Dr. Jason raised his hand. "Uh, 'scuse me boss, but is anyone gonna tell me what's the status on my cat?"

"Your cat is fine, Doctor. The animal was retrieved at approximately the same time and location as Ms. Huntingfield."

The deranged plastic surgeon breathed a sigh of relief. "That's good. That's very good."

"As I was saying," Richard continued, "We have additional business to take care of. Mr. Bones, meet Valkyrie, otherwise known as Alexis Huntingfield. She's your responsibility now."

I blinked. Wait, what? Just like that? I didn't even know this guy, or even what his role was in the organization. As for the skeleton—well, once again, I got a distinct impression that the featureless skull was equally surprised.

Looking between me and the boss, Mr. Bones scratched his forehead with a single boney finger. I found myself wondering whether that actually did anything or if it was just a minor subconscious habit. Then there was a subtle look of realization, followed by the sound of fleshless fingers snapping together. "A-ha! She's the one that everyone's been talking about!"

Glad to hear that my dumbass 'plan' did kind of work, I mused to myself. Perhaps it ultimately worked a little bit too well. The skeleton jabbed a finger in my direction again. "But I actually know literally nothing about who you even are." He rounded on Bossman Richard. "And it doesn't really matter, because you know how I am—responsibilities for anything aren't really my style, so I'm going to have to—"

"I am well aware," the boss cut him off, "which is precisely why I'm putting the two of you together. Similar personalities tend to pair well, and in this particular instance, I'm hoping the power disparity will work to dampen some of the more extreme behavior on both sides."

I blinked again. Oh hell no, he is not going to stick me with an insane Tier 6 who doesn't care about other people. Is he just trying to get me killed? Given the circumstances, that almost seemed likely.

Mr. Bones and I shared a glance, each one of us appraising what we saw in the other. This guy already felt like an agent of chaos, but if my read on him was correct, we weren't actually very similar. Being impulsive and potentially reckless was the symptom of many different personality archetypes. No, I doubted we would actually think alike in most situations.

When both of us finally broke eye contact—eye to socket contact? I glared at my new boss. "Absolutely not," I said in unison with Mr. Bones. God fucking damn it.

God fucking damn it! I barely had a chance to take a bite out of the volter titan I was tangling with when a random tier 5 passed too close to both of us and knocked us out of the air due to its unrestrained aura.

Crashing down into the sand was bad for several reasons. For one, it genuinely hurt, even though I was a giant monster made out of literal metal. Being made out of metal meant I was heavy, and the impact was forceful enough to bend one of my wings entirely out of shape and more subtly deform the joints of my six legs.

The volter fared even worse, exploding with a blast of lightning that turned all the sand our landing kicked up into droplets of rapidly cooling glass. The more important reason why the fall was bad was because it put me back on the ground. There was a very good reason for maintaining altitude as I had been, despite how much it was starting to tire me out.

I was in the middle of a Tier 6 incursion, and I was not happy about it.

After further hashing out our introductions, Mr. Bones wanted to return to the Armageddon region of Nevada—and that meant dragging me along. Quite literally dragging—the bastard hauled me through what felt like miles of simultaneously sticky and slippery void goop.

Yeah, it turned out that Anchor's abilities could serve as a genuine means of transportation—but they weren't exactly your average teleport.

And, since no one else lifted so much as a finger to help me out of the dire situation, I was now just doing whatever it took to survive.

It couldn't have been even an hour of combat at this point, but I already considered my continued survival to be an impressive feat. Even though the range of the incursions, as well as the severity, was now steadily shrinking, there were a lot of higher tier Anathema rampaging around in all directions. That general problem came with the slightly more specific problem of auras.

Flight made it significantly easier to avoid the worst of it, but it was far from a perfect solution. Tangling with the Tier 3 volter that was actually slightly bigger than I was in my full chamelium form meant I wasn't able to react to, let alone dodge, passing through the fully unleashed aura of something much nastier than either of us.

And while simply being within the aura wasn't really the same as the suppression spikes that the Bouquet people skewered me with, it made using my abilities incredibly difficult while simultaneously lashing out in an attempt to passively kill me.

So yeah, we went plummeting to the ground.

Now that I was here, though, I took the chance to devour everything that I could. Being far more brittle, the other flying Tier 3 Anathema shattered rather than bent. That was kind of convenient, but the way all of its latent power manifested as one giant burst of lighting upon death was considerably less so.

I fucking hate enemies that explode on death or leave behind damaging AoE spots or similar bullshit. That was my second least favorite monster modifier in my ARPG exploits, second only to monsters with high life regeneration.

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The specific irony there was not lost on me.

Well, at least it's fucking tasty. Or it was, up until the final trace of life left it and the stupid thing turned just as flavorful as the surrounding sand. Oh come on. That was also something really annoying that fortunately didn't exist in ARPG land. Losing all the loot if you actually succeeded in killing the enemy was complete fucking bullshit.

The more I do this, the more I understand why most of us just go after humans. It's a much less frustrating experience. Even if they tasted good, Anathema were one of those foods that was just downright annoying to eat, like a messy, slippery hamburger that was stacked way too tall to be easily managed.

At this point, I just had to warily hunker down while my wing fixed itself. Finally, I was ready to take to the skies again. Or rather, I wasn't ready, but I didn't have much other choice.

