Bioshifter

I stare at Helen as she stares at the ceiling, presumably consumed by murderous whimsy.

Uh. Hmm. Okay! That was a really concerning thing for a person to say. Am I letting that one slide? No, I need to trust this woman to watch me while I sleep, I'm definitely not letting that one slide. Crap, okay, what would Ida say in this situation?

"Can we, um, maybe unpack that real fast?" I ask, quietly clearing my throat.

"What?" Helen asks.

"You know, that was just, uh. Should I be worried?"

"Should you be… oh fuck, Hannah, no! I didn't mean it like that!"

"You just said it would sound amazing to kill people and not feel guilty about it," I press. "Regardless of how you meant it, I feel like we should have a conversation about it."

"What the fuck is a conversation going to do?" Helen growls. "Look, I just mean like… the people after me are always so Goddess-damn excited to see me bleeding out in the dirt, you know? My death is not something to mourn, it's something to be excited about. Something everybody can clap each other on the fucking back after they get it over with. But I don't get that. When I defend myself, I'm the monster. It's exhausting, that's all."

"So you're not going to feel bad this time?" I ask.

"Why should I? We watched these guys explode a dude because he didn't want to spend the rest of his life casting magic on their boat. They murder and enslave people for fun and profit. Let's fuck 'em up and be the heroes for once."

"For someone who seems to resent heroes so much, you sure do want to be one."

"It's called envy, you skittery bitch," Helen smirks. "I hate a lot of people that I would rather be. Why are you making such a big deal out of this? Getting cold feet?"

"I mean, I don't want to kill anybody if that's what you're asking," I mumble. "I know they probably deserve it, but…"

But there are a million buts. What if the bad people here are only a small subset? What if the bad people here aren't even as bad as we think? What if there's more going on than just the monsters we see on the surface? What if us killing these people isn't any different from all the people who want to kill me?

I admit it seems unlikely—as Helen pointed out, we literally watched these people murder a man in cold blood for a trivial reason and then use us as slaves for hours—but my instinctive panic and revulsion at the idea of taking a life doesn't really care about that logic. Especially since Helen's plan likely involves me killing a pretty significant chunk of the crew, not just whoever we've personally witnessed doing bad things.

"Oh," Helen frowns. "Yeah, that's a problem. I could maybe get Sela to do the killings, but that thing is way more conspicuous than you are. I'd have to lug it around... yeah, there's no way. It would put way too much pressure on us, we would get noticed long before we got into a good situation. Are you sure you can't do this? You've killed before, right?"

"Yeah, while under the influence of a Pneuma mage trying to train me to assassinate you," I answer. I don't actually have any idea how much of the killing I've already done was Sindri influencing me, but the last thing I want to do is find out.

"Okay, fuck. So you might hesitate or vomit or something. Shit, I really don't want to suggest this, but… there is something I can do that might help."

I mean, I actively don't want help overcoming my aversion to killing people, but now I'm worried so I ask.

"What is it? You don't have any Pneuma spells, do you?"

"I mean, I have Aura Sight. But no, I'm an Art mage, remember? Art magic can influence your emotions. Nowhere near to the same extent as Pneuma, but I can do it."

Oh soggy bagels, why is it always mind control!?

"…I want you to promise me that you will never, ever do that to me under any circumstances," I hiss quietly.

Helen's eyebrows raise.

"Whoa, okay. It was just an offer," she says, raising her hands in surrender. "We're on the same side, so there's no way I'll do that to you without your permission, okay? Just to explain though, the intersection of Art and Chaos manifests to me as the scrambling or destruction of emotion. My works of art have the ability to functionally remove certain feelings from people. It's completely temporary and has no other compulsion; it just messes with your current emotional state. And if I scramble all of someone's emotions, they pretty much just stand around stunned, so that's pretty useful. But what I'm planning on using it for today is pretty simple: while you ideally go around making messes out of people, I'm going to remove our captors' suspicion and worry over where their buddies have gone."

Woah.

"That sounds absolutely crazy," I say. "In like, a good way."

