Chapter 14: The Desperate Hunt
The hallway carpet was rough against Lia’s bare skin. Each breath hurt her ribs. She moved by instinct, a wounded animal seeking its own kind. She found the stairwell, the concrete steps cold and unforgiving. She didn’t know Yuna’s apartment number, only that she lived in this building, a few floors down. She started knocking on doors.
The first opened a crack, a security chain taut. An old man’s eye widened, traveled down her naked, bruised body, and the door slammed. The second, a woman holding a child, just screamed and called for her husband.
Shame was a luxury she couldn’t afford. The void inside demanded to be filled. On the third floor, she recognized a potted fern outside a specific door. Yuna had mentioned it once. She hammered her fist against the wood.
It opened. Yuna stood there, bleary-eyed in a oversized t-shirt and sleep shorts, her long black hair a messy cascade. “Lia? What— oh my god.” Her gaze took in the nudity, the cuts, the tear-streaked grime.
“Let me in,” Lia rasped, pushing past her.
Yuna shut the door quickly, her hands fluttering in the air, unsure where to look. “Are you hurt? What happened? Should I call—”
“No.” Lia leaned against Yuna’s kitchen counter, shivering. The apartment was tidy, quiet, smelling of lavender laundry detergent. The normalcy of it was offensive. “Yeji. She took it. She used the injector. It’s gone.”
Yuna’s sleepy confusion sharpened into understanding, then anger. She crossed her arms. “You tried to take Lewis. I told you that was a bad idea. I told you she was volatile.”
“I know!” Lia shouted, then winced, clutching her side. “I know, okay? And now I’m nothing. I’m empty. You have to help me get it back.”
“How? Lia, look at you. You’re…”
“I’m what? Pathetic? I know! But you have it. You have Ana. You can make more. You can give me some.”
Yuna backed up a step, her brown eyes wide. “No. No way. You see what it does. You see what it’s doing to me. She talks to me all the time now. In the mirror. At work. It’s not a gift, it’s a… an infestation.”
“It’s power,” Lia hissed. She stepped forward, gripping Yuna’s shoulders. Her hands were cold. “You’re not trapped in your boring life anymore. You’re more. Please. Just a little. A drop. Something to make the quiet stop.”
Yuna shook her off. “Get a grip, Lia. Take a shower. Put some clothes on. We’ll figure this out in the morning like normal people.”
“I don’t want to be normal!” Lia’s voice broke. The desperation was a living thing, writhing in her gut. She looked around, wild-eyed. “Where is it? Where does it… come out?”
Yuna’s face went pale. “What are you talking about?”
“The gamma. The essence. Whatever it is. It’s in you. It has to… manifest.” Lia’s eyes locked onto Yuna, a horrifying thought crystallizing. Her earlier, failed attempts had been on the wrong source, the wrong medium.
From the source, the emptiness whispered.
“No,” Yuna said, reading her intent. “Lia, don’t you dare.”
But Lia was already moving, driven by a need that erased all boundaries. She dropped to her knees in front of the startled Yuna and shoved her face against the soft cotton of her sleep shorts.
“STOP IT!” Yuna cried, trying to push Lia’s head away. But Lia was stronger, fueled by mania. She hooked her fingers into the waistband and yanked, pulling both shorts and underwear down to Yuna’s knees.
Yuna gasped, frozen for a second in shocked humiliation. Then the anger came. Real anger. The kind she never let out. The kind that pooled in her stomach and made her hands shake. “Get off! Get off me, you freak!”
Lia ignored her, pressing closer, a scientist on a grim excavation.
And then, Yuna felt it. A familiar heat, a rushing in her ears that wasn’t her own pulse. The mirror in her bedroom seemed to call. Let me out. Ana’s voice, a deep, seductive rumble from within her own skull. She wants a taste? Give her a banquet.
“No,” Yuna whimpered, fighting it. “Not now. I don’t want to.”
You never want to. That’s the problem. The heat spread, a green flush rising on her skin. Her bones began to sing a deep, aching note.