I'd of course been considering just flying away and leaving Mr. Bones behind—but what then? I had no idea where the incursion ended, and frankly, if I went down again, I'd want to land close to the one guy who was kind of sort of supposed to be on my side.

Also, I was an Anathema. If I could make it to the edge of the incursion, then so could the many, many other Anathema who were way fucking stronger than me. And do you know what happens when a bunch of Anathema cross the edge of an incursion? They don't! The incursion would just grow to accommodate us, putting me right back on the treadmill.

Also, since the incursions were shrinking, people—Guardians, Star Guardians, the Military—must be actively obliterating anything that pushed the edge. So yeah, I realized quite quickly that I was stuck with Mr. Bones until the psychotic Tier 6 was ready to pack up and go home.

God fucking damn it.

This was also the first time I'd flown in full chamelium mode. It was actually easier than it was in Valkyrie mode, probably because my completely inhuman body was actually built for that kind of motion, despite being far, far heavier. Still, it was a bit tiring.

I'd just ascended back up to the lower, purple-black cloud layer when a pillar of godly fire set the entire horizon ablaze. It was easily miles distant—actually, I wondered if I was even judging distances correctly, because something about the perspective felt wrong—like I was seeing something that was more than just a few miles away, but well over the horizon line. So how—?

I stopped cycling my wings and let them rest, feathers vibrating, so that I just gently hovered a mile or so up into the air. Nothing attacked me—it seemed as if we were all equally transfixed. The blazing, heavenly spear was so bright, even from so far away, that it was hard to distinguish any detailed features in the surrounding landscape.

It's the Liberty's Zenith, I realized. I remembered that a full-scale test had been on the table, and in fact, they were set to go ahead with it. I guess I forgot about it, what with everything that's been happening.

Even from here, I could feel the destructive power. It washed against my metal surface in a way that was viscerally unpleasant and sent my razor-sharp feathers tingling and rattling in a way that skirted the edge of pain. I wouldn't survive that—would I even survive it at Tier 7? 8? The total ruin of London and the surrounding English countryside was a lingering testament to the fact that, worst come to worst, ordinary human technology was more than a match for the highest tier Anathema the world had yet seen.

In a certain sense, the arrival of Star Guardians, followed by their more numerous, lesser brethren, saved humanity not from Anathema, but from our own collateral annihilation.

The surface of my exoskeleton prickled as a now-familiar Tier 6 aura of a Guardian washed over me. Unlike the other, higher tier Anathema, this one didn't snuff out my own power and send me tumbling down to the ground. It was just at the boundary between oppressive and invisible—as if only incompletely restrained.

Mr. Bones stood next to me with his arms crossed, surveying the same horizon. Stood. His fleshless feet were firmly planted atop a swaying, makeshift tower made of thousands upon thousands—maybe even millions—of alien bones.

"Impressive, isn't it?" The beam of atomic hellfire itself was gone, now, but much of the energy remained, lighting the darkened landscape with a dull heat. Likewise, the Earth's very atmosphere continued to react, swirling and churning up dust and air alike into a darkly glowing storm.

"I'm wondering how it differs from a typical warhead," I admitted. "From what I understand, it's actually supposed to be weaker." Well, that was relative to the larger modern warheads. It was still a lot bigger than either of the bombs used at the end of the Second World War. I was still convinced the reason for making it was really just because it was cool and intimidating.

"Does it hurt?"

Wait, what? The meaning of the question hit me a moment later. Oh, right. I knew that 'atomics' were supposed to be especially effective against Anathema, even at high tiers. That was supposedly a big part of why nuking an entire area into oblivion actually worked. A thermonuclear device wasn't just the biggest bomb we could make—it was also the specific kind of bomb that was almost unnaturally effective. If you can even call anything to do with Anathema 'natural' or 'unnatural,' I guess.

So did I feel anything? I think I do, actually. Or rather, I did—I recalled the uneasy feeling of something washing over my 'skin' and setting my metal, bladelike feathers tingling. Radiation of some kind, I guess? I instinctively doubted that I would have felt quite the same thing as an ordinary human.

And from such a distance, with all that air in the way—the tip of one of my forelimbs twitched. I felt suddenly vulnerable in a way I couldn't quite understand. What even is it about atomics? If it were just radiation, we couldn't exist in this reality at all. There was light everywhere, and light was fundamentally the exact same kind of thing as UV, gamma and x-rays, and even other forms of radiation like alpha and beta particles—essentially just Helium nuclei and free electrons.

Surely there has to be more to it? Sure, humans could walk around in sunlight but were also easily killed by high energy beams. Could it be that simple? It can't, right? I was pretty sure that the Anathema weakness against atomic weaponry types was more than just a factor of scale.

The more I thought about it, the more uneasy I became. Alex, you're literally studying materials science, but you never planned to do an x-ray spectroscopy on your own metals? Even with the interruption to my continued uni studies, I felt like I should have been more keen on getting back into the uni labs and measuring the fuck out of myself.

But when I pictured it, my alien gut was telling me that I'd rather just stick my hand down the garbage disposal. What the fuck? Genuinely, what the fuck?

I realized Mr. Bones was staring at me.

"No," I lied, "I don't feel anything."

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