"It's weaker than you probably think. People can still logic their way to realizing that we're up to something, they just won't have the emotional push that would normally spark someone to start thinking about that in the first place. It helps, and it buys us time, but we still have to be subtle."

"What else can you destroy? Can you just like… remove their ability to want us to be captives?"

Helen wiggles her hand in a so-so gesture.

"Not really? Again, it doesn't change any of your established thought patterns, only your current emotions. And I can't give people a desire to want to free us, I can only remove things. If someone on the crew was already secretly wishing that they could help the captives I could, say, remove their fear of consequences and that might push them to help us? But I haven't seen anyone like that. For most of these people, I suspect they take their status as slaveowners for granted, so removing their desire to own us wouldn't change what they see as the status quo. It would just kind of make them not care and that wouldn't be noticeably different from how they already are."

Ugh, that's so disgusting to think about. I suppose if nothing else, Helen is making an increasingly good argument for killing these people. …Is she doing it on purpose?

"…Are you sure you can even cast spells like this without exploding?" I ask. Not to change the subject, just… you know. That feels like a very real threat with the Pneuma-activated bomb collar attached to my friends.

"I should be able to," Helen nods. "Rebellion's Lament isn't picking up on this planning session, and I've already confirmed it doesn't pick up on spellcasting. So as long as I don't directly attempt to hurt anyone, I can't think of anything else liable to trigger it bar manual activation."

"And temporarily destroying someone's emotions doesn't count as hurting them?" I press.

"Well, technically, I'm just crafting a beautiful work of art. Emotional destruction only occurs as a byproduct of someone choosing to look at that work of art, which I'm sure you agree is entirely out of my control," Helen answers with a grin.

I sigh.

"You're absolutely crazy. How many times have you risked dying in a horrible explosion while figuring this stuff out?" I ask.

She waves me off.

"Chill out, Hannah. I know what I'm doing. The question is whether or not you can handle what we have to do next. When night falls, we're only going to have a short window to kill all the most dangerous people on the boat."

"Besides us, you mean," I mutter, shifting the weight on my legs to nestle further into the blankets of the bed.

"Besides us," she agrees, flashing another grin.

I'm not really sure what to say. Just thinking about this makes my stomach roil with both disgust and hunger. I haven't gotten anything to eat since we woke up this morning, and that horrible, bestial part of me won't shut up as a result. I still don't want to do it. I don't have a better plan, I don't have a good excuse, and I don't even have a good reason to believe that these people deserve to live.

Except… wait, I gotta back up on that thought. That just starts up a whole host of questions. What does it mean to 'deserve to live?' Who gets to decide that? I certainly feel like I shouldn't be allowed to decide that, I can barely make decisions on what to eat for breakfast. A lot of people would say that killing is never justified, except maybe in self-defense. But what counts as self-defense in a situation where we are getting oppressed and abused and enslaved? I mean, it's not like they've done anything super bad to Helen or me, nobody has beaten us or even yelled at us that much, but I guess having a bomb collar strapped around her neck is pretty good at making us compliant.

And like, that's obviously inhumane, right? Pretty sure it's a war crime or something. But do conventions for war established on Earth apply to people from another world? Wait, what am I saying, they obviously don't apply legally but that's not what's important here, what's important here is that basic human rights are being violated. Uh, and dentron rights I guess. And… my rights. Whatever they are. But what are rights!?

Gah, okay, this is getting really stupid, brain. 'What are rights?' Crap in a hot dog bun, I am overthinking this. Come on Hannah, detach yourself from the situation and look at it abstractly. If you heard a story about someone else who got kidnapped by pirates and their friends got strapped with bombs and you heard that they went on a little nighttime tryst to assassinate all those pirates in their beds and save all the people with bombs on them, would you think of that person as justified or unjustified? Justified! Obviously! Especially if we have no practical way to free all these people without killing them, and I definitely can't think of one.

