Tammy and Avi stand on either side of the main door, sharing their thoughts.

With Tammy’s psychic powers, he can see the flame of every soul in range. Theirs are the only souls outside the tower, and there are 27 inside, spread across the upper four floors. Avi sees them too, thanks to Tammy’s influence, and the black, twisted soul on the fifth floor obviously belongs to the gurant. Sociopathic, cruel, spiteful; gurant souls, to Tammy, feel more like cheap imitations of real human souls.

Avi looks over at her husband. He’s sweating a lot, and his eyes look heavy. “[I could just go in and kill everyone, if you’d rather wait out here.]”

“[No.]”

She silently purses her lips. “[So what’s the plan? Shouldn’t be too hard to take out the humans, but the toadman will be trickier.]”

Tammy rubs his eyes using only his left hand. “[Uh… everyone up there should be engineers handling the sensors and radios. They know we’re here, but they won’t be too tough. The gurant will be wearing power armor, so it’ll be a little trickier to take out.]”

“[I just said that.]”

“[…Yes, you did.]”

“[I think you should lie down.]”

“I think,” Tammy says, his breathing labored, “that you’ve covered for me enough on this little outing, and I need to at least pull my weight with a good plan.”

“[Well, of course! I’m your partner and, more importantly, your wife.]” Avi gives her sweetest smile. “[It’s my job to pick up the slack on your bad days, and verse vicea.]”

“[It’s vice versa.]”

“[Hmmm, no, I don’t think so. And you’ve been wrong a lot today, so I’ll trust my instincts.]”

Tammy pouts, but sees Avi trying to suppress a giggle and quickly drops it. He walks into the tower’s bottom floor. There shouldn’t be any traps, and he knows it’s unoccupied.

The bottom floor is a large room with an armory on the left, and a break section on the right. The armory features a few rows of metal lockers, covered by glass windows, that house dozens of weapons from shotguns to sniper rifles. The break section features chairs, couches, tables, and fridges. Tammy can tell the area is luxurious for the Gurant Empire, which speaks to how much the gurant values the job they’re doing. The soldiers, now dead, would rest in this area until it was time for them to take position on a guard tower, or to run out and man the many artillery guns.

Tammy’s tired eyes drift to the ceiling. There are 15 souls on the second floor, alert, watching the stairwell. “[What is that, six inches of space between our ceiling and their feet?]”

“[Looks like it,]” Avi crosses her arms.

“[Do you have acid?]”

“[Teehee,]” she flashes a toothy grin, “[of course I do. That’s my bread and butter!]”

“[Well…]” Tammy wipes his forehead of sweat. “[What’s the ceiling made of?]”

Avi looks up, then reaches her tail to tap the ceiling. “[Feels like concrete. Maybe some steel beams inside.]” She discharges a few drops of acid. The sticky green fluid chews up through the concrete, and when it’s had its fill, it turns into a brown sludge and falls to the floor with a harmless plop. After a few doses of this, Avi breaks into a compartment between the floors. Ventilation, pipes, thick electrical wires, crisscrossing steel support beams, the space is about four inches wide, with a two-inch floor and two-inch ceiling.

Tammy frowns, then moves his right arm, instantly suffering a burst of searing pain. Once it passes, he brings his left hand up so he can bite the tip of his thumb. “[Too thick for bullets to pass… there’s one staircase… If they run down to fight us you can kill them one by one, but charging into their firing squad will be rough… What are the walls made of?]”

Avi glances to the side and taps the wall. “[Some pretty thick metal.]”

“[…Okay. For now, start severing wires until the power goes out.]”

Avi complies, stabbing her needle into various wires and injecting more acid. The band of muscle that forms the center of her boney tail is insulated, so there’s no fear of electricity. Soon enough, she ruins a main powerline and the facility goes dark. Even the bright lights outside are cut. From the stairwell, they hear murmurs and gasps, but the guards turn on their flashlights and the light reflects down the wide, curved stairwell.

Tammy hooks his left arm. He can’t see in pure darkness, but bone-tails can. Once she sees his arm, she silently rushes over and wraps her arm around his, directing him outside the tower. “[Here’s the plan. We grab a few artillery shells from the yard, throw them inside, then rig them to blow.]” Once they’re outside, Tammy can use the light of the moon to see, but Avi holds onto him anyway. They head over to the ammunition containers. “[Since the tower has no windows, the explosion should be contained by the metal hull, and the floors should be weak enough that the explosion will rip through all five layers of concrete.]”

