Chapter 26: Chapter 20

Click, clack, click, clack I am annoying as fuck, click, clack, click, clack, you are just a dead carcass.

Look everyone! A dead woman walking! A freak for you to laugh at and be amazed by!

"Mak. Start the operation," Olesya gave the command, shaking off the dark thoughts in her head and surveying the situation one last time. She was standing on the rooftop of a building, shrouded from view by a fierce fire that was coming from the floor below. The flames licked her form, but the Shell kept her safe from harm, numbing the sensation of heat all around her. Her mechanical eye easily cut through the wall of flame, pinpointing attack routes, assigning numbers to the foes, and the terminal within her brain was busy sending this information back to her pack, "Velka. Start as well. Everyone else, follow her lead."

On the street across, she could see makeshift defensive formations of the Resistance. The building before her had three floors. A pretty big billboard was placed on the second floor of the building. However, it was hard to determine what was once written on it, a painted beast on a billboard now lay half broken on the ground, the parts of the billboard on the second floor were broken to allow a small sniper team to survey the area. The entrance to the bunker is located on the first floor.

A turret was installed before the main entrance into the bunker, guarded by several people. Sandbags were placed in a half circle before the turret, while several trucks, most likely empty of the energy cell and fuel to prevent the explosion, flanked the turret. The adversaries had a clear view of the entire street to the south through the main entrance.

Two alleys run behind the building, the alley to the west had a mixed group of Regulators and two Bentos Cyborgs in it. Nothing too serious, these Bentos only had a single augmented limb, nothing compared to Olesya’s body. Their movement betrayed their young age, both people ducked at the distant sound of explosions. Easy prey, Mak’s pack will deal with them.

This place was weird. The enemy forces made a position here, in the area well behind the front. They were content with simply defending this place, even after downing several reclaimers, they allowed other soldiers to retrieve the dead and wounded. Foes within the building refused to surrender or even answer the calls of the command. They were content with defending this place to the death. Captain Osero checked the reports that recon was able to gather and failed to find any spiritual or strategic value in this place. In short, there was no reason for enemies to lay down their lives here. Despite all of this, simply leaving enemy soldiers behind was not an option and Olesya volunteered to take them down. Her original assignment was to guard a remote hospital, but no one could attack such a heavily fortified position, and sitting in one place while others risked their lives was maddening. Captain Osero acknowledged this and agreed to Olesya's initiative, rerouting some other exhausted group of normie soldiers to defend the hospital instead.

Two darts shot from the building, piercing two gunners behind the turret. These were just sedative darts, Olesya saw no reason to harm the future citizens of the state. Before the men even fell on the stone floor, a small river of black carapaces charged from the ruins of the buildings that surrounded the bunker. The wolfkins were not stealthy by choice. They were shock troops, ones who reached the enemy heart and tore it out. But each and every wolfkin was taught since childhood how to sneak up on the insectoids and kill them silently. Each warrior was rigorously trained on how to move in their power armor without causing a noise. By sneaking close to the enemy position and launching a sudden attack, even the toughest defenses would fall in the carnage that the shardguns would cause.

Nothing of the sort happened here, of course. Their opponents were normies, tired and scared men and women. Killing them was dishonorable, unneeded and wasteful. The wolfkins merely grappled with their foes, throwing them on the ground and tying them up. Instead of shardguns, they used short-ranged rifles that fired sleeping darts. It didn't matter how determinate the foes were, before the very eyes of Olesya Velka disarmed five regulators so fast that they barely had the time to scream. While people desperately reached for their pistols, Velka had already moved deeper into the bunker, leaving them to the males from her pack. The scout’s claws twitched in anticipation. Any other female, old Olesya included, would have hated non-lethal combat missions. The restraint, the care that you need to show in taking down the normies alive puts quite a strain on your mind. Olesya failed this test once, when she made her first kill. Velka, on the other hand, lived for a challenge. Taking down foes alive and unharmed was just as fulfilling for her as the usual carnage.

