It would be inaccurate to say that the top brass is mad at me. They certainly aren't happy with me, but the general panic and wild speculation over an unprecedented situation is at the very least quite stressful for everyone involved.

  I think I might now have the highest unconfirmed kill count of anyone in the army? Maybe that's being arrogant. I'm sure other superheroes have done some crazy stuff. Either way, I'm not really sure how to feel about it.

  "Okay, Seraphim. Explain. What did you do?"

  An excellent question, officer. I'd like to know myself. I've learned two important bits of information today: one, it's absolutely possible to negotiate with aliens. Unfortunately, two, aliens are batshit insane. Or at least the worshippers of Blasphemy are, which I suppose is only reasonable in hindsight. How do you worship the concept of disrespecting the sacred? Wouldn't any act of honoring a god of blasphemy itself be against the concept of blasphemy?

  Whatever, it's not important. These aliens might be crazy, but that doesn't mean all aliens are. The possibility of negotiating with another faction therefore exists, and that's… huge. Impossibly huge. I can no longer reasonably justify lying to the government about my ability to communicate with them. We have officially passed the point where the risks to me are too outweighed by the potential benefits to… basically everyone. Including me.

  But I don't want to admit that I just straight-up lied about it. Especially to a colonel. I'm currently sitting in a tent on a former golf course outside St. Louis, my debrief apparently having been thrown way up the chain. I wonder if that's normal for superheroes. I've already noticed a lot of difference that, by rank, I probably shouldn't have.

  "Sir. Are you familiar with my ability to insert myself into the alien pheromone network?"

  "There was a report," he answers noncommittally. "But my understanding is that you couldn't control alien units."

  "That's correct, sir," I answer. "But I can understand a lot more of what's going on than just enemy position. Their communication is exceptionally complex and robust when they're actually in groups rather than cages. And I may have, uh, accidentally said something that they understood. And then they flipped out a little before the Angel ordered them to find me."

  "And that's when their forces started converging on you?" he asks. "You said the Angel 'ordered' them to find you?"

  "Yes sir, they're definitely troop commanders of some sort, sir," I say. "I'm figuring it all out, bit by bit. They're smart. Really smart. It might be a full-on language."

  "You're 'figuring it out?' Is that why you suddenly stopped responding to communications? Your team claims you 'suddenly froze up, grew scales, and stopped talking to anyone.'"

  "Yes sir, apologies for that. I could tell the Angel was targeting me, so I tried to… distract it. And that succeeded for a while, and then it ordered all of its troops to commit suicide. I do not have any idea why."

  And that's the honest truth. What the hell is that crazy thing thinking?

  "How did you distract it from so far away?" he asks me, and I scrunch my eyebrows in confusion.

  "What do you mean?" I ask. "I used the pheromone network."

  "Warrant Officer, you were miles away from the Angel. Smells can't travel that fast. A 'pheromone network' could not, cannot, work like a radio. According to the eggheads there would be minutes of delay, at minimum."

  Huh. Huh. That's… a good point, I hadn't thought of that.

  "...That's really interesting," I hum, tapping my knuckle against my chin as I think. "The other aliens act as relay points for the network, but… no, the smell would still be traveling the same speed regardless of concentration or intensity, wouldn't it? And the scents are more like data packets than discreet words, they're very complex. I'm… I'm almost certain it's scent, though, alien olfactory organs are so dramatically more complex than any of their other senses that I don't know what else they could possibly be using them for."

  "Alright, we'll table that mystery for later. There are only two things that are important right now. One: freezing up in a combat zone is unacceptable. The circumstances may have been extenuating, but your squad needs you to be present in the moment. If an Angel's mere presence is all it takes to put you out of action, you're useless."

  I grimace. That's a fair point. Why did I freeze up? I suppose part of it was that I was putting extra effort into ensuring everything I was saying was conscious and deliberate; I didn't want to screw up first contact, that would just be embarrassing. Of course, since I am now thoroughly embarrassed, that won't be a problem anymore. I think there's more to it than that, though. Communication was a little more difficult than I'm used to. It's like… oh, wait, I'm so stupid. It's because I was using a human-alien brain mixture, wasn't it? Whatever part of the Angel brain that does communication probably wasn't all there. I am kind of winging it a little when it comes to brain mixing.