“[And kill everyone inside!]”

“[Exactly.]”

“[Except for the gurant, who’s wearing armor.]”

Tammy waits for Avi to pop open a metal crate, then she grabs three large artillery shells, one under both arms, the third coiled by her tail. She shows the third to Tammy. “[Cluster rounds… Yeah, these won’t penetrate power armor.]” Tammy grabs one and tucks it under his left arm.

“[So how do we kill it?]” Avi asks as she walks back to the tower, a gently sway in her tail as she enjoys problem solving with her partner.

“[Uh… fuck it, let’s just shove like seven crates in there and give the tower a dozen new basements.]”

“[Haha, great plan! Maybe the monster’ll get buried in rubble and suffocate!]” Walking side by side with Tammy, she playfully bumps him with her hip, though he’s so out of it that he ends up stumbling, falling, and landing on his bad shoulder. Avi purses her lips as she looks down at him, eyes bulging and jaw clenched to suppress his scream. “[S-sorry.]”

He simple nods. Avi extends her tail, and Tammy grabs it to be pulled up.

“[Though, about your plan. If the explosion from a few crates is big enough to dig that far into the ground, wouldn’t it also be a great enough explosion to rip through the walls of the tower? Then it would reach the rest of the containers and ignite those shells, yes?]”

Tammy thinks while they reenter the tower and set the three artillery shells down. “[…yes. Probably.]”

“[So, with such a blast, the entire listening post would be destroyed, which would at least rip apart the gaps in power armor.]”

“[That sounds correct. We’d have to be pretty far away before we ignite it.]” Tammy clicks his tongue, “[and I didn’t think of that. So yet again, I would have killed myself without you.]”

Despite the darkness, Tammy instinctively ‘sees’ her bright smile. “[Don’t worry, Tammy! I also would have killed myself if I didn’t have you!]” The end of her tail shakes, letting off a happy rattle.

“[That’s… not what I meant, but okay.]” Tammy puts out his arm, signaling Avi to grab his hand and lead him outside where he’d at least have some faint moon and star light to see. “[So we set the whole listening post to blow, kill the toadman, then-]”

Just as the two exit the tower, they notice the black soul stir.

The gurant has gotten up.

“[Of course it wouldn’t just sit there, waiting for us to do as we wanted!]” Tammy’s mind cries.

“[Do we have time to rig the artillery boxes?]”

“[Not if we want to escape the blast radius in time.]”

“[What about retreating to the mountains and finding another opportunity? We killed so many soldiers already.]”

“[No! We’re not running away! Besides, before we cut off the power, they probably sent out a transmission asking for help so…]” Tammy nibbles the tip of his thumb and paces around his wife in a circle. Then, the two of them notice the other souls on the move. The remaining soldiers are following their master.

Avi narrows her brow, “[you think four shells are enough to destroy the inside of the tower?]”

He thinks for a second, then pulls his thumb out of his mouth, “[definitely! Condensed in such a space, it should rip through all the floors and kill or wound all the humans. The we can deal with an isolated toadman.]”

Avi’s tail wraps around Tammy’s waist and spins him to face the perimeter wall, “[I’ll rig the shells, you get to cover!]”

Tammy nods and runs off, with Avi heading back inside to fiddle with the three cluster rounds. The gurant is getting closer, now on the third floor.

She kneels in front of a shell and spins it, so the warhead faces away from her.

Imperial cluster rounds are designed in such a way that shooting them with a high-caliber bullet can set them off, but her custom revolver is out of ammo. Glancing to the armory at the side, none of the stored guns or grenades are up to the challenge.

There are three components: The primer in the back which propels the shell through the artillery barrel, the internal spark chamber in the middle that detonates in the air and shatters the shell, then the cluster warheads in the tip that are spread over a wide area and explode upon landing. Due to how they’re created, the internal spark chamber needs to explode before the cluster warheads can detonate.

With clenched teeth and years of practice, Avi brings her tail forward and starts dripping acid onto the middle section. The gurant has reached the third-floor staircase.

One drop at a time, the green acid sizzles, steams, and soon turns brown so she can wipe it off and not damage the gloves of her body suit. With careful application of acid, the metal is eaten away over a space no wider than a dime. The gurant is above her on the second floor; she can feel the vibration of every stomp.

