Despite the vast power that Blake felt coming from the Behemoth, he didn't need to expend any energy to defend himself.

The effect wasn't omnidirectional; Instead, it formed a cone, dozens of meters long, all feeding back into that furnace within the creature's chest. Space began to visibly warp around the edges of the cone as within gravity collapsed to a single point. He watched as constructs scrabbled against deck plating, claws and weapons scoring the metal in futile defiance. Some near the mouth of the cone managed to hold their ground, but the pull grew stronger the closer one was to the creature. For those further up the funnel, the gravitational gradient was too steep. They fell en masse into the furnace-bright opening.

Blake watched as polymer, metal, and scavenged flesh all disappeared into the violet light. Still, the pull continued. Twenty constructs. Thirty. Fifty. The creature consumed indiscriminately, and with each body, the light escaping through the cracks in its body grew brighter. When the jaws closed, they did so with the finality of a vault door.

The results of the feeding were immediate and visible. The creature's muscle mass increased, bulking up its back and shoulders to almost comical levels. Scales grew and expanded, flexing slightly away from the flesh, as if venting heat in the form of that misty violet light. Each of the eyes dotting the abdomen burned brighter, and even its horns pulsed with fresh power.

The Behemoth rolled its swollen shoulders and flexed its hands experimentally, knuckles cracking like stone.

Then it moved.

The first casual swipe of its arm took out half a dozen constructs. The other arm crushed four more—obliterated against the deck like crushing insects. There was no technique here. It had mass, momentum, and pure overwhelming force. Every impact released a pulse of fiery power. Violet power was bleeding from the cracks in those massive armored forearms, like its bones were made of concentrated hurt.

On two legs. Its gait was halting and awkward, but the amount of destruction that it left in its wake kept the image from being amusing. Blake watched it tear through the Puppeteer's forces like a lawnmower through dandelions.

"Well," he said quietly. "That's deeply, deeply unfair."

The Behemoth didn't pause to savor its empowerment. It turned, scanning the battlefield with those four predatory eyes, and Blake saw the moment it identified a threat worth addressing.

A construct twice the size of the standard husks lumbered into view. Hydraulic pistons drove legs made from I-beams. Its torso was a welded cage of rebar and polymer, and nestled in that framework sat a bio-mechanical turret. Flesh fused to steel at the joints. The barrel—some kind of reclaimed ship-cannon—tracked the Behemoth with servo-assisted precision.

The cannon fired. A lance of superheated plasma carved across the distance.

The creature's head snapped toward the threat. Its lipless maw opened, and violet light gathered in the back of its throat.

The discharge was immediate. A concentrated beam of energy, no thicker than Blake's forearm, punched through the air. The construct's torso erupted. Metal peeled back like foil. The bio-components flash-cooked, bursting in wet pops. What remained toppled backward, limbs twitching in mechanical death spasms.

Blake felt the heat bloom even through the viewport. His HUD flickered, and he saw Kitt's analysis overlay stutter back into partial function.

'That was at least a magnitude stronger than the feeding pull,' she said. 'But look—'

Scales along the creature's shoulders contracted slightly. The violet glow leaking through the cracks in its arms dimmed by a perceptible degree. Not much, but visible.

"Inefficient," Blake muttered.

Another construct emerged—this one a nightmare of fused insect carapace and industrial piping. Four limbs ending in spinning saw-blades. It skittered forward with unnatural speed, closing the distance.

The maw opened again. Another beam. The construct vaporized mid-leap, reduced to charred fragments and ash.

The dimming was more pronounced now. Scales drew tighter against flesh. Light bled slower through the cracks.

'He's burning through reserves fast,' Kitt observed. 'Powerful, but he's fighting like ammunition is unlimited.'

"Which it isn't." Blake tracked the third discharge—a trio of smaller constructs, each armed with jury-rigged flamethrowers. The beam carved through all three in a sweeping arc. Effective. Wasteful.

The creature's bulk had visibly diminished. Not dramatically, but enough that Blake could mark the difference. Swollen muscle mass across the shoulders had reduced. The horns pulsed with less intensity.

And the Puppeteer's forces had noticed.

The constructs stopped charging directly at the creature. Instead, they began to spread, circling wide around its flanks. Simple tactics. Textbook flanking maneuver. Nothing fancy.

