The chill of the air-conditioned locker room tingles against my skin as I stare at my clawed hand, flexing the fingers into and out of a fist. The PR stunt went about as well as it could have. I looked pretty cool, if I do say so myself, and that goes a long way to avoid the potential image issues my power presents. People will let you get away with a lot if it entertains them enough.

  I still had to make my superhero body mostly humanoid, of course. Can't stretch things too far. That means two arms, two legs, a head, and general normal human body proportions. The additions all come with my name—Seraphim—which I had a lot of fun designing to theme. Biblically-themed superheroes are fairly popular here in the 'ol U S of A, so my 'costume' design comes straight from Isaiah 6:2: 'above it stood the seraphim: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.'

  Most depictions of the seraphim I've seen make all six wings equally huge, but that's absurdly clunky and would make both coordination and balance horrendous. Instead, my body has one huge pair of wings on its back, as well as two tiny pairs of wings: one emerging from my ankles and covering the top of my feet, and one emerging from my temples to wrap in front of my eyes like a blindfold. The blindfold doesn't impede me, of course, because the Book of Revelations also mentions some six-winged angels that are just absolutely covered in eyeballs.

  I keep my eyes restricted to my big wings, as well as a collection of six underneath my feathery blindfolds. In practical situations, I will of course be looking around with them and not blinding myself at all, but I don't really need to. I am, somewhat ironically, using about an eighty-twenty Angel-human brain mixture to run this body, and the optical center is all Angel. I can look in any combination of directions with any number of eyes and not get confused.

  As for other aesthetics, I was actually instructed to lean into the fact that I'm technically naked, exposing a tantalizing amount of breast underneath a spiky collection of chest feathers designed to make people think they might catch a flash of nip if the wind blows right. But of course, I don't actually have any nipples in this body (why would I bother to form them?) so those dreams will go forever unanswered. I wondered for a little bit who the target audience was supposed to be given the mix of 'biblically rigorous' and 'incredibly slutty,' but then I realized how stupid I was being. Those two things go together like peanut butter and jelly, don't they?

  I guess they decided that if people were horny enough and/or outraged enough, they wouldn't be afraid, and that's the main thing we're trying to avoid. I'm definitely not an Angel, no sirree! Just don't look beyond skin deep, okay?

  Because yeah, all that visual posturing is the boring part. The power under the hood is what makes this body a joy to be in. Optimizing my musculature always helps me scratch that itch in my head to tinker with a form, and I've managed to construct a hybridized system between alien and human musculature, hanging off of a vastly improved skeleton (partially rebuilt with architectural principles rather than organic ones, though I'm still learning how best to implement things like triangular lattices).

  Anyway, earthlike musculature pulls, whereas alien hydraulic systems push. I need to sit down with an engineer sometime and hash out the best ways to take advantage of that duality, but right now I've found success with doubling them up and letting them cover each other's weaknesses. Hydraulic systems are very powerful, but they suffer from requiring extremely sturdy and therefore extremely heavy pressure-resistant containers to hold the fluid in. If I could just build my muscles out of metal, this might not be a problem, but unfortunately I can't just turn my internal organs into a lightweight aluminum alloy. I'm stuck with bone or crystal, so the hydraulics end up being absolute hell on the square-cube law, weighing a lot more than musculature of similar strength despite taking up a lot less space. By forming the core of my strength with hydraulic systems and padding out any extra needed force with muscle, I hit a solid middle ground of power-to-bulk that I'm happy with, at least for now. There's a lot of room for improvement, of course, but that just gives me something to do.

  One thing I feel like I should note, though: despite all these wings, I can't fly. At all. The human body just isn't shaped for it, and even if I didn't have a weight problem the closest set of instincts I have available is like, an eagle or something, which would be useful as reference material at best. Gliding, though, I can almost definitely do gliding. And as demonstrated, I can certainly fall with style.

  Of course, none of this matters if I can't even use this body in the first place, and one of the unfortunate things about having massive wings and no clothes is that it makes it rather difficult to carry around military gear.

  That's why I'm staring at my hand, trying to will the bullets I know I must have absorbed to reappear. Initially, I thought it didn't really make a lot of sense that I can shapeshift bullets out of my body. If I had just pushed them out and let them fall to the ground, then sure, but that's not what I did. I made the bullets disappear. And I'm pretty sure I've done the same with things like toxins, acid, and air.

