# 43

Xena stood deep in the hive.

She had made it in time to witness the first, but not the last, use of a chestburster on a cape. She despised Skidmark and Mush. They were both filthy creatures. Xena couldn’t even call them human with how many narcotics had been shoved into their bodies.

Sherrel was an exception. She was still so “new” to the gang… plus she had massive fucking tiddies. Those tended to sway Xena’s opinion on a lot of beings being redeemable.

A villain is only misunderstood if they’re hot. If not, then they’re just evil.

“Wh-Whashafuck?” Adamina said groggily. Her eyes were unable to focus on any one thing due to the withdrawal hitting her like a ton of bricks.

Xena stood there patiently, just watching the goblin-looking woman try to comprehend how truly fucked she was. And not even in the good way.

The black British woman finally focused enough to see Xena through the dim lighting and her cloudy vision.

“Whodafuck… Are you?”

Xena didn’t answer. She simply tapped a long index claw across her forearm’s carapace. Xena honestly didn’t want to do what she was about to do, but she wasn’t retarded enough to pass up on free upgrades to her powers. Even if she would have to wash her mouth out with high-proof alcohol and fried puffs afterwards. Maybe even binge on a few bags of salt and vinegar chips to thoroughly scrape the insides of her mouth of the unfortunate taste she was about to experience.

Mush also began to awaken, but unlike Skidmark he was more out of it. Xena didn’t question it. But as Skidmark went on to speak more with her scratchy voice, Xena felt it.

She was fortunate to not have to suffer the repugnant woman’s voice for much longer.

“Arhh! Why the fuck does my chest hurt so much?! What the fuck did you do to us, bitch? Let us go!”

It was beginning. Soon Xena would have another source of unpleasantness to deal with, but with the added benefits of a new little one and some boosts to her general powers.

Skidmark started to thrash in her resin bindings, achieving jack. Mush attempted to follow her lead but all he got was shit. Both drug abusers relied so heavily on their powers that their physical fitness left them in similar states that, without their narcotics, would be only comparable to children. Particularly starved children.

All it did was make it far easier when the sound of wet cracking could be heard. Skidmark screamed in agony. Mush gave out a silent yell.

Their ribcages were being split apart from the inside. With a sudden lurch, two bloody yellow missiles popped out with enough force to splay the bones in a gory caricature of a flower.

While they moaned their last breaths, Xena struck.

First it was Skidmark. Xena’s pharyngeal jaw burst through her pallid forehead and carved out the woman’s corona pollentia along with much of the cerebellum and occipital lobe.

The taste was a sour, bitter thing in her mouth. Alabaster’s brain matter genuinely tasted better.

Xena didn’t reflect long on the taste as she moved over and replicated the process on the slimy skin of Mush, boring a hole big enough to be used for a water bottle.

Their slack forms bled onto the floor from their restraints as Xena grimaced.

Somehow, Mush tasted worse than his boss. Like a sardine blended into sour milk. Both now-dead capes were truly repugnant filth. Xena would make sure that any future power targets would be from healthier subjects.

As the two sets of brain-core samples were digested, Xena felt the subtle change in her being

With a thought she used Skidmark’s “gift” and immediately fell over with a grunt. Her fall caused a minor tremor in the hive. It took Xena a moment to figure out what the hell went wrong.

Despite her normal bimbo-mode that her double brain normally ran on, when Xena actually used it to look up memories it was very good. As if she was watching a replay with proper editing software. With the ability to speed up, slow down, pause, and using her superior senses that she rarely ever fucking used because of her constant dumb-bimbo juice addiction, Xena could even view the memories from different angles like it was the Braindance scenes from Cyberpunk.

Xena slowed down the memory. She watched as at the moment she activated the power a force was applied to her whole body at once. Xena, the smart woman that she was, didn’t position her body to brace for the force and fell over. It made sense that she would get a “boost” from Skidmark as that was what the goblin’s whole shit was. The fact that Xena didn’t brace for a movement ability had her mentally facepalming.

This time Xena lifted her head and then stood up. She bent her knees slightly, making sure she was actually ready this time. With a thought she pushed her whole body to the side.

It was as if she had lubed up her feet. Xena glided across the grey floor for a few feet. When the ability stopped pushing there was no slow down, just like there had been no acceleration. With the preparation it was a smooth translation in the geometric sense. And the best part?

She could spam it.

Every push drew from her biomass, spent and gone into the ethereal without any byproduct. Granted that was true of much of her abilities that didn’t actually produce anything.

Already Xena had traveled several hundred feet while pontificating on the parameters of her pilfered power. She stopped in the middle of a logistical conga line of her daughters. Xena put no thought into what they were doing and instead focused on her second Strategically Transferred Enhancement Ability of Lesser power.

