Chapter 18: The Storm Breaks
The window didn't shatter. It vaporized. A cascade of glass and twisted aluminum framing sprayed across the hallway, and then the wall itself bulged. A massive green shoulder punched through drywall and studs like paper, and the air turned thick with plaster dust and the raw smell of ozone.
Lewis screamed. The sound was thin, broken, swallowed by the thunder of collapsing structure. He tried to scramble away, but Ana's weight still pinned his hips, her green hand a vise across his chest.
Yeji rose from the wreckage of the wall. Fifteen feet of murky, swamp-dark green muscle. Her eyes blazed, not with the clean emerald fire of Ana's, but with something older, fouler, a drowned rage that had fermented in betrayal and abandonment. She filled the shattered bathroom, her skull grazing the ceiling, her black-nailed hands hanging loose at her sides, twitching.
"Found you," she rumbled. The voice was a rockslide, each syllable grinding the last.
Ana didn't flinch. She rose off Lewis with a fluid, contemptuous motion, stepping over him as if he were debris. Her own glow intensified, that vivid, serpent-belly green, and she squared off against the towering intruder. Seven feet against fifteen. The difference was absurd, almost laughable.
"You're early," Ana said, her voice a low, amused purr. "The party hasn't started."
Yeji lunged.
The speed was impossible for something that size. One moment she was a statue of dark green muscle, the next she had crossed the ruined room in two terrible strides and her hand was closing around Ana's torso. Ana gasped, genuine surprise flickering across her face as she was hauled off her feet.
"Let me go," Ana spat, clawing at the massive fingers that encircled her ribs.
Yeji's other hand came down and seized Ana's thighs, spreading them with brutal efficiency. Ana's eyes went wide. The understanding was instantaneous, sickening.
"No," she snarled, thrashing. "You wouldn't. You don't know how—"
"I know," Yeji said, and her voice was a promise. "She took mine. I take hers."
Ana screamed as Yeji lifted her, tipped her, and buried her face between the emerald thighs. It was not an act of pleasure. It was a mining operation. A siphon. A theft of the most intimate, violent kind.
Ana bucked, clawing at Yeji's shoulders, her heels drumming against the great green back. A raw, guttural sound tore from her throat, a mixture of agony and horror. She could feel it, the gamma energy in her core, that vast reservoir of stolen power, being drawn out of her like a thread pulled from a tapestry.
"Stop," she gasped, her voice cracking, losing its hypnotic edge. "Stop, you don't understand what you're—"
Yeji made a sound of deep, consuming satisfaction. She did not stop. She drank.
Lewis, forgotten on the floor, stared at the two titans. His brain had stopped trying to process. It just watched. Steam rose from the wreckage. The house groaned around them, the structure straining under the combined weight and violence.
Ana's screams changed pitch. They thinned. Became less certain. The vivid green of her skin began to pale at the edges, the color leaching out like ink bleeding from wet paper. Her body, that powerful seven-foot frame, started to shrink.
"No," she choked, and now it was a sob, a desperate whimper. The arms that had pinned Lewis to the floor were thinning, losing their monstrous definition. "Please. Please, I just got free. I was going to be something."
Yeji's response was a low, vibrating hum of pleasure that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with reclamation.
Ana's muscles dissolved. The green skin flushed, shifted, darkened back toward a mortal brown. Her hair lost its wild emerald curl, falling limp and black against her shoulders. She shrank like a deflating balloon, her frame contracting, the power draining from her cell by cell.
For a moment, Yuna dangled in Yeji's grip, naked, human, utterly spent. Her brown eyes blinked open, confused and terrified. She saw the monstrous green face above her.
"Thank you," she whispered, her voice hoarse and raw. "Thank you, I didn't want it. I never wanted it. It took me over, I couldn't—"
Yeji dropped her. Yuna hit the floor hard, all the air driven from her lungs. She curled in on herself, shivering, trying to piece together what had happened.
Yeji didn't look at her. She stepped over the cowering woman, over the ruins of the bathroom, and reached down. Her huge hand closed around Lewis's torso, lifting him gently, almost tenderly. He didn't struggle. He was beyond struggling.
"No," Yuna wheezed, pushing herself up on her hands. "Where are you taking him?"
Yeji paused at the broken wall. For the first time, she turned her head. Her eyes, still burning with that dark green fire, locked onto Yuna.
"Somewhere safe," Yeji rumbled. "Somewhere we won't be followed."
And then she was gone, leaping through the gaping hole in the wall, Lewis cradled against her chest, vanishing into the cold night air.