Suisei's body gurgled and sputtered as I held him, his corrupted blood trickling down my arms. As familiar tickling sensations cropped up wherever his blood touched me, I realized my body was absorbing his biomass down to the very last drop.

Had I still been the Genneth Howle of a week ago, I would have probably just screamed for help as I fought in desperation to stem his unstoppable bleeding. However, this week's Genneth had far more tools at his disposal than the man he'd once been. That wasn't to say I wasn't panicking; I was totally panicking, but panicking responsibly.

I quickened my thoughts to slow time to a crawl, until the drops of Suisei's blood seemed to hover midair.

Before doing anything else, I replayed my memory of the past few seconds, just to make sure Suisei had actually said what I thought he'd said.

And, wouldn't you know it, he had:

"I will not let the Sword of the Angel fall into the wrong hands."

I took a leap of faith and assumed Suisei had said that because he knew where the Sword of the Angel was, but didn't currently have it on hand.

Break the Tablets… I thought.

This explained… a lot. All this time, he was protecting the Sword. That was why he was so insistent about keeping his secrets secret. In the battle between good and evil, good—if it knew what was good for it—would never let evil know the whereabouts of its most sacred and powerful artifacts. Considering everything I'd learned so far about the War in Paradise, it wouldn't have surprised me if the Sword had played a role in bringing Suisei from his version of our world to mine.

Through the slowed time, I looked Dr. Horosha in the eyes. I could almost see the light inside them begin to fade. His head was slumped back, and his short, night-black hair matted with stress and sweat.

Though I didn't agree with what he'd done, I understood it. At this point, Suisei's body mattered less than the information holed up inside it. He could have tried to hide, but that wouldn't have stopped him from dying, and once he did, any nearby wyrm could have absorbed his soul and learned his secrets, and with Verune's cultists on the premises, that was a risk he simply couldn't take.

Worse, what if there were some silver-eyed wyrms outside, trapped in the fungus' thrall? If one of them absorbed Suisei's soul… my God. I didn't want to know how much worse the fungus could have become if it got a hold of the Holy Sword? The very thought of it plum scared the belassedites out of me.

What to do? What to do?

Had this happened a couple of minutes ago, before I'd learned my family was still alive, I would have had few if any compunctions toward consuming Suisei's body right then and there. Even if I ceased to be recognizable as the human being I'd once been, with the help of my necktie, everyone who knew me or needed to know me wouldn't have had any problems recognizing me. Then we'd just link up and I'd tell them what they needed to know, or use wyrmsong, if they were on Team Transformee.

But now…

Darn it!

Once I was reunited with Pel and the kids, I would need to talk to them, and to do so without my spores killing them on the spot, but how would I do that once I had fully transformed?

What to do? What to do?

I thought of sampling only a little bit of Suisei's body—maybe only his head—just enough to get all of his memories, but then the leftovers would still be at risk of getting picked up by a passing wyrm.

I was about to think-ask Andalon that very question when she turned to me and spoke, unaffected by the slowed time.

After all, she was just a figment of my imagination.

Streaks of light shone in her hair.

Was she channeling &alon's power all on her own? Had my changes advanced that much?

At that moment, I realized I hadn't gotten much, if anything, in the way of those blue flames since eating Vernon. General Marteneiss' body was the biggest single meal I'd ever had, by far, and the progress in my transformation that that meal had triggered was, correspondingly, more drastic than anything before it. Since changes further connected me with &alon's greater self as they progressed, I should have been drowning in those blue flames that carried that new, incoming data to me, straight from Ampersandalon herself, but I wasn't.

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It made me worry that things were about to get pretty intense sometime soon.

Andalon gestured at Suisei. "Take Dr. Sushi's head," she said, glancing at him before looking me in the eyes. "The rest of the fungus won't have any more of his ghost in it. Then you won't change so much, Mr. Genneth, so you can still talk to your family."

I let time flow like normal. "If that's the case," I said, "then that's my only option. Here goes nothing, I guess," I added, with a mumble.

But, instead, I bit my lip. What can I say? Just because I'd resolved to do what I was about to do, that didn't mean I was looking forward to doing it—even if he did smell incredibly appetizing.

Letting go of Suisei, I surrounded him with a cocoon of plexus threads. Through the corner of my vision where I kept a patch of wyrmsight permanently active, I watched the blue and gold threads spring into being and they wrap around Dr. Horosha's body; outside of that patch, all I saw was a slight quivering in the air as the magic held Suisei's body aloft right beside me.

I reached out with a claw and pulled his PPE's visor off his head.

