B.R.T. 12.37 - Tonic/Chthonic

Eager to devour
It eats, but its hunger grows...
until all are gone.

***

Kanamu looked at his scanner, fiddled with the zero adjustment,
then looked down at the sad, silent figure, asleep in Stellite's
pink bed.  

"This won't hurt," said Kanamu, trying hard to soften his
gravelly drawl.  "Just a little scan...neural signals, circuit states..."

Maybe he was wrong.  Kanamu hoped so.  
A good surprise, for a change; that would be nice. 

No signal.  Kanamu moved the pickup coil around on her helmet,
watching the scanner readout. 

"Scoops did say you were talking-"

Without warning, a tremendous groan burst from his patient's throat!

Kanamu's scanner was torn from his hands and flung into the air, the 
cable whipping wildly, wrapping around Tsugaru's flailing arms as she
thrashed wildly, gurgling and convulsing--

"Primus! it's a seizure!"

---

It was horrible. It was everywhere. Tendrils of filthy slime, a vile 
mobile fungus wrapping around her, spreading and subdividing as it
flowed across her armor that was not like armor...

"Gggh...ggggghrrrgg!"

...she could feel its unclean touch, gelatinous strands
of cold, slimy corpse-flesh, cutting off her air, a dead weight
bearing her to the ground...

"Ggh - ground!"

"Gget...foot....free!"

SHROOOOOOOM!

The hissing green jet roared forth, spun her around.  With a repulsive
squelch, Tsugaru slammed into the sickly green ground, crushing the
writhing mass of wings and tentacles beneath her. She felt
a cracking pop, but rolled free,in one piece, clear of the foul thing.

"Stay back, you sick freak!"

Rolling hurt.  Around her back she reached, and felt jagged metal,
slippery with hydraulic fluid.  A piece of skirt armor had broken
off in the landing, and a fragment had gotten stuck in her back. 
The remaining piece was still stuck in the creature's twitching remains.

"Ugh," she groaned, looking at the dark, tarlike mass of protoplasm. 

"I need a shower."

"At least it's-"

Then she noticed it...a fiery glow, surrounding the lost armor
fragment.  It was dissolving into the creature.  The glow began to spread.

"N-nope...not...dead..."

Tentacles exuded from the black heap, reformed, and braided into
repulsive limbs...

"Definitely not dead."

...and then it stood up, a gruesome apparition in the 
shape of a powerful humanoid figure, with claws and talons of fleshy
tentacles, and two ropy, writhing feelers in lieu of a head. 

The armor was gone...consumed in a flickering fire that burned
in the creature's rubbery ribcage.

It was twice as big as before.

Then it spoke, a ghostly, wandering voice out of nowhere...

You.

"Yuki functing Oshima!"

You.  Good.

Twice as big as before, and with just one bite of armor...

"This sucks."

***