Mak and his group hit their foes from behind, when the patrol turned to race back to the aid of their comrades. The male soldier kept behind, firing darts into the Regulators’ backs and allowing the females of his pack to take down Bentos. The warriors tore the weapons from the arms of their foes, throwing them face down on the stone ground, slowing the fall of their foes at the very last moment, to preserve the enemy’s soldiers from injuries.

Seeing that the sniper team on the second team moved, Olesya leaped from the building, crashing through the remains of the billboard on the second floor. The stone crumbled like paper when her body broke through it, the people within screamed in panic, seeing her towering form, the monster clad in steel, looking down on them through the green visor.

The first sniper pointed his rifle at Olesya, and the wolf hag allowed the prediction engine within her body to work. It was an experimental piece of technology, a machine that predicted enemy movements and advised on the optimal path of the operation. The room she was in was a half-empty hall, the broken accounting machines lay at the side of the walls, several tables with ammunition on them stood in the middle of the room. The foes, two regulators and one soultaker, were armed with low powered energy rifles, weapons that posed little threat even to the power armor of regular troops, much less to her Shell. The prediction engine alerted Olesya that the old-looking rifle in the enemy's panicked hands was about to blow up due to a jammed energy cell within.

Instead of charging directly at the foe, Olesya moved across the room, smashing tables into pieces. She backhanded a regulator sniper on the other side of the hall, the woman was the only one who had her in the scope from the moment Olesya arrived. Only panic stopped her from pulling the trigger and the prediction engine took this into consideration. The backhand from Olesya broke the regulator’s arm and threw the woman to the side of the room, rolling and screaming in pain. Moving toward the regulator with a faulty weapon, Olesya cursed silently. Her physical strength grew by weeks, and it was getting harder and harder to adjust to it. She merely intended to throw the woman off her feet, the prediction engine already mapped the route for her to come back and knock her out. Now the machine was updating the recommended course of action based on her misstep.

She appeared before the first foe, giving him a light low kick to knock him off his feet and grabbing his about-to-explode rifle. She threw it in the air, shielding the man with her back and knocking him out with a snap of her finger across the lower jaw. The rifle exploded, steel shards harmlessly hit Olesya in the back of her armor, failing to even scratch the paint on her armor. Engineers worked overtime to fix the Shell after her battle with the Bento. Now her armor was as good as new.

She turned toward the last foe and sidestepped the energy beam. Olesya could not move faster than light, but the prediction engine mapped the route of the enemy line of fire for her. She dodged before the energy beam left the barrel of the weapon. Olesya never gave the foe another chance to fire, speeding up to him and knocking him out with a chop to the side of his head. The moment she saw how soultaker’s helmet broke underneath her hit, she felt genuine fear.

Fear was something she was getting used to living with in recent weeks. Fear of losing her feelings again. Fear that Till was lying to her. Fear that her family and all others will name her a monster the moment she takes off her armor. Fear that her body would grow too fast and the metal part wouldn’t be able to adjust in time, causing the cables that circulated the blood within her to rupture. She experienced the nightmares without sleeping.

Now she was afraid that she had killed the man. She carefully caught his now limp body with one arm and tore the armor and the clothes on his chest with her other arm, pressing him against her chest.

The Shell was not a usual power armor. Whatever technology Till used to craft it, allowed Olesya to feel the outside world through the sensors built into her mighty armor. Shell transmitted the sense of touch, the sense of smell, and even the warmth of the human body in her paws with perfect accuracy. She heard, loud and clear, the thumb sound of the man’s chest. She tore the rest of the helmet from the man’s face, lifting his eyelids. The prediction engine ran a scan on his body, confirming that the man had suffered no brain damage. This time, Olesya used just the right amount of strength.

