Kaia the Argent Wing

The street was fucked. Like, the actual street. The asphalt of the road was a spider's web of cracks, with some sections having been lifted half a foot above the rest. Further down the street, a water main was pissing water up almost ten feet into the air. The rainbow effect it was creating reminded me of my current gender predicament. Slay, queen?

Anyway.

The houses up and down the street looked quite worse for wear, but surprisingly only a few had whole collapsed walls. It honestly looked like a giant had gone down the street, gently pulling the houses' foundations every which way. There were massive cracks up and down almost every wall where the weakest section of each had given way when the stress of the shifting ground grew too much.

A few people were cautiously tiptoeing out of their houses, some with guns in hand. The closest was still thirty feet away, so I had time to rush away from my house and pretend I was walking down the road. Didn’t want people to see me coming from my house and connect the dots.

Making a decision, I made sure my weird new ears were hidden in my long hair and jogged up to a woman with two teens who were staring around in shock. It was the start of summer break, so there were going to be a lot of kids home.

“Are you okay?” I asked as I reached them.

The mother’s eyes swung around to stare at me like a frightened cat seeing something approaching. “Yes. Why do you have that weapon?”

Oops. I guess a spear was probably pretty intimidating to a random suburban mum.

The girl of the two teens had different priorities. “Holy shit, you’re tall.”

“Personal defence,” I explained quickly, and maybe I was a little flustered at what the teen said… because yeah, my new form was at least six and a half feet tall now. “The spear is for personal defence, I mean, I don’t know why I’m so tall. Uh… do you need—”

Anything I was going to say was cut off when a cacophony of gunshots split the eerie post-earthquake silence. Oh crap, those were close.

“Where are the emergency services?” Asked the girl, who was maybe fifteen years old.

Huh. She was right. There were no sirens. In fact, there were no car sounds at all. That was probably why the silence felt so creepy, we were so used to hearing cars in the distance that their absence made us uneasy.

“No cars at all,” I said, somehow finding it within myself to worry even more. The roads were broken here, but they couldn’t all be ruined, could they? Looking to the mother, I said, “We should gather everyone we can and form a group, go somewhere safe.”

“Safe from what?” the kid asked, scared. “What’s happening?”

“Um, did any of you get the… fuzzy emotion things?” I asked, completely butchering an attempt to be discreet about the system. If I was the only one that had it, that changed things.

The two teens didn’t say anything, they just looked confused, but the mother’s stare turned bug-eyed.

I met her gaze with a reassuring smile. At least, I hoped it was reassuring. “Did it ask you to choose?”

“Yes,” she said softly, as if unable to believe that the strange thoughts in her head weren’t just due to shock from the earthquake.

“I’m guessing you didn’t get any… fighting choices?”

She nodded once, and I sighed. Okay, it stands to reason that a housewife wouldn’t get anything combat related either. I wonder how many people did get something to do with fighting.

“Mum,” the second teen said suddenly. He’d been staring at his phone for a long time now, fiddling with the buttons on the side. “My phone isn’t working. Sometimes it starts, but then it glitches and dies again.”

“Not now, Jackson,” she shushed him.

Huh. I was still wearing my pants from before I… changed. My phone should be— there it was. I clicked the lock screen button, but nothing happened. Trying again, this time I held the power button to turn it on. The screen flickered, and for a brief second I saw the initial logo, but then it died again. Crud.

“That’s weird. Mine’s not working either, dude,” I told the kid. There was probably a lot of stuff not working, if the same thing was happening to two stranger’s phones. I was about to ask about cars and anything else electronic, when the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

Quickly glancing around, movement caught my eye. There was something between two houses on the other side of the road. My stomach dropped. I was going to play the hero. There was nobody else who could do it, and whatever was between those houses was one, not human, and two, as big as one.

“Find others,” I said to the mother, keeping my eyes on the other side of the road. “Find other people, stick together, and see if you can’t get somewhere with nice, thick, unbroken walls.”

No sooner had I urged them to leave when something leapt out of a scraggly suburban hedge, heading straight for me. Fuck, but it was fast.

Lifting my makeshift spear, I held my ground, despite every single neuron in my brain screaming that I run. Grey, white, and black speckled fur blurred while shining rust-coloured teeth flashed. Holy fuck, it was a squirrel the size of a medium sized dog!

