt hair and flesh infuriated my nose. The tunnel also partially collapsed, with rocks and soil falling on me, pissing me off more.

I continued my crawl, not speeding up but also not slowing down, plowing through the earth and crushing rocks beneath my hands and feet, an unflinching unstoppable monster. Those were always cool in horror movies. The guards screamed and broke ranks as I came closer and closer.

However, one guy was particularly brave.

He remained standing in my way, lugging a metal tube on his shoulder. He shouted something at me—I could clearly hear his words, but my mind chose to ignore the squeaks of a creature about to die. There was a flash of flames and puffs of smoke. A projectile came for my face.

I didn’t look away, cocky and feeling indestructible in my werewolf body.

BOOM!

“GHRAAOGRH!” I roared in pain. Fucking hurts like shit! Red overlapped my vision; my left eye was bloody. Stinging pain surged up the side of my skull. My regeneration kicked into action, and my hunger was reignited.

I charged at the man who fired, biting down on his torso. Only his lower body remained standing like a leg mannequin modeling pants in a department store. The rest of him got chewed in my mouth, the pieces of flesh and bones, then flushed down my gullet.

Blood, smoke, metal, earth, the odors of many different people that have passed through these corridors—my powerful nose took them all. Wading through the mesmerizing mess, I zeroed in on a specific scent—Amber Deen.

Ewww. The sane Erind part of me was weirded out smelling my friend in this much detail, but the predator Blanchette part had no issues tracking a scent.

I was trying to find my own trace when I was Pino, but I couldn’t pinpoint what it should be. Plastic? Metal? There were tons of metal around here. When it came to Deen, I knew her signature scent—her soap, probably shampoo, could be her perfume—of cotton candy. It jumped out from the earthiness of the surroundings.

I followed it, squeezing myself through narrow corridors like a hairy slug, ignoring the attacking men trying to stop me, looking for the way to the heart of the Tea Party base where they held the hostages and the parasite monsters. More prey for me—the parasite monsters. As for the hostages… Deen better have a plan to save them because I certainly fucking didn’t.

My Mom was already out of here; the rest could just roll over and die for all I care.

I’d trash this place, disrupting whatever shit the Tea Party was doing, which was undoubtedly evil, and saving the day. That was my official press release.

My real intention was to fight the Adumbrae scurrying around this hole that would be their grave.

I had more control of Blanchette’s werewolf form than ever before, but I couldn’t entirely suppress certain aspects of it. Or did I not want to fully stamp out this form’s animalistic and feral side? An altogether different experience of rage when hunting strong prey, anger, and ferocity on a level I could never as Erind. I didn’t consider myself a thrill-seeker… but maybe I was.

Strong prey—I needed to find that first.

Prey that’d fight back. Prey that’d cause me great pain, make me feel the risk of dying, the thrill of a fight with my life on the line.

But I wasn’t going to die. Many times I had toed the line between life and death, but I never thought I’d actually die.

Fear of death… The people in that room in the basement of the Greaves building feared for their lives enough that they were willing to sacrifice me. These men running away from me were also afraid. Very much so. I had read books and watched movies mentioning that fear had an odor. A cliché line for monsters and serial killers hunting the protagonist that they could smell fear. A mere horror trope? Scrunching my nose, I sniffed the air.

Still trying to figure out what fear was supposed to smell like. But there was… something there.

Something.

It oozed out the pores of a man crouching between two large crates. Smell of his tears. Smell of his piss. And then an odor that was nothing but also something—like tasteless water that tasted like water. It was more of an aura telling me there was no threat from him. Weakness. Submissiveness.

I stopped next to him.

The man faced the wall, like a dog thinking it was hidden if it couldn’t see its owner. He covered his ears as if not hearing me would make me disappear. He sobbed, mumbling nonsense like family and about the pay not being worth it and regrets—random stuff.

I pressed him against the wall, my hairy palm as wide as his curled-up body. Gently at first. His muscles tensed, and his heart pounded so hard I felt its beating through his back. His breathing became harried as he needed more oxygen, but he was also trying to stop himself from making any noise, terribly failing at that.

Amused, I continued pushing him to the rough wall. He whimpered. I pressed and pressed, interested in how long he could hold a scream. Cracks from bones and wet popping noises. Warm blood spread across my palm. One tiny yelp, and that was that.

Props to him for keeping quiet until the last second. I would’ve let him live as a reward… if he wasn’t already dead.

His buddy, on the other hand, was very loud.

