Cauterizing flesh

A part of someone's body, still dripping blood. It might have been a foot.

The foot became more, expanding, branching out, swelling, with flesh ballooning out like an explosion had gone off within it, but then tearing, revealing red meat instead of the smoke and fire residual to an actual explosion.

I focused the beam at center mass, tried to cut it away from the spikes that impaled it.

Arms reached out blindly from the mass, and one of the hands found the toppled black spikes. Again, they seemed to multiply the growth rate.

***

"Don't, please," I said the words through grit teeth, and I worried I was drowned out by the whine of the machine and the sound of tens of thousands of pounds of meat and blood pouring out of the point where the lasers were drilling into the expanding blob of flesh.

With the golden light illuminating one side of Crystal's face, and the red light from her hand shining through her hair as the wind stirred it, I saw her looking at me, studying me in the second or two she took away from aiming.

***

Until the toppling construction knocked a few of the pins loose.

Others took the cue, and began knocking out the needles that were feeding into the tumorous lump. A few strikers were right under it, running through a waterfall of gore that flowed from our ongoing attacks, to take the pillars out at their base.

The creation stopped growing and started dying.

I turned my laser toward Ophion. Again, I shot that chewed-gum tumor of a head and chest, the laser cauterizing as it cut.

He's Fortuna's, I thought. He's connected to her, he might as well be an extension of her like my arm is an extension of me.

- Infrared 19.3