  The acid, technically, was only ever my own acid—the acid I produce when using a Wasp body. But what's the difference between 'my' acid and anyone else's? When it starts burning my skin, why doesn't it count as in my body? I'm not sure, but the air is what really got me thinking.

  I can directly oxygenate my cells, but I've tested it and I can also directly shapeshift air into my lungs. Yet air isn't really 'biological.' It's just a handful of elements, mostly. So why not a bullet? What difference is there, fundamentally, between those things? The body might need oxygen to function, sure, but does it need argon? Pretty sure it doesn't, but I'm pretty sure the air I give myself is just normal air. So why can't I put a bullet into my own body?

  I pop a live round out of a magazine and swallow it, tracking it down into my stomach before it finally vanishes. Wait, should I even need it to be in my stomach for this? I shapeshifted bullets out of all kinds of different spots before. I pop out another, place it in my mouth, and will it to disappear. Nothing happens. Frowning, I try again, and the bullet stubbornly refuses to go away. This is so… arbitrary. I don't understand the rules here.

  Come on. The bullet doesn't belong in this template. Shift it away.

  My mouth empties immediately, the space the bullet previously occupied replaced seamlessly with air. What the hell? Okay, it worked that time. Now I just need to put it back. Right? I should be able to do that. I'm probably not causing the bullet to stop existing, because material I eat is added to a resource pool. Presumably, I retrieve material from that resource pool in order to shapeshift. So the resource pool should contain the bullets. I just have to put them back.

  Why can't I? Why does my power not let me? What's the difference between bullets and argon?

  There's the obvious stuff, of course. A bullet is solid and metal, while argon is a part of the air. A bullet is something that hurts the body, while argon is mostly just inert. I'm not technically shapeshifting pure argon into my body, I'm shapeshifting a normal mix of Earth atmosphere into my body, which is only around one percent argon. The body is explicitly designed to handle that much of the noble gas.

  …Argon belongs in this template. Why? Because the template contains argon. It doesn't do anything for the body, it isn't useful to its biological function, but my power doesn't require me to shift useful things, as preferable as they are.

  Is there lead in my body? Is there mercury? Quite possibly trace amounts of it, yes. Neither is beneficial. Both I would be better off without. I can find them, if I focus. There are a few chemicals I can feel that aren't doing anything helpful, a few compounds floating around in my brain and kidneys that aren't produced by any part of the body and are partially made of things I very much need to not be chemically bound this way. There isn't much of it, and the redundancies in the body render them largely irrelevant, but they're there. I can remove them, so I do.

  I can also return them. They don't help. They don't provide a function to the body. But they were part of my body, so I can make them part of my body again. What's the difference between mercury and a bullet? What's the difference between lead and a bullet? In many cases, nothing. Nothing at all. It's not supposed to be in the body. But it can be.

  A bullet can be part of my body, for the duration of its stay. It can be intended. It can be part of the template. Right? Doesn't that make sense?

  A bullet can be part of my body. A bullet can be part of me.

  I shift it into being, spitting the round out of my mouth. Holy shit. I take the other bullet I swallowed, the one that made it to my stomach, and shift it into my mouth as well. Spit. I shift the fired bullets, the ones that lodged themselves into my flesh months ago, into my mouth. Bent, spent, and naked without their casings, they fall from my lips one after another, clattering onto the floor. That's all of them. I know that somehow.

  I did it. Was a trick of perspective really all it took?

  What else can I do this with?

  I pick up my canteen. It's way too big to swallow… with a normal mouth. But really, do I need a mouth at all? From my hand, I grow a layer of skin across and around the canteen, engulfing it completely into my body. I decide it doesn't belong there, and make it vanish. Then I decide it does belong, and bring it back. Yes. Yes, yes, holy shit yes. I disappear it from my right hand, form a sack out of my left, and reappear it there. Yes!

  "Oi! Superheroine! What's the holdup!?" a familiar voice calls out, soon followed by a familiar face entering the locker room and doing a double-take. "Holy shit."

  "Jazz?" I blink. "Hey!"