She rested his head on her left shoulder, allowing herself a moment of clarity and enjoyment. Heartbeat. Oh, how she longed to hear one. The heart in her chest was a silent chunk of flesh, unmoving. The blood that circulated through her veins was now propelled by advanced technology, rather than by the pump of her heart. She no longer had any need in heart, but the desire to hear its thumb, to know, to feel herself alive was all-encompassing for her. Olesya heard the whining of the regulator with the shattered arm and knew that she had to start treating the wounds of the captives. However, right now, all she truly wanted was to continue to hold this body in her arms, the man looked like a child when compared to her towering form. All she wanted was to hear his heartbeat, over and over again, to stretch this moment into eternity.

"Report." Olesya said over the communication network, still holding the warm body of the man close to her chest, allowing herself this vanity.

"The enemy forces are subdued, my wolf hag!" Velka enthusiastically reported.

"Losses?"

"Miniscule. One of the enemy soldiers lost a few fingers, several others suffered a few broken bones, but we captured them all alive, wolf hag!" Velka quickly replied once more. The scout surprised Olesya. Before Olesya’s injury, Velka always pushed her boundaries, trying to undermine Olesya’s leadership without actually throwing a challenge. The scout was strong and the challenge seemed inevitable. Velka hated the very idea of knowing that she was weaker. Velka wasn't stupid, and Olesya quickly understood her plan. The scout wanted to grind Olesya's gears, to rile her up into madness before starting the fight. However, soon after Velka returned from the hospital, she eagerly showed her neck to Olesya, prompting the wolf hag to bite her, not once complained about any assignment and, most surprising of all, started self-educating herself by reading books and joining the war games with the normies.

"Civilians?" Olesya asked, looking at the screen of her visor. Her mechanical eye already called the icons of her group, indicating that they were all alive. This was expected. They faced no new breeds in this operation, and normal humans were too slow to resist a sudden attack of the wolfkins.

"All alive and not the worse for wear, wolf hag," Mak responded. Other scouts in her pack felt themselves uncomfortable around him, the male who was elevated way above the position of a warrior was a curiosity and an unusual thing for them. Initially, Olesya elevated him out of necessity, he had the experience, after Siri’s death and the loss of valuable personnel, she lacked the skilled officers. However, the male backed up his experience with skills, meditating conflicts with other scouts without the use of violence. He simply allowed them to bite his neck and moved on with his life. Recently, Velka even started working with the man, instead of berating him like she usually did before. To tell the truth, Olesya was beginning to worry that Velka might be possessed by a spirit of a skinwalker. Perhaps she should ask the doctors to check her.

"Some of them are afraid of us." Velka added, and Olesya heard a cub’s cry and the angry voice of a male, demanding that wolfkins leave them alone. She also heard the sound of tearing through metal and more curses from locals, along with begging voices. Olesya frowned, from the sound of it, the people were begging to keep someone safe.

"Escort them to safety. Gently and patiently, Velka," Olesya let go of a man in her paws, placing him on the remains of a broken table. She walked toward the injured regulator and the woman cried out in panic, "I have wounded. Send someone my way to pick up the prisoners." Looking at her oversized paws, Olesya caught herself thinking that she was missing Svetlana. The hatred toward the medic burned ever brightly in her, but no one could have said that Svetlana was failing to pull her weight. Now they need to administer the sedative to captured soultakers, treat the wounds of their foes all on their own. Olesya shrugged and began treating the regulator's wound, allowing the sedative-laced syringe to slid from her vambrace. The needle pierced through both the armor and the skin of the woman, putting her to sleep while Olesya treated her broken arm. She finished the job, then walked and put the others in the room to sleep.

"Wolf hag!" Velka excitedly shouted over the communicator, "We found the reason why the locals were gathering here! It’s a food bank of sorts!" Her words were accompanied by a loud cry from some cub and more angry shouts from the people, "Or an arena, I dunno."

