Torn sneakers spped against pavement, the ctter of steel trailing along close behind, a shrill, guttural battle cry bubbling up in tempo with the rising of the club, a crescendo capstoned by metal crashing into metal, deeply cratering the front armor of the creature as her own elbows once more snapped like twigs from the reverberating impact.

  By the time they’d even finished breaking, muscle and sinew was already twisting itself back into familiar patterns, feet pushing up off the asphalt as she rode the momentum of her own body repairing itself, unching upwards as both sickled limbs plunged into where she’d stood a moment earlier.

  Still clinging onto her makeshift weapon, Alice swung upwards, clutching tight for leverage as she spun, releasing at the st moment to let inertia carry her onwards and upwards, foot meeting the remains of the bottom half of it’s head and snapping at least a few more joints inside of it before she managed to get a grip on the pulverized mass. She scrambled up it, like a bug fleeing the swatter as she tried to get herself close enough to it that it couldn’t get those sword arms anywhere close to her.

  Unfortunately, the creature itself did not seem interested in being cooperative, one of the limbs already rotating on the shoulder joint as it swung backwards, tearing a line across the road below as it spun back around to scrape her off of itself.

  Barely taking time to think, she pnted her feet down hard on its carapace, both hands digging into exposed wiring under the cracked and broken headcase, yanking backwards as hard as she could manage.

  Unable to adjust or recalibrate their swing, the razor-edged sickle slid across its own carapace, slicing clean through both of Alice’s ankles and upwards into the remains of it’s own head, the bde digging through machinery and cabling, the st few points of articution finally snapping as the entire head was sliced clean off.

  She took her trophy with her as she tumbled down, her severed feet following along after her as she rolled all the way back down, rolling down and off of the newly blinded creature, smacking hard into the ground with a pained groan.

  “Goodness you’re reckless. I’d almost imagine you’re enjoying injuring yourself like this.”

  “Fucking… a little help without the director’s commentary would be nice!”

  She dragged herself backwards on her back, her jacket torn to tatters from the elbow down from the constant arm-breaking blows, still-raw elbows digging into the ground for purchase as she tried to make some distance without any feet to stand back up on.

  A sudden jolt of pain shot through her entire leg, demanding immediate attention and a scream of more surprise than pain.

  A mass of muscle, nerves, and blood vessels burst out of one of her newest stumps, the tendril of meat spiraling forwards, finding the matching ankle it had been separated from earlier and plugging into like cord into an outlet, rescinding as rapidly as it had extended.

  “Is that helpful enough?”

  She wiggled her toes underneath the remains of sneaker over top of them, and they responded, as if they’d never been pulled loose of her to begin with.

  “…I can work with that, sure.”

  She grabbed the remaining foot that had fallen nearby her, spping it back into pce with significantly less style and substance, and nonetheless feeling the sensations as it reattached itself to her.

  Her ability to stand newly returned, she wasted no time in pushing herself back upright, eyes darting back to the enemy combatant in front of her.

  Missing a head and one of its four legs, and covered in dents and scrapes on every inch of remaining carapace, the thing clearly looked like it belonged in a scrapyard.

  And yet despite its growing number of injuries, it remained operational, blindly cleaving everything around itself, vaguely following along in the direction she’d fallen, some backup sensory device having already kicked in to allow it to continue its rampage.

  “Damn thing’s stubborn as hell, thought it’d care about losing a head at least.”

  “You both seem to have a lot in common, then.”

  “Nah, I’m a lot cuter than some broken-down old action figure.”

  She peeked into a mostly-intact window to her left, catching sight of her reflection. Ragged patches of cloth that could have previously been called “clothes” hung off of her loosely, with every exposed inch of skin sthered in blood, dirt, motor oil, or some combination of all three.

  “…usually am, at least.”

  The mirror she was using was shattered a moment ter, a half-blind swing of those same massive, hulking bde-arms taking it out along with the top half of the brick wall it was a part of, Alice ducking backwards not a moment too soon as it cleaved through.

  “Christ, I’m sick of those arms…!”

  The other sickled limb followed quickly after the first, puncturing into the ground she stood on, the girl throwing herself sideways into the new pile of rubble, grunting as she nded in the loose shards of gss.

  “Little-”

  Her teeth smmed together hard enough to make her wince in pain, lips pursed tightly against her will.

  “Quiet.”

  She grumbled a compint silently, but ultimately didn’t fight back very hard against her involuntary muting, instead keeping her attention directed towards the beast ahead of them, waiting for the next attack.

  …and kept waiting. Moments dragging on and on and on in quiet observance.

  “…my guess seems to have been correct, then.”

  “Mmmph…?”

  Their voice echoed inside her head once again, their mouth also tightly sealed as they produced no audible noise while speaking to her.

  “You broke it’s optical appendages earlier, and it continued loosely being able to track us. Therefore with your incessant yammering, I surmised it must have retained auditory detection functionality, a hunch that, with you newly silenced, seems to have been proven correct.”

  Still unable to talk back while they held her jaw shut, she instead proudly presented a middle finger towards her own teeth-filled eye socket.