A person who straps deadly explosives to other people and forces those people to work for them is in the 'morally okay to kill' category, especially at the hands of their own victims. Right? Right. So it's fine. Let's do this. Helen needs my help to save Kagiso and everybody else that just got captured. I should do this. It is okay to do this. I have to do this if I want to help these people. The world sucks and when evil escalates hard enough it's not sufficient to be a comic book hero that never kills. There is a line where the sanctity of someone's life becomes less important than the health and well-being of the people they are hurting. How can I look at the situation around me and believe otherwise? It's the right thing to do. I know it is. I need to do it.

"…I don't know if I can do this, Helen," I whisper miserably.

I shudder, my memories of the lives I've already taken clawing at the back of my mind. It feels like it should be easy. Like I should just be able to make my choice with logic and will my body to obey. But the thought of it is just horrific. Revolting. I'm shaking just thinking about it. I don't know if I can hold myself together long enough to do what needs to be done.

I'm not a fighter. I'm a wimpy, self-absorbed upper-middle-class kid from the Bible Belt. I can and have attacked people in self-defense, but this isn't a brawl. It's not a desperate fight for survival. Helen is asking me to assassinate people in cold blood, to just murder them without them even knowing what's going on. To strike from a position of perfect safety and take a life with none the wiser. And I just… I'll falter. I won't be able to do that.

I'm not good enough. I know that. But what scares me this time is that despite all my justifications, I still don't know if I'm not good enough because I can't kill these people, or if I'm not good enough because I wish I could.

Helen sighs, sitting on the floor and leaning her back against the bed so her head is next to me.

"...Fine," she says. "That's okay. It's not like we have to do this tonight. I'll figure out another plan tomorrow. Wake me if you change your mind, though, okay?"

She closes her eyes, letting out a long breath and clearly trying to get some rest. I remain where I am on the foot of the bed, tempted to snuggle up to Kagiso but not wanting to touch her and aggravate her wounds. Plus, I doubt I'm going to be getting any sleep right now anyway. I'm… currently a bit of a mess.

Idly, I focus on the rooms—well, fancy cells, mostly—around us. Naturally, the hallway is guarded, so even if we bypassed the lock (which, I mean, would be pretty easy) we'd still have to contend with the guard. My Aura Sight has worn off since the battle, though, so I don't know what kind of magic the guard is capable of. I still have no idea how long that dang spell lasts, since I didn't even notice it shutting off. Whatever. It's not important.

The rooms next to us are important. I'm not going to act like I was fond of anyone on our boat, especially since our strategy involved not letting them know I existed in the first place, but a lot of them seem to have made it out of the battle a lot worse for the wear than Helen and I. They were still given work for the day. Is that really a good reason to murder all these people? Because they force us to work? Is that enough? Why do I keep asking myself this, over and over, after I already decided on my answer? Yes, obviously, slaves should kill their owners. So why am I such a Goddess-damned coward?

With a chuckle and a lick of Her lips, Her presence descends around me, as if to say 'you rang?' I shudder, and She caresses my carapace, apologizing for not paying much attention to me during the battle prior. A lot of much more interesting things were happening, that’s all. For an instant, I want to apologize for not being interesting enough, but I clamp down on the instinct with fervor. She laughs at me anyway.

Why are You here, Goddess? I mean, I guess that's a stupid question since You're everywhere, all the time. But why are You making Yourself known? You know my swear was the furthest thing from an intentional summoning, and You don't normally do social calls.

That too is a stupid question, and I feel foolish for asking it. If I am to be Her prophet, should I not receive Her revelations, from time to time? I start to panic, but She quickly reassures me that I don't need to worry about Her popping in like this to ensoul people on Earth—that would be cheating, and any spread of Her divine power will remain in the hands of those who already use it. But here, on Her beautiful tree? She sees no harm in the occasional visit. Nudging me ever so gently, just to show She cares…

The Goddess snaps her fingers in the room two floors above us, so I glance up with my spatial sense just in time to spot the pirate woman who ordered Helen around earlier today dragging one of the crewmates from our ship onto a chair and tying him down. He looks absolutely terrified, and the woman yells at him inaudibly for a bit before punching him in the face.

