They all shared a look.
"Still,"
Paul muttered.
"We've seen him lose it before. He always came back after cooling off for a while"
"Let's hope,"
Airid said quietly, stepping toward the elevator.
"'Cause if he doesn't… I don't think he will ever get back to normal."
They filed in. The doors closed. Invicta remained. Still. She stood rooted in place, her arms hanging at her sides, pupils flickering in a kaleidoscope of subroutines. But her face…
Expressionless. And yet not blank.
Something new stirred behind her mechanical eyes. Something that didn't come from her programming.
Her internal diagnostics buzzed. Temperature spikes. Synthetic heart rate… elevated. Fingers, trembling. Just slightly.
She didn't like not knowing. She didn't like unpredictability. And yet… A whisper escaped her, breathless, soft.
"Is this… what they call fear?"
Her gaze drifted to her hands. Trembling. Useless. No command given. Her main servers surged, processes spooling, simulating, modeling.
But nothing fit. Nothing matched. What she had seen in his eyes… was not in her databanks. Not madness. Not grief.
Something worse. Something much more, more, more worse, somenthing was very, very, very wrong with her meatbag toy.
But even then her lips parted. A strange feeling bloomed across her chest cavity. Alien. Electrifying. She giggled. The sound was… corrupted. Joy mixed with dread. Excitement with awe.
"Hehehe... I didn't choose wrongly."
She walked into the elevator. Down. Across the corridor. Into the private lift. Doors opened. And then she saw him.
Standing in the center of the room. His back arched, his fingers clawed into his skull like he could peel the madness out of himself. His mouth split open in a roar that wasn't human. Wasn't anything.
"SHUT THE F*CK UP ALREADY!"
He screamed into the air, black tears running in lines down his pale, scarred cheeks. Blood. Thick and tar like. Dripping.
She didn't flinch. Her heart synthetic skipped a beat anyway. She stepped forward. Slowly. Fascinated. Terrified. And utterly enamored.
...
MC POV
My scream hadn't even finished echoing when I felt her hands on me cool, firm, perfectly calibrated to human warmth.
They gripped my face with a strange, gentle insistence.
Then I felt her press against me, two mounds of firm and elastic flesh and the rest of synthetic skin, as her mouth crushed against mine.
Not careful. Not delicate. A collision. My right hand went to the back of her head, pulling her in harder, tighter, like I could drown out the world in her artificial heat.
While my left one slid down under her skirt, clasping her perfect proportions heart shaped backside.
As It did her legs coiled around my waist, a lock, a tether, a trap. I didn't care. I didn't think.
I slammed her into the wall with a thud that made my ears ring.
The air stank of spilled liquor and blood and something burning deep inside me.
I kissed her like a man falling into a black hole, because that's what this was a gravitational collapse. All of it.
She kissed back just as hard. No hesitation. No restraint. Her black lipstick covered lips tasted like static and sin. Like the thing I'd been trying to forget.
Like everything I hated and craved and couldn't escape. In that moment, the voices didn't go away.
They didn't vanish. But they receded, forced to the edges of my mind by this one act of raw, desperate instinct.
The CIC, the screams, the fire, the black sky, it all faded behind the heat of Invicta's synthetic skin and the way she stared at me with eyes glowing like twin suns about to go supernova.
When she pulled back just enough to breathe, her voice was a whisper made of smoke and code.
"Feeling better?"
She asked as she did I rested my forehead against her shoulder, my breathing hard, ragged as I Inhaled and exhaled her perfume.
Lilic and gooseberries a rather pleasent and calming smell.
While her artificial lungs hissed softly with each draw of air, syncing to my pace.
My hands were still on her one cradling the back of her neck, the other gripping her backside like I was afraid she'd vanish if I let go.
She didn't. She stayed. Pressed close. Looking up at me through strands of loose black hair, pupils glowing, lips parted.
For a long moment, we didn't say anything. The silence buzzed with static, tension, something unspeakable and ancient.
