Twenty, from cavities along his arms, one hundred from cavities at his back. Thirty from points along his legs. One from his urethra, two from glands at either side of his mouth. Almost forty were crammed into his digestive system, and they wormed their way out through gaps and folds, making their way to openings in the stomach.

His entire body reformed and restructured, more gap than physical mass. Webbings of skin stretched to cover gaps here and there, but they were so thin the light could shine through them.

Swansong used her power as the first of his fist-sized children drew near. It was slow to initiate, slow to cut off, and a moment after stopping, barked out another brief blast that sent her off balance.

When she went to use her power again, it didn’t activate.

“You have to send your swarm after me because you’re too scared. You’re smaller and more pathetic than these bugs of yours, Nedley.”

Fluids within his chest and stomach churned. He could feel protein chains and calcium forming the basic infrastructure that would become full fledged children. They were stronger now. He had fed on the flesh from the Black Goat and from two of Valkyrie’s flock. By feeding he evolved, and by evolving, he improved his children.

She couldn’t catch all of them. Even if she had access to her full power, she might not have managed it. They crawled up the storage containers in the hallway of the loading dock, then leaped. She blasted those. They snuck low, zig-zagging across the ground. She caught those too.

But one scurried close to a storage container, masked by a lip of metal above it. It got close enough to reach out with pincers, snipping the back of Swansong’s heel, like wire cutters through butter.

She blasted it, right hand outstretched but shifted her weight to compensate for the recoil, and in the doing, she put her weight on the injured foot. Blood spurted, and she lost her balance, the ongoing use of her power throwing her back as she fell.

With sharp eyes, he could see how the lower half of her heel had slid left, the upper half sliding right, until they slid past one another.

She fell, and with pain and disorientation, she didn’t seem to immediately grasp which direction his children were coming from.

Capes from Valkyrie’s contingent joined the fray. One with needle spines he could fling, to spear ten of Spawner’s children with ten needles.

“You’re pathetic, Spawner,” Swansong taunted him. “I’ve talked to someone like you. Someone small, trying to pretend they are something more than they are, and doing a bad job of pretending. The harder they’d try, the more pathetic they would look. You’re embarrassing yourself and worse, you’re embarrassing me, because I consider myself related to you.”

“Related?” one of Valkyrie’s capes asked.

“Sure,” Swansong said. “Close enough to being related. Same person brought us into this world. Nedley? You need to be something more, if you’re not going to make the rest of us look bad.”