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𝔽𝕆ℝ𝔼𝕊𝕋 𝕆𝔽 𝔻ℝ𝔼𝔸𝔻
ᴡʜʏ ɴᴏᴛ ᴘᴜɴᴄʜ ᴀ ɢᴏᴅ?
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𝔽𝕆ℝ𝔼𝕊𝕋 𝕆𝔽 𝔻ℝ𝔼𝔸𝔻
ᴡʜʏ ɴᴏᴛ ᴘᴜɴᴄʜ ᴀ ɢᴏᴅ?
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The locals wouldn’t cross the line. Not even to help her prep when it was their own fucking kids disappearing. They stood back with their heads down and their hands wrapped around worn charms, whispering quiet nothings that probably used to be prayers before they lost their teeth. The old man with the burn-scored jaw just spit into the dirt when she asked. The younger one, a girl missing two fingers and the light from her eyes, handed her a child’s drawing and turned away without a word.Content Warning: This scene contains depictions of body horror, psychological manipulation, intense combat violence, and references to harm involving children. Reader discretion is advised.
Crayon. Black, jagged figure. Red cloak. No eyes. No face. Just mouths. Dozens, maybe more. A child’s interpretation of something the world hadn’t meant to survive seeing.
Sammy folded the picture into her chest rig, lips pursed around a cigar stub, and stepped to the edge of the Forest of Dread.
The treeline loomed like the gates of something old and hungry, and far too aware of her. The trees bent just slightly inward, like they were leaning down to listen.
She lit her cigar with a flick of her thumb-lighter, flame blooming against the coming dark, and muttered, “Let’s see what’s chewable in there, shall we.”
Then she walked in.
The light behind her didn’t just fade. It recoiled.
It was hot, in the way fevers are hot. Muggy and wet, thick with breath, the kind of heat that made your skin crawl with the memory of someone else's hands. The forest didn’t feel like a place. It felt like an interior. She was inside something now. Something that wanted her to notice how close the trees stood. How soft the moss was beneath her boots. How every branch creaked not with wind, but weight.
Sound came and went in snatches. Once, it was the patter of bare feet through underbrush. Another time, a hiccup of laughter. High. Delighted. Familiar.
She turned her head fast enough to pinch her neck, Old Reliable sliding up into her hand on instinct. Nothing. Just trees and mist and something that might’ve been fog, or the breath of a mouth too wide to name.
Then her comm crackled, and everything in her spine locked.
“You’re late, Samantha. Again.”
The voice wasn’t just familiar. It was her sister’s. SAM-02, smooth and low and always smug even at the edge of dying. It wasn’t possible. Couldn’t be. But the forest didn’t care about possible.
Sammy swallowed hard. Didn’t speak. Didn’t ask. She just moved forward.
More shapes flickered in the fog. Her dead sisters. Intact, alive, even laughing. SAM-06 with her helmet under one arm and that firestarter grin. SAM-03 crouched by a child, murmuring comfort. SAM-05 humming the old Federation march that none of them were supposed to remember.
Then came the stabilizer. A vial of 13-9, full and cold and sweating in SAM-02’s hand.
“Just take it,” she said, as casually as if they were back in the medbay. “You’ll be fine.”
Sammy reached without meaning to.
It dissolved to ash in her palm.
Her expression didn’t change. Her grip on Old Reliable did. She raised the weapon and fired.
The bullet cracked through SAM-02’s skull. She smiled the whole time. Then vanished in a shiver of static.
The others came faster, whispering grief and regret and should have been in voices she remembered too well. She didn’t argue. Didn’t flinch. Each time, she squeezed the trigger. Her sisters fell again, this time silent. It didn’t stop the forest from humming around her like it was listening in delight.
Then they were gone. All of them.
And something else stood where they’d been.
A man.
Their frame was long, elegant, and androgynous, wrapped in red and gold silk that shimmered like candlelight on blood. Their skin was smooth and luminous, their hair black and fine as moth-wing threads. Their eyes shimmered with something wet and wanting, and their smile looked as if it had been drawn from memory rather than made for them.
They stepped between trees without disturbing a single leaf. Their presence rearranged the air.
Sammy didn’t lower her weapon.
They passed close. Too close. And paused. The smile faltered just a moment. A slight twitch. The scent hit her all at once—sweet rot, perfumed decay, the tang of dry bone and charred figs. Hunger dressed as elegance.
“Oh,” they said, softly, tilting their head like listening to a distant song. “You ache so beautifully. We are Brahne, and we want you.”
Their voice wasn’t one voice. Beneath the surface, a dozen others murmured. Hundreds, maybe. Some laughed. Some cried. A few sang lullabies through their teeth.
“So much want wrapped in such a fragile flame. To be whole. To be forgiven. To punish. To save. How lovely it all is.”
They circled her with the slow delight of a predator that knew its prey hadn’t realized it was bleeding yet. Their hand lifted, fingers dark and delicate, as if they meant to brush her cheek.