  "It won't happen again, sir," I promise. "I'm still a little new to all this, but I learn fast. It was an issue with my power that I won't repeat."

  "I'll hold you to that," he nods. "The second thing, then: is that Angel going to come after you again? Have you painted a target on your back, soldier?"

  My first instinct is to lie and say no, but… why? It would be kind of stupid not to be honest here.

  "Quite possibly, sir," I confirm. "I don't know if that Angel is very mad at me or very excited about me, but it's definitely very something."

  "Good," the colonel grins viciously. "Every good trap needs bait."

  I blink. Alright, maybe I should have lied.

  What happens next flashes by me at a rapid pace, the situation growing more and more out of my control with every step. The Army continues to sweep forward with its usual protocols, but as I expected they find nothing but corpses until they reach the Queen's domain. With our rallying points established just outside it, our army prepares to move in. It is at this point that the wing ripper squads will need to be deployed, ready to counter the inevitable assault from Angels. One of the major challenges of this is the fact that we don't have very many experienced squads, and a given squad can only be deployed so quickly; a Queen's domain is an enormous amount of space to cover, and Angels can often move around the battlefield very quickly, retreating before reinforcements capable of defeating them arrive.

  So naturally, the Army is very excited about the potential to know in advance where at least one Angel is going to show up. The problem, of course, is that it means I and the rest of my squad are probably going to have to survive the direct attention of an Angel for a while.

  If I'm being honest, I'd probably prefer to just not have my squad backing me up in a situation like this. Having to keep them all in my domain means that domain needs to be spread out, and therefore much weaker. It also limits my mobility, which is probably bad, and just generally gives me a lot more to focus on in a fight. Anastasia and Ed will be there to back me up—standard procedure during an Angel attack is to consolidate the squad—but of course I don't actually want Anastasia anywhere near an Angel, regardless of how helpful she would be.

  It's all moot, though. I naturally do not have a choice. And while I have a bit of experience killing Angels, I doubt I'll be lucky enough to have such a favorable power matchup this time around. I'll have to rely on the support of the wing ripper squad that will be lying in wait behind us. I hate relying on other people.

  When I finally return to my squad, I'm met with a lot of uncomfortable looks. I suppose no one likes watching the superhero whose job it is to protect you from Angels go borderline comatose at the first sign of an Angel. They probably like it a lot less when they are then told said superhero is about to become Angelbait.

  "We're gonna die, aren't we?" Jimenez asks me.

  "We'll be fine," I reassure him, having no idea if I'm lying or not this time. But with morale being what it is, it's better for him to have false hope than despair. Nearly everyone here will instantly die if they get too far away from me. I have to make sure I'm at least a somewhat reassuring presence, in that light.

  "Easy for you to say," Jazz smirks, elbowing me in the side. "The rest of us can't put ourselves back together from vaguely human-shaped goop."

  "Nah, I've survived Angels before," I boast with false confidence. "Just stay close and I'll keep you safe while the offense team handles things."

  "Listen to the kid," someone else butts in. "The best thing you can do to survive is to stay out of our way."

  I turn to meet the eyes of a fellow superhero, the leader of the wing ripper squad that will be backing us up. His name is some kind of hard-to-pronounce Irish phrase. Sí Gaoithe, I think. I reach out and poke his domain with my own, tasting growth, camaraderie, and the many swallowing the few. It reminds me a bit of Maria's domain, if substantially more aggressive. He pushes back against me, and I make the conscious effort to let him inside like I would do with Anastasia, just to signal my lack of hostility. Minutely, his eyebrows raise in surprise, and he reciprocates, letting me scan his biology. Just a normal human, if a very strong one. Oh, but his brain is gonna be useful!

  "Sí Gaoithe," I greet him with a nod, relying on his own habits to make sure I pronounce it correctly. It's kind of like 'she gee-ha.' Not at all what I expected from the spelling. "It's good to meet you. It's a big relief to have someone so experienced backing us up."

  As I expected, managing to actually pronounce his name seems to impress him further, and I even earn myself a slight smile and nod of acknowledgment.

  "It's good to be working with such a promising newcomer," he says. "I wasn't informed that you were trained in domain synchronicity. That's good information to know."