"A what?" Olesya summoned the images from the Velka’s pack cameras onto her own retina. The scout was in the spacious underground bunker. The walls of the bunker were remodeled, in numerous pathways and corridors that speared all around the bunker, while instead of the room, cages were now placed in places. There, among actual greenery, were various beasts. Birds from the not-so distant Iterna are currently freaked out at the sight of the wolfkins. Lambs and fawns gave voices in their cages, hiding behind the larger specimens. Creatures that looked suspiciously like orais, nimbly ran to the ceiling. In one part of the bunker, an actual pool of water was made, separated in two by an iron grating. A few safe walkways were thrown over it. The wolfkin who looked down from the walkway saw long serpentine forms in one pool and a huge, four-legged reptile form, with a long snout and mighty jaws, in another.

"It’s a zoo." Olesya said, understanding why the people were still here. The locals came here to protect the animals.

"What, wolf hag?" Velka asked.

"A place to gather and keep various animals. Not for eating and not for fighting. For the civilians to look at them." Olesya responded, trying to understand what they were supposed to do with this discovery.

"You are bullshitting me, right, wolf hag?"

"Anyway," Olesya decided to ignore the remark, allowing a smile to touch her lips. Good old Velka, "Tell the locals the animals will be kept safe, post guards here, ask a few locals to stay and help maintain the place if they are willing. Leave Mak in charge, he is a bright lad. Do not, I repeat, do not eat or harm the animals, Velka. We may be barbarians, but the state is not. Notify the regular army and captain Ivar. I will message Till myself." She despised the man for what he did to her. But desperate times call for desperate measures. The chief scientists had a way to force even the hand of Ivar should the captain try and resort to something drastic. No, Olesya won’t be taking any chances, they will do this situation strictly by the book. This place will be preserved and will be kept safe under the laws preserving the cultural heritage of the newly reunified lands.

Icons of Mak and his group went dark all of a sudden, and Olesya leaped to the western wall of the building, smashing it with ease. She looked down an alley before and saw the wolfkins, alive and well, busy tying up the prisoners. Mak stood up, moving slower than usual. It took Olesya a moment to understand that his armor was offline. Still, the male showed impressive skill, backhanding a piece of rubble away before it could hit one of the prisoners on the ground.

"Wolf hag!" Mak called Olesya himself, "We just had something weird." With a whizzling sound, the lenses of his armor came back online, the armor rebooted itself, starting to work anew.

"Explain."

"A wolfkin, not of the packs, came to us. She told us that the hospital in which Svetlana went came under attack. We tried to make her come with us, but she simply escaped with the use of EMP." He pointed to the remains of a grenade, and Olesya narrowed her natural eye. The power armors were well protected against such devices. Whatever was used here was not something that the resistance could easily get their hands of. No doubt, Till would be curious about such find.

Instead of connecting to a communication network with a thought, Olesya reached for the side of her helmet with her paw and called the command the old-fashioned way. He may have disliked it when she was doing it, but she didn’t care at the moment. Her paw trembled when an update came in, Aranea and her team faced something unusual in the hospital.

Storming the way she came in, Olesya jumped on the street before the underground zoo, landing on the stone. She landed straight, without bending her knees, and the stone road exploded beneath her heavy weight. A small crater appeared around her legs upon her landing, pieces of stone from the broken road flew up in the air.

"Velka. You are in charge for now. Preserve the zoo, update Till Ingo later for me. If I don’t come back, you are in charge of the pack for good."

"Wait, what are you…"

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The wolf hag let her arms get loose, despite the massive armor. She spread her arms wide, allowing the back of her armor to shift. The seam across her back split, pushing the device stored within the spine to the inner layer of the armor. Just like he promised, there was no pain. The device, a tube-looking thing roughly a meter in height, passed through the armor that shifted itself to let the machine out. Cables and wires still connected the device to the Olesya’s inside. Her body trembled a bit when the device mounted itself right on her back, almost as if it was always there. A surge of energy moved from the insides of the wolf hag, hurrying across the wires and the cables toward the device, powering it up and activating it.