  “Ah, I presume this is another aspect of your ‘cuteness’ you mentioned before.”

  The duo watched as their opponent slowed down greatly without the presence of sound to guide them towards a target, slowly backing up and away from the ruined build, using their massive forelimbs to feel out the area around them before finding a mostly open and unobstructed area to occupy away from the cramped confines of the walls and alleyways it had been leveling through for so long now.

  Slowly, carefully, silently, Alice stood herself up, taking special care to avoid the remaining bits of broken gss as she exited the rubble she’d been knocked into.

  She studied the thing in front of her, trying to find any weakness left in it she could exploit to finally disable it, the sheer beating it had taken thus far seeming to have done next to nothing.

  “You, uh… got anything rger I can hit it with, eye guy?”

  Her voice was barely a whisper, begrudgingly accepting it was better to let it remain blind to her location a bit longer.

  “Larger…? What do you take me for, some kind of stage magician with a box of fireworks for you?”

  “You can stitch me back together in a few seconds, of course I’d expect you to have something else!”

  “Bah! Demanding wench, I bring you back from death, and you refuse to help yourself beyond that? You’re the one to have broken it thus far, why don’t you offer me something we could do to it?!”

  She stuck her tongue out at… herself, she realized, before grumpily returning to focus on the metal bug once more.

  They were right though, she realized… everything to have damaged it up till now was directly her doing. Meaning she could probably find some way to break it again, with this time hopefully taking out those arms it had and leaving it wholly defenseless.

  Time to think.

  First injury, her truck crashing full force into a leg.

  As effective as it had been, probably not repeatable. It had been already focused on that idiot of a magical girl before, and didn’t even notice her over the mass of sounds around it. Now, it was dead silent, and she wouldn’t even be able to start one of the cars around here without getting its attention, let along get one moving.

  Second injury, her rebar club wedged into it’s front pting.

  Finding a second object she could swing into it wouldn’t have been hard at all, not with how much debris it had been kind enough to make for her. The problem, however, was that the first seemingly had no real impact to it, only serving to make a unching point for her to scale up the thing, and it remained wedged tightly in there still, squeezed between the dented armor.

  Third injury, its own severed head, still sparking uselessly on the ground in front of her as she pondered her options.

  Scooping it up, she looked it over, having a chance to inspect some of the inner workings of the thing. A pair of insectoid-looking eyes dominated the structure, set snugly into the thick metallic ptes the rest of it’s body was composed of. She pushed her fingers underneath of it, just barely enough room between joints and metal to slip a finger or two in. She gave it a testing pull and found, while seemingly very thick and rigid, the metal didn’t seem terribly resistant to directly applied force, eventually malforming and pulling free after she spent a few seconds just yanking at it.

  “No wonder I dented it so easy, feels like they built this out of scrap metal.”

  “I don’t suppose your pn has become ripping it apart bare-handed, has it?”

  Alice looked at her hand holding the torn piece of armor, covered in her own blood from constant breaking and healing and re-breaking and re-healing. And as she looked her newly repairable body over, her mouth twisted into the sickeningly smug little grin of someone who’d just had a particurly bad idea creep into their head.

  “…y’know? Maybe you’re pretty helpful after all.”

  “That was sarcasm, I wasn’t implying you should start rip-”

  Too te for expnations and opinions now. Her arm had already reared back, one leg raised before stepping forward with confidence, putting her full weight into her arm as she lobbed the mantis’s severed robotic head as hard as she could, the sunlight catching on the glistening, multifaceted eyes set into it.

  It sailed overhead on an almost picturesque flight path, over the rubble littering the street, over the smashed and bisected vehicles dotting the ground, and most important, over the armored insect it had previously been attached to.

  The flight was finally ended as smashed hard into the window of a parked car, breaking it cleanly open and starting up the arm, loud and shrill and bring, drowning out the sounds of everything else nearby.

  It only got to sound off for a few moments however, as the car was swiftly perforated by the same hooked bdes responsible for all the destruction in the area nearby, both of them stabbing into the metal structure one after the other, a perfectly kept rhythm until the arm finally petered out sadly, trailing off as the repeated puncturing of it’s frame finally ended.

  In the newly found silence, a second sound was now substantially easier to make out than it had been moments earlier, a single bded limb already spinning around as quickly as its gears would move, towards the sounds of torn sneakers spping against pavement once more.

  Alice had gotten a lot more time out of that distraction than she’d really pnned for ahead of time.

  But even extra time to get in close could only do so much, the overly-familiar sword limb almost on top of her as it aimed to fully bisect her in a single swing.

  In an incredibly inadvisable course of action for anyone else in this scenario, she reached her right hand out to meet it halfway.

  Fingers met steel, getting purchase a millisecond before digging into her skin, all the time she needed to pivot her momentum upwards, sacrificing her entire right hand to carry the rest of her body over the path of the bde, her foot striking down on it as she kept moving forward, hellbent.

  Her weight threw the heavy swing downwards, the arm burying itself into the road, the mantis struggle to pull it free again, the other limb finally pulling out of the car it had been punched into as Alice’s other foot struck into her pnted rebar club, once more leaping with whatever energy she could muster.