But the Behemoth didn't adapt.

It tracked targets directly in front, firing short bursts from its maw to eliminate threats. Each discharge cost it. The glow faded further. Scales contracted more. Meanwhile, constructs poured around its sides, claws and blades raking at its legs, its lower back—anywhere it couldn't easily reach.

Dark ichor welled from fresh wounds. The creature bellowed, swinging its massive arms to crush the attackers, but for every three it destroyed, five more slipped past its guard.

'All brute force, no tactics,' Kitt said.

"Shame he's got enough brute force to make it work." Blake's tone was dry. "Mostly."

The constructs swarmed now. Dozens of them, climbing the Behemoth's legs, latching onto its torso. Blades stabbed into the gaps between scales. It thrashed, each movement crushing handfuls of attackers, but the momentum had shifted.

Its chest began to split.

The horizontal maw yawned open. Blake felt the pressure drop—sharper this time, more desperate. But instead of the focused cone from before, this spread omnidirectionally. A sphere of force expanding outward from the creature's center mass.

The temperature plummeted.

Blake leaned closer to the viewport, his right fist pressed flat against the glass. Cold bit through his glove—sharp, immediate. Frost raced across the surface in spreading fractal patterns, creeping toward his hand. His breath misted. The metal frame turned cold enough to sting. Condensation froze mid-formation on every surface—deck plating, support columns, the Behemoth's own scales.

Heat didn't fade. It was ripped from the environment, funneled into whatever mechanism drove the attack.

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The shockwave hit.

Constructs launched outward in every direction, tumbling like shrapnel. Deck plating buckled. Support columns groaned. The blast radius had to be fifty meters. Everything within that sphere was simply gone—vaporized or flung clear.

The Behemoth stood alone in a perfect circle of scorched metal. Frost sublimated instantly as superheated air rushed back to fill the void.

Then it inhaled.

The gravitational pull returned, but this time the chest remained open, drawing in debris. Shattered metal. Fragments of polymer. Shredded biomass. All of it funneled into that furnace-bright opening, and Blake watched the material begin to glow as it crossed the threshold.

'He's not converting it,' Kitt said, urgency creeping into her tone. 'He's heating it.'

The chest sealed. The furnace light blazed brighter, hotter, shifting from violet to white-blue. The creature's entire frame shuddered. Bulging. Straining.

Then its maw opened, and it exhaled.

A torrent of molten slag erupted from the chest. Superheated metal, liquefied polymer, and burning biomass—all of it compressed into a lance of incandescent fury that streaked across the battlefield toward the rear lines.

Toward the Puppeteer.

Blake's [Warden's Insight] tracked the trajectory. The blast would hit dead-center.

The Puppeteer moved.

Threads erupted from its body—dozens of them, hundreds, shimmering lines of silver-white energy that wove together in the air. They formed a dense lattice, layers upon layers of interlocking strands suspended between the creature and the incoming napalm.

The pattern clicked in Blake's mind. Anti-RPG netting. Cope cages on tanks. Same principle—scatter the concentrated payload before impact, turn penetration into dispersal.

The blast hit the net.

Impact. The threads caught the molten payload and scattered it—fragmenting the concentrated stream into a thousand burning projectiles. They sprayed outward, raining down across a hundred-meter radius.

But same as those tanks—meant to reduce, not stop.

Flames washed over the Puppeteer's position. The creature's chitinous plating blackened. Flesh sizzled where droplets of molten metal found purchase. One of its scythed limbs caught fire, the joint seizing as heat warped the biomechanical components.

The Puppeteer screamed.

Blake flinched. His right hand snapped up to cover his ear, palm pressed flat against the side of his head. The sound burrowed—a resonant, multitonal shriek that vibrated through the viewport and drove straight into his skull like a nail. His [Warden's Insight] had amplified every frequency, and now his inner ear throbbed with pressure that wouldn't equalize. He hissed through his teeth, tilting his head away from the source.

The scream cut off.

Blake lowered his hand slowly, testing. His ear rang, but the pain was fading.

The constructs surged forward again.

The Behemoth, depleted from the napalm attack, had nothing left for grand displays. Its glow was dim now. Scales hung loose. The bulk had diminished considerably.

