Wind whipped around me as I bounded towards the enormous Handy-Dandy. A compressed sheath wreathed my form, its whirling edges sharp and powerful enough to draw blood.

I didn't expect it to do meaningful damage to the huge Anathema, or at least not damage that it couldn't shrug off. The actual purpose was to cut past any individual limb that it might try to throw in my way as I dove towards its central mass—and also because it made me feel cool.

My mind latched onto a minor detail as I closed in—that each footfall in my loping, six-legged gait cratered the concrete where it landed. I hadn't noticed it nearly so much in my fight with Von Jackass, probably because I never quite got up to speed—but the pavement felt mushy.

I was so big and so heavy that a proper sprint was too much for ordinary construction to handle. It might sound impressive to anyone who hadn't experienced it, but being the one affected, it was fucking annoying.

When I slammed into the central mass of the Handy-Dandy, it was like—it was like a major league pitcher slinging an unripe tomato into a huge block of jello.

My mind struggled to catch up with the unfolding physics of our collision. Things didn't work the way I was used to on this scale. It was like how a rat dropped down a mineshaft would scurry off at the bottom, a human would thud against the bottom and stop moving, and an elephant would splatter.

Only, I was much bigger than an elephant.

My momentum could not be denied, and the physics of our respective bodies would seemingly rather rip and deform than shove me back. And this, kids, is an example of an inelastic collision.

What wasn't a surprise was that I fared better than the even larger Anathema. If it weren't for our regeneration, I would be scheduling an auto-shop body detail service—and the Handy-Dandy would be scheduling stitches at a ship anchor chain foundry.

As such, I was perfectly happy with the outcome once the shock and disorientation from my own unfamiliar kinesiology. Bloody, bloody everywhere, and all of it to drink!

My teeth ripped into the sundered flesh with ease. The Handy-Dandy might be tough, tougher than ordinary flesh, but all that meant was that it felt like ripping into a tenderized steak without superhuman strength, as opposed to—uh oh.

One of the massive arms had reached inward and grabbed me by the wing. Not cool! Out of every place you could grab be, that was the absolute worst. It was a good thing, then, that I'd already discovered the countertechnique.

Digging my claws into the base of the other arms around me, I tensed the right set of alien 'muscles' in the precise way that set my sharp, metal feathers vibrating like hundreds of overpowered cast saws.

The feeling of pulpy and sticky shredded viscera tangling through those same feathers was decidedly unpleasant. But the disgust that shuddered through me must have paled in comparison to the pain of having one of your hands reduced to the meat equivalent of the inside of a pumpkin.

The arms shuddered around me. Yeah, that's what I thought. Not so keen anymore, are—gah, would you please stop doing that?

I might have taken one hand out of the fight—for now—but the other Anathema still had dozens more. That was kind of its defining feature—and this time, the damn groping bastard had seized hold of one of my rearmost legs.

Fucking—gah. It was strong. It might not be as durable as I was, but it was just the right raw strength for a genuine contest between us to be possible. Another hand joined the first, trying to grab hold of my other rearmost leg.

I batted it back, blindly kicking my leg and raking my talons against anything that got too close. My remaining legs joined in as well, talons digging into flesh and securing my position. Damn feely bastard.

We were at a stalemate. The Handy-Dandy still had me by the leg, but nothing more—and it would sooner rip its own skin off than pull one of my legs off the rest of me. But that left me in a position where there was little I could do beyond cling tight.

With a burst of strength, I send my neck lunging forward just enough to latch onto the deepest inner mass with my teeth.

It took a couple cycles of chomp-release-chomp to get a better grip, but from there it only took maintaining a strong clamp and a good full-body pull for me to tear free an enormous chunk of flesh. Loose skin and stripped muscle peeled away in a manner not unlike a ravenous barbarian tearing into a huge chicken thigh.

~Yummy, yummy, yummy—

The larger Anathema thrashed, the force pulling against my leg doubling, and I found myself fighting a frantic, losing battle as it at last dragged me away with a huge strip of skin and muscle still hanging from my mouth.