Avi cracks a smile as she finally sees a small tuft of exposed fiber, which insulates the internal spark chamber. “Yes..!” She says softly as she angles the shell towards the staircase, then runs towards the armory and rips a grenade out of a locker.

Running outside, she pulls the pin, tosses the grenade right next to the exposed fiber, then slams the metal door shut and runs to the side. She presses her back against the bastion wall and covers her ears.

The grenade’s combustion punches through the webbing and ignites the internal spark, causing the shell to explode and launching the warhead’s cluster pellets forward. As the gurant’s heavy boot lands on the top step of the back staircase, the cluster munitions explode. The concrete shatters beneath the gurant, and the combined heat, force, and shrapnel punctures the metal hull of the remaining three shells. Their internal sparks detonate, and are quickly followed by the rapid, overlapping pops of their cluster pellets.

Explosion after explosion rips inside the tower, shaking the entire outpost. The door is ripped off its hinges as a fireball escapes and the flames quickly rise up before dissipating in the cool night air.

Deep fissures are sent along the concrete yard outside the tower, and every floor inside the tower is blown to pieces. The shattered pieces of the concrete floor are sent upwards, the metal warps, and soon it comes crashing back down in four distinct layers. Furniture, computer equipment, and the messy remains of crushed soldiers. The immense heat also causes secondary detonations in the armory, from thousands of bullets and hundreds of grenades.

Tammy senses each soul in the tower fade, except the black soul.

It falls to the bottom floor and is only disoriented for a moment. Then it starts pushing through the rubble as if it was water.

Tammy and Avi look to the doorway and a large piece of warped metal—what used to be a large computer on the second floor—is wedged in the doorway. The gurant, clad in his black metal power armor, walks forward undeterred. The wedged metal is weaker than the door frame, so the computer bends and tears out of the gurant’s way, sheering in half as he steps out of the bastion.

His solid black armor has a flamethrower attached to his right gauntlet, and a gatling gun attached to the left. The cluster bombs left only a few scratches here and there, and most of the decorative cloth has burned away.

The gurant turns to see Avi by the wall of the tower. His voice impossibly deep, like a low growl, with his suit translating his words into the bone-tail language. “You’re… The Reaper.”

“Heehee!” Avi brightens up, her tail swishing wildly now that she doesn’t have to worry about the listening station. “Sure am. Though, I prefer when people call me ‘Toad Slayer’.” She cracks her knuckles and eyes her large, heavily armored prey with a toothy grin.

The gurant looks left, then right, then returns his gaze to Avi. “Where’s Dream Walker?”

“He’s around, don’t you worry. In fact, he’s-“ she shoots her hand out, pointing past the gurant, “right behind you!”

“My armor is equipped with a motion sensor.”

“Eh? Well, whatever.” Avi crouches down, ready for her muscles to activate like an explosion, “it’s not like I’ll need cheap tricks to add your corpse to my score.”

The gurant’s gatling gun attachment begins spinning, a high-pitched whine overpowering the crackles of fire inside the tower.

“It’s fortunate that I didn’t know you two were the attackers when I made that last transmission. They would send too many reinforcements, and I’d have to share the prestige of finally being the one to end you both.”

“[That’s a tactic,]” Tammy transmits from his hiding spot. “[It’s telling us about reinforcements to try and goad us into rushing to kill it, or escaping so we’re not caught between it and the reinforcements.]”

“[We’re not running, and I won’t be rushing. I’ll kill him at my own pace.]” Avi thinks with a confident smile.

“[Ahhh,]” Tammy sighs in a small mixture of pain from his shoulder, and pure admiration for his wife. “[I love you.]”

Avi’s body stiffens, her face blushing. “[Wh-what?]”

The gurant doesn’t know why Avi loses focus, but he senses it nevertheless. He raises his arm and spews flames from the attachment on his gauntlet. Burning, sticky oil is launched over 50 feet, Avi barely dives out of the way in time, though her tail is caught.

“AAH!” She cries, the oil clinging to her boney segments and coating the black length of muscle and tube that connects them. The bones are indestructible, and the muscle fibers are insulated, but it still hurts. A searing, white hot sensation over a dozen feet of tail.

“[Sorry!]” Tammy cries. “[I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’ll shut up now!]”