Oh. She's torturing him. The Goddess nods, gently lounging on top of me with her supercilious presence. There is indeed torture going on, the Goddess agrees. She wonders idly about the very problems I was wondering, just moments ago. Exactly how many war crimes am I going to sit around and watch before I finally let myself loose?

Does She have to reveal exactly how foul the so-called 'rich inner worlds' of these people are before I'll agree they should be snuffed out? Does She have to tell me exactly how likely my friends are to be raped in the next few days? Where exactly is the line at which my oh-so-deeply-moral musings are actually just dull excuses to continue doing nothing?

I flinch as I watch the pirate break one of the man's fingers, taking it slowly enough for me to see the bone fracture, splinter, and finally snap. Why is she even doing this? What sort of interrogation do they need to perform, exactly?

Does it matter?

I… I should go. I should help him. I need to help him. This is… I mean, I'm fucked either way now, right? I'm either going to get messed up in the head about murdering people or I'm going to get messed up in the head about sitting here and watching while I let someone get tortured. I don't have a choice anymore. I… I have to go. Wait, is that the whole point of this divine visit? To just take away my opportunity to not kill these people?

The Goddess laughs. Don't be silly, free will exists! Pinky promise!

She vanishes. I want to scream, but I guess I don't have time for that anymore.

"H-Helen!" I yelp, shaking her with a leg. "Helen, I changed my mind!"

"Huh? What? Oh!" she exclaims, standing up as I scuttle over to the wall and start climbing it. "Wait, where are you going?"

"They're torturing somebody upstairs!" I hiss. "I have to go save him!"

"Whoa, wait!" Helen insists. "We have to kill the guard on this floor first, or I can't follow you!"

I'm panicking rather than listening, so I don't stop. I'm vaguely aware that we should stop, that I should follow Helen's plan, but the only thing pushing me to act hard enough to bypass my fears is this urgency, this need to correct the problem that I have allowed to happen. As I scuttle up the wall, I soon meet the ceiling, but I suppose I've learned how to solve this problem. Carefully, I phase all but my feet into the fourth dimension, then as I lift my leg towards the solid object I need to pass through, I phase that foot out as well, only taking hold partway through.

I reach inside the ceiling and stand on the middle. And I keep climbing, walking right through a solid object by just stepping entirely around it.

And so I run up two floors, finally making it to the room where the current, ongoing torture is taking place. But wait, what do I do? What do I do!? I can't climb up the air to reach any of her vital organs, so I guess I have to hamstring her, right? Bring her to the ground so that I can stab her in the heart or slit her throat or something. But that would give her plenty of time to scream, and then we would be found out, and then nobody would be saved! Because they can always just trigger the bomb collars manually, right? Oh crap, this is why Helen wanted me to wait!

The man screams as another one of his fingers is broken, and I wish I could cry but I drop back down, twisting myself from floor to ceiling and letting gravity carry me from there, landing on our bed next to Helen, bouncing once, and waking Kagiso.

"Hmgh? What happening...?" Kagiso mutters, wincing.

"Helen, I'm sorry! We have to go, someone's getting really hurt—"

"Both of you shut up," Helen orders. "And She Knew The Whole World Was Her Canvas."

She reaches out and touches the bedpost, and with a sizzle it starts melting away, leaving behind the carving of a man screaming in agony, clawing at his own face as what's left of the bedpost impales him.

"Kagiso, just lie there and do nothing. You have a bomb on you that will explode if you try to hurt anyone."

"Kay," Kagiso mumbles, and rolls over to try and get more sleep.

"Hannah, just… focus on your target. Don't look at what I'm doing or we're fucked."

Target? What tar—

"And She Would Devour Their Very Screams," Helen intones, moments before the door to our room slams open and the guard outside shouts at us… but neither the door nor the guard make a single sound.

