Inception

Chapter 62: Feral is the New Sexy

Something wholly unconnected to Lena's consciousness rose up at the sight of the Vice Captain falling to the street far below, a bloody hole punched through his gut. In a flash, like one sees their life before they die, Lena saw the Vice Captain's soft smile as he offered her food, gently washed her hair, said he loved her, and lastly, like a blazing sun above a reflective sea, stand from the viscera of a kaiju that had hurt her, covered in its blood and guts, roaring in feral triumphant.

It had been a horrible sight. A violent one, showing a man who had decended to an apex predator.

But it had made her feathers stand on end, as though it had been the hairs on her arms and neck.

This man, she had thought. This man will not die so easily.

Her talons stretched out for him. Her wings grew high. And as they did so, her weakened, exhausted, bloody, and sub-par body began to warm. Her mind began to blurr.

Find it, find it, find the source, hissed the little kaiju within her.

She screeched again, this time louder, making the very air turn needle-like. Hundreds of panicked civilians below toppled to the ground, unconscious. Even some of the suited up Defense Force which followed went limp.

Kaiju No. 9 fell from his crouch readying for a jump.

But it wasn't all of them she was looking for, even as she was aware of everything that was happening around her with her keen and heightened senses. It was the smoke—the source.

And she found it instantly, faint but pearlescent, rising up to the sky from only about a mile away from where a line of the first division base met a convenient store.

She dove for it, Soshiro held tightly in her talons. She could barely think now. Instinct drove her like electric trails through the sky. But enough of her thought remained that when she saw a gaggle of Defense Force soldiers, she gently dropped her injured cargo amidst them.

She couldn't think about what would happen if Soshiro died. She couldn't think.

The source! The source! DESTROY THE SOURCE!

She came down on the 7/11's sidewalk talons first.

Bits of cement rocketd into the air. One hit the convenient store front, shattering the glass. The people who had taken shelter inside screamed

Lena paid them no mind. Her focus narrowed in on the wavering smoke slipping out from beneath her feet.

It sucked into her flesh, like moths to a flame. Where it touched she grew light and warm.

Her hands on the joints of her wings joined her feet, digging into the earth with a mad desperation. All the while the kaiju chanted in her mind, sealing the bulletwounds across her flesh and numbing her exhaustion.

As more smoke entered into her body, her flesh hardened and her feathers grew sharper. Her vision heightened till she could see every crumb of dirt she threw away, every insect, and every pore between her scales. She could hear the heartbeat and breath of every creature within several miles around her, the screams, the fear, the shouted orders to surround No. 9 as it closed in on her, to take Soshiro to medical bay, that the fortitude of the unknown kaiju were steadily rising---

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Thinking of doing another collaboration with my co-writer of "Beauties and Beasts." Got this idea bout two dragon girls going on a hunt for a man and doing it all the wrong ways, namely 'Stokholm syndrome.' It's going to be silly and self-serving, because that's what we do. Makes me excited.