At first, she heard a soft humming noise from behind her back. The wind started to blow in all directions from her back, sending the stones away from her. The intensity of the wind increased, but at the same time it became more concentrated, forming a solid stream in the form of a column behind her. This was just a cooling mechanism of the device, a part of its adjustment to the harsh climate of the Ravaged Lands. The true gift came later. Olesya’s legs lifted off the ground when the gravity engine came online, bending the laws of physics for her, allowing her multi-ton body to rise in the air like a feather. She lifted up, first slowly, then faster, passing above the rooftops, lifting higher and higher.

Her heart made a beat. First one. Then another. And Olesya smiled with happiness, touching her chest, before blinking and charging toward the hospital like an arrow.

"Till," She contacted him, "My heart is about to jump from my chest. What is…"

"You are excited," Till replied, "And partially afraid. Give it a few minutes, I will administer the…"

"No need," Olesya forcibly calmed her heartbeat, allowing worries for Aranea and others, even Svetlana, to flood all her consciousness, "I am good. Aranea is in trouble. If I learn that you had anything to do with…"

"Why would I do anything to someone who is crucial to your rehabilitation and to the experiment? Carry on, Velka is calling me for some reason." The man cut her off. Ingo learned the names of every single member of her pack. For what reason, Olesya had no idea, but so far, he had made no move to harm either of them.

Olesya stormed through the dark clouds, flying over the streets where combat was still going on. She saw hard-pressed reclaimers, a group of soldiers who lost their sergeant in a mechanical suit to a scaled monstrosity that towered over them. A new breed opened its jaws wide enough to swallow a human and unleashed a sonic scream that left a hole in the chest of one of the soldiers. With the new breed supporting them, the enemy force began their advance, several enemy soldiers charged from the cover, accompanied by a hover tank. Olesya stopped her flight, allowing the energy cannon behind her back to unfold, pointing the weapon at the tank. Never before had she used this weapon without standing on solid ground. But while Olesya was still alive, she would never, ever allow her allies to die when she could help them. The prediction engine started working anew, calling up the schematics of the hover tank from within the terminal inside her brain. She had found the location to shoot in less than a second.

A white stream of energy, an overheated plasma beam, shot freely from the cannon, spearing the tank, hitting the enemy officer within the tank right between the shoulder blades. The poor fellow never even had the chance to scream, a torso-sized round hole appeared in his chest, his heart burned away, his lungs exploded from overheating, and his spine column was severed. The tank stopped, her shot burned its way through the engine as well, causing the massive vehicle to burrow into the broken concrete. Olesya gestured to the allied soldiers before the new breed leaped into the air.

In her old life, this would have surprised her. The new breed leaped a dozen meters in the air, before grabbing at the side of the building and propelling himself higher, becoming a blur for the soldiers below. In her old life, she could have been too slow to react to this.

Not anymore. The prediction engine already calculated the enemy’s next move, and Olesya shifted her body, aiming the cannon at the foe. The enemy was about to grab at her legs when instead he spread his arms wide, revealing a thick membrane that stretched from his wrists to his ankles. The gigantic jaws opened and Olesya moved away, pretending to be caught by his trick. He was wide open, but a building was behind him. The wolf hag could not risk the potential civilians within.

The head of the foe looked down, and a sonic scream unleashed from the mouth of the creature, propelling it upward. Olesya noted that the gigantic gator, as she decided to call her foe, avoided hitting the building, instead aiming at the street below. The scream propelled the creature to a position above Olesya, and the gator used the membranes to glide at the wolf hag, spreading his jaws wide for a bite.

She took the attack on her left arm, allowing the cannon to fold backwards. The eyes of the gator widened when its teeth shattered against the power armor. The prediction engine screamed a warning, the creature was about to unleash another sonic scream. According to the stream of data that flowed into Olesya’s brain, the sonic stream unleashed by the gator could break even molecular bonds. What it hits, it will shatter.

Big deal. Olesya grabbed the creature by the side with her right paw, shattering the scales, burying the steel fingers into the flesh and reaching to the ribcage. No air, no screaming, friend.