  "Jesus Christ, girl, where were you hiding those abs in basic?" Jazz gapes. "Are you naked? You're supposed to be getting dressed! What the hell are you doing in here?"

  "Improving my Transit rating, probably," I say, reabsorbing my wings into my body so I can start putting on my uniform.

  Jazz rolls her eyes.

  "You power nerds and your STRATAS ratings."

  "I mean that's not the goal, it's just one of the likely results," I say, quickly throwing everything on. It's not put on well, but it shouldn't have to be. "Watch. I'm either about to do something really useful or really, really stupid."

  "Uh, how stupid are we talking?" Jazz asks, and then I eat the entirety of my assigned military gear.

  Well. 'Eat.' More like I rapidly form a shell of muscle and skin around my entire body and deconstruct everything inside, turning myself into little more than a big, hollow blob of flesh. My gun, my uniform, my armor, my accessories, all of it is gone. Sent to the void.

  Then, little by little, I shape myself the beginnings of a human form. A carefully-made, thin frame, attached to the inside of the shell to keep it one continuous body. Gently, I will my gear to form around the inner me, then grow within the clothes, filling them out as I complete myself. Once I have a fully-formed and fully-dressed body, I determine my body needs the rest of my gear where it's supposed to go, willing them back into the world in their proper places before unforming the shell, retracting it back into myself where it connects via my scalp and feet. Wait, shit, helmet and boots! I do the canteen trick for each foot and just inflate the end of one arm to pull the helmet out of that, securing it on my head the old fashioned way.

  I am now fully dressed.

  "Yes!" I whoop. "It worked! God, that was just the test run! I bet I could do all that so much faster! No more constantly stripping to use powers! Fuck yes! Did you see that, Jazz!?"

  I glance her way, meeting a wild-eyed stare, one hand covering her mouth. Jazz dry heaves, trying to hold back vomit, and rushes towards the nearest toilet.

  People never appreciate my hard work.

  "Jazz?" I call out, hesitantly following her. I find her having opted for a sink instead of a toilet, leaning over it and taking deep breaths. She hasn't vomited yet, and is probably trying to maintain that state of affairs, so I don't want to get too close too quickly. I certainly hope that she won't associate seeing me with nearly vomiting from now on, but in the immediate term that is a genuine risk.

  "What the actual fuck?" Jazz heaves. "That was the single most disgusting thing I've ever seen in my entire life."

  "Um. Sorry?" I manage. "I guess I'm just used to it."

  "God, somehow the fact that it wasn't a bloody mess is even worse. Like normally you'd expect the fucking Thing to vomit something out covered in saliva or pus or something but it was all just dry."

  "Well, I didn't really want all of my gear to come out covered in saliva or pus," I frown, unable to stop myself from feeling a little offended.

  "I could see through the fucking flesh blob," Jazz continues. "Stretched over some scarecrow-thin inflated ribcage. And there was shit moving around inside. Did you fucking eat yourself?"

  "Depends on your perspective, I guess?" I hedge. "It turns out my power just kind of alters the entire process of eating into another form of shapeshifting."

  "Oh my god, please shut up," Jazz whines. "Jesus, I was so excited to be on your fire team until like one minute ago. Am I gonna have to see shit like this every day?"

  Well fuck me for getting excited about something, I guess. I suppose I should have seen this coming; it's not like it's difficult to predict that most people would be grossed out by a shapeshifting flesh blob. I let how happy I was get in the way of paying attention to other people's feelings. Unacceptable.

  "Sorry," I tell her. "Do you need a minute? I can go."

  She waves me off.

  "Yeah, I'll be fine, just get to the rest of the squad, okay? I'm good, I'm good."

  If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  I nod and head out to the staging area, my face twisting through different configurations as I work through the stress. I, too, was happy to learn Jazz is part of my fire team, but now I'm worried about it. Time to meet the squad, though. I hope the rest of them don't have too many issues with it.

