I had to hope this would work. I was trusting vague instincts I didn't know I had—but Von Jackass left me with little choice but to take a leap of faith. It was advantageous that being wedged inside a relatively large building like this was exactly where I needed to be for this to work.

The Tier 3 Star Guardian continued to hammer me with blow after blow, but that was fine. Taking a beating was a necessary ingredient for this to work.

The other major ingredients were a lot of metal in the area and direct access to a massive amount of power. Power in the conventional, engineering sense—in this circumstance, electrical power. It could probably come in a few other forms, but electricity was what was available and more than suitable for my purposes.

No longer bothering to stop Von Jackass from battering me, I focused on getting direct contact with the central steel skeleton of the high-rise.

Doing so wasn't challenging, and from there, a storm of violet not-quite-lightning tore through the first three floors. Metal objects—anything from staplers to entire filing cabinets or HVAC piping—ripped free to fly toward me.

The ferrokinetic chaos surely gave Von Jackass a bit of trouble, but I'd lost track of him. All I knew was that I kept taking blow after blow, taking such a beating by this point that entire exterior plates had been shorn free, my exoskeleton warping off its vastly stronger Adamantite frame.

Which is just fine. It was exactly what I wanted.

As my regeneration revved up to its maximum, those thin, branching, Adamantite roots grew and squirmed, questing through metallic 'flesh' in search of usable material and attempting to pull my pieces back together.

But so much damage had now accumulated that my regeneration could no longer keep up with the continued abuse. My body began fighting to keep itself together and protected in any way it could.

All the metal that I continued to draw inward was fertile soil, and so too was the immense scaffolding of the building itself. My regenerative capabilities began pulling from whatever material they could, and as much as they could.

At this point, and for the very first time, my body began healing wrong—and I couldn't have been happier.

Like vines, or roots, or maybe some sort of cancer, thin veins of reddish-gold Adamantite squirmed through any metallic object in reach. I began to not only tap into the main skeleton of the building, but also the plumbing, the HVAC, and the wires.

And so I am become Building, destroyer of Star Guardians.

Okay, that sounded incredibly lame. I was glad I hadn't actually said it as an attempt at some badass mid-combat line.

Regardless, gaining a degree of brute control over the entire HVAC piping system as well as direct contact with the major connections to the grid was entirely necessary. I still wasn't done, and material was only one half of the equation. I needed power.

I wasn't even sure what Von Jackass was up to at this point—I couldn't exactly see anything except with my single pair of actual eyes, and those had been punted through the wall of an elevator shaft along with the rest of my head. My main 'body' seemed to be plugging up the top, with my head hanging down through the shaft like a weirdly shaped, overweighted elevator car.

Here goes.

The nature of my power over air was crude, destructive, and short-range, but with my central tissues spread throughout the building's structural and resource systems like this, sucking a literal ton, if not more, of air into the interior of the building wasn't an impossible task.

It just took a lot of effort—effort that was repaid by the megawatts of electricity I was now soaking up. Amazingly, I wasn't even overloading the main circuits. The building was designed to guzzle more power than I ever should have taken at this tier under ordinary operational conditions.

I wasn't nearly so prepared—a fact made obvious when various components of my metallic flesh amalgam turned white hot and began violently sparking or outright melting.

But I pressed on. My form at this point was kind of like a scaled up version of that gory mid-80s horror movie—the one with the dogs in antarctica—but with metal instead of ordinary flesh. It would be able to take far more energy than this soon enough.

I pressed on. An excruciating wrenching and flexing motion was enough to rip open the mother of all gas leaks, and from there—well, I didn't need to do anything to ignite it.

The amount of extra air I was shoving through the HVAC system pushed the leaking natural gas everywhere, and with plenty of oxidizer and molten, sparking metal everywhere…

There was a mighty big boom.

In a semi enclosed space, a deflagration of that scale had the kind of pressure that would shred lungs and make eyeballs bleed. I sure hoped that was what happened to Von Jackass, and that I wouldn't have to bring the power of the final stage to bear.

Not gonna count on that one, though.

The bastard was fast, tough, and hard to hurt for long. I needed to be sure, and for that, I needed a clear and decisive kill.

As the deflagration finished, the pressure reversed, all the air collapsing violently back inwards and wrecking everything even further. It also left all the flammable materials throughout the forty something floors ablaze.

The explosion was more than just a way to try killing anyone in any part of the building. It was also heat, and laws of science be damned—heat was something I could use.

With so much metal now comprising my form, and with so much power coursing through me—both from the electrical grid and from the huge amount of heat I was absorbing—well, it was finally enough for my misguided regeneration to switch course.

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I could feel exactly what my body wanted to do, and so I helped it along a little bit.

Steel groaned, concrete fractured, and hundreds of tons of material came crashing down. If the interior deflagration had been deadly, the entire fucking building falling apart was downright apocalyptic.

If Von Jackass lacked the good sense to have fled the interior by now, then he was definitely dead. I'd gotten his measure by this point, and he wasn't that unkillable.

