The thing turned its head, and Ayla finally saw it.

A bat.

That was the first word her mind reached for. It was not entirely accurate.

The body was the size of a man and stood on its hind legs the way a man stood, with the weight pitched forward over the toes.

The skull was elongated and pointed, the snout split into two ridged halves like the leaves of a closed book.

The eyes were small and wet and red, and there were six of them, set in two columns on either side of the snout.

The wings were what mattered.

Eight of them.

They unfolded slowly, in pairs, from joints that had no business existing on a body that small.

The first pair came from the shoulders. The second pair came from the ribs.

The third pair came from the hips. The fourth pair came from the spine itself, lower down, near the base.

Each wing was longer than the body, leathery and scarred, the membrane veined with something that was not quite blood and not quite light.

The wings spread wide. The chamber’s red glow caught the membranes, and the membranes glowed back.

"Move," Kenji said.

He moved as he said it. His sword came up. His feet found purchase on the wet tissue floor.

Ayla had already moved.

She stepped into the shadow of the lattice of cords above them and emerged behind the bat’s right shoulder.

Her hand was already against the back of its neck before the bat finished registering that she was no longer in front of it.

Bloodnet pulsed into its skull.

Nothing happened.

The bat turned. The motion was almost lazy. Its first pair of wings folded forward and slammed into Ayla with the force of a huge boulder hitting her all at once.

She went sideways through the air for ten meters and hit the lattice of cords with her back.

The cords gave slightly, then bounced her forward, and she landed on her feet on the tissue floor with her hair in her face.

She blinked.

Bloodnet had not worked. The bat had no blood she could find. Or it had blood and the blood was not where blood should be.

"Kenji," she called. "Its blood is not where I can reach it."

"It is in the wings."

She looked at the wings again. The veins glowed faintly. The glow pulsed.

She had assumed the glow was light. The light was the blood. The bat’s circulatory system ran through its wings and only through its wings.

"Acid," Kenji called. "Burn the wings."

He was already running at it.

Kenji moved like every loop he had ever lived had been training for this exact second.

His blade caught the bat’s lowest pair of wings at the joint where they met the spine and cut clean through the membrane.

The bat shrieked.

Kenji slid under the second pair of wings as they came down to crush him. He came up on the bat’s other side and cut the third pair.

The membranes parted.

The glowing veins inside them spilled their light onto the floor, and the light hissed against the tissue and ate small holes into it before it dimmed.

The bat dropped to one knee. Half its wings were severed.

Then it laughed.

The laugh was not a bat sound either. It came out of the split snout in three layered tones, none of them in agreement with the others.

The cut wings began to grow back.

Ayla saw the regrowth and felt her core go cold.

"Faster, Kenji."

She moved. Acid Synthesis bloomed across both her hands. She vaulted the lattice of cords, landed on the bat’s back between the second and third pair of wings, and pressed both palms flat against the spine.

The bat screamed and bucked. Its remaining wings beat the air. The wind threw Kenji backward across the chamber.

Acid ate downward through the bat’s vertebrae.

The bat’s wings beat once. Twice. The third beat lifted both Ayla and the bat off the floor and toward the ceiling.

The lattice of grey-white cords stretched above them, and Ayla was carried up among the cords while the brain of the host hung directly above her now, vast and pale and pulsing.

She let go of the spine.

She fell.

The fall was thirty meters. She landed on her feet hard enough to crater the tissue floor under her, knees absorbing the shock, and rolled forward to her hands.

The bat hovered above the lattice. Its severed wings had already grown back. All eight wings spread wide.

The glowing veins inside them brightened. The bat opened its split snout and breathed in.

The chamber pressure changed.

Air rushed toward the bat from every direction. Ayla felt the wind pull at her clothes.

Kenji, on the far side of the chamber, slid forward across the floor.

"It is going to exhale," Kenji shouted. "Get behind something."

Ayla had no time. The bat exhaled.

A cone of red light shot out of the snout. The light was not light. The light was every drop of blood the bat had pumped through its wings condensed into a single forward beam.

The beam cut a trench through the tissue floor where Ayla had been standing a half-second earlier.

She was no longer standing there.

She was standing in the bat’s shadow.

Shadow Stride had brought her up under the creature while it exhaled.

She was directly beneath the open snout, at the base of its throat, and the bat could not bend its head down far enough to see her.

She placed both palms against the soft skin of its underbelly.

Acid bloomed.

She did not stop.

The bat had four pairs of wings and a regenerative system rooted in those wings, but the underbelly was the part of it that had no defense.

The skin parted under her acid like wet paper. The flesh beneath came apart.

She pushed her hands through the opening and reached into the chest cavity until her fingers found something soft and wet and pulsing.

She had been looking for the heart. The heart was not there. There was no heart.

There was a small, dense organ shaped like a closed eye, set inside the chest cavity where the heart should have been.

She closed her fingers around it.

She tore the organ out by hand.

The bat went silent.

All eight wings stopped beating at once. The body dropped like a sack. It hit the tissue floor with a wet, final thud.

Ayla landed beside it, her arms red to the elbows, the closed-eye organ still throbbing weakly in her fist.

The chamber went quiet.

Kenji approached slowly across the floor, his sword still raised. He stopped two paces away.

"Is it dead?"

"It is dead."

She held up the organ.

"Its heart was not where its heart should be."

"How did you know?"

"I guessed."

Kenji did not know what to say to that.

[You have slain an Eight-Winged Bat.]

[Biomass consumed: Eight-Winged Bat.]

[Racial form acquired.]

[Trait acquired: Eight-wing transformation (B)]

Ayla lowered the organ and looked up at the brain of the host.

It hung above them on its lattice of cords. Pale. Folded.

Pulsing in the slow, dreaming rhythm of a thing that had been asleep for a thousand years and did not yet know that the predator who had been eating it was dead.

"Kenji."

"Yes."

"Stay back."

She took one step toward the brain.

Then another.

She placed her hand against the lowest curve of the brain.

Tendrils bloomed from her palm.

Hundreds. Thousands. The blue threads slid into the pale tissue without resistance, the way water slides into sand.

Ayla closed her eyes.

She began to feed.

Until she heard an old ethereal male voice, "Child, you have finally arrived."