  "I wasn't trained," I admit. "It's just what Vermillion and I default to when we're around each other. I'm already trusting you with my life out there, I don't see why I can't trust you with my life in here, too."

  He gives me another nod. For being a wing ripper so experienced that even I know his name, Sí Gaoithe doesn't look very much like a superhero. He's a fairly small man, slightly shorter than my Seraphim form and thin enough that he almost certainly would have been called 'stringy' before the military forced him to put on some muscle. Now, I think the correct term is 'wiry.' His muscles are drawn so tight against his bones and skin that you almost don't even need my powers to think he looks like an anatomy diagram. His bright red hair is cut to short military standard, his face is a mess of freckles and the occasional spot of acne, and his nose is deeply crooked from what was almost certainly a bad break sometime in his past. All in all, he's a pretty ugly man, traditionally speaking. But his power is as strong as they come.

  Full domain-range telekinesis, with the ability to simultaneously control and manipulate nearly any number of objects. Even more frightening, the act of carrying more objects doesn't make his power harder to use—it actually makes him stronger. The more things he's moving at once, the more strength and speed his telekinesis gets. The only known upper limit to this is the fact that he eventually becomes so powerful that he starts crushing everything he's holding on to without even trying, dropping it all when it gets too small.

  "If you and Vermillion can synchronize, then your first priority when the Angel comes at us is to link up and reinforce each other's domains. Angels have all kinds of nasty tricks to get through your defenses. Be ready for both tangible and intangible threats at any time."

  "Yes sir," I nod seriously, and he nods back, seemingly satisfied.

  "Good. Respond quickly to any orders I give you and your squad will make it out alive."

  He walks off, probably to talk to Ed and Anastasia, while I and my team finish getting ready. Soon enough, we will be heading back into a Queen's domain. I wonder what it will be like, after all this time.

  I don't have to wait long to find out. The Queen sits on the west side of the Mississippi River, draped over the city of St. Louis like a pile of rotting spaghetti. She looks a lot smaller than the Chicago Queen at a glance, who was more of an enormous, ever-present tumor on the horizon. But between her countless tendrils snaking in and around the buildings and landscape, it's much less practical trying to figure out the size of the Queen of Blasphemy. With how spread out she is, though, we'll run into some of her tendrils long before we push deep into the city. I have to wonder how she'll react to that, and if I might be able to scan some of her biological information. The thought is uncomfortably exciting.

  First things first, though. The Queen's domain extends over the river and about half a mile past the east bank, forcing us to push into and over an area where our enemy will be at its strongest. Humans are not particularly adept at fighting underwater, and even without enough space for Leviathans, the aliens have no such weakness. There is simply no way to effectively sweep an entire body of water that is protected by a Queen's domain. Inevitably, we will be ambushed when we cross and we will be flanked from behind after pushing past. All we can do is minimize the risk as much as possible. Which means, of course, offloading most of the risk to me.

  "Ready to take a dip, Seraphim?" my team lead jokes, flashing me a nervous smile.

  The aliens have no need for bridges, so they're all smashed. We have to cross the thing in amphibious vehicles, each super protecting a transport. For most supers, that means they get to ride along. For me, though, I'll be a lot more effective underneath the boat.

  The aliens themselves are amphibious, so their pheromone network presumably works underwater. I'm not entirely sure how, but I'll just add that to the list of questions and accept it for now. The point is, I think I can probably act as an early warning system in conjunction with the sonar, and even if I can't I'm just generally going to be a lot more capable of killing stuff in the water if I can reach it. Bullets can only go so deep.

  "Almost," I say. "I'm flesh bubbling if you want to look away."

  Nearly everyone other than Jimenez does so immediately, but I don't wait to envelop myself and all my gear to swallow it into storage before emerging as a sleek fish woman. The body is embarrassingly unoptimized; I just haven't really done much amphibious training, so lacking a better idea on how to move underwater I've mostly just given myself organic diving flippers and made my body as sleek as possible to reduce drag, with the exception of the tentacles I have growing out of my back that I'm going to use to attach myself to the bottom of the boat.