  I walk into the room wearing my Seraphim face, minus the wing blindfold because it doesn't really fit inside my helmet. Everyone is mulling around a little, so the NCOs probably aren't here yet. If I'm being honest, I'm not entirely clear where a Warrant Officer stands, rank-wise. In technical terms, I think I might be above a Sergeant, but in practical terms I think I'm very much not. There's a substantial difference between Warrant Officer One and Two—a Chief Warrant Officer is very much an officer, but a regular Warrant Officer is like a secret third thing. My ability to order everyone else around is dependent entirely on my assignment, and it sure seems like my assignment is placing me below Sergeants and Corporals, but nobody has really pulled me aside and given me the exact spot I'm supposed to stand in the hierarchy. I'm exactly as trained as a Private, though, so I think I'm just going to act like one until instructed otherwise.

  "Well that's gotta be her. Yo! Sera! You're with us!" someone very loud yells in my general direction, while staring straight at me. But my name is absolutely not Sarah, so I refuse to answer to it. "Hey! Man, can she not hear me?"

  The annoying private walks over and places himself in front of me so I cannot possibly get away with ignoring him any further.

  "Hey! You're Seraphim, right? We sent Private Garner to check on you. You're with our team."

  "I am Seraphim, yes," I confirm. "Morgan is also fine. That's my last name. And 'Sarah' is absolutely not my first name."

  "Yeah, it's your superhero name. Seraphim, Sera? Easier to say. Anyway, come on."

  How is it that I have managed to acquire yet another unwanted nickname? I haven't even met this guy yet! Well, I guess I should get this over with. I expand my domain around him and the people he's leading me towards, getting used to their templates and letting my body twist and shift. Hmm. One of these is familiar.

  "Jimenez?" I blink. One of the soldiers who escorted me around the zoo waves at me.

  "Hey! I figured you were Seraphim!" Jimenez grins at me. "Let me guess. Garner's not here because she walked in on you going full eldritch?"

  "It was at least on purpose this time," I sigh, letting a small smile onto my lips.

  "Sorry again about the tank," he says sheepishly.

  "Water under the bridge," I assure him honestly. "Literally, I suppose. It took me a long time to reassemble myself, but I learned a lot from it."

  The nearby members of our squad start giving us very odd looks. The guy next to Jimenez leans in and stage-whispers to him.

  "Dude did you seriously shoot a superhero with a fucking tank?" he hisses.

  "What? No! I threw her into a tank when I wasn't supposed to. Like a fish tank!"

  Now everyone looks even more lost. I smirk.

  "Honestly, getting shot with a tank probably would have been easier for me," I announce. "But hey, you were pretty cool about it. And I don't get those seizures anymore, of course. It's not going to be a problem again."

  "Hey, that's great!" Jimenez grins. "Oh hey, Garner's back!"

  I turn around and indeed find Jazz making her way to our group.

  "You okay?" I ask her.

  "Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. Just give me a warning next time."

  "What were you two up to in there?" another squad member asks.

  "Well, I—"

  "You don't wanna know," Jazz cuts me off. "I thought I wanted to know, and now I know, and I promise you, you don't wanna know."

  I frown.

  "...I'm probably going to have to inoculate you all to the intensity of my shapeshifting. I don't want it being a problem in the field."

  "Uh, what exactly do you mean by 'inoculate?'"

  I don't get a chance to answer, as a shouted order to form up by squad has us all quickly shutting up and lining up. Oh, hey! Anastasia's here! I couldn't see her through all the bodies on the other side of the room. It looks like each fire team is nine people, and there are three fire teams in our squad. The three supers in our squad are me, Anastasia, and Ed, the latter of whom is of course sitting in his wheelchair rather than standing at attention. He's keeping his back straight, though.

  Man, what a squad. We have a freak, a child, and a paraplegic all heading into a warzone together. I wonder what all these other people think about us. I never thought too much about superheroes when I was younger. They weren't going to be relevant to me in my future (or so I thought) and I had other problems taking up my attention. Now that I am a superhero, I have to wonder what everyone thinks of me. It must be a little frightening knowing that you're going into an instant death zone held back only by the willpower of a nine-year-old. Maybe that's why my fire team seemed so happy to see me. I'm the most normal-seeming supersoldier in the squad, and isn't that a sad thing to consider.

  What follows is pretty administrative for a good while. The corporal at the front of the room starts with a headcount, which is useful to me because it means I can actually learn the names of everyone on my team.

  "Private Jarrett!" the corporal calls out.

  "Here, Corporal!"

  "Private Jaques!" the corporal says, somehow pronouncing it as 'jack-wes.'