The tail of the creature wrapped around Olesya’s arm, pushing the arm away. The prediction engine sent an update to her brain, the machine did not expect such physical prowess from this new breed. You and me both, buddy. Olesya thought, grabbing the shoulder of the gator with her left paw. The gator still gnawed on her arm with the broken teeth, but the pain in his side stopped the sonic scream from coming out. The prediction engine corrected Olesya, sending her update that the creature released supersonic waves. Shut up. I will call them whatever I want. Olesya thought to her helper, breaking the scales on the shoulder of her foe, aiming to reach all the way to his right collarbone.

The gator lifted both his arms, smashing the fists against the shoulders of Olesya and releasing the hold on the arm. She tore part of his skin away, but the impact sent her crashing all the way down, right onto the rooftop of a building below. The gator glided after her, still holding her arm with his tail.

Olesya crushed through the rooftop, breaking the stone, the force of impact sent her through the storage room on the upper floor and into the apartment on the floor below. The gator landed after her, smashing the broken remains of the bend with his clawed legs. However, blood was pouring out from the gaping wounds on his side and on his shoulder. The new breed’s bones were very much safe. The green eyes of her foe could see through the dust and falling rock just as easily as her own natural and mechanical eyes. His jaws opened wide, and Olesya jumped to the left.

The tail of the creature jerked her back into position, while the three-fingered hand of her foe rose in the air, slashing through the still falling stones with sharp claws. The hit never reached Olesya’s visor, for she punched the hand away, shattering both claws and the bones within her enemy’s hand and causing the eyes of her foe to widen at this pain. In panic, the gator tried to unleash a sonic scream sooner. Olesya allowed a smile to touch her lips. Both she and the prediction engine already calculated her evading maneuver, the moment the gator screams, she will duck, allowing the stream to pass above her, and then she will punch his throat.

They both stopped, hearing a scream behind the wolf hag. Through the sensors of her armor, Olesya noticed a small group of people, a man in the robes of the Planet’s church, and what looked like his family. She cursed silently, ignoring the advice of the prediction engine. The gator’s scream will leave a blood smear if he hits them. Meanwhile, the Shell at least had a chance to endure his shout.

The new breed stopped. What ran through his head, Olesya had no idea, but she charged forward, grabbing him by the sides and pushing him through the window. Her knee found the gator’s solar plexus, causing the new breed to gasp for air in desperation. The wall and the window before them shattered into pieces, and both opponents flew outside. Feeling how the hold of the enemy’s tail on her arm weakened, Olesya threw the enemy into the skies, preparing to use her energy cannon to finish him off. She allowed the gravity engine to hold her in the air.

The drones came from the black smoke to her left. Not one of the Reclaimers, these were disk-shaped, bulky machines the size of a dog, with a single gun pointed at her. Energy streams were unleashed from the guns, crashing against her armor. She allowed her plasma cutters to slide on the fingers. Till added claws to her mechanical arm, stating that Olesya should not give up on her femininity. Oh, how she wanted to tear off his throat for such mockery. All her hopes to attract a male, to have cubs were just ash now, no matter what his poisonous tongue would spit. Till, as vile as he was, added something incredible and unique to her claws.

There were five squares on each of her vambraces. When she willed it, they slid from her wrists onto the knuckles and further on the tips of her fingers, before flowing through her claws, both natural and artificial. Her natural claws were hollowed out the same way her bones were, a tube of weird alloy now ran deep inside each claw. The skin around her claws was "soaked" with nanomachines, saving both her paws and claws from violent flames that were born within her body. The flame that moved through her fingers, through her claws, through the special channels that were made to funnel the flame and finally into the squares, coming from them in a violet color, the deadly claws made not of material, but from the flame supported by a heat of nine thousand kelvin. The claws, made of flame, were both the gift and the curse that Ingo bestowed on her.

Something else reactivated in her body. Some organ. Olesya had no idea what the man returned to her. She would figure it out later. But the knowledge that she was slowly reviving made her feel euphoria. She was a corpse. But she was a corpse who will live again!