No, not just a squirrel. Its teeth weren't just rust coloured, they were literally jagged pieces of rusted iron. The same rusted iron covered important sections of its body like plate armour, except that this armour was growing directly out of irritated pink skin.

God— or, gods, rather, but the screech it made while it tried to gut me with those tetanus chompers… nightmare fuel.

I jumped backwards out of the way, surprised at how fast I was, both mentally and physically. It wasn’t like I was the flash or anything, but it was a noticeable bump over my normal body. Teeth flashed through where I’d been, and I got a good blast of rancid rodent breath. Gross!

I’m not sure how I began to thrust my spear at the squirrel, it wasn’t a conscious decision, but the next second the point skittered off the squirrel’s armoured shoulder. The motion carried it further, where it lodged in its thigh.

The squirrel squealed in pain and leapt away from me. The spear slid out with a weird sucking sound, and I took the momentary reprieve to gather myself again. I was doing this, I was fighting a giant rust-flavoured squirrel. Think of it like a video game, Kai, it’s just that. You’re level one, you need to protect some people from this low level mob. Just… stab it.

My foe and I seemed to have the same idea at the same time, and my spear punched through its open maw as it tried to bite down on it. I missed anything immediately important to the squirrel, but I think anyone would hate swallowing a random kitchen knife. The squirrel definitely hated it, and it bit down and thrashed wildly, trying to dislodge my weapon. That was a mistake, because the old broom handle haft broke, leaving me with a stick and it with a few feet of spear down its throat.

Blood sprayed everywhere while it writhed around on the pavement, and I had no idea what to do. Honestly, I really didn’t want to get close to it, but… what if it got the spear loose and it wasn’t too wounded to keep fighting? I needed something to kill it with. Uh… the stick in my hand would probably do next to nothing to it.

That was when I remembered the stones that lined a rock garden in my neighbour’s front yard. Turning, I dashed for the sidewalk, hopped up, and then bent to lift one of the rocks. While I was moving, I glanced around, checking to see if the family had made it to safety. Their front door was swinging in the wind, and the girl was watching me through a crack. Distantly I heard the mother shout, and the peeking face disappeared. Phew, now I just needed to finish this beastie.

The stones were all white limestone and about a foot in diameter. Time to test how much strength this bunny girl form had!

For the first time ever, I actually made use of some skills I learned in the compulsory physical education classes. I hefted the stone like a shot putter and took careful aim. The squirrel was now pawing uselessly at its maw, oblivious to my plans.

Yeet!

The first stone crunched onto the broken pavement far beyond the monster and rolled to a stop. Oh. Damn! I was like, legit strong!

Okay, take two! Yeet!

This one sailed true and came down on a forepaw, cracking it and throwing the squirrel onto its side, where it screamed in pain again. Pity for this obviously mutated creature tugging at my heartstrings, I rushed over and hefted the stone again.

“Sorry buddy, you got fucked by fate, I guess,” I told it, and dropped the stone onto its pain-glazed eye. Crunch. The squirrel went still.

Ugh. That sucked. Poor critter didn’t even realise what was happening, it just knew that it was in pain and everything about its body was different. No wonder it attacked the first moving thing it saw.

Still… my spear was broken already, and the squirrel had chunks of it that were made of metal. The teeth especially. Ah, screw it. My life was about to become a twisted facsimile of a video game, may as well embrace it and begin the looting process.

Trying not to gag, I bent to one knee and carefully reached into its maw. When I found what was left of the forward section of my spear, I pulled it free and inspected the blade. The knife was actually mostly fine. I could still use it… except that the handle was still a little long. The metal teeth of the squirrel would fix that, though.

Using its jaws as a grisly tool, I chopped the haft of the spear down until it was just the duct tape wrapped section again. Then, I took the knife and looked at the monstrous squirrel. Those teeth were really sharp. I think the core was actual iron, despite the exterior being rusted to hell and back. They’d suck for another spear, but I could make, like, an axe or something.

Cutting the teeth out of the squirrel was… fucking gross. Flesh makes the most awful sounds while you’re slicing it up. At the end of my efforts, though, I had two teeth large enough to be axe heads, and two that might make good tools of some type.

“First mob looted,” I muttered to myself, carefully ignoring that I was leaving metal on the bone, so to speak. The armoured parts would just be too grisly to extract for me right now, and I should probably run back home to put another weapon together. Time was a resource that too many people were running out of, and the more I spent fucking around, the more people would die.