He jolts in shock, but then a wall of metal spikes appears in our doorway, blocking us in as the room itself twists to try and kill us, swords and spears twisting out of the ground and the walls with lethal intent. Adrenaline surges through me and I leap forward, passing through the blocked doorway effortlessly and catching the man's ankles with a Spacial Rend. He drops to one knee, so I jump on his back and stab him through the heart.

He collapses, my first kill of the night.

Helen's hand, wreathed in the crackling black energy of Chaos, punches through the corner of the summoned barricade and carves it out of the doorframe. She pulls it back into the room, annihilates it, and proceeds to destroy every last sign of the Matter mage's influence, carving away the twisted walls until they are once again pristine. Her movements are precise and practiced, and only moments later she exits the door, locks Kagiso inside, and obliterates the corpse as well.

"Could you get the bloodstains?" she asks me casually. "I would have to shave off a bit of the floor."

I'm not sure if I am terrified, impressed, or mad at her for not letting me eat my kill. I cast Refresh to hide the last of the evidence, and Helen picks me up to confidently stride towards the stairs. She holds me in one arm, and the carved bedpost she crafted in the other. The moment we make it up two flights of stairs, however, we spot another pirate in the hallway where the interrogation room is. Helen walks right towards him like she belongs here.

"Hey!" he shouts at us, but then glances at the bedpost and calms down a little. "…What's that for?"

"Captain asked for it," Helen shrugs. "Maybe it's for his ass?"

The pirate starts to laugh, and then the sound disappears and Helen throws me at his throat. I cut it in half. His body inaudibly collapses and his head rolls to the floor. What am I doing. What am I doing? Goddess, I'm so hungry. Helen destroys the corpse, I disperse the blood, and Helen breaks the door to the interrogation room down.

No amount of suspicion-destroying magic seems to prevent the woman in the room from realizing she should be attacking us after the world goes silent and the door falls to the floor, so in moments her tattoos and piercings twist out from her body to impale us in a dozen different places. Helen drops me, holding her carving behind her back as small bursts of Chaos obliterate anything that might pierce her skin. I rush forwards, falling most of the way out of existence before I take her out the same way I took out the first man: cut the tendons in the leg so that I can reach the heart. She falls, blood pooling on the metal floor. The man strapped to a chair gapes at us, hope entering his eyes. Sound returns.

I don't pause for a moment. I'm too hungry to let Helen take this kill, too. I start to eat my prey.

"Start screaming again," Helen orders the torture victim. "We are absolutely still in danger of these bombs going off, and we need them to not realize anything is wrong, understand? And She Knew The Whole World Was Her Canvas."

She touches the outside of the door, and a horrific portrait of the torture victim writhing in pain, the woman we just killed beating him, carves itself around her hand. I mostly ignore it, busy burying myself in the dead woman's chest cavity. Lungs are so springy and delicious.

"Come on Hannah, we need to move," Helen insists. I ignore her. I'm eating.

"Hannah!" Helen snaps, approaching me and reaching her hand towards me. I hiss at her, loud and furious. She flinches.

"Hannah?" she presses a bit more cautiously. "Hannah, come on, pull yourself together."

I don't think you want me to pull myself together. I think that the moment I pull myself together I'm going to have a complete fucking breakdown and immediately become useless.

"Hannah," Helen continues, kneeling down next to me. "Come on. We've got more people to save. We can eat when the job is done."

Right. When the job is done. When everyone is safe. I have more food to hunt. With an agonizing pull of willpower, I drag myself out of my feeding frenzy and step away from the corpse. Helen destroys it. I Refresh the ground and myself, clean of evidence. Helen scoops me up in the crook of her arm again, and we leave the room, shutting the door behind us. The torture victim keeps screaming, and I suppose with so many broken bones he doesn't need to fake how in pain he sounds.

The Goddess coos with delight.

"Okay, I need your weird ability to look through walls, Hannah. Is the captain in his quarters?"

"Yeah," I confirm, surprised at how flat my voice is. "Asleep."

"And do you have eyes on the bomb collar guy?"

"Also asleep. He has a slightly fancy room near the captain's. Like a first mate or something."