And the Puppeteer's forces had learned.

They didn't charge. They swarmed. Coordinated. Three constructs would pin a leg while others climbed the torso. Blades found the gaps between scales with surgical precision. The creature thrashed, crushed attackers by the dozen, but it was losing ground.

Ichor poured from wounds. One of its eyes went dark, punctured by a jagged blade. Its left arm hung limp after a construct severed something critical in the shoulder joint. Still dangerous—each swing still pulped attackers—but it was drowning in bodies.

The glow in its chest flickered. Faded. The furnace was nearly empty.

Then the chest split open once more.

The pull was weaker this time—barely a fraction of its initial strength—but it was targeted. The creature grabbed the nearest constructs with both massive hands, crushing them as it fed them directly into the maw. Others were drawn in by the gravitational effect, tumbling into the furnace despite their desperate attempts to anchor themselves.

The feeding was frantic. Desperate. Constructs still clung to its back, still stabbed and tore, but it didn't stop. It fed through the assault, converting its attackers into fuel even as they wounded it.

The jaws closed.

The transformation was immediate. Muscle swelled. Scales expanded and locked back into place. The glow returned, violet light bleeding through renewed cracks. Even the damaged eye regenerated, reforming with sickening wet sounds.

Now empowered, the Behemoth moved.

It tore free of the remaining swarm with savage efficiency. Each swing of its renewed arms sent constructs flying. It carved a path through the enemy forces, back toward the Hunger-spawn lines, leaving a trail of shattered bodies in its wake.

When it crossed back into friendly territory, the lesser spawn parted around it. The creature collapsed against a support column, chest heaving.

And then it began to heal.

Wounds closed. Not instantly, but fast enough that Blake could watch the process. Scales knitted back together. Ichor stopped flowing. The creature deliberately burned through its reserves, trading stored energy for accelerated recovery.

Within moments, it stood strong again, if not whole. Blake estimated that it would strike again within the next few minutes.

'Blake.' Kitt's voice sharpened. 'Look at the Puppeteer.'

Blake shifted his focus, narrowing [Warden's Insight] toward the rear of the battlefield where the burned creature worked its maw with renewed purpose.

Blake zoomed in. In the rear, new constructs were already rising. Patchwork horrors of Hunger biomass and Puppeteer tech. Threads stitched them together in a frenzy of motion. The hands of the new units split open, forming mouths filled with sharpened metal in place of teeth.

And most dangerously, just like the Acephalon, sickly light began to glow from those gaps.

"How long did that take?" Blake asked.

'Roughly three minutes since amputation.'

Blake closed his eyes and raised his head towards the ceiling, slowly working his neck in a circle to loosen up some of the tension that had crept in. Three minutes to reverse-engineer and weaponize another spawn's feeding mechanism—seemingly negligible time required to graft it onto disposable constructs.

"The Behemoth's a monster," Blake said quietly. "But that thing—"

'Is building an army,' Kitt finished. 'And every piece it steals makes the next generation stronger.'

"Yeah. It makes sense that it was the first spawn to go rogue. The others have potential, but they don't feel like they're quite done yet." Blake pulled back from the viewport, cutting all but a trickle of mana to [Warden's Insight]. The world dimmed as the ability faded back to its most passive level.

"You know what's awful?" he asked.

'That the most annoying person you know might have said something you agree with?'

"Yeah. I hate to think that Aureon had a point, but looking at what these things are capable of..." Blake trailed off, turning toward the cart. "Glassing the crater doesn't sound quite as insane as it did an hour ago."

'We stop the Outsider, we stop all of this,' Kitt said. Her tone had shifted—firm, resolute. 'No more spawn. No more adaptation. Just Caprea and a bunch of inert biomass we can purge at our leisure.'

"That's the plan." Blake crossed the observation deck, boots crunching on frost-damaged flooring. The cart sat where they'd left it, humming patiently. He climbed in, settling into the seat.

The viewport behind them still showed the battlefield—three impossible horrors locked in their evolutionary arms race, tearing each other apart while building themselves back stronger.

Blake didn't look back.

He sat back down and let Caprea steer the cart towards the correct corridor. The one that would bring them to the rift. To the Outsider's anchor and whatever final nightmare waited at the heart of Caprea's crash.

There was work to do.

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