Requiem of the Broken

Chapter 24: Frenzy

Aria twitched on the floor, the teleportation hallway had apparently used up enough energy teleporting the heroes that she herself had failed to teleport. Instead, she had only been partially teleported with large chunks of her body just vanishing, leaving her lying on the floor while her body desperately tried to repair itself. She must have been lying there for a few hours at least, by the time she had been able to move. She had no idea where the heroes might have been transported, but given the fact that the teleporter had been malfunctioning, she doubted they were where the villains intended to send them. They could also have been killed instantly instead, either way, she was now alone in the hallway.

She gave her body a stretch, feeling joints and her back pop in multiple places and tender muscles being worked. When she was confident she had regained her mobility she continued down the hallway. She eventually found herself at a door that was welded shut, so she simply transformed one arm into a giant claw and ripped the entire door frame out of the wall. A few seconds later she was hit by multiple explosives and bullets, the explosions burning her clothes to ashes, only slightly burning her skin and knocking her backward with the majority of bullets whizzing over her head. She got her feet, ignoring the bullets, and charged through the doorway, an explosion of blood pouring out of her skin and her remaining articles of clothing being torn to pieces. All that mattered was killing her old captors, finding her husband and child, and then leaving everything behind; if that meant butchering an entire complex of people, what did that matter?

She tore through the line of villains with ease, their bullets, explosives, and quirks doing little to slow her. She burst into a hallway and came across some kind of strange creature, it was all black, with four extremely muscled arms ending in giant pincers, six spindly legs with some sort of carapace on them, two scorpion tails dripping a ghastly purple liquid, ten eyes, and a huge maw of spine-like teeth. Every joint slowly leaked blood which was pooling on the floor and had a mass of thin purple hairs all over. That didn't bother though, what was bothering her was the fact that as soon as she had ripped the metal door from its housing she had suddenly developed an inexplicable headache. The creature also seemed to feel some kind of a mental shock because it jerked and took a few steps back when the door had been removed.

They stood staring at each other for a few seconds, then it released a chittering cry and charged her. She caught the thing with her claws but it was its momentum was too great and it forced her backward. Eventually, she managed to arrest its charge, and with a massive flex of muscle, she threw it to the ground. It landed and then it suddenly jerked and it put its legs underneath of itself and like some kind of grasshopper, launched itself at her. It slammed her to the ground, bringing its four pincers and scorpion tails down at her. The tail barbs hit her chest but failed to penetrate her skin, while the pincers closed around each limb and started clamping down with all their might. Aria howled in pain, she could feel her bones screaming in protest, on the verge of snapping. The pain, the headache, and her own panic overwhelmed her and all that was left was a bestial rage. Blood exploded from her head and formed into the mutated shape of a bear and wolf. She opened wide and clamped her giant maw around the entirety of the creature's skull and punched through the carapace with ease. Cold blood gushed from the stump and head into her mouth and she accidentally ingested some of it. The creature went limp and sagged on top of her.

The cold blood slid over her now large and sensitive tongue and she stilled. The second the blood hit her tongue her headache pulsed in a sudden burst of pain, then it abruptly faded. She knew instantly why this creature bothered her so much. It was born of her blood, the cold blood reeked and tasted of her own but with a bitter acrid taste to it. This was one of the Hounds of Zeus. She felt her instincts roar to life and every part of her demanded she drink more of its blood. In a fit of wild urging she drank of its blood and she felt the insectoid essence within the Hound suffuse her entire being. Her mutated quirk factor assimilating, converting, and then attaching the repurposed DNA to her own. She pushed the dead Hound off of her and felt her tail morph and change, the tip becoming scorpion-like and now able to inject venom. She also felt she do more in the way of changing, but limited it to the tail. The carapace would only hamper her mobility.