"Okay! Great. I guess since we are doing this the fast and frantic way, those two are our next targets. I would have preferred that we take things a little slower and picked people off for most of the night, but we have a witness so therefore we have a time limit. Let's go kill the Pneuma mage."

Yes. Sure. Hopefully I'll feel a little less bad about this particular murder. I direct Helen to the room directly underneath his room, have her throw me straight up, and I latch onto the ceiling, climbing through it and then up the inside of the man's bed to stick a claw through the back of his skull and swish it around until his brain is a fine purée. I am taking absolutely no chances at letting this guy be conscious even for a second. So he's not. He dies in his sleep, a mercy that some twisted part of me is proud of giving him, despite my fear and hatred. But I know it was a pragmatic choice, not any sort of positive moral quality, so I make sure to shut that part of me up.

A quick Refresh pulls all of the blood out of his head and, more importantly, out of his pillow, so that anyone peeking in won't spot anything amiss unless they notice he isn't breathing. Then I crawl back down and drop into Helen's waiting arms.

"Fuck yeah, I felt the spell go away. I guess we'd better hurry up and kill the captain before all hell breaks loose."

"Why is all hell going to break loose?" I ask.

And then, all hell breaks loose. Shouts of triumph and calls to arms ring out throughout the ship as countless prisoners and slaves suddenly lose that ever-present feeling of death around their throats. This obviously alerts the living pirates, and in seconds spells start getting spoken from all over the ship. Our target, the captain, is out of his bed and onto the deck long before we can get into position.

"Well, dammit. The messy way it is," Helen grumbles, running towards the stairs. "We need to kill as many people as we can, as fast as we can, before the pirates kill all the sailors."

Is that really the only way? Is that even the best way? I don't know. I don't think I'm up to arguing it, though. Helen makes it to the deck, where a half-dozen pirates are bickering with each other, including the captain, who is shouting and trying to figure out what happened to his bomb guy. Helen tosses me to the ground, steps towards them, and gives them a simple answer.

"He's dead," she says. "Like you're all about to be."

She waves her carving in front of them, making sure it catches their eyes. The smart ones flinch, realizing that they need to look away, but it's a little too late.

"Is that fucking right?" the captain sneers. "Honey, you're about to be the next corpse in my bed."

"Wow! Didn't need to know that about you! Look buddy, I've been alive for twenty years and I only stopped fighting for one of them. I'm not going to be taken down by a bunch of two-bit morons trying to wave their dicks around because they literally can't understand that they should be afraid of me."

She tosses her sculpture at their feet, and they only glance at it for a moment. Because, I realize, they aren't suspecting a trap.

"Head down and protect the others, would you Hannah?" Helen asks. "Try to avoid letting anyone come upstairs."

"You gonna be okay?" I whisper.

"Oh, better than okay," Helen grins. "Today, I get to be a hero."

"Try to keep her tits intact, boys!" the captain roars. "On His Vessel, He Is King!"

"Cloudflay!"

"Heartbreaker!"

"Spectral Laser!"

Shouted spells ring out over the deck as I drop through the floor, Helen weaving calmly around weapons that head her way. Her own incantation is the longest, but I have a feeling that the battle is over the moment she completes it.

"They Hunted And Hunted, But Not A One Could Catch Her," the Goddess sings. "For How Could They Touch Their Own Annihilation?"

I watch Helen walk straight through spells like they were air. A sword swings for her neck, and the blade simply ceases to exist wherever it would touch her, the tip flying free as it cleaves in two instead of her. Helen grins, raises a hand, and casually passes her fingers through the attacker's face, leaving thick, bloody gouges behind wherever she touches, like a profoundly more horrific Spacial Rend. Rather than sever, she simply removes.

Chaos. The antithesis of all structure, all order, and all reason. The magic that only destroys.

Helen laughs and laughs and laughs.

As much as I would like to, I can't just fall a few stories to my destination. The thing about falling is that it tends to be in a straight line, and the thing about going in a straight line in w-space is that if you aren't traveling directly towards 'normal space,' then odds are extremely likely you are traveling away from it. That means if I fling myself too far at an angle while not in real space, I end up without anything to land on. So I have to crawl through the floor, move my body back into normal space, drop from the ceiling to the next floor, then crawl through that floor, and so on.

