Cracks split the ceiling and shot across the floor. Entire walls shifted dropping into dips formed from collapsed rock.
Nox raised his voice until the glowing strands binding the smoked glass together flashed white. The rise and fall of sound caught the light, forcing it to pulse with the same rhythm. Nox flexed his throat, and a second tone joined the first sending deeper vibrations through the stone bunker. The new tone meshed with the woven particles in the sheet of smoked glass. It shimmied, resonating back Nox’s keen.
Hair thin fractures crawled from the edges, racing across the surface, spreading until breaking points marked the woven strands within the glass.
Nox’s cry died off, leaving behind the tick of spreading cracks.
He burst through the barrier blowing smoked glass across the room. Fragments cast a rainbow of hues before hitting the floor. Tiny diamonds once capable of containing the impossible.
Nox blurred through the room, splitting the door into the hall, shearing slabs of concrete in his exit. Men filling the hall raised their weapons. Rapid gunfire lit up the corridor. Their shouts static. Their aggression an inconvenience. Bullets struck Nox, and the Anubis drank up the mass, channeling it into the raging waters of energy where they disintegrated to nothing. He lunged, and silence snapped into place, leaving fire hovering at the tips of rifle muzzles, freezing hearts mid-beat, turning the advancing men into flesh statues. Nox opened his hands, extending his claws as he bulldozed through the group, following the trails of particles left by Dekker.
The suspended millisecond resumed, and the screams of dying men followed Nox around the corner. Engines rumbled to life, shouts came from beyond another steel door. The energy pulsing from the space around Nox pushed aside molecules, and the metal and concrete wall parted, riding the eddies, power freezing again outside its reach. A blast of arctic air swept in a burst of white. The snow liquified then drifted away as fog before reaching Nox’s fur.
He emerged from the bunker. More men with guns unleashed a barrage of bullets. Nox ignored them and searched the interlacing paths of particles left by living things or objects. Matter limited in ways unknown to the Anubis. And now that it had slipped through the folds of reality tapping raw energy, it never would.
A flash of black flickered in Nox’s periphery. The only warning he had before the horde of Anubis plowed into him. He rolled, coming up on his feet, a creature locked on every limb. The heat billowing from Nox swelled, coiling around the other Anubis sinking into their bodies. In a wash of darkness, the energy holding them together shredded. Nox pulled back on the power, towing the remaining shadows into his core.
His arms thickened, his claws elongated. The already massive head on his shoulders lengthened, sprouting another row of teeth.
Nox’s field of vision curved into a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view. More Anubis topped the hill behind him, at his right and his left. None of them carried the pattern of particles marking Dekker.
Nox found the trail he wanted mixed in the clutter of particles weaving through the spaces between a group of military-type trucks. The dub-dub of rotary blades beat the air beyond the vehicles. Nox blinked and his sight shifted, turning all mass into a wave of transparent light. Dekker’s path rushed the helicopter warming up less than a mile away. A minuscule distance to something that wasn’t held by physics.
Nox leaped. The swell of Dekker’s army rose up, knocking him from the air. Teeth tore into Nox’s flesh, ripping away mouthfuls of hair and muscle. Clawed hands sank into his bones.
The Anubis within Nox threw out threads of black, piercing the creatures trying to tear him apart. They vanished one by one, every new thread making contact erased them from existence. The horde thinned, and the remaining Anubis backed away. More joined the ranks until an ocean of creatures boxed him in.
They surged in on all sides. Nox charged, sliding between the milliseconds into where space and time spread in an endless blanket connecting the multiverse. He followed the plain; each step took him forward another second in time until he reached the helicopter hovering inches off the ground.
He extended his claws, parting the connected molecules of the hull in a perfect line creating two solitary sides that had never been joined.
The paused in time broke, and sound returned on the back of a pain filled scream. Blood sprayed from severed limbs of the pilot, speckling the ground in crimson. Another man tumbled from the split copter, the two halves of his body twitching in the snow.
The helicopter’s rotor blade lifted the upper half promptly, spinning it into the ground, tossing up wads of snow and earth. Shards of metal became projectiles, and the contents of the helicopter scattered across the ground.
Survivors fled in the wake of approaching violence.
Dekker pulled himself from the pile of debris. His form twisted, black burst from his flesh, and his bones popped, the change shredding his clothing.
Dekker was larger than any of the other Anubis Nox had faced. The arch in his back rising far over the head of the average man. He snarled, but his display didn’t match the fear in his eyes.
Good. He needed to be afraid. He needed to be terrified.
He needed to know the truth.
Death was the doorway.
And the dead were the key.
The horde of smaller Anubis flowed around the vehicles on the hill behind Nox, heading his way.
He charged and Dekker met him midleap. Two beings made of different energy forcing contact, perverting physics in a quantum explosion. Snow blew up from under them, the rocky ground shattered, and the aftershocks shoved back the advancing Anubis. Nox locked his jaws onto Dekker’s throat. He flailed, hacking away at Nox’s chest, but the wounds closed before they were barely opened.
Nox slung his head snapping Dekker’s neck slamming his body against the ground. Once the other creature was under Nox, he swiped his claws in opposite directions. Dekker’s scream severed. Castoff of ichor and blood followed the tatters of his body spreading in opposite directions. Soiling the pristine white.
Nox turned on the horde less than a hundred feet away. They’d pulled to a stop, eyes on what was left of Dekker. A battle too easily won, left the Anubis pulsing with rage.
Nox threw back his head and howled. The glass of the vehicles shattered, metal of the copter groaned, the rock underfoot cracked, splitting into long jagged lines. Sound ricocheted off the terrain flowing back onto the horde colliding with Nox’s keen. One after the other dropped to the ground screaming. Their molecular bonds between the Anubis and human tissue split, forcing it to purge leaving behind human bodies.