A few minutes before the death of the Metal Beast…

  Walking down a hallway to collect her thoughts, Chimera was flanked by Bayleaf as the two walked in silence.

  That didn’t stop them from speaking to each other, but words were unnecessary with the newly formed bond they both shared.

  Still Chimera didn’t speak for a while as she contemplated the new information.

  Chimera had just finished speaking with the various prisoners that they had taken from the enemy ship. Most had been mad at the time, so besides Bayleaf’s interrogation, they had very little information that wasn’t accessible in their fragile states.

  Now with a bit of time, the prisoners returned to a semblance of normal, giving Bayleaf and Chimera the chance they needed to gain a bit more from them.

  The deep dives they both preformed revealed a rather harrowing notion, but what bothered Chimera the most was one crucial detail.

  The pheromones.

  How’d a group that’s at war with this Elfari Empire manage to get access to pheromones that were directly tied to the royal line? Something like that wouldn’t be accessible without direct access to someone of their blood, right?

  Yet Chimera knew it was the same when she checked the prisoners, because that same pheromone receptor was somehow inside these Hoodian crewmates.

  Linked to their brain’s in a similar way to the very same as an old enemy of hers. It was attached to their amygdala and reward center of their brains, sending a feedback loop of rewards for obedient actions and suppressing the desire to resist with faith in this ‘Verdant Goddess’.

  It was like taking a hammer to a person’s head until they couldn’t think straight anymore, and then just accepting whatever the assailant said to get the pain to stop.

  It reminded Chimera too much of Dr. Pox’s medical devices, the ones he used on his ‘death children’ to instill sadistic tendencys and obedience in their ‘father’.

  All the way out here, in nowhere space, and I’m seeing something so familiar. This can’t be a coincidence, can it?

  The dots connected too well, the methods too similar.

  ‘I can sense your worry Mera… it’s kind of overpowering in a way. What’s on your mind?’

  Bayleaf poked her shoulder to grab her attention, which pulled Chimera out of her dark thoughts.

  “Nothing… at least I hope.”

  Bay walked ahead to stare at her, a dour look coloring her features as she spoke, “Then share it if it’s nothing.”

  Chimera stared up at her, “It’s nothing Bay…”

  Bay still walking backwards crossed her arms, “so it’s personal then? It feels like it.”

  “Bay, drop it.” Chimera felt a shift of magic course through her mood. She lost a bit of control, but it was surprising to her that her magical organ reflected her emotional state as well. It hadn’t done that before.

  Bayleaf rolled her eyes, “this personal thing, does it have anything to do with that mixture we found in those reptile’s brains?”

  Chimera wanted to snap at her, but Bayleaf impressively pierced her way into Chimera’s mind, seizing her thought process and sifting through it.

  “Bay! What the hell-’

  “Enough, I’m not being kept in the dark about something that pertains to my people, Mera. You said I can still help them, but then you keep this shit from me? Who the hell is Monica Ferrous? And this Pox bastard, why are you thinking about that right now?”

  “They were my enemies, the same people that ruined my… Mother’s life. Who tried to kill my friend and who sent my brother to be hospitalized for most of his life! How dare you just… push into my thoughts like that!”

  Chimera was pissed, but so was Bayleaf.

  Their thoughts began to go on the offensive in the mindscape, Bayleaf pushing back as this information was crucial to their mission and the reason they were on Torsca in the first place, while Chimera was infuriated that Bay would simply take that knowledge like it belonged to her.

  Back and forth they argued, claiming that need trumped any sort of privacy that Chimera wanted to keep, while she complained that nothing Bay had done lately showed that she deserved to know about Chimera’s past.

  Eventually both were exhausted with the arguments, standing in the hallway and staring at each other for the past three minutes.

  Just as they were about to go at it again, an alarm played over the ship intercom.

  “Warning, Hostile Metal Beast detected, request for reinforcements has been sent. Warning, Hostile Metal Beast detected!”

  Chimera immediately touched base with the Meras as her body teleported to the bridge, the crew aboard already moving into position to assist.

  “Class A Metal Beast, heavily augmented and showing signs of a malfunctioning magic core in its housing. Vice Captain,” one of the bridge personnel pulled up an image of the Metal Beast in question.

  Chimera heard her continue, “three minutes to detonation.”

  Bark turned to regard Chimera, “Captain, we need a solution fast.”

  Chimera shrugged, “I’m only good at fighting Bark, you decide what we need here.”

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  Bark took that as confirmation and pointed at the crewman who spoke earlier, “those MACs that the Meras told us about, how soon can we get them charged up and ready to fire?”

  “Calculating,” the crewman typed on a scrying tablet, face furrowed in concentration.

  After a few seconds, she looked up, “a minute should be long enough.”

  Bark turned to Chimera, “think you can buy us a minute?”

  With a crack of her fingers and a lazy stretch, Chimera gave a last minute thumbs up before disappearing to the outer hull of the Meras, free falling towards her target.

  …

  Wow, Brutal.

  Chimera witnessed Tessa, one of her favorite Elfari if she was being a bit biased, stab the over-augmented monkey in the eye with her strange tech staff, causing the beast in question to fall over dead.

  Whatever that staff did also did something about the mana core as far as she could tell too, causing the makeshift bomb to cool and settle into a stable state.

  “Cheers for the Harriers!” Chimera whooped in the air, causing a few of the men and women around her to echo her cheers. It soon spread over the camp, leading to a hollering and whooping frenzy, all of it directed at Tessa.