  I have to make sure the whole thing remains in my domain, after all, so maneuverability isn't really the goal here, anyway. Realistically, I need to turn myself into some kind of organic weapons platform, something with enough reach to intercept any approaching monsters and enough weight to actually stop them before they try to breach or board the boat. But of course, I can't make myself too big, or the drag will stop the boat from efficiently crossing the river. I wonder what the best way to attack underwater even is? I suppose I'll need to grab on to things, maybe with large jaws on the ends of limbs? But that isn't a super efficient way to kill. What about venom? Do I have any examples of venom that will work on alien biology? Damn it, I should have looked into all this stuff before, I just never have any time!

  That trend doesn't change today. I have to hop in the water and attach myself to the boat before I can finish optimizing my plan, but I suppose that's alright. Restrictions enhance creativity, and all that. With all my tactical gear consumed except for the underwater radio I'll be using to signal if something is up, I latch myself to the underside of our ride and settle in to cross the river. It's wide, but it's not that wide, so at the very least I won't have to deal with all of this for long.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  I open my senses, hooking myself up to a Raptor brain to best interpret them. Yeah, there are aliens in here alright. And they're definitely going to try to kill us. It would be bad to draw in an Angel while we're still crossing the water, so I stay silent, waiting for the enemy to come to us while I shift my body into a longer and longer series of tentacles, ready to latch on to my prey and not let go until their demise.

  As I had a feeling might be the case, the pheromone system does indeed work underwater, partially in defiance of the water's current. I can still smell some of the aliens downriver from me, which almost certainly isn't how smell normally works. I'm not complaining, though, and I quickly send the predetermined radio code for an incoming attack before reaching out my many arms to engage the enemy.

  Raptors are just as fast underwater as they are out of it. The first few dodge around my tentacles, more used to swimming than I am with catching, but I can always grow more tentacles to even the odds. With my domain covering the ship itself, my squad is only in moderate amounts of danger as the Raptors I miss leap onto the deck and try to stab something. Gunshots ring out, muffled from all the way down here, but I can feel the enemies on the deck fill with holes and die.

  We had to shoot a few enemies on approach, as well, and during that I saw what happens when the bullet leaves my power radius. It's… weird. The Queen in Chicago was fairly straightforward—it cut things. When a bullet (or a person) left the protection of a domain it got shredded into pieces so small they became unrecognizable. The dust formerly known as bullets rapidly decelerated into harmlessness from the air resistance and that was that. Something similar happens here, but rather than merely cut the bullets are… changed.

  Blooming outwards, the metal opens into fractal branches the instant it leaves its protective domain, expanding into a thin mess of lines that looks more or less like a tumbleweed made of foam. It decelerates like a balloon shot out of a cannon, collapsing harmlessly against anything it actually manages to impact after the change.

  The Queen's domain is heavy against my own, not trying to crush me or demand my death but instead pressing gently, rubbing around the outside and carefully inspecting for the tiniest crack it could use to leak in. It's a corrupting influence, an ooze hungry for the chance to devour reality and shift it into some twisted mirror of what it once was.

  A haze settles over my mind as I focus my thoughts on the fight for the boat, tapping into the unnatural focus of alien minds to push away everything but my task. A dozen Raptors die by my hand before we finally make landfall on the west bank, and once we do I have to quickly change form and return to dry land, forming up with my squad to intercept the defending forces on the shore.

  I surface, spotting multiple Behemoths charging our position with Raptors backing them up. There's no time to get all my gear; I inflate my arm, form my gun inside it, shift a new hand around the grip, and let the bubble of flesh pop as I push my domain forward and let the bullets fly.

  Unfortunately, the effective range of our weapons has dropped to a pathetic thirty feet; I'm not comfortable with expanding my domain an inch more with the Queen waiting to pour inside. Alien corpses fall one after another, but there's no way for us to stop the entire swarm. The aliens of Blasphemy are much thicker and stockier than those of Division, with greater strength and resilience and less emphasis on oversized blades. A Behemoth gets too close, our bullets absorbed into its thick skin and failing to penetrate anything vital, so I swallow my gun and shapeshift into an elephant, matching its charge with a headbutt. Multiple bullets aimed at the Behemoth end up sinking into me, but I swallow them too and return to human size now that the enemy has been halted. This close, a bullet finally scores a hit deep enough to disable one of the Behemoth's legs, and it dies shortly after.

  "Warn us, Seraphim!" my squad leader barks.

  "Taking point! If you're going to shoot me, avoid the head!" I shout back.