Just as I'd predicted, my talons dug deep gashes through multiple arms, in some cases going so far as to rip free additional chunks of gore. But the Handy-Dandy had enough of me by this point and was willing to bear the consequences.

It flung me a short distance away—as in, I tumbled half a block of so through the air before smashing sideways through the wall of some shitty cinderblock building not dissimilar to the club in its construction.

The building was empty, which was probably for the best—aside from a smattering of small, weak Anathema. Many of them—of those that hadn't already been crushed—tried to flee, and some of them even succeeded. The rest of them were ripped around by the wind or bludgeoned by my massive tail.

I took the moment to rest, recover, and devour my resultant spoils. To be quite frank, the big dangly scrap of Handy-Dandy that I'd made off with was far from the best thing I'd tasted. There were plenty of random Anathema I'd taken bites off of that were definitively tastier and of a higher potency—what the Handy-Dandy had going for it was sheer scale.

The stringy, shredded-pork-like piece I'd claimed was still, in absolute terms, fucking huge, and such an amount of any kind of meat was going to be an absolute treat.

So I sat there, a hundred ton dragon, crouched inside the half-collapsed ruins of a shitty bad part of town abandoned brickwork, munching on the world's largest strip of raw bacon.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

A curious thought struck me as I chewed. This really does taste like human. Putting aside the quirks of how my alien biology rewarded me with tingly spikes of pleasure for eating literally anything of unusual potency, the ordinary, basic meat flavor of it—it tastes like people.

In one way, that shouldn't be surprising. Handy-Dandies were notable for just how eerily human their collection of hands were—but also, that was exactly the point. Those unerringly human arms not just looking human but tasting the part too…

Kinda freaky, ha. It didn't bother me—I'd eaten my share of actual humans—but it was definitely strange.

Once I'd finished my monster bacon, having devoured it in a way amusingly similar to those videos of rabbits eating plant stems like an office paper shredder, I took some extra time to further indulge in my constant hunger by cleaning up the mess I'd made with the various weak Anathema still in the building.

Some of them were already dead, making them about as worthwhile a meal as the surrounding cinderblocks, but others were merely critically injured or otherwise incapacitated. Not bad. Not bad at all.

But alas, things rarely lasted forever—and it was time for me to throw myself back into the fight. I hadn't been oblivious to the world beyond the collapsed building, and Scythe Girl was still fighting the fuck-off-huge Handy-Dandy.

She wasn't doing a bad job of it, either. She was continuing to wrack up far more damage than I'd accomplished, enough that the other titan was slowly but surely losing the regeneration battle. That was typical of the bigger one on one fights—or really, with Anathema and Guardians in general.

If a single killing blow wasn't an option, then it became a game of who could wear down whose regeneration faster.

There were a lot of train car sized severed limbs lying about, now—hmm. Certainly, my original intention had been to win the fight and recover some ego. But I wasn't above playing scavenger, either…

I began sneaking my way closer—an amusing thing to attempt as a building-sized beast of supernatural terror. But if I could hang around the edges of their fight, perhaps neither of them would bother stopping me from cleaning up all those limbs Scythe Girl had severed.

And at the same time—you know, this wasn't how it was supposed to go, was it? I couldn't help but wonder what Katherine and the others were doing.

Stephanie "Amethyst Reaper" Shadow

Stephanie's eye twitched. There was a fucking dragon made out of metal sneaking around and dragging away all of the pieces of the Handy Dandy that she cut away.

She wasn't sure if she could even explain why she was finding it so annoying. Perhaps she didn't like a potential threat hanging around at the periphery while she battled against a persevering foe.

Perhaps it was because she felt indignation at a powerful creature that was more than capable of hunting on its own instead hanging around like a stray dog to snatch away her rightfully earned scraps—even if she herself had no intention of using them.

Perhaps it was an upwelling of some alien instinct of hers as a half human.