Fighting in the air was a novelty for her. Her fear for Aranea, worry for this stupid bitch Svetlana, and for all others forced her hand, prompting her to take a leap of faith and overcome her fear of the skies. However, how does one fight in the sky? She felt no foundation under her feet, she controlled her flight by using her new "fifth" limb, the gravity engine. Olesya remembered how her father once took her to a city in the Wastes. The city had a sports hall, where a new curiosity was opened, an actual swimming pool. After the Dynast approved the free healthcare program for the Wastes, Wyrm Lord used some free funds to build such things for the locals. Olesya remembered how she screamed and thrashed, when her father lowered her into the water. Her dad was always near her, supporting Olesya all the way while she was overcoming her fear and learning how to swim. She was using the swimming technique right now, instinctively hitting with her legs, increasing the speed of the gravity engine and diving into foes.

The gravity generator allowed her to freely move up and down, back and forth in the air at will. The energy discharges that were meant to overload her armor were harmlessly dissipated by the systems of her body. The crude drones lost trace of her when Olesya sped herself up to the speed of a bullet, relying on her mechanical eye to navigate her way through the clouds and among the drones. And then she struck at them. What her plasma cutters touch, they melt, causing even the molecules in the path of her claws to become ionized. The claws pierced through the steel, not facing even the tiniest resistance. She slashed through four drones before her prediction system warned her to dart back.

The machines changed strategy. Instead of energy, they fired a strange substance that was becoming solid before her very eyes, attempting to encase her large form into a cocoon, capturing her in that way, limiting her ability to cut her way free with plasma cutters and drop her on the ground. She darted back and the black substance before her turned solid, falling on the house below and breaking the roof. The twelve drones spread wide in the air, aiming to surround Olesya and use their advantage to drop her down.

The prediction engine had already deduced their trajectory when the new body crashed into Olesya. The gator from before. She kept track of him, of course, the Shell’s sensors were giving the information about him to the prediction engine, allowing the machine to calculate the best way to deal with the new breed. She allowed her foe to glide at her from the smoke-filled skies, using her own cannon to smack the gator across the head and push his sonic scream into the drone above them, turning the machine into dust. The impact of his collision gave her the necessary speed boost to evade attacks from the drones, while her own plasma cutters speared through the gator’s collarbones. The new breed screamed, all too human, and wrapped his tail around her waist, desperately trying to stay on her. Even a single movement of his body caused him to experience the unbearable pain when hot plasma melted away the flesh.

"Surrender." Olesya said, looking into her opponent's snake-like eyes. Tears ran down from his eyes, his arms hung like ropes. However, the new breed threw a glance at the drones that surrounded them. The prediction engine made a theory that the gator wanted to use them to save himself. No, buddy. He plans to sacrifice himself to let them get a shot at me. Olesya corrected the machine.

"Wolf hag." A thunderous voice said, and streams of water struck from above, bisecting the drones in half. Olesya turned towards the direction of the voice and saw him breaking through the clouds above them. The scaled body, still beautiful despite the dark clouds around him, was held in the air by the pair of mighty wings, the wings spanned almost twice the size of his body. Not a single injury or scar marked the membrane of the wings. The two gigantic legs almost touched the building below them, the mighty tail pointed the claw into the gator’s face in a silent threat.

"I surrender." The gator said, and Olesya turned off the plasma cutters, catching the body before her as gently as she could.

The gator’s skin shifted beneath her fingers, his form compressed itself, the green scales were becoming smaller by the minute before merging with the pink skin. Three clawed fingers spread with cracking sounds, the bones within separated, turning into a human hand with five fingers, the claws moved into the fingers, slowly becoming the normal nails. The tail slid away from the Olesya’s waist, merging with the spine of the new breed and disappearing from the eyes all together. The long muzzle retracted into the head, turning into the face of a normal human. The horrible wounds still remained on her foes, but now before a young man was before the Olesya’s eyes. His brown hair was cut short, the tanned skin was covered by blood and sweat. One nostril was gone, lost in some past scramble. Tears flowed from dark eyes, against the youth’s attempt to tough out the pain.