  "Okay!?"

  I spit a new magazine out of my mouth and quickly load it into my gun, stepping forward to kick a Raptor before it can stab me. I need a better body for this. The human form is very good at fighting simply because it can hold a gun, and guns are very dangerous. I still need to be able to do that, but I need to be larger. If I don't match the Behemoths in mass, I can't stop them when they get close.

  Well, I guess there's an easy way to match enemy Behemoths in mass. I shift into one, honestly preferring their bulky, practical template over the spindly Division ones quite a bit. My legs are thick, with crystalline growths that act more like hooves than blades. This is the body of a living tank, and I rise up on it, my humanoid form attached from the waist up on top of its back so I can still rain down lead.

  To help people shoot me less, I've also conveniently color-coded my body to match the military's preferred shade of green. Hopefully the fact that I'm stomping Raptors flat and acting as an elevated gun turret will also help people determine what side I'm on, but who knows?

  From up here, I can see Anastasia's and Ed's squads, each fighting just as hard as my own. One of Ed's men gets stabbed and just shrugs it off, the blade failing to draw blood before a rifle butt to the head caves in the Raptor's skeleton. They aren't quite as lucky when a Raptor gets their maw around a man's arm, but the wound probably isn't lethal. Ed flinches as the man gets bit, like he felt it himself. Maybe he did.

  Anastasia's side of things, of course, is a whirlwind of death. Her soldiers barely even have to do anything, a storm of her blood creating a barrier so impenetrable I feel an Angel order their troops to stop even trying to attack her, redirecting them down the battle lines to try and find a weakness elsewhere.

  Then the enemy forces start to emerge from the river.

  We were prepared for this, for a certain definition of prepared. What could we do? Drop depth charges down the entire length of the Mississippi? Our rear-facing gun emplacements light up, having been waiting for this moment, but now the real battle has started.

  My heart pounds as a rain of gunfire pours over the eerily silent aliens, my vantage point letting me see soldiers getting overrun and impaled well down the length of the river. But the bodies of our enemies pile up far higher. There's no way we'll lose this, not until the Angels descend.

  "Push forward!" our commander orders, and we do as we're told, the ambush from behind rapidly petering out after the initial attack. We're in the thick of things now. Protecting our flanks is going to be difficult from here on out, as the Queen can feel every bubble of domain inside her own and direct troops accordingly, slipping Raptors past when we aren't paying attention. I can listen in on any orders traveling near me, but this is a very large battlefield.

  Not to mention, the orders coming in are… different than before. Simpler, quieter. The aliens have adapted to the idea that we can listen in on them remarkably quickly, but I suppose they're probably used to warring with others of their kind. I can still tap the communications—they don't have any kind of scrambling or encoding—but there's a degree of care that wasn't present before, and the amount of information I'm getting out of it is dramatically less.

  Which is… weird, right? If they knew how to do this, why not always do it? Opsec doesn't work if you only practice it after an information breach. Are they just bad at war? They've been kicking our butts for years now, so that would be embarrassing if so.

  "All units be advised, we have confirmed Angel movement towards sector nine. Confirmed Angel movement towards sector nine."

  Yeah that's where I am. Of course that's where I am. I just had to go and make myself seem interesting to the crazy extradimensional zealots.

  "Squad three, form up!" our sergeant shouts, and I don't do anything because everyone else is supposed to form up around me. I shrink back down to human size, forming my gear inside my body and hatching out of the egg of flesh fully dressed and indistinguishable from any other human. Hopefully.

  "Still weird!" Jazz tells me, though the genuine disgust from before has been replaced mostly with teasing.

  "You're just jealous of my superpower-sculpted ass," I joke.

  "Only when you have one!"

  "Target spotted, two o'clock!" another member of my squad shouts, and the banter ends instantly, heads swiveling up to the sky. I spot the Angel, enhancing my vision to pick up on the details of its appearance from afar. It looks like some kind of horrific flying spider the size of a human being, a thin body with eight limbs dangling down as it buzzes towards our location with Wasp-like wings. The front two legs are long and bladed while the back two legs are relatively short, tucked up against the monster's stubby tail. Its sideways-opening mouth drips with acid.