But the building didn't just collapse naturally. It collapsed as a result of its entire skeleton becoming mine. Steel beams folded, collapsed, and reorganized themselves, with metal and fire and a dozen megawatts of current folding like origami into a beast of nightmares.

And so, a dragon I was once more—but where before I had been a proper titan, now I was a true colossus. My lizardlike neck extended not a couple of stories high, but dozens.

I had no wings, for what use were wings when I could simply reach with claws each nearly the size of a bus?

"Oh yeah," I rumbled, my voice grinding and shaking with a tectonic timbre, "It's Kaiju Alex time."

In contrast with its immense power and size, my new form was rough and crude, armored not with polished plates and scales but with pitted, warped hunks of material. It also wasn't my power.

I couldn't have so much as moved under my own strength alone. I was operating on a blaze of stolen power, the particular nature of my abilities and my environment presenting an opportunity to bootstrap myself well beyond whatever could have been possible with my tier.

The moment the electrical infrastructure in the area outright failed, or someone had the insight to shut it down, my Kaiju moment was finished. The shift from the energy being nearly too much to take to consuming megawatts of power just to stand was sudden and frightening.

But no one else has to know that—and really, why stop at megawatts?

I began the process of freeing myself from the ground while searching for any trace of Von Jackass. Neither took me long, and it was with contemptuous ease that I slapped a dark speck from the air with one massive foreleg.

Who hits harder now, hmm?

My vision at this scale wasn't great, but it wasn't hard to track him as he slammed along the pavement three blocks distant. Huh. That was actually a big leap, wasn't it? I hit him at roughly a forty-five degree angle.

Like what that kraken did to me once.

Von Jackass rolled to his feet, took one more good luck at me, and then booked it in the complete opposite direction.

"Oh, I think not," I rumbled. I wasn't going to just let him run away when the going got tough—not after causing me this amount of trouble. There's a pretty good chance I don't get out of this alive, so you definitely won't.

In the same spirit that I'd bootstrapped myself this far, I leveraged the huge currents rampaging through me in the form of a massive, intensely powerful field. Even just existing like this, charge tickled along my surface and the air tasted like magnets.

How the fuck do I know what magnetism tastes like?

Regardless, I could leverage that electromagnetic presence as if it were a crude substitute for a high tier aura—or at least I could to the degree that it let me start pulling even more current from a wider area.

It would be easy for an observer to mistake it for me blasting the blocks around me with bolts of lightning, but it was actually the opposite. As I pulled from nearby transmission lines and even local atomic generators, my megawatt draw surged a hundredfold—twohundredfold—five hundred—I was no longer drinking like a skyscraper, but like a large industrial process plant.

It all happened in a handful of seconds, seconds in which my city-devouring jaws fell open in preparation to unleash a biblical scale judgment. The resulting beam was blue-white and composed of pure light more than anything else.

The nerd in me idly hypothesized that maybe the beam included beta particles and ionized atoms from the air or my own mouth—but it was clear that the only thing reaching the ground was an 'energy' beam of some kind.

That wasn't to say there wasn't also an absolute torrent of plasma. There very much was, and it was unlike anything I'd seen my beam attack do before, with visible evidence of supersonic shock diamonds.

Unfortunately, a plasma jet like that didn't tend to go far enough to directly scorch the pavement several blocks distant. The rest of the beam did, and it was intense enough to make concrete explode in a shower of superheated fragments.

Fire alone might not have been a true obstacle, but that was clearly something he wouldn't be coming back out of. Von Jackass was forced to stop short and search for a new escape route.

He wasn't going to find one.

"You know, for someone trying to join the side of Guardian supremacists, you're not exactly doing a good job of proving your superiority," I rumbled. "I wonder, will they let you try again with an opponent who can't vaporize you? That's kind of a bad look."

I wasn't just toying with him for sadistic pleasure. Okay, I am—but that's not the only reason. I wanted to eat him, and it would be hard to do that if he actually managed to get away.

That was the same reason for aiming the beam ahead instead of on top of him. I could have already killed him, but what was the point of that if I wouldn't get an excellent meal out of it?

This time, he decided to run towards me, seemingly with the intent to run under and then behind me. It wasn't the worst idea, but it also wasn't a good one. I know just how to handle this…

It wouldn't have worked before, but the rules were different now. As Von Jackass made his desperate dash, I focused on the placement of my right foreleg and on channeling a lot of power into it.

Right as he passed below my head, I released the mounting surge of power, blasting a large chunk of metal straight off my own body with a violet arc as thick as my human-form thigh. The hunk of metal slammed into him diagonally from above faster than he could ever hope to react.

It didn't even kill him. It just smeared the lower two thirds of his body across a crater like—you know, I don't think I've ever seen something like that before. Neat.

He was still alive, but not for long. I was quick to snatch the more intact part of him up with my other foreclaw. Lifting what was left of the Tier 3 Star Guardian hundreds of feet into the air, I took one last good look at him, staring deep into his glassy-eyed face.

And then I popped his stupid head into the back of my mouth like I was snacking on a miniature grape.

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