Mush had made powered armor with his power. Most wouldn’t really consider it as such, since it was just literal refuse, but it allowed him to withstand forces that would have killed a normal person as well as apply forces that would have killed a normal person. Between the damage he could cause with each “attack” from his trash armor and the sheer weight of all of it alone, it was for all intents and purposes “powered.”

Just instead of a fuel cell or battery to keep it running, it was a multidimensional biomechanical computer likely the size of a large island or even small continent that was powering the suit of shit.

Just like with Skidmark’s booster, Xena pushed Mush’s power and watched as her chitin writhed on her body. She looked closely and saw thousands of tiny cilia had grown all across her body. Every tiny hair-like structure grasped out for something.

Xena watched as some dust fell onto the back of her large hand and practically stuck fast. The cilia captured and held onto the small particles.

Having an idea of what exactly was happening, a rare event for Xena, she quickly traveled through the hive toward Sherrel’s garage. Along the way more and more fine particles collected onto her mesoskeleton, turning it from smooth charcoal to a matte grey with a texture of sandpaper. Xena’s palms could likely be used to smooth out wood from just stroking it with how much they had gathered from her quadrupedal movement.

When she arrived in the refurbished warehouse, her chitin acted as if it was charged with static electricity as the floating particles were attracted to her. Xena walked toward an active work area where a Squealer-morph was grinding down a particularly stubborn piece of metal. With Xena’s close proximity each of the sparks jumped at her greying skin.

Soon the greying took on a sparkling effect as the cilia captured the metal dust, gaining a thick “sandstone” layer on Xena’s hard chitin.

It stopped accumulating after the plate got half a foot thick. Xena was sure that if she let the power run over her whole body she would look truly armored. But with how slow it was growing, Xena wasn’t sure how well it would work as armor. It would be very useful versus anyone making use of granular-based powers.

With a thought, Xena stopped pushing Mush’s power and witnessed the layers slough off of her body in chunks before impacting the ground and crumbling. It reminded Xena of when powdered milk clumped up.

The Squealer-morph stopped what she was doing and angled her head at Xena with a very tired frown. The displeasure radiated off the smaller alien in waves that made Xena slowly walk away as if she hadn’t just done the equivalent of emptying a full shop-vac right next to her.

The Squealer-morph let out a tired sigh as she watched Xena leave back down into the hive proper. She set the angle grinder down and went off to grab the vacuum.

-X-X-X-

It was finally time.

Xena stopped messing around. With confirmation from a very scared Lisa, a very smug and horny Rebecca, and a confused but horny Simurgh, she knew Coil was currently inside his bunker.

She rubbed her T-rex hands together with a face-splitting grin.

She looked over her shoulder at the many xenomorphs arrayed behind her.

“Now remember, if you see any tentacles run away and inform me about it. She can’t actually copy you but she could still easily kill you and we don’t need any needless deaths from a simple raid.”

A chorus of clicking hisses answered her.

“Good. Let’s loot this viper’s den!”

She cocked back her large fist, her legs shoulder-width apart for a textbook stance.

She held up three fingers from her T-rex hand and started lowering them one by one.

When she finally clenched the fist, Xena shot her fist forward while also pushing Skidmark’s booster at the same time.

Xena’s fist impacted the exposed and dirty concrete with the force of a runaway 18-wheeler, crushing and shattering the man-made stone along with the rebar that reinforced it.

Immediately Xena could tell that Xecate was very much a petty bitch. Slowing down her perception, she watched the fragmentation of her entrance explode into the currently in-use barracks for the base.

A concrete shard rotated slowly as it flew through the air. Its trajectory soared toward a slowly rising head of a once-sleeping merc. He was on his side, so when the chunk of debris impacted the side of his head it did not simply strike him. The rotation carved a valley into the man’s skull. The edges of the wound were quickly crushed as the rest of the stone’s bulk continued its path through his brain and out the other side.

A bent piece of rebar pierced through the air with an almost predestined path of destruction and pain. The metal wrapped around a mercenary’s spine, effectively stapling him to the metal chair he had been sitting on. His headphones were ripped out of his ears as his phone fell to the floor.

Another mercenary found his glasses turning into additional shrapnel as smaller chunks of concrete shattered them and sent the shards and rocks embedding into the back of his eye sockets.

With the opening move, the sleeping shift of Coil’s mercenaries was reduced to casualties. The ones not immediately killed off by the alpha strike would be unable to react to the hive’s assault.

Xena tsked at the state of the place as her daughters swarmed in through the breach.

While the hive’s tunnels were built with someone of her stature in mind, the Endbringer shelter-cum-villain base was built with the intention of housing normal-sized beings. To make matters worse, it was built with the intention of being difficult to storm as well.

Xena would be wholly unable to confidently strut through the halls with her intended swagger of one who had already won. She might be able to ram the halls with her massive headcrest, but she wasn’t sure what was and wasn’t load-bearing.