  Anastasia's and Ed's team forms up with our own, configuring to ensure everyone is covered with as tight and dense a domain as possible. Anastasia and I synchronize, giving each other a determined nod before she shifts her attention to double-checking her gun. Ed just gives me a grin and a thumbs-up, his domain pressed firmly against mine to empower both of us from the resonance.

  "Where are you, little native? We'll be ever so sad if you've failed to attend your banquet!" the Angel calls out. I take a deep breath.

  "Drawing in the enemy," I report.

  "Wouldn't miss it," I answer at the same time. "Please show me to the meal."

  "It's all around you!" the Angel laughs, and then they start rapidly accelerating.

  "Sí Gaoithe to Seraphim, a second Angel has engaged our position. Reinforcements will be delayed, over."

  What!?

  "Sí Gaoithe, the target will be in range in under thirty seconds, over!"

  "We'll get to you as quickly as we can. You'll have to handle it until then, wing ripper. Sí Gaoithe out."

  "Well, fuck!" Jazz swears.

  "Ed, Ana, can you cover the squad if I draw it away!?" I shout out.

  "Who the fuck authorized you to draw it away!?" my sergeant snaps at me.

  "I don't have any room to move if I'm busy protecting you!" I tell him. "I'll be fine, the damn thing doesn't even want to kill me!"

  "The hell you mean it doesn't want to kill you!?"

  "Are you hiding among your lessers, native? Ha! How delightfully profane!"

  It's here. It's already here. How the hell did it start moving that fast? Is that part of its power?

  "Well, I suppose I'll just take a guess then! Are you… this one?"

  I feel something strike my domain, thin and piercing, a needle the length of a spear. It's more than dense enough to skewer its way through my stretched-out domain, even with Ed's resonance effect powering me up, just because it's so small. The Angel shot its domain like a projectile, skewering one of my squadmates from shoulder to leg. It feels like a river of oozing pus rushing upstream, disgusting and upsetting merely for the sake of it.

  And then, I realize my squadmate is dead.

  Time seems to slow as that thought hits my consciousness. The man's heart still beats, at least for the next split-second. But I failed. An enemy domain got in my range, dense enough to overcome my defenses. It all happened so fast. To do this, the Angel must have sacrificed all their own defenses, dropped all protections their domain grants them in order to launch it out at a range, all to be sure of one swift kill.

  And then the domain retreats, carrying a thin line of my squadmate's flesh with it like someone put a finger over the hole of a straw and pulled it out of a drink. My squadmate's corpse falls, and the bullets we send at the Angel simply never make it, the Queen's domain still rendering them useless from this far away. The Angel scrapes its forelegs together with satisfaction, hovering tauntingly above our heads.

  "Reciprocation. Failure. Possibility. All working together! How very wonderful. Of the three, I can only imagine you must be one of Possibility's favorite toys. It is rare for the eldest to grant its gifts! Rarer still is our chance to grant it anguish. We shall enjoy sealing off your future, little native."

  "I am going to kill you," I huff back.

  "Ooh! Violence for violence! Perhaps you are Reciprocation's after all? Let's see!"

  Shit.

  "Ana, look out!" I shout, but I quickly see I needn't have bothered; my little warrior dodges to the side, the ground kicking up dirt where she was standing moments before as the bolt of domain impacts and does… whatever the domain does. Grabs things? Some kind of telekinesis, maybe?

  "You, then!" the Angel determines with glee, the spear of domain twisting towards me. On instinct, I shrink my domain to keep it out, to block it away, and at the edge of my radius a soldier's arm is exposed to the power of the Queen. In an instant, his flesh shifts, as his glove and the sleeve of his clothes turn to liquid and melt into a pool at his feet. I cover him back up as quickly as I can as I dodge out of the way of the spear, but the damage is already done.

  It's… hellish. The arm feels more like a deadly parasite to my power than an actual part of the man's body, despite the fact that the two are still connected. His skin is a solid mass of hardened material, locking his limb down like a cast, but it sorely needs the support as his bones have been reduced to a wobbling jelly, the marrow within pumping poison instead of fresh cells into his bloodstream.

  Oh, shit.

  "Cut his arm off!" I shout. "Ana! Amputate him!"

  She doesn't hesitate, her domain entering mine and quickly slicing him free from the mutation at the shoulder. The already-screaming man collapses in agony, but someone on my team picks him up and carries him towards Ed, causing the bleeding to rapidly clot.