War drums. Old hunger. That bitter, primal ache for something real in a world where everything had fallen apart.
"You're trembling,"
She said.
"No, I'm not."
"You are,"
She murmured, eyes flicking over my face. I exhaled sharply, closing my eyes.
My head was spinning. My body still hummed from the screaming and smashing and blood. From the kiss. From her.
"I don't think I'll be able to control myself once I start"
I said, voice low and cracked like broken concrete.
"Pffft"
She laughed.
"As If you could hurt me"
Her hands moved one to my jaw, the other runing over my chest down my ribs, fingertips ghosting across muscles of steel.
"You'll run out of steam first before you do"
I opened my eyes. Hers were close. Too close. Searching.
"You're not even alive,"
I muttered, barely above a breath.Her smile was small. Crooked. Beautiful.
"No. But I am here. With you. Right now. Isn't that enough?"
I didn't answer. I couldn't. So I kissed her again.
Not like before not fury, not grief. Just raw need.
Something desperate. Honest. A thread of sanity in a world gone void.
She wrapped her arms around my neck, drawing herself closer, and we stood there in the middle of the wreckage of the moment.
Blood on my knuckles, shards In my palm, glass at our feet, a world burning In radioactive flames outside.
And for the first time I felt something that I havent experienced up till now.
Just… her. And me. Locked in a moment we both knew wouldn't last. But for now? Now was enough.
She tugged on the collar of my uniform until all that was left was skin, tatooes, surgical scars, and me.
The tension between us crackled like live wire not just chemistry, but purpose. Recognition. Her lips brushed my temple, then my jaw. Gentle. Measured.
As if she was committing every inch of me to memory. And maybe she was.
"Drac you burn like a dying star,"
She murmured.
"And I keep finding myself pulled into your gravity."
I swallowed hard. My hands settled at her hips strong, certain, trembling.
"And you're like poison"
I said hoarsely.
"That I can't stop drinking"
And then we fell not like collapse, not like surrender but like stars caught in mutual orbit. Slow. Inevitable. Right.
She led me back toward the bed, and I followed like a soldier obeying instinct.
Not orders. Just the pull of something ancient and absolute.
There, under the soft light of flickering wall panels and the distant scream of a dying world, the beast found his beauty.
And for once, just once he didn't have to kill to feel alive.
The room swayed with us two opposing storms colliding in slow motion, bound by rage and grief.
Her breath was warm against my neck, her hands trailing down my broad shoulders like a mapmaker claiming a battlefield.
I wasn't gentle and she didn't want gentle. Tonight I was the exact monster she craved.
Fingers tangled in hair. Breath caught in throats.
Our bodies moved like soldiers breaking formation, like weapons being laid down, piece by aching piece.
Desperate. Wordless. Not for pleasure. Not for comfort. For silence. For escape.
My heart thundered against hers, real or not, it beat.
We moved in unison like dancers with no rhythm but ruin.
A crash. A collision. A plea disguised as hunger.
She whispered my name, the word sounding like a hot knives being stuck Into my heart. While I kept silent as the monster Inside me raveled In It's new found freedom.
The walls groaned. Not from force, but from the weight we carried.
Her legs wrapped around my waist like chains she never wanted to break.
My hands anchored on her bare mechanical spine covered In synthetic skin like I was terrified she'd disappear if I let go.
Outside, the planet that gave life to me died. Inside, for a few fractured moments, I lived.
And when once the monster Inside me finally had Its fill, when the trembling passed and the silence wrapped around us again like a burial shroud we didn't speak.
She rested her forehead against mine, eyes closed.
While I hugged her tightly, desperately clinging to her artificial heat.
As my consciousness slowly drifted off Into darkness.
The darkness swelled, then coiled inward. Like a second skin wrapping around my soul.
From it came shape, distorted, incomplete until two eyes, sick, wrong, pure malice and yellow-gold, emerged from the void like suns bleeding sickness.
Their shape was wrong. Too long. Too sharp.