Kira never hesitated. She dove straight toward them while letting the Soft Blade yank up the bulkhead in front of her, sending black needles jabbing toward the guns, and throwing a thousand different threads through the air—each one seeking flesh.

The mounted weapons exploded in a roll of deafening thunder. The room seemed to grow quiet around Kira as the xeno dulled the sound. A dozen or more projectiles slammed into her, some of them breaking or puncturing parts of the suit, with accompanying lashes of not-pain.

It was a valiant effort on the part of the defending Jellies. But Kira had learned too much, and she had grown too confident. Their efforts were nowhere near enough to stop her. A half second later, she felt the tips of the needles tickle the mounted guns, and then she was stabbing through them, destroying the machinery.

The muscles, bones, and carapaces of the Jellies posed no more of a challenge. For a handful of frenzied seconds, she felt their flesh—felt her blades piercing their insides, soft and giving and quivering with trauma. It was intimate and obscene, and although it sickened her, she never stopped, never slowed.

Kira withdrew the Soft Blade then. The area before the circular door was a cloud of misted ichor and mangled bodies: a massacre all her own doing.

A sense of uncleanliness filled her. Shame too, and a quick, sharp yearning for forgiveness. Kira had never been religious, but she felt as if she had sinned, same as when she’d inadvertently created the Maw.

What else was she supposed to do, though? Allow the graspers to kill her?

She didn’t have time to think about it. Propelling herself forward, she grasped the door with tendrils extended in every direction. Then, with a shout and a heave, she tore apart the massive structure and threw the parts aside so they crashed into walls and dented bulkheads.

14.

Pungent nearscent assaulted Kira, stronger than any she’d smelled before. She gagged and blinked, eyes watering behind the suit’s mask.

Before her was a huge, spherical room. An island of crusted rock rose from what would have been the floor when the Battered Hierophant was under thrust. Surrounding the island—enveloping it, encasing it, subsuming it—was a vast orb of water, midnight blue and flexing like a great, mirrored soap bubble. And there, in the center of the orb, mounted atop the crusted island, was the great and mighty Ctein.

The creature looked like a nightmare, in both senses of the word. A tangle of tentacles—each mottled grey and red—sprouted from a heavy, corpulent body studded with random growths of orange carapace. Hundreds, no … thousands of blue-rimmed eyes lay within the upper half of Ctein’s folded flesh, and they rolled toward her with a collective glare powerful enough to make Kira quail.

Great and mighty indeed, Ctein was enormous. Bigger than a house. Bigger than a blue whale. Bigger even than the Wallfish, and more massive too, as it was solid through and through. The size of the monster was difficult for Kira to comprehend. She’d never seen a creature so huge except in movies or games. It was far larger than she remembered from her dreams, the result, no doubt, of Ctein’s ceaseless gluttony through the centuries since.