  "Here!"

  "Private Jimenez!" the corporal barks, butchering it into 'jim-en-eez' instead of 'him-en-es.'

  "Jimmeneez nuts!" Jimenez shouts, to quite a bit of laughter that doesn't come from the corporal.

  "Great, so we have a volunteer for every working party this month," the corporal deadpans.

  "Yeah that's fair."

  The sergeant comes in to do most of the rest, explaining our assignment and giving us a rather uninspired motivational speech. More importantly, we get our deployment, predictably to the front lines. My platoon is heading to St. Louis, Missouri… or at the very least, the battle line near the city that used to be St. Louis, Missouri. Now it's alien territory, and we are to be part of an extended operation with the ultimate goal of retaking the Mississippi River.

  It makes a certain amount of sense. Contesting the aliens in the ocean is borderline impossible for us because submarines don't stand a chance against Leviathans. They simply don't have the maneuverability, suppressive fire, or armor to withstand being crushed by the massive serpents. With uncontested undersea superiority, the aircraft carriers that normally form the backbone of naval warfare are relatively useless outside of assaulting a coastline, and nearly defenseless against an enemy fully capable of weaving through minefields and pulling entire battleships into the depths of the ocean in moments.

  Rivers are a different story, though. The Mississippi can get pretty deep, but even it doesn't have anywhere near enough space for a Leviathan. Other types of aliens are perfectly happy living underwater, and military vessels usually aren't made for the area, but we don't really want the Mississippi River so we can put boats with guns on it. We want the river so we can put boats with supplies on it. (Including guns, probably, but not for shooting from the boats.)

  That, and it would be a major symbolic win for humanity. Personally, I think it seems a little optimistic. Major symbolic wins should probably come after tangible material wins. But hey, I guess we have to start somewhere, right? We can't structure our entire war plan around the assumption that we're all going to fail and die.

  We're going to be deployed to the front lines, and soon. I'm going to be back among aliens. I might very well have to fight another Angel. It's a lot to think about as I get through the day and lie down for bed.

  Even if I hadn't been able to manually induce myself into slumber, boot camp would have quickly taught me how to pass out. Yet almost as soon as I fall asleep, I find myself awake, surrounded by darkness, and devoid of form. I quickly assemble myself a body, patting around at my surroundings to confirm my suspicion. Skin and muscle and crystal and bone, just like I thought.

  I'm having the meat dream again.

  I expected this might happen. The easiest way I've found to escape this squishy prison is to simply induce myself to fall asleep a second time. I figured that out a good while ago, and it has been helping me get excellent rest, mostly devoid of horrifying eldritch flesh caves. Today, though, I finally have the energy to be in an experimental mood. I'm going to figure out what's up with this place, once and for all.

  Oddity number one: I can use my powers here, but I don't feel my domain. It just isn't around me the way it normally is, an extra muscle in my mind that I can flex to move however I please. Yet if I focus, I've started to figure out how to map the area around me. It feels different from my normal biological scans, but fundamentally everything around me is biology. I can determine its composition, shape, and status. The first time I did this, I stretched my senses as far as they could go, pushing my range beyond what my domain would normally be capable of and overwhelming myself. This time, I make sure to be careful, only extending my range enough to help me navigate. It's gross, but I've gotten plenty used to gross. I can handle it.

  Now, I want to see it. There's no light in here, but if I can still shapeshift then I can make my own light. Though I don't have any particularly bright sources of bioluminescence, there's nothing stopping me from making up the difference with surface area. I adjust my entire epidermis to glow, pulsing yellow-green light revealing the area around me. I've seen it all in my mind's eye before, and my real eyes confirm it's just as gross as I expected. A cave of exposed flesh, guts and organs and skin mixing together into a Cronenberg mess of a room. I don't let the human instincts for shock and horror take over; my eyes carefully take in the details of the area. I'm looking for… yes, there. A chunk of crystal.

  A shimmering blue blade is wedged into the wall, so I approach it, grasping it, tugging on it, yanking on it until it comes free. Large and heavy in my arms, I eyeball its measurements and confirm my suspicions. It's a Behemoth's leg blade. Not just some random chunk of crystal, but a very specific chunk of crystal that I have worn on my body before.

