Oh well, sorry Katherine. You served your purpose. It looked like I wouldn't be retrieving her after all.

"Wait!" Luna interjected. Goddamn it. "We need to help the others."

The big guy paused. "What others?"

Fuck this. I was not going to die here because Luna wanted us to be heroes and save her new friends. I also realized that I'd been a bit of an idiot and that Bucket Guy had the right idea. Cocking my fist back and twisting with my whole body, I punched the wall.

My Adamantite tipped, clawed metal fist broke straight through the cinderblock. The hole was small, but it wouldn't stay that size for long. Stuffing my other hand through with superhuman strength, I proceeded to rip the surrounding blocks apart.

By that point, I'd done enough damage that a single good kick was enough to create a gap that I could force the rest of my body through. Once I was almost on the other side, I looked down to see what was below me—just in time to see someone else blow their own exit out of the first floor right below me.

It was Surfer Dude, and he had both Katherine and Maria hot on his heels. "You mean these others?" I didn't know if Luna could hear me, but it didn't actually matter. "Looks like they had the same idea."

"Alex!" Katherine stopped and shouted up at me.

"In the flesh," I muttered while working the last bits of myself free from between the cinderblock and dropping down onto the gravel beside her. Looking back up, I saw Luna stick her head out through the crack.

"Come on," I urged Katherine, "they'll catch up with us."

"Alex." She caught my hand as I tried to brush past, pulling back against it. "We could use you at your full power."

I blinked. Backing off on my intention to rip free from her grip, I turned the phrase over in my mind. Fuck. She might be right. By 'full power,' I hoped she meant my full Anathema form and not the stunt I'd pulled in my desperate attempt to defeat Von Jackass.

The former was reasonable. The latter would be irresponsible at best.

"Fine." The alleyway we'd landed in was far from safe. It was still right next to the breach, and as we spoke, multiple smaller—but far from weak—Anathema had claws their way out through the ruined windows above.

Katherine's pseudo-aura pushed against my senses, indicating that her anti-Anathema vibes were active—but oddly, the sensation was distant and muted. Oh shit, is she deliberately excluding me somehow?

It would make sense for her to do that now that she knew what I really was, and it also made sense that she could. Nice.

But I needed to shove all of those thoughts out of my head and focus on shifting into the colossal beast of fire and steel that I was always meant to be. The whole process would take about ten seconds, but ten seconds could be an eternity in such a deadly situation.

As my form shifted and expanded, everyone else gathered around me and Katherine. Maria for protection, and Surfer Dude to be the protection—as I focused on growing into a several hundred ton beast, the powerful Tier 3 Guardian sent a wave of force through the gravel at his feet. The rocks trembled, shifted, and crumbled down into a fine sand.

Holy shit. He can make his own sand like that? I was glad to learn that while we were on the same side and not during a fight. That's basically cheating.

Luna, meanwhile, had lowered Staircase down to the ground using one of her sticky shadow ropes. She was working on repeating the technique with Smartypants, and I assumed that Bucket Guy was still up there defending her from behind.

How chivalrous.

Finally, my transformation neared completion, and I had to step over the adjacent chain link fence and shove over a dumpster in order to fit. Luna finished lowering down Smartypants and hopped down herself.

Since the gap I'd broken in the second floor wall was still narrow, I decided to help Bucket Guy out by punching a much, much bigger hole next to it with armored talons curled into a fist the size of a small car.

See? I'm being so thoughtful.

Bucket Guy jumped down to join the rest of us, and from there, Surfer Dude took the lead, cutting a path straight through the trampled fence and the building beyond using the raw abrasive power of his personal sandstorm.

There was one problem, though—I was way too big to fit. Damn it, Katherine, this is all your fault. It wasn't a question of whether Surfer Dude's hole was big enough—it wasn't—but whether the entire building was big enough.

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Could I have squeezed myself low to the ground and crawled in? Yes, most likely. But there was no conceivable reason for it to be worth attempting.

The better option was to squeeze my way out onto the main street and try catching up to them on the other side. That's what I assumed they were doing—there was little way for me to tell now that everyone else had followed the annoying vigilante.

Something grabbed me by the tail.

Fuck. Anything that was big enough to grab my tail at my evolved size was going to be downright huge—so from the moment I felt the massive grip, I knew things were going to get messy.

Whipping my long neck around by 180 degrees, I tried to get a look at whatever titan had dared put its grubby mitts on me, but by that point it was too late. The massive Anathema yanked me backwards, dragging me up and away and causing my own massive claws to leave deep scars carved through the ground.