  She followed right after, throwing in her own cheers as the Harriers celebrated their victory.

  Nice job! Chimera thought as she moved close to the cooling corpse of the Metal Beast.

  Chimera was about to place a hand on it when Lysandra rushed over to tackle her to the ground.

  “Woah! What gives?!” Chimera yelped out as Lys pulled her back up.

  “Do not touch them, it is for your own safety.” her hardened face spoke volumes as Chimera turned to stare at the corpse.

  What could be so dangerous-

  Just as she was thinking about it, a wave of green energy washed over the Metal Beast’s body, flooding the corpse with a tangibel green goo that sealed every part of it. No one had done anything to it as far as Chimera could tell, but from what she saw, whatever was surrounding it came from within the beast’s body.

  Shortly after it was surrounded with the stuff, the green goo began melting the corpse, leaving nothing but a dark stain where the acidic goo was left over.

  Self-destruct in the form of an acid bath, who the hell designed these things?

  Feeling cheated from a potential DNA acquisition, Chimera turned to check out the ship in question as well.

  Near the entrance to the vessel were a few tied up guards from Anvilage who were likely pheromone bombed into letting the Metal Beast out of whatever cage it was in. Likely from the inside of the vessel as far as Chimera could guess.

  A twinge of worry colored her thoughts as she turned to Tessa.

  “Tessa, you had access to the guns on the vessel right?”

  The still celebrating hacker turned to address her, “well, yeah, because they still had power…”

  The realization that something was terribly wrong appeared all over Tessa’s face as she turned to point her staff at the vessel.

  Catching onto the tension, Lysandra dropped Chimera to the ground as she turned in the direction of the ship.

  “Harrier Tessa, what are you checking the ship for?”

  Chimera jumped up to answer, “it’s obvious right? Guards that were indoctrinated, a Metal Beast that just happened to come out when we arrived? And Power, on a ship that was downed.”

  Tessa nodded, “thought the same thing, it smells like bait High General. I’m checking the surveillance and ship systems… No! Damnit. We need to leave!”

  Chimera felt it too, a sudden spike in magical force that was coming from the ship’s engines slowly but assuredly started to glow white hot.

  “Get the teams out of the ship! All Harriers, evacuate the site, Now!” Lys shouted as the scattered Harriers picked themselves up and tried to put distance between themselves and the vessel.

  Chimera raced towards the entrance to the ship as quickly as her power would allow, druidic magic and partially restored super speed giving her seconds in what would take minutes to reach the door from her location.

  She pulled the doors open, slamming them against the sides to make more room for the Harriers that were still inside. She watched them run for the outside, but a few were too hurt to keep up with the rest.

  Chimera grabbed who she could, feeling the spike of energy reach a critical level through her own senses.

  With one last snatch, Chimera jumped into the air as high as she could, using a bit of reverse gravity magic to lighten the people around her as well as herself. It gave her the intended effect of bounding upward, just close enough that the Meras could catch her and teleport them inside.

  It wasn’t limited to her either, as countless Harriers were pulled and placed in the cargo bay section by Meras. Most breathed a sigh of relief, but the look on some indicated there was still more below.

  Chimera was about to speak to Meras about sending her back when she felt it.

  A colossal boom shook the Meras just as a final few were teleported onto the vessel, sending the ship back and causing everyone to fall to the floor from the aftershock. Its effect was felt for a full five seconds before the ship stabilized and everyone was able to try standing again.

  Chimera got to her feet and started healing those that she could, sending thin wiry tentacles to stick into people and transfer whatever their bodies needed to regenerate.

  She took away their dead tissues and unused body fats to help replenish her own stores, which allowed her to top off her generators and start up a few more that she held dormant.

  Brimming with life and new power, Chimera located Tessa and Lysandra among the Harriers, both already working to check on their prospective groups. She even saw Bargo and Arrose directing a few to help pick up the exhausted Harriers and move them.

  “-It’s confirmed High General.”

  “Damn those crafty snakes! Take what we could recover and place it with the engineers, maybe they can make sense of them.” Lysandra motioned to a group of Elfari who had trollets and crates of tech that looked rather similar to the interior of the Sword they were on moments ago.

  Still, why was Lysandra pissed about that?

  “Hey your highness, what's wrong? We didn’t miss anyone did we?”

  As she approached Chimera noticed Tessa’s sour mood as well.

  “All gone, it's all freaking gone!” Tessa slouched, a look of defeat on her face.

  “What is?” Chimera felt like she was missing the big detail.

  Tessa grabbed a hold of Chimera and pulled her up, keeping her at eye level as she whined.

  “Those damn snakes did more than blow up the ship Mera, they took all of their important tech with them! Half of the stuff we recovered is useless, absolutely useless!”

  Lysandra gripped a piece of ship tech and crushed it, “all of the data has been wiped from these storage devices, and the ones that have any are locked behind DNA coding, so no one can even touch them without setting the blasted things off and destroying the data within. Unless we have the correct Hoodian, it’s all pointless!”

  Chimera stared at both of them, gingerly, grabbing the tech that was DNA locked, and scraped a bit of leftover residue from the place that it likely was held from. In moments, she had the code for the person, inserted within the reader, and watched as the device opened to reveal its contents.

  The two of them stared at the device, then at Chimera, then back at the device again.

  “You both forgot I could do this, didn’t you.”

  It was more of a statement than a question, but the look of pain and potential migraines on their faces confirmed her answer.

  Damn it feels good to be a blob.

  …