Lia felt the change begin. She looked up, her eyes blazing with hope. Yuna’s slender thighs were tightening, the muscle definition becoming stark and sudden under skin that was shifting from tan to a luminous, verdant green. A jolt of pure energy, like static ozone, filled the air.
“Yes,” Lia breathed.
Yuna cried out, but it was cut short, her voice breaking and deepening into a guttural groan. Her body expanded. Her frame tore out of the confines of her t-shirt with a sound of ripping cotton. Lia fell back, watching in rapt awe as Yuna—no, Ana—unfolded into the room. Seven feet, then more. Glossy green skin over dense, powerful muscle. Her torn clothes re-knit and reformed into the dark, suggestive leather and ripped stockings. Her hair was a wild emerald cascade.
Ana looked down at Lia, now small and human on the floor. Her green lips curved into a smile that was all predatory delight. “You woke me up.”
The voice was a husky vibration in Lia’s chest. This was different from Yeji’s brute strength. This was older, wilder, dripping with a sensual menace.
“Please,” Lia whispered, crawling forward again. “Please, I need it.”
Ana tilted her head. “You’re digging in the wrong place, little scavenger. It’s not in there.” She placed a massive green hand on her own lower abdomen. “It is there.”
She leaned back against the wall, a queen on a cracked plaster throne. “If you want it… take it.”
Lia didn’t hesitate. She pressed her mouth to Ana, her quest no longer clinical but fervent, worshipful. Ana’s laugh was a low thunder. One giant hand came down to cradle the back of Lia’s head, not tenderly, but possessively.
The taste was nothing like before. It was electric, verdant, alive. It sparked on Lia’s tongue like licking a battery. And then it came—a surge, not of fluid, but of pure, radiant energy. It flooded Lia’s mouth, her throat, a green-gold luminescence that she swallowed in desperate, choking gulps.
It hit her system like a star going nova.
The empty cavity inside her exploded. The silence was vaporized by a roaring, howling storm of power. She screamed, her back arching violently as her own body began to tear itself apart and rebuild.
Bones cracked and lengthened. Skin stretched, burning, then hardening into a deeper, mossier green than Yeji’s, than Ana’s. She grew. And grew. Six feet. Eight. Ten. The ceiling of Yuna’s apartment compressed around her. Plaster rained down. She was twelve feet of raw, furious muscle, her own tattered nude form now a monument of rage and need.
The hunger was back. But it wasn’t for power. It was in her blood, a pounding, relentless drumbeat. She was hornier than she’d ever been in her life, every nerve ending shrieking with desperate sensitivity.
She looked down at Ana, who was watching her with fierce, approving eyes.
“Good,” Ana purred. “Now you understand.”
Lia’s voice, when it came, was a seismic rumble. “It hurts.”
“I know,” Ana said, pushing off the wall. She stood before the colossal Lia, still formidable but now slightly smaller. “Let me show you how to make it stop.”
They came together not with a kiss, but with a collision. A meeting of tectonic plates. The apartment walls shuddered. Lia lifted Ana as if she weighed nothing, pinning her against the ruined wall. There was no gentleness, no romance. It was a conjugation of forces, a violent, grinding negotiation of release.
Ana wrapped powerful legs around Lia’s waist, meeting each desperate thrust with a driving force of her own. They were both laughing, a sound of chaos and shared madness. Plaster dust filled the air like snow. A bookshelf toppled. The mirror on the wall shattered, reflecting their fractured, green forms in a thousand glittering pieces.
Lia buried her face in Ana’s neck, breathing in the scent of ozone and crushed greenery. The painful, wonderful pressure built, a gamma-star reaching critical mass. For a moment, the world narrowed to the slick, driving rhythm, the roar of blood, the shared pulse of something utterly inhuman.
In the wreckage of the quiet apartment, under the cracked ceiling, two monsters held each other, moving as one, chasing a feeling that was more addiction than pleasure, a temporary plug for a void that would now never truly be filled.
The storm, for now, was all there was.