For the next few moments, I failed to resist effectively, my mind too caught up in the sheer surprise of something being big enough to not only grab my dinosaurically proportioned body but to dangle me off the ground entirely.

I recovered my wits quickly, but then everything turned into a confused blur as my colossal assailant whipped me through the air like an angry, hundred-thousand-kilo flail.

I wasn't sure what it was that it smacked me into, only that it definitely wasn't the ground. What the fuck—I was already swining again and not at all happy about it. Fuck this shit! With a rare flash of insight, I flexed the esoteric muscle that triggered a rapid vibration in each of the feather blades in my wings.

My motion jerked to a halt. Whatever had grabbed me wasn't prepared for that, and its grib slipped away, shredding its hand in the process as it ripped along the spiny plates of my tail. Serves you right, asshole.

Twisting in the air, I flicked my tail around, and felt the tip whip into something that had tried reaching for me again. There was a tangible crunch as my own massive appendage slapped it away.

With a single beat of my wings, I put horizontal distance between myself and the even larger titan before dropping back to the ground. I hadn't been paying much attention to where I landed, and a flat, wide building collapsed beneath me, unable to handle my weight or at least not my impact.

Oops.

Shaking my way out of the rising dust cloud, I got my first good look at the huge bastard that was responsible. It wasn't hard to pick out which of the hundreds of Anathema now swarming into the blocks around the club was the one that grabbed me.

It was a Handy-Dandy.

If there was going to be an Anathema type called a Grabber, then it shouldn't have been the much more common black, tentacled creature that actually bore the name. It should have been Handy-Dandy, but being less common, no one managed to give them a name in time to stop one of the two or three most common Anathema types to steal the perfect one.

As such, the creature that now towered over even me got stuck with an even stupider name—a name that was arguably even worse than the atrocious Chamelium pun.

Where the much more common Grabber was a formless mass of black tentacles, a Handy-Dandy was a grotesque tangle of dozens or even hundreds of eerily human looking arms, often being contained within a tangle of tattered fabric.

The one that had just flung be around me wasn't visually unusual in any way other than its unreasonable size. The hand of each arm was about as big as a normal sized hand would be to a housecat. No wonder it could swing me around like that.

In total, each arm was about as big as I was—and there were dozens of them.

But what did it swing me against? I was certain that it swung me at something that wasn't the ground. There weren't any buildings nearby to be tall enough, and there also weren't any other Anathema of comparable size.

So—my attention snapped to the side, where a tiny figure rocketed hundreds of feet up in the air, rising into a falling arc towards the massive Handy-Dandy. It was hard to see anything of that size at this distance in the dark, let alone when moving at that speed and with nothing but the night sky as background.

Nonetheless, I knew it was a human figure, and that meant only one thing—it was a Guardian. Probably.

I almost expected the Handy-Dandy to ignore the miniscule creature leaping towards it, but that prediction could hardly be further from the truth. A dozen hands reached out in the opposite direction, all grasping for a hold they could use to pull the unsightly Anathema away from the descending Guardian.

At the same time, other hands reached for cars, chunks of concrete, and even other Anathema to fling at the attacker. That's what it did to me, I realized. It literally used me as a flail.

Many of the projectiles missed entirely, but several got close—including a decent-sized Kraken that the far larger Handy-Dandy had grabbed by one of its five flexible legs.

The flailing, airborne titan careened towards the tiny human—and a luminous, amethyst blade like a crescent moon shimmered into the air above her, slicing down like a magical giant's scythe and cleaving the helpless Kraken clean in twain.

Holy shit. Surroundings forgotten, I started in awe as the terrifying woman completed her downward arc, the massive amethyst sickle swinging back around in front of her—and a steel dumpster clutched between fingers the size of tree trunks slammed into her from the side.

I assume that's what happened to me, then. With the momentary spell now broken, I did the logical thing by springing into motion and willing the very wind to gather around me. The colossal Handy-Dandy might be a formidable opponent, but its tier wasn't any higher than my own.

That meant I could take it on—and while there were advantages to being a titan, there were disadvantages as well. If there was one thing I'd regretted about the direction I took with my evolution, it was that it made it much less likely for me to pull off my old habit of chewing my way through the insides of Anathema far larger than me.

I had no idea why the small breach that formed in the club had suddenly exploded many tiers higher, but if there was one thing that had worked for me so far, it was seizing opportunities to grow stronger.

Alright, Scythe Girl. Let me show you how it's really done.

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