  "This is my storage space," I mutter to myself, the hot air tasting like iron on my tongue. As suspected, there is a real, physical location of some sort where I house the biomass I remove from our reality. I am, if my hunch is correct, currently standing in an entirely separate dimension. One that is, arguably, inside myself.

  "What the fuck."

  I wedge the Behemoth blade back into the wall, accidentally cutting a gouge into the flesh with the blade. I flinch. That kind of hurt.

  Wait. It hurt? Why did it hurt? This might be a storage space for my extra mass, but it's not connected to my… body…

  I look down, yelping in surprise as I spot my feet fusing with and sinking into the floor. I stagger back, tripping as one leg fails to unearth itself, and landing on my butt. The soft ground cushions my fall, but then it quickly gives way to another attempt to absorb me. I shapeshift myself separate, leaving behind the stuck parts of my body like I once did to escape a glue trap, hobbling away as I try to reform my feet. Immediately, I get stuck again, unable to avoid touching the ground, but this time I don't feel myself sinking.

  I feel the floor getting sucked up into my legs.

  Right. Of course. If this is the inside of my storage space, then I can't just teleport in materials however I want. The materials are already here. I don't feel my domain because this entire area is a function of my domain, some aspect of my power that I have unwittingly manifested myself inside of. This body probably isn't my actual body, is it? I presumably don't disappear entirely while I have these dreams, so my usual body still has to be on Earth. This is just some puppet body that I am somehow remote controlling through my dreams.

  I feel kind of silly for freaking out so much about this place before. It's definitely odd, but there's nothing scary about it now that I understand what it is. I guess I can just put this puppet body back to sleep and let myself rest until tomorrow, but I should think about whether or not there's something else I should do here first. Oh, I know! This is my storage space. I should take stock of my inventory.

  Slowly, carefully, I expand my awareness, looking over my inner world. Oh, wow. There are a lot of little crystals in here, most of them shaped like Raptor foreclaws. Wait a minute, am I creating a new set of crystals every single time I shift into an alien? I must have a veritable mountain of Angel scales stacked up somewhere if that's the case. That's so wasteful! If they're all still here I can just use them! I'll have to modify the design a little so that the crystals can be properly anchored in the body without the organs that developed them in the first place, but that won't be too hard. Continuing to look around, I mentally locate one of the more disturbing sections from my initial freakout: the feces room. I guess my body can only recycle so much waste, and the result is an uncomfortable slurry of dried poop, urea, and ammonia—along with lots of other things I don't really want to investigate too closely—that's just kind of hanging out in here. While a lot of biologically useful things are in human waste, I clearly haven't properly set myself up with a recycling center. I could also just dump this stuff somewhere, I suppose. Maybe if Jimenez pisses me off I can give him a very, very bad day cleaning the portashitters. Whatever, I'll put it on the to-do list of things to figure out in the future. It's not super urgent because I don't feel like I've hit any sort of upper limit for how much I can store.

  …Now that's a thought, isn't it? I don't have an apparent upper limit to what I can store. I've figured out how to contain and retrieve arbitrary items. Did my powers just get upgraded from shapeshifting to shapeshifting and also hammerspace? I can carry my gear in here, so potentially I can carry a lot of people's gear. As long as I can swallow it, I can put it in my eldritch stomach. Could I devour a huge chunk of supplies and then be teleported by someone like Cross Country, thereby creating cross-continental supply trains? Could I eat a person, and keep them alive in here? I have an atmosphere, and I can certainly breathe with normal human lungs. It wouldn't be pleasant, but it doesn't seem impossible. I doubt I will be able to find anyone willing to let me eat them, though. …Except maybe Dr. Bovary. I guess I could just start by testing with bugs or other small animals. I'll have to catch one next time I see one.

  There is one issue I see to all of this, of course. My meatspace does seem to be a little bit… digesty. I can't even stand still without the floor trying to eat me. Is using my own insides as long-term munitions storage really a good idea? What happens if something misfires inside my own extradimensional guts? I've never felt any conscious awareness of this place while awake, which means I have no way to monitor what's happening, so keeping anything in here long-term seems risky at best. Ugh, there's just so much that needs testing here! I wish I figured this out months ago, back when I actually had time to mess with my powers. I'm not going to be able to risk too many experiments when I'm back inside of another Queen's domain.