Regardless, it was pissing her off—and there was little she could do about it. Stephanie doubted she could accomplish anything by attacking the damn vermin other—maybe she would get lucky and scare it away, but it was just as likely she would only succeed in provoking the thing to attack.

While the former would be a blessing, the latter would be even more annoying—the oversized Handy-Dandy was frustrating enough on its own. Adding another powerful and likely annoying to fight Anathema to the mix was not a great idea.

But—what even is it? Stephanie didn't recognize the six-legged dragon, a dragon seemingly made out of solid metal. It must be a rare type. Otherwise, I would definitely recognize something like this.

Perhaps if she'd been paying more attention to recent news, she would have drawn a connection to the so-called LA megatitan—but she hadn't, and having just got back to the city, she was unaware of the disruption the event had caused.

So annoying.

Despite her victory being guaranteed, the Handy-Dandy was proving far too capable at dragging things out. There were just so many limbs, huge limbs, and by the time Stephanie had cut away three of them, two more had grown back.

Bit by bit, she was making progress—but it was slower than it should have been. If she could just get past all those infuriating arms, she could easily overwhelm the creature's regeneration—but the Anathema wasn't completely mindless, and it was perfectly willing to use its own arms as a living shield.

The few times Stephanie had tried to slip past them and attack the inner, central mass, the titan had proved faster than its size would imply, knocking her aside with its massive arms and pelting her with all manner of debris.

Actually, the same dragon-thing that continued to lurk at the edges, dragging away the severed pieces and likely consuming them, had been one of the first things it had hit her with. The massive titan had grabbed the much smaller, but still large, titan by the tail and swung it around like a living flail.

Stephanie might have found more amusement in that if she hadn't been on the receiving end of it—and if the damn creature hadn't lived to stick around and circle their fight like a big, metal vulture.

The half human shook her head. She was getting distracted. She—a concrete column slammed into her, sending her tumbling off the rooftop she'd been standing on and bouncing off the hard pavement of the street on the other side.

"Ugh. Fucking bastard." With a slight groan, Stephanie pushed herself off the ground—then her arms shuddered, and she collapsed back down. Fuck. That hurt. She wasn't completely helpless, and she'd be back in proper fighting shape in short order—but getting hit by a flying chunk of concrete still did some serious damage.

"Hey."

Stephanie jerked to her feet, her body's bruised and broken condition forgotten. Her head whipped around in search of the low, gritty voice that—her eyes landed on the metal dragon. It was sitting there, legs tugged under it almost like an enormous cat.

A half eaten arm from the Handy-Dandy was sitting on the ground in front of it. Fuck. It's right there. I—

"You look like you could use a little help."

Stephanie blinked. Her mind churned—the dragon? No, that can't—but it—fuck.

If it was possible to fuck an interdimensional monster and then give birth to a genuine half-breed like herself—and if it was then possible for that half human to awaken as a Guardian during an incursion 20 years later—then why can't it be possible for there to be an intelligent full-nonhuman that can talk?

"Uh… maybe…" Stephanie allowed, still not sure what was happening anymore.

"Yeah," the dragon continued—and it was definitely the dragon talking to her, she was sure of it now, "I noticed that you kept trying to jump on top of buildings and stuff, so I figured you might have an easier time if I could just give you a lift."

Stephanie's brow furrowed. "I—you—what?"

"I can fly."

"Oh." Stephanie nodded, well aware that she wasn't being very eloquent. Is a fucking dragon offering to let me ride it? That's—actually really fucking cool.

At the same time that Stephanie's thoughts continued to race, the dragon blinked, its head tilting to the side as if curious. "Yeah, but—you taste weird. You're not a normal Guardian, but you're not like a Star Guardian either, or even like me…"

Oh shit. Stephanie swallowed. It knows that I'm…

"What," the dragon asked, its tone more curious than threatening, "what are you?"

Next chapter will be updated first on this website. Come back and continue reading tomorrow, everyone!

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.