  Momentum and adrenaline in equal parts carried her up and onto the structure once more, her one good hand grabbing onto the empty cavity its head previously occupied for leverage, clutching herself tightly against it for dear life as it struggled to shake her off again, still trying to free either of it’s weapons from their unintended sheathes.

  “I’d congratute you on managing to scale it a second time, but I believe you need hands to rip something apart with, no?!”

  It was true, with just the one hand to hold herself up with, she couldn’t really start ripping anything off of it while she was up here, making her sacrifice before seemingly invalidate the entire rest of her hastily-constructed pn.

  Luckily for her however, the loss of that hand was, in fact, fully intentional.

  Biting down hard on her own lip, hard enough to drawn still further blood, she plunged her stump of a right arm exactly where she wanted it: squarely into the exposed hole between shoulder and torso, barely rge enough for a hand to slip into, but just right for a severed wrist.

  “Wait, what do you think you’re--”

  Alice prayed to whatever god felt like listening to her, and flexed her forearm muscles in the exact same way she’d felt her leg move earlier.

  On command, her body obeyed. Countless tendrils burst forth from her exposed meat, winding themselves through iron and wires and twisting gears and protesting superstructure, pushing through at her orders as they tore a path towards their target, her purposefully severed hand sitting opposite of the creature she was tched onto.

  They burst free from the other side of the armored exoskeleton, punching the flimsy metal out of the way as they raced towards her hand, meat finally rejoining meat as the raw muscle and sinew fused itself into pce before winding backwards, reeling her catch back in as fast as it could move.

  As soon as the full hand reached the other side of the shoulder joint, however, it found the opening left my scattered tendrils too narrow to slip itself through, smming to a wincingly-painful stop in pce as it struggled to squeeze itself through and return to its correct pce at the end of its owner’s wrist.

  Alice, doing her absolute best not to pass out from an overload of pain from exposed raw flesh and nerves to live machinery, had further ideas on the matter however, and with full control of her now-reattached hand squeezed her fingers down tightly, gripping in pce as tightly as she could manage.

  Fingers dug into weak metal, already so substantially damaged by now that it could hardly offer serious resistance to being ripped into from inside and outside at the same time.

  Servos screamed almost as loudly as the girls tied in knots between them, machinery trying to function as flesh grew itself into every nook and cranny, pushing outwards as the robotic mantis and Alice herself found themselves in an endurance match, arm wrestling in so direct a manner that hopefully no one before had ever even conceived of.

  Meat pushed back against machine, joint pulled against joint, screeching, animalistic anger roared over the sounds of failed resistance, cables and cogs and servos all sparking and snapping and shattering under the force being applied to them from all sides, all of them breaking entirely one by one, as the entire structure of it’s shoulder finally broke down entirely, one final, agonized, victorious scream as she pulled backwards with all her might, ripping the beast’s entire arm with her, sending its already precarious bance off entirely as it tumbled sideways, smming itself into a building as it stumbled and sending her flying the other direction.

  “Could you try anything less personally destructive sometime? We’re sharing this body, and I’d really rather you stopped doing your best to break--”

  Alice wasn’t listening to a word he said, the sheer amount of pain wracking her body not so much as putting a dent in the shit-eating gremlin smile pstered across her bloodied face.

  “Let’s see--”

  She was already standing again, rotating her body in a slow, bored spin.

  “--how you--”

  There was a screech of scraping metal that grew gradually louder as she turned, her right arm doing its best to keep moving with her.

  “--fucking--”

  The monster’s severed arm slowly accelerated, still firmly woven into the flesh of the girl who’d torn it off, raising off the ground as it gained speed.

  “--like it…!!!”

  It wasn’t even given a chance to right itself after colpsing, the heap of abused metal and circuitry unable to dodge it’s own bded limb swinging hard back into it, tearing straight through what was left of it, severing its other arm clearly through the elbow joint before leaving a deep rend through the side of it, the entire structure jolting and twitching as more systems began to fail.

  Even as the first strike carved through it, Alice kept moving, every st mote of energy left in her body determined to fucking obliterate this thing. The terrible appendage of meat and iron twisted together into an unholy mass raising overhead as she put every ounce of her soul into lifting her bde-blended arm one st time.

  “Graaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh…!!!”

  She smmed downwards, rending through armor and wire and stone and brick and asphalt all, burying the entirety of her scythe arm into anything unfortunate enough to be in front of her, the remains of the mantis finally reduced to the useless scrap metal it was always meant to be as the impact exploded debris in all directions, shattering the bde itself and ripping the flesh melded into it apart.

  Finally, after what felt like an eternity of bloody fighting, it was dead.

  “Did… d-did I get it…?”

  “…you did, as inglorious a death as it was.”

  “That’s… that’s nice… ehehe…”

  Without the energy left in her to mumble out a single word further, she colpsed forwards limply, passed out and victorious as the adrenaline finally ran dry.

  It was 1:37 PM on a Wednesday. A lone body y alone in a pile of blood, oil, and loose trash, next to a massive crater dotting an almost fully leveled neighborhood.

  Alice Decaras, age 28, had never felt more alive.