“N-no!” Avi winces from the pain but smiles through it all. “With the power of love, I shall claim both victory, and this fucker’s head!”

The gurant has no way of knowing for sure why she blurted that out, but he understands the threat. The Reaper has probably killed more named gurant than any other single person in history. Her words are serious and need to be treated as such.

His left gauntlet, housing the gatling gun which has been spinning all this time, rises.

But as it does, Tammy fully activates his psychic powers.

Avi, committed to killing the gurant, shuts off her brain and operates entirely on instinct. Every nerve in her body processes information, and her body automatically reacts. Tammy, meanwhile, hardens his soul and spreads it across the entire outpost, sending the information to Avi. Every bullet, drop of slick red blood, grain of dust, faint crack in the concrete floor, the minute temperature differences from square centimeter to square centimeter, and the faint gusts of wind. Everything reaches Avi’s mind, and her body reacts accordingly.

The gurant launches more oil that burns at several thousand degrees, but it might as well be in slow motion. The bone-tail moves so fast, and switches directions so rapidly, that the gurant can’t accurately lead the flames. By the time the oil reaches her position, she’s gone.

The bullets are a far graver threat since she can’t out-speed them, but the solution is simple. A devastatingly high caliber weapon with an anti-material tip to each bullet, moving faster than sound. Just one bullet could puncture a foot of steel or rip a man in half. But with how perceptive Avi is, she calculates the position of the gurant’s gauntlet, the trajectory of each bullet before it’s fired, and her body automatically dodges. The gatling guns of the gurant are, ironically, too precise. There’s no spread or randomness, every bullet flies in a perfectly straight line. While dodging a bullet after it’s been fired is completely impossible, it’s a simple task, with Tammy’s help, to see where the bullet will travel and move out of the way before it leaves the chamber. Thanks to Tammy’s soul, her body can sense the inside mechanisms of the gatling gun, predict the exact recoil of his arm, and therefore calculate the next dozen bullet trajectories. When she can’t dodge, Avi raises her arm to deflect bullets off her right hand. Her gloves, muscles, and skin are shredded from the force, but her skeleton, joints, and cartilage aren’t even scratched.

It’s a skill only possible because of Avi’s ability to turn off her brain, and Tammy’s unrivaled psychic talents.

With this, the fight lasts just 59 seconds.

It’s 13 seconds to circle around the gurant, slowly getting closer while dodging the flames and bullets.

8 seconds are spent dodging the gurant’s wild fists, the flames and bullets still shooting off as he tries to hit her.

1 second is dedicated to spotting a slight gap in the gurant’s power armor, near his elbow, and stabbing him with the needle of her tail.

The next second sees her dodge another wild swing while the needle is in his flesh, and she injects him with a powerful blood clot serum. Due to hardy gurant biology, destroying the brain is the most reliable way of ensuring a kill, and blot clots cause heart attacks and seizures.

Avi pulls out her needle, then dodges for the next 10 seconds as the serum slowly takes effect. Avi can ‘see’ it spread through his veins and induce rapid coagulation. From the injection point in his elbow all the way to his heart, the blood turns solid and the valve in his heart can’t close over the hardened blood.

Despite the catastrophic heart attack, the gurant keeps fighting. Everything thus far has taken 33 seconds. In the midst of a gigantic blood clot that’s still spreading through every artery, the gurant fights with no real change in speed or strength for 26 seconds, and Avi must keep dodging as any blow could knock her off her feet, which would invite the gurant to roast her alive, or shred her flesh with the gatling gun. At 54 seconds, the lack of oxygen finally slows his movements. At 59 seconds, the blood clot reaches his brain, and he falls over dead, his power armor cracking the concrete as oil burns around them.

“Whew,” Avi lets out a satisfied breath, standing over her conquered foe, wiping her sweaty brow with her bloody forearm. “That was satisfying. Tammy! He’s dead!” She pauses for a moment. “I mean ‘it’ is dead.” There’s no response. “Tammy?” She walks over, zigzagging around the oil puddles and pillaring flames.

In the crossfire, much of the outer walls were ripped apart, and even the nearest guard tower collapsed as the gatling gun tore through enough of the metal that it couldn’t support its weight anymore.

Stepping over a collapsed bit of wall, Avi looks around the concrete yard and spots Tammy curled up in a ball a dozen meters away.