She had done something similar at the PRT building, but that was more an accident than purposeful. Hell, her breach had collapsed a part of the ceiling due to the height difference.

At least that part didn’t matter much.

So in order for her to achieve the look she wanted, she’d have to get on the same “level” as Coil. Xena grabbed a sheet from an unmolested bed as she started shifting, compressing down to a very human six feet.

She threw the sheet over her shoulder and it too changed from the drab grey into a beautiful and bright Barbie pink.

The fabric hung loosely and sheer on the upper part of her voluptuous pale body. One shoulder was bare while the other held up the Mediterranean-inspired outfit and prevented her breasts from slipping free too easily. The spandex crotch hugged her groin comfortably and showed off her prominent bulge and ass.

Half of her power went suppressed in line with her now covered skin. It was unfortunate, but Xena highly doubted she’d need her full strength to give the boot to Coil’s face. If she really needed to let loose, it wasn’t difficult to just take it off.

The accident with the E88 was purely, purely, due to chance and should be treated as an exception, not the rule.

Xena heard the gunshots coming from within the base and decided she’d faffed about a bit too long. Xena flipped her golden locks as she began to strut down the halls of Coil’s base, knowing that the time it would take her to get to the villain’s reinforced office would be plenty for the man to truly lose it.

Her hips swayed side to side to the sound of screaming, hissing, and gunfire as her organic high heels clacked on the treated concrete floor. The fluorescent lights flashed in angry strobes while the klaxons screamed in protest.

From a side hall a mercenary tried to run away. He tripped and fell to the floor, dropping his rifle.

“OOF! Oh God, Oh God! Help meeeeeeeaaah!”

He screamed as he desperately scrabbled for the gun, only to be pulled back into the hall. Walking past it, Xena didn’t even bother looking. She knew the man was being prepped for a facehugger.

She continued on to where her bird and brat had told her. A massive metal door that looked like it belonged more in a missile silo than a simple bunker. Several locking bolts lined the frame and all were already engaged. A camera sat high on the wall, overlooking the door and at least ten feet on either side.

Xena saw the rationale. If it were too close it would allow somebody to hide in its blind spots and ambush him if he were to answer it. Xena just smiled and waved at it.

“Hey there Tommy-boy. Mind letting this defenseless damsel in? It’s so awfully scary out here.”

Xena covered part of her mouth with her hand, leaning over a bit and looking down each end of the hall. Her voice was low and conspiratorial.

“I heard there’s a monster running loose.”

To her surprise, a speaker near the door crackled to life.

“Whatever you want, I’ll give it to ya. Money, women, Hell I’ll even leave the entire state if you just let me.” His voice was calm as he made his offer, as if he wasn’t terrified of not only being unable to use his power that he so relied on but also trapped like a rat.

“Just know that if I die, not only will this base explode but my other deadman switches will go off!”

Xena pouted up at the camera.

“Calvert! That’s not how things are going to work!” Her voice was patronizing.

“I already have what I want and will get what I don’t already have easily enough. You’re just delaying the inevitable and your threats don’t matter when they’re not going to work.”

It was as if she were speaking to a stubborn child, unable to reconcile that he wouldn’t be going to Disney Land.

Xena extended her palm and started to do something she hadn’t done in a while: fleshcraft. Well, at least a very limited form of it.

She started by giving her palm varicose veins, ensuring there was a concentration of them in the center. It made the flesh an angry and pulsing red. She then started to cut off the platelets to the area, making it incredibly thin. With a final act Xena started to strip the collagen and keratin from the skin covering the area.

It was a large, highly pressurized blood blister just waiting to pop like a bubble at the slightest agitation.

And unlike a normal human, Xena’s blood was rather aggressive in its chemical reactions.

Xena slapped the door right on the top frame, causing the blood to spray out over the entire door and immediately start smoking as it ate through the metal. The xenomorph blood treated the reinforced door as if it were styrofoam, melting pockmarks across it and turning the locking bolts into a likely carcinogenic gas.

Xena breathed in the fumes with a victorious smile, proud in her intelligence as her breaching strategy worked and didn’t blow up in her face. She even managed to avoid getting any of her blood on her outfit.

“You leave me no choice then.”

Coil’s voice spoke in a flat tone.

She barely heard his voice through the holes in the door.

“Travelers, we have invaders in the base trying to kill Nicole! Defend the base or she won’t get healing by Panacea!”

Xena’s eye twitched as the acid finally ate through enough of the door for her to see him. Coil stood there in his ridiculous villain costume.

“Fuck you, Coil,” she spat, voice heavy with irritation.

The metal continued to melt between them, revealing more of the interior office. Coil’s finger was still pressed on the intercom button.

Xena let out a long, tired sigh.

“Great. Just what I fucking needed."

A/N

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