  Beside me, another man dies as the Angel rips a line of flesh out of his heart.

  "Shit! Aren't you supposed to be protecting us!?" someone shouts.

  "He's leaving himself open to do this!" I protest. "I'm telling you, Sarge, you have to let me take the fight to him! I'm the only one here that can fly!"

  "God, fucking… fine! But you'd better not die, Seraphim, or I'm kicking your ass in hell after the brass sends me there!"

  "Take me with you!" Anastasia demands, and haha no fucking way!

  "I need you to protect everyone, Ana! Stay here, I'll be fine!"

  "Come on, everyone, form in tighter!"

  "There are so many of you natives! So much power distributed among you! But none of you know how to use it!"

  As we try to converge so I can safely engage, the Angel's domain snakes past us and passes through the man carrying Ed in three different places, yanking out more flesh and leaving them both collapsed on the ground. One of Ed's other men immediately rushes to quickly release the harness holding him and pick him up, but he, too, is killed on the way.

  With each death, Ed's domain flares. The horrible Failure his god had been anticipating has come to pass, granted so graciously by Blasphemy's hated spawn. The Angel radiates irritation, and Ed… he stands up.

  I can't help but stare a little in shock. I can feel him in my domain now, and biologically he should still be paralyzed below the waist. But somehow, in some horrible way, I understand. The alien brain I'm using finds it almost obvious. His power wasn't just to empower others. It does do that, of course. It is an aegis of life, a promise of victory, and a radius of protection. It is all these things so that its true power can be unleashed when they fail.

  "Careless of me," the Angel admonishes itself, its domain rushing back up into the sky as Ed's blooms forward, forming a tunnel to the target. Ed reaches down, grabs the gun of the man who had carried him all this way, and with his perpetual smile finally gone he fires down the tube of his own sovereign territory. The bullets reach, the Angel losing two whole limbs from the spray of automatic fire, held firm and accurate in spite of the recoil, before it manages to escape back into its Queen's territory.

  But once it is high enough again, I can already tell it's going to resume the attack.

  "Seraphim to St. Louis Control, we're receiving heavy casualties from the enemy Angel. Detaching from my squad to engage in powered combat. Any estimate on reinforcement ETA? over."

  "Acknowledged, Seraphim. Reinforcements are still tied up, you're on your own out there. Tear them till they fall."

  "Roger wilco, Control. Seraphim out."

  I start to shift, shoving as much power into my legs as I'm physically able before making a straight vertical leap, shrinking midair into a barely organic mass of aerodynamic bone to ride the momentum as high as I can. I'm not great at flying; I don't have much practice. But I'll need to make it work.

  I shift into a streamlined Wasp before I start to fall, adjusting the body as much as I can on the fly to discard the parts I don't need and enhance the parts I do. Rocketing upwards as fast as I can, the Angel makes one more stab through me with their domain, but I've shrunk my own into a purely defensive cover along the edges of my body. When it moves through me, my flesh isn't torn clear out of a hole in my side, but I can still feel the power try, a gravity-like force wrapping around a thin tube of my innards and yanking me in a direction that distinctly isn't down.

  I stumble in the air, spinning upside-down and ruining my flight, but I shift into a cat, right myself, and grow right back into a Wasp to continue my ascent. Ugh, this form is so bulky I can probably just attach these wings to the back of my Seraphim form and fly just as well, swapping out feathered wings for functional ones. I make the shift. It actually works. Nice.

  "Come then, Possibility's toy!" the Angel laughs, seeming largely unbothered by the fluids leaking out of their shot-off limbs. "Let us engage in a harmonious exchange of our cultures! Teach me so many more values to profane!"

  "Oh, gladly. I have a divine command I'm already planning to violate all over your ass."

  "You will tell me!" the Angel states. Not orders.

  "Sure I will, buddy," I confirm. The Wasp parts of my brain want acid glands, so I remove one of my hands and form them at the end of one arm for flexible aim. "It's an easy one: thou shalt not kill."

  The world shudders around me. The ground trembles. The air becomes naught but mirth. The Angels are laughing, and so is their Queen.

  "We like it!" they praise me, and I swallow an urge to shudder.

  "Yeah. Figured you would."