She walks over and lays down in front of him. “Tammy?” She reaches out to poke his arm with a torn and bloody hand, and suddenly his body starts spasming, holding the spot she touched and rolling around in agony. He arches his back, and his mouth is open as if he’s screaming, but there’s no sound. “Uhh…” Avi brings her hand to her ear and snaps her fingers but hears nothing. “Oh, haha, right. That gun was going off the entire time, so my eardrums must have burst. Whoopsie! [Tammy? Can you hear me?]” Avi has stuck by Tammy for so long that she can initiate telepathy with him.

“[AAAAAAH!]” Tammy’s return thoughts are just screaming, which is what his vocal cords are doing as well.

“[Ah, must have been hard on you. Well, thanks for using your powers like that, though! It helped out a lot.]”

A soul is not bound to the physical world; it is purely ethereal. Time, gravity, touch, sounds, smells, the soul experiences none of this. Tammy, using his soul so thoroughly to assist Avi in her fight, got used to that sort of ‘senselessness’.

Therefore, once he returned to his body, Tammy was hit by all those sensations at once.

Gravity crushes him, a simple poke feels like a knife, the actual knife wound is the worst sort of searing pain imaginable. The hard concrete, Avi’s voice, the sharp ringing despite the earplugs, the stench of gunpowder, blood, and burning oil. It’s too much, the poor man is overwhelmed by reality. It’s like a soft cap on his psychic powers. The flashy stuff, like spreading his soul to analyze everything for even just a minute, leaves him debilitated for hours.

Avi hops up, grabs her husband in a princess carry, then steadily walks across the concrete field, up to the rocks.

“[I’ll go rig those crates to detonate. I had a great idea to blow them once those reinforcements arrive, haha! Think they’ll send a gurant, and we’ll add two kills to our total today?]”

“[That’s,]” Tammy forces his mind to focus. “[A great idea. Good job. Yes. I love you. Great plan.]”

Avi sets him down on the rocks and plants a quick kiss on his mouth. The taste and feel of her soft lips send Tammy spiraling in agony, but there’s nothing for it but to push through the pain.

30 minutes pass before the sensations settle to a manageable, though still incredibly uncomfortable, level.

45 minutes go by until Avi is finished rigging the listening post to explode.

After an hour of hiding in the rocks, three transport helicopters land in the listening post. Avi blows the shells, and the explosion blasts an instant wave of heat across the mountains, with the two feeling the shockwave in their teeth. Three gurant wearing power armor, 60 professional human soldiers, and nine pilots are vaporized. All that’s left is a large crater and warped metal.

Avi turns to her husband with a bright smile, and Tammy forces a weaker one.

She reaches into one of Tammy’s pouches and pulls out a folded wanted poster. One side has a picture of Avi, the Reaper, and the other side has an image of Tammy, the Dream Walker, wanted dead or alive, with the confirmed death of either rewarding the killer with rulership over an entire planet in the empire. She runs down and finds a good rock to pin it under. Eventually, the empire will come around to investigate what happened to the listening post, and the wanted poster will ensure they get credit.

With that, Avi returns and puts Tammy into a piggyback ride, heading off back to their camp.

“[That went well!]” She says cheerily.

“[It did, despite my repeated failures.]” His eyes are shut, his body is weak, and even his thoughts are dry. Though a total of four gurant deaths does a lot to boost his mood despite the thick layer of pain all over his body.

“[Oh pish-posh, you did great! You helped me when it mattered, and I helped you when it mattered! We can only rely on each other, after all.]”

Tammy thinks for a moment. “[Yeah. It’s just us.]” It hurts, but he presses the side of his face against Avi’s cheek. “[I love you, Avi.]”

The warmth from Tammy’s cheek spreads into her face and deep into her heart. It’s an unfair attack, for which Avi has no defense, and her tail flails side to side. It takes a lot of effort to avoid smacking the hell out of his back. “[N-now lets head back to camp, grab our stuff, and go join the rebellion!]” She removes her left hand from under Tammy’s thigh and sticks her fist in the air.

“[Wooo,]” he raises his fist too.

It’ll be three hours until Tammy’s sensations return to normal, though his sensitivity will spike if he uses his powers too much. Avi’s eardrums won’t heal for four days.

The tribe from earlier will eventually pass through the valley, though Tammy and Avi already forgot about them. While they have a vague attitude of wishing the tribe well, the gurant was the real goal.