“You… monster! I’ll… pay!” Another man came at me with a sling of grenades across his chest. Their pins were removed. His mouth was opening and closing, shouting irrelevant words. I couldn’t bring myself to care what he said. His smell of fear radiated more than his friend. And yet, he waved his arms, trying to get my attention. Interesting difference in reaction, and quite a heroic one—I award him the Deen badge of stupidity.

I opened my mouth wide, and he willingly jumped into it. My teeth pierced his mid-section, but I didn’t completely bite down. He struggled inside my mouth while his legs wiggled outside as if I had a snake’s tongue.

Some of the men stopped running and looked back. Did they think their buddy’s plan would work? The wiser ones continued to flee.

Explosions forced my jaws open! The man in my mouth disintegrated. My jawbones got dislocated. My cheeks stretched and tore; my neck and chest experienced the same. Flames rushed down my throat and heated my chest. Smoke gushed out my nose.

I was disoriented for a couple of seconds, seeing all white and hearing nothing other than a high-pitched whine. Great agony overcame me. I furiously coughed, wildly shaking my head, hitting the walls and ceiling as if it’d make the pain disappear.

People cheered. I roared, drowning their voices. Annoying little shit!

Pain! Pain! Pain, pain…

What was the pain? My jawbones clicked back in place. The flesh of my throat and cheeks stitched shut. The voices of the cheering men died down, and their faces fell. These idiots seriously thought I’d die from this childish antic? False hope. Fun to crush it.

Despair—that’s what they’re feeling, isn’t it? I swiped the men. My hand moved so fast that their bodies exploded. Some of them barely resisted, standing dumbfounded, perhaps accepting their fate. Others tried to shoot me, knowing they couldn’t run away fast enough.

Despair. What did that feel like? I doubted I was capable of such emotion. I could mimic these men's facial expressions and actions, but I couldn’t wrap around my head what despair was. Happiness, sadness, anger, those sort of shit—I didn’t experience them as an average person did, but I felt them nonetheless, just in low doses. It was easy to approximate how others would act.

Despair, on the other hand…

I went deeper and deeper into the network of tunnels. From hapless normal humans with guns, the resistance leveled up to augmented people and combat drones as the alarms wailed and the base was roused to the threat of a giant furry bitch wanting to do some remodeling. Demolishing was probably the better word.

From flesh and bone, I now crunched flesh, bone, and metal. These Tea Party people had a lot of tech stuff to throw at me. I preferred attacking the base of the 2Ms below Eve—the food they served was edible. I spat out bits of metal. Disgusting crap ruining my meal.

“This way… this… quick!”

“Gather! We fight… here!”

“Electro… trap… kill it!”

Shouting. Many different voices. All insignificant. Clouds of fear rolled through the people. I breathed deeply, hoping that inhaling their fear would give me a glimpse of the sensation. Such a weird thing I did there. I chuckled, but it came out as harsh and guttural noises.

Everyone ran to an artificially dug cave with a semicircular opening—it looked like an airplane hangar built underground, like a hidden base of a villain. Wait, this was the hidden base of a villain… Cool. These people probably had a plan for drawing me there. Were they concentrating their forces in one place for me to eat faster? I doubted they were that considerate.

They probably wanted to try new ways of failing to kill me.

Deen and my Pino self didn’t pass through here earlier. The way we took following Vanessa’s pet led to the upper levels of the base, circling the periphery of the great cavern at its center. If I continued on that path, I’d get stuck in smaller tunnels. And I wanted to go straight to the buffet, not above it. Though a titanic werewolf falling out of nowhere was a hilarious image.

I entered the cave. Gunfire and explosions greeted me. My fur burned away and regrew like a timelapse video of growing weeds replayed continuously. Most bullets bounced off my flesh. Those that could penetrate were immediately spat back out as the wounds healed. The acrid smell of gunpowder filled the air.

“Hrwaaogh! My powerful half-roar half-howl blew away the smoke.

The sides of the cave were stacked with metal crates, freight containers, machines unfamiliar to me, and heavy equipment that was probably used for digging out this base. At the center of the cave, the Tea Party men had used forklifts to arrange several crates into a sort of barricade, taking up positions behind it, and added the forklifts into the wall.

Three containers weren’t aligned with the rest, their ends instead pointed at me. Through their open doors, I saw each had a whirring cannon-like machine inside with glowing parts operated by frantic people. Probably Adumbrae-killing weapons or some bullshit. The Tea Party got plenty of fabulous toys, and their base looks way basier than the 2Ms.

They didn’t have plenty of Adumbrae in their ranks so this probably made up for it.

Blue beams fired out of the sci-fi cannons and hit me.