It doesn't take that long, but it takes a lot longer than I would like when a battle is starting in a world where basically everyone always has a gun. I make it to the lower decks just in time to fall on a pirate's head, skewering it in the process and hanging onto his body with my toes as he collapses so I hide back in 4D space before any of his allies see me. I move as quickly and efficiently as I can, limbs flashing out to cut people down as I finally get to speak my own spells for use in combat.

"Spacial Rend! Aura Sight!"

The blades I extrude from my legs are now over a foot long, making it easy to simply chop off entire legs rather than worry about slashing through tendons. I look for targets of opportunity, moving between floors and focusing on Fire and Light mages wherever possible, as I notice attacks from Space mages often clip dangerously into my other-dimensional safe zones, whereas anyone with a nonphysical method of disrupting enemies can mess me up as well. But whenever people who are actually dangerous to me notice I'm around, I can simply leave or work as a distraction while the freed slaves supply their own offense.

With everyone working together and me assassinating dangerous targets, we push the pirates further and further down into the bowels of the ship, where they finally hole up in the cargo bay. The cargo bay has only one way in or out, a large door that the pirates barricade with crates and booby trap with spells. The furious rioting victims want to smash the door down and finish the pirates off once and for all, and I can hardly blame them, but I still have to reveal myself and shout at them so they don't kill themselves.

"Wait!" I yelp, hanging from the ceiling above the mob. "Hold on, it's way too well-defended in there. We should wait for…"

Oh, shoot, Helen's probably not coming, is she? She doesn't want to use her powers in front of anyone else.

"What the fuck are you?" one of the former slaves snaps at me.

"Good question, but not the time!" I say. "I've been the one chopping people's limbs off, I'm on your side here. I might be able to get in and kill some of the people who have been setting traps, but we should definitely not just rush through the barricade willy-nilly. Give me a second, okay?"

I spend that second trying to figure out what the heck I should do, with my heart beating out of my shell and my gut insisting I just drop on one of the nearby corpses and finally get a good meal. I ignore that urge and crawl around the outside of the ship, peeking my way into the cargo bay from the opposite end. Unsurprisingly, most of the surviving pirates are people that I was too scared to personally engage, meaning that the whole room is full of terrible matchups for me. So what do I do? How do I finish this rout?

Well. I guess the thing a good person would do is to try and negotiate. I'm not sure that would fly with either the pirates or the mob of ex-slaves though, and I'm not exactly an eloquent girl on a good day, let alone when I'm dissociating full-on into 'solve the problem' mode in order to not think about the massacre I just performed. How terrifyingly easy it was. How natural it felt. Human lives falling away without even the slightest bit of resistance against my claws. It... I...!

Hey! I said don't think about it, me. Focus on this cargo bay. Is there something in here I can… wait. Oh gosh! Sela is in here! I quickly scuttle inside, finding the crates that we rather unceremoniously left our murderbot sitting on top of.

"Sela!" I hiss as quietly as I can. "Sela, wake up! There are a bunch of super dangerous people in here!"

"Affirmative," Sela quietly thrums back. "I have detected this."

One of the pirates starts to speak an incantation that sounds like it's going to be pretty long. Which means it's going to be crazy powerful! Crap! We're out of time! This is a terrible idea, but I may as well ask.

"Look, I know you don't have any onboard weapon systems, but if there was ever a good time to kill a bunch of organics, it's now! All the pirates in this room are trying to kill us, and we need to stop them before they kill everybody who knows how to drive the boat!"

"Clarification: diplomatic priority target is specifically requesting that I kill everyone in this room?"

"Well, other than you and me, yeah. Can you do it?"

It lets out an indignant huff of steam.

"Can you breathe, you pathetic sack of meat? You will need to protect me while I cast."

"I don't think I can do that!"