"You did excellent." Olesya honestly told the opponent before looking at Ivar above. The blue wyrm willed the water into existence, taking away the new breed and lowering him in a cocoon of water to the ground forces beneath. The Resistance on the street below surrendered the moment Ivar appeared above them. The new breed landed safely, and field medics from both sides now tried to save his life. Olesya briefly sent a message to the troops below, alerting them about the people in the nearby building. The soldiers will evacuate the civilians at the first opportunity.

Blue eyes looked at Olesya, examining her like a rare insect, "Skies belong to the winged creatures. Explain your presence here."

"Deliverance is under attack. Our personnel, patients, and a member of my pack are in danger. Coming to reinforce wolf hags Aranea and Annie, sir!" Olesya saluted him, nearly falling upside down. Flying was still proving difficult for her, doubly so when the prediction engine was not working. But to conserve energy, she turned off the helper. With Ivar here…

More drones broke from the clouds, and Ivar moved his mighty wing. A tornado made of water came into reality, swirling faster and faster around the duo, consuming the flying machines like a hungry beast and spitting out the collapsed forms on the ground below. Ivar paid no attention to this spectacle of destruction, reaching with one gigantic arm to the communicator on his head:

"Your information is correct. Do you need any assistance with your task?" Ivar asked, and Olesya felt a chill of fear running down her spine. The blue wyrm never offered help to anyone. What sort of game was he playing in?

Her first instinct was to refuse. But she's already accumulated debts the way a gambler does, so what’s the harm in one more debt? "Just keep the machines off my back, sir. You are too big to enter Deliverance, sir! We can handle the situation on our own, captain."

"I will hold you to your word." Ivar responded, gesturing with his tail, and the water around them parted, opening a path toward the hospital. Olesya darted toward the hospital, flying with all speed her new body allowed her. More silvery forms of the drones started to rise into the skies from the streets. One, two, three… A dozen. Two dozen. Fifty drones. So many that Olesya genuinely wondered where the resistance had hidden them all and why hadn’t they used them earlier. The prediction engine within her activated against her will and started to calculate the route of how to evade them, finding no option but to fight. All predictions were broken when the sound of thunder broke through, slicing through the sounds of the battlefield below, silencing the buzzing of the drones. Ivar snapped his fingers. A simple gesture caused the water around him to gather around him, covering him in a cocoon. Bubbles of air run from his mouth to the outer surface of the cocoon. Within this watery prison, he snapped his fingers once more, producing no sound. The cocoon exploded.

With an aim that would make even the most skilled soldiers feel envy, droplets of water shot from all directions from Ivar, hitting the drones in the air, leaving no chance for either foe. The drones were submerged one after the other and collapsed to steel balls within. Olesya flew freely through them, sparing no thought or energy to bother and calculate the route. She had the best kind of bodyguard right now.

Her deal with Till was simple. The man offered her a choice to join "Project Warlord" as he called it. All wolfkins grow thanks to their powers, but many of them have various peaks. Through extensive research, Till claimed that Olesya had no chance to become a warlord, while Aranea was a warlord’s material. By taking someone like her under his wing and making her a warlord, he would prove to the entire Wolf Tribe that augmentations are nothing to be afraid of, while at the same time finding a way to manufacture the new breeds of the warlord’s class. Olesya thought him crazy, but the man seemed to genuinely want to help both her and Aranea race to their goal of becoming warlords. After waking up, seeing the horror that she had become and hearing his explanation, Olesya signed a contract, agreeing to work with a man for twenty years in exchange for a new, biological body. She could opt out of the experiment at any date, but this would mean being stuck with a cheap augmented body for life, never being able to purchase cloned limbs and organs.

There was, of course, one last option. Should Aranea die, the deal was off, Till promised that he would give the cloned parts to Olesya for free. But this was a bridge that Olesya never intended to cross. Her life, her friends, her family, her pack… She may have become a monster, but her mind was her own. Narrowing her eyes, Olesya darted toward the hospital. She will save everyone she can.

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