“Rrwhaaa!” My muscles painfully seized as if the crampiest cramps plagued my whole body. I gnashed my teeth, saliva frothing as I endured the pain. I tried to regain control of my body and continued moving forward despite my muscles not listening. I couldn’t think straight—I just focused on those machines shooting at me. Destroy…sci-fi shit! Destroy the sci-fi shit!

But before I could reach the beam cannons, they started fizzing and clanking. The Tea party people operating them scattered. Did something go wrong? The power of the beams weakened, and the pain was subsiding.

Wrong for them.

I leaped at the machines, tearing through the metal container like ripping open a present and smashing its contents. Disappointingly, the machines just sputtered and broke apart. No explosions? I destroyed the other crates, squishing the men who didn’t escape quickly enough. I lifted a forklift between my jaws and gnawed it into several pieces.

Again, no explosions.

Dammit! This went against what I learned from scientifically-approved action movies where everything destroyed exploded. I wanted explosions and destruction! I wanted to burn this whole fucking place!

What should a girl do to get some explosion around here?

I noticed three objects flying toward me from the corner of my eye. I just had enough time to raise my arms to block them. The missiles exploded and hammered me to the ground. The blast was so powerful that the floor beneath me broke as I slammed into it. Strips of flesh got torn off my arms, leaving bare bones behind.

I want to cause explosions, not the other way around!

“Raoooargh!” I roared at the augmented assholes with giant spider legs growing from their backs, scampering across the ceiling of a large cavern. They had missile launchers attached to their shoulders, shooting me from above.

I grabbed a loose tire from the forklift and threw it at one of the spider bastards like a frisbee. It hit the missile he had just launched, causing an explosion right in front of him. It also caught a couple more of his multi-legged buddies.

Explosions! I stood tall on my hind legs and howled in celebration.

Then I picked up slabs of cement that was once on the floor and threw them at everything that looked like it’d explode. I also tried hitting the crates to see what was inside them. I got lucky and hit what might’ve been a bunch of ammo. It went off and caused a chain of detonations.

Soon enough, everything was on fire. The ground shook from blast after blast. My acute senses were overwhelmed by it—the smell of everything burning occupied my noise, and explosions and screams melded into one noise, deafening me. I only saw red and orange as the fire raged. I blended in the blaze with my crimson fur…

Nah… I’m just on fire too.

The cave storage whatever turned into an oven. I walked to the opposite side of the cave, leisurely observing my handiwork. I was a giant werewolf with patchy burning hair and skin bubbling from the heat, and I was feeling giddy, the pain a simple footnote in my mind.

Sirens blared. Heavy metal doors appeared from the sides of the exit, threatening to lock me here.

I rushed to stop them from closing. I gripped the metal doors, crumpled them, and pushed them open. Their mechanisms tried to push back but failed and gave out.

“Hraaaohhh!” I howled as I bent the doors open like they were cardboard, allowing the fire to spread. Destruction! Fun!

A strong gust of wind blew away the fire that had spilled into the tunnel outside the cave oven.

Cold? Very cold. I stopped in my tracks, surprised at the sudden temperature change. Raising my arms, I noticed my fur had turned into icicles, the frost spreading on my skin. At the left end of the tunnel, a floating woman appeared, swirling blue particles wrapped around her, braiding into her floating white hair.

She opened her glowing blue eyes and mouth and said, “I’m here to preserve the specimen. Hardy, make sure you minimize the damage to its body when you neutralize it.”

“Ya’ got it, ya’ frosty bitch!” a hoarse voice shouted in reply. “Just stop its movements, and I’ll do the rest!”

Coming out the bend at the right end of the tunnel, a shirtless muscular man appeared carrying a sledgehammer with its head ending in a curved spike. His hairy chest could rival mine—another weird observation—and his thick arms were laced with threads of burning ruby.

Finally. A challenge.

Instinctively, I knew they’d last longer than any enemy I had, especially because I had seen Hammer Man before. He was the one who killed the puppet I used as a distraction when we kidnapped the old man with teleportation powers.

Could these two make me feel despair?

Likely not, though an approximation would be nice. It was like an ice cream flavor with a peculiar name that I was sort of willing to try because I was particularly adventurous on a particular day. I was really interested in it because I had seen it several times this day.

Then I’d eat them to satiate my intense hunger! Eat and grow stronger!

I drooled at the prospect of tasty food, flowing down my mouth and dripping along the ground. I snapped my jaws as a challenge to them. Ice Woman waved her arms, sending a cascading hailstorm toward me. Hammer Man charged, his sledgehammer crackling with black electricity.