  Still, this is good, this is useful. My power is shaping up to be even more crazy than I expected. I'll have to experiment with keeping little useful things inside of myself and seeing if I can bring them back out later undamaged. Stuff like a combat knife, a spare change of clothes, some food… no, wait. I obviously can't store food in here, I would just… eat it. Still, though! I'm getting excited.

  Unfortunately, I doubt this much excitement is conducive to sleeping well. I can't think of anything else to do here right now, and I will certainly be back here later, so now is probably a good time to fall asleep. I sink back into the floor, my brain cradled comfortably in the foundations of my meat-house, and induce myself into slumber. Next thing I know, I'm groggily waking back up, and my day is quickly filled with briefings, squad exercises, and a lot of getting shouted at by our sergeant. I guess some things never change.

  Only a few days later, and it's time to depart for the front lines. For perhaps the first time in my military career, I am not transported to another state via Cross Country, but instead by a regular normal military transport aircraft. The flight is loud and boring. I can't even play with Anastasia because they only keep one super per vehicle, ensuring there is always some defense against a possible flying Angel. I'd comment on how funny it is that most Angels don't fly, but I guess I don't really fly either most of the time. I could if I wanted to, but it wouldn't be fast enough to keep up with aircraft so the military prefers me on the ground.

  I have to say, I expected myself to be more stressed than I actually am at the prospect of returning to an active warzone. I didn't exactly have a pleasant experience with it the first time around. I suppose that when push comes to shove, I think I could survive alone if I had to. I was only in danger the first time around because I was so critically low on biomass. This time, I've spent the last several months stuffing my face at every available opportunity. It would require an exceptionally dangerous Angel with a very specific skill set to physically prevent me from returning to human territory if I was really motivated.

  But of course, I'm not alone. I have eight other people I'm directly responsible for ensuring the survival of. I have five other people I'm not supposed to worry about per protocol, but I know I would struggle to stop myself from rushing to their aid if need be. Anastasia is in my squad, so she will always be at least fairly close, but Christine, Maria, even Peter? I'll be constantly worrying about them. Yet despite all that, I still feel relatively calm. Maybe the Angel part of my brain is just relieved to be heading back towards something it understands. Orders, objectives, and violence. It's so much easier, so much more natural, than having to constantly deal with human egos.

  As we approach St. Louis, the horizon changes. From a distance, the city itself is impossible to miss, but its greatest invader is just as impossible to avoid. The St. Louis Queen is unmistakable as anything else, despite looking nothing like the Queen that dropped out of the sky in Chicago. Whereas she was a bulbous mass of giant, ever-dividing cells, the Queen here is wider, sleeker, more chaotic and much less centralized.

  It extends over St. Louis like a mass of vines, spreading over and corrupting everything it can manage to touch. Its body is eternally inconsistent, each direction it stretches drastically different in presentation. Bright, white-and-red patterned tendrils reach west while dark, thorny spikes reach east. Every protrusion north of them combines somewhere down the line into a single, massive lump of a tendril that crushes the city wherever it lies, and to the south is a mess of twisted arms that wrap together in complex patterns, growing over the city like moss. Some parts of it even jut upwards, as if in mockery of the flattened skyscrapers left in its wake.

  Yet the St. Louis Gateway Arch is, somehow, intact. The city-sized monster crawls all over it, its tendrils winding up the sides and draping off of it like hanging moss. There's absolutely no way it's incapable of destroying the city's most iconic monument. No, the Queen has chosen to preserve it on purpose, holding it greedily as if mocking our attempts to reclaim it.

  Twisted Wasps hover through the air around the city. Lines of Behemoths can be seen preparing next to the Mississippi. Countless Raptors doubtlessly lie in wait, hidden in strategic parts of the city. The aliens may not understand our technology, but they understand war. They see we're preparing, and they're doing the same.

  This is what I've been training for, these past several months. What we've all been training for. It's time to see how much of a difference that training makes.

  don't want a single superhuman trying to shelter multiple fire teams at once and splitting their attention between multiple team leaders. Inflating the team size makes things harder on leaders but is necessary to keep a reasonable amount of people in the battle at all, given every soldier needs constant domain coverage.