Its body starts whirring with frustration, the cooling system running louder. We're fortunate that everyone else is making so much noise.

"...Excess of souls detected in the immediate area," Sela concludes. "Organic assistance no longer required. Tremble, mortals, for your god is made of steel."

"AblativeSoulBarrier(powerCell[0], 0, HEMISPHERE, 90, 0, 0)"

"The fuck was that!?" a pirate shouts, and spells start flying our way, but they're soaked up by a green and sickly light that flickers in front of Sela. And then, the robot starts casting for real.

"IdentifyFuelSource(target.noTarget, 37, true, false, fuelarray[])

GatherFuel(fuelarray[])

OverclockCell(powerCell[0])

AllocatePurgatory(powerCell[0], fuelarray[], true)

OverclockCore()

MultiTarget(IdentifyFuelSource(target.noTarget, 37, false, true, fuelarray[]))"

"Holy shit! Steel One! The Steel One they brought is alive!"

"Death mage! It's a fucking Death mage!"

"HardOverride(FIRST_LAW, false)

for(x in target)

Kill(target[x])"

Sela's body buzzes with power, its internals spinning and fans roaring. Lying flat on the ground, it lets the explosions of spells cascading around us clear its line of fire and aims with both hands, firing a gatling blast of deathbolts out of its palms as its arms rapidly swivel to hit each pirate square in the chest. Most of them fall like dominos, but a few remain standing, clutching their chests in pain but continuing to fire back. The green, screaming figure inside Sela's power cell fades into nothing and I start to panic, but it's just as immediately replaced with another soul. Red. Female. In agony. I can't discern any other features. Sela's forcefield turns red to match her.

"MultiTarget(IdentifyFuelSource(target.noTarget, 37, false, true, fuelarray[]))

for(x in target)

Kill(target[x])"

Thoom thoom thoom thoom thoom. Once again, a shot fired directly at each living pirate. Two go down. Their counterfire burns through another soul, but Sela just fills itself up with a new one. Orange, male, crying.

"MultiTarget(IdentifyFuelSource(target.noTarget, 37, false, true, fuelarray[]))

for(x in target)

Kill(target[x])"

Thoom thoom thoom. One more death.

"MultiTarget(IdentifyFuelSource(target.noTarget, 37, false, true, fuelarray[]))

for(x in target)

Kill(target[x])"

Thoom thoom. Another new soul.

"Kill(target)"

Thoom.

"Kill(target)"

Thoom.

"Kill(target)"

Thoom.

The last and most resistant pirate finally falls. Sela lets out a massive burst of steam from all its joints, venting vaporized coolant in every direction.

"Targets eliminated," Sela declares, sounding quite pleased with itself. "Catharsis achieved."

"That was… holy garbanzo beans," I whisper. Like a whole squad of soldiers trying to rush a tank on foot.

"Clean me, meat," Sela demands. "And get me water. Now."

"Y-yes!" I sputter. "Right away!"

"Hmm," Sela muses, its metal-scaled face twitching up into an ever-so-slight grin. No time to worry about that! Water, let's see… water. I mean, I could get water from the Sapsea, but I'd need to go find a window or open a hole or… oh! Wait, I know! People are mostly water!

"Refresh," I incant, stabbing a hole into a couple of the newly-made corpses and desiccating them, pulling the water out of their bloodstreams and over into Sela's mouth. It seems very surprised at first, but then it starts letting out a creepy robotic laugh as I continue feeding it corpse water.

This is so fucked up. Holy shit this is so fucked up, did I really just do all that? Th-the assassinations and the amputations and the eating people and the fucking corpse water!? Did I really just… how many? How many was it? Four, and then… five, six, eight, ten… thirteen people!? Holy fuck. Holy fucking shit I just killed thirteen people and helped my friends kill way, way more! And oh hey, would you look at that, the immediate danger has passed. Guess it's time to have a complete and total mental breakdown!

But hey, since I'm a fucking monster, I can at least do this the monster way. I scuttle over to one of the still-juicy corpses and drown my screams in meat.