"I don't care how many parallel worlds there are," I grumbled, "there's just no reality where I'm sticking one of my colleagues into my mouth."

I wondered if Suisei had heard that, but I guessed I'd hear the answer from him soon enough.

By now, experience—both others' and my own—had taught me that biomass didn't need to get jammed down my throat in order for my body to absorb it. My increasingly fungal physiology could acquire nutrients simply by physical contact, much like the horrifying way Geoffrey's corpse had been incorporated into the fungal abomination that had also claimed Nina's body.

Focusing on the plan I had in mind, I turned to Andalon and asked her if she thought it would work.

"Just be fast," she said, with a nod. "Be super duper fast."

I looked Suisei in the eyes. "If this hurts, I'm sorry."

He didn't look back at me.

I levitated Suisei up against the wall with my psychokinesis and then, with a single finger, I stuck a claw into his mouth. Claw and finger combined passed down his throat like the world's worst intubation tube.

Queen and Beast, it was wet. And… slimy.

Right on cue, my fingers' scales began to tickle. Considering what was about to happen, it was probably the single most unsettling, sinister tickle I'd ever felt. The filaments came a moment later, hyphae and haustoria pushing their way out of my finger and hand and digging into Dr. Horosha's flesh, both inside and out. Even the parts of my three-fingered hand that weren't directly inside Suisei's mouth or throat sent their haustoria out across his face. I watched the black lightning the infection had grown beneath his skin twitch as it hooked up with my tendrils.

Then things got gross. Really, really gross.

Suisei's head… contracted, as if its contents were being slurped out through an unseen bendy straw. His skull and face collapsed on themselves like a crushed tin can, bones cracking and crunching. His eyes leaked their vitreous humors down his face as filaments erupted from his corneas. My body suckled from his flesh, pulling it into and up my arms in rivulets that flowed beneath my scales.

"There," Andalon said, "you got him! You got him!"

Wincing, I pressed my other hand against his chest and then—closing my eyes—used the claw I'd stuck down his throat to rip his head right off his neck. Sound of meat and tendons snapping and tearing as I pulled up with my left arm was downright sickening. With my eyes closed, I didn't see the dangling things that writhed against the underside of my arm, I just felt them, just as I felt them stick to me, igniting strips of paresthesias all across my arm as they began to merge with me. The tingles spread over my hand in gobs, like putty or clay. A tightness quickly set in after that.

Suisei's head—and whatever else I'd pulled up along with it—were melting into me.

By the time I opened my eyes, it looked like my hand was covered in a misshapen water flotation balloon. Thankfully, the lumps vanished quickly, disappearing into me as they crawled up my arm.

But Suisei's body. Angel…

I dismissed my levitation spell, letting the corpse fall to the floor.

The space between Dr. Horosha's shoulders looked like a pot whose plant had just been uprooted.

I dared to imagine how much of his spinal column I'd pulled out, and then, with a shudder, immediately regretted it.

I turned to Andalon. I noticed the light in her hair faded. More importantly, I realized I'd just committed a major oopsie-doopsie.

"Darn it!" I swore.

"Wha's a matter?" Andalon asked.

"The Self-Help Group!"

I was already unsure of whether or not the wyrms from the SHG even knew that Suisei wasn't a fellow transformee, and now, on top of that, I had to add the slight detail that their de-facto leader's headless corpse was now a half-eaten mess sprawled out on a hallway floor.

So, yeah, I was definitely going to have to explain that to everybody, but, right now, the Last Church's attacking forces kind of took precedence over that.

Reaching for my coat, I pulled my console out of my pocket, only to remember that I'd had Jonan buttoned up the pocket for me.

"Fudge!"

Not wanting to ruin the only convenient means of carrying my console that I had left, I slithered down the hallway to the console that I happened to know was mounted on the wall just around the corner. I woke the machine up with a swipe of the back of a finger over its screen, and then used some softened force thorns to initiate a videophone call with one of the consoles in the Self-Help Group's ward.

I started to speak from the instant the call went through.

"Dr. Horosha is dead, it's a long story. Right now, all that matters is that the hospital is under attack by Verune's cult. Get down to the garage, and release as many wyrms as you can along the way. We need all claws on deck, for this one!"

Ending the call, I slithered back around the corner and glanced at Suisei's corpse.

"What do I do now?" I asked Andalon. "Do I… do I just leave him there?"

But then I heard an explosion, and then turned and looked out a window and saw a group of Verune's transformees flying over the Pediatrics building, to join the battle.

"Fricassee me…" I muttered.

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