Sammy didn’t let them.
The air shifted again.
And suddenly, she wasn’t in the forest anymore.
She stood in the Screamliner’s corridor. The floor beneath her feet hummed with clean energy. Her joints didn’t ache. Her vision didn’t flicker. Her spine didn’t feel like it was pulling itself apart. SAM-06 called out from engineering. A child giggled in the distance.
The medkit held two full bottles of 13-9, just waiting.
It was quiet. Warm. Safe.
And completely, absolutely false.
She saw it without turning. Just at the edge of her vision, half-hidden in the corner of the corridor.
A child’s toy. Stuffed bear. One eye missing. Covered in dried blood.
She stared at it, and the ship shimmered around her. The warmth cracked. The laughter warped into sobbing. The hum of the engine stuttered into something wet and organic.
The forest rushed back in.
Sammy raised Old Reliable and fired.
The shot tore through Brahne’s illusion. The man shuddered, form rippling like water punched hard. The scream that followed wasn’t theirs alone. It was a thousand voices bleeding out at once. A chorus of agony and ecstasy, stitched together like nerves laid raw.
Brahne staggered, laughing, but it didn’t sound right anymore.
Their skin split. Their limbs lengthened. The illusion dropped like a mask dipped in acid.
They unfolded.
What rose in its place was no longer human. A body built of hunger and worship, cloaked in red and gold, studded with mouths. Eyes opened across their chest and shoulders. Their grin widened until it circled their face like a halo of fangs.
“You taste like vengeance,” they said. “It will cling to our teeth.”
Sammy didn’t respond.
She holstered Old Reliable, reached behind her, and yanked the ERASER Mk.IV free. The cannon locked into place along her forearm, humming with restrained fire.
Brahne opened their arms in welcome.
Sammy pulled the trigger.
The beam hit them dead in the ribs, burned a hole the size of a dinner plate through their side. Their body pulsed. Mouths screamed. Light fled the space around the wound.
Then it sealed.
Sammy stared into the stitched void.
“Guess I’ll have to try harder,” she muttered.
The clearing trembled under the weight of Brahne’s regeneration. Trees leaned away without wind. The sky above buckled, clouds spiraling as if unsure which direction was up. Brahne stood at the center, towering and grotesque, a red-gold cathedral of teeth and rot. Eyes blinked open along their arms, stomach, throat. Their mouths whispered, cried, laughed in overlapping tones as they moved with the elegance of a god wearing a nightmare like a shawl.
“Ugly on the inside too. Nice to know.”
Brahne opened their mouth. No, several mouths. And a single sound slithered out. It didn’t reach her ears so much as her nerves. A psychic chime, wrong in every frequency, like memory and hunger being wrung through a meat grinder. She grit her teeth and advanced.
They struck.
The forest twisted before her eyes, the clearing vanishing as if blinked out of existence. One moment, grass and blood. The next, steel plating beneath her feet. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. The Screamliner again. Empty and pristine, as if nothing had ever gone wrong. Except for the smell. It was always the smell that gave it away. Under the metal tang and synthetic polish, she could smell them. The children. The sisters. Burnt bone and sweet decay.
Sammy fired before the illusion finished stitching itself together.
The plasma bolt sang through the illusion, unraveling the false reality in a crackling wash of color. Brahne shrieked, their voices fracturing into chaotic melody, and lunged.
She ducked, but not fast enough. A claw. Dark and glistening raked across her ribs, tearing leather and skin alike. She hissed through her teeth, pivoted on her heel, and fired again.
Old Reliable belched blue plasma in a quick four-round burst as she hammered the trigger. The shot hit one of Brahne’s lesser mouths, tearing it open in a burst of steaming gore. The wound didn't close right away. Not like before. The edges pulsed, knit slower. Weaker.
Sammy took note.
“Not a fan of the multi-shot, huh?” she muttered, switching firing modes. The pistol shifted under her palm, adjusting as she slapped the plasma selector into burst mode. One pull, three shots.
She smiled, eyes flickering with something that looked too much like glee.
“Let’s fuckin’ dance.”
She let her finger go.
The burst mode roared. Shot after shot after shot thundered into Brahne’s body, ripping through layers of otherworldly flesh. Holes bloomed across their chest, their abdomen, their arms. Dozens of them. Plasma burned as it entered and flared as it exited. Each wound sizzled like meat in oil.
Brahne shrieked in dissonant rage. They reeled, staggering back, limbs unraveling into wrong angles. One of their mouths began to weep. Another bit down on its own tongue and laughed. Illusions burst around her. Dozens, layered like peeling wallpaper with each trying to catch her off guard. Her sisters dying again. The children screaming. Herself, broken and healed and whole and dead.
She ignored all of them.
She fired again.
Again.
Again.
Her shoulder ached. Her spine burned. Every finger screamed with overuse, but she didn’t stop. She slammed her thumb against the side of the grip, hit the burst release, and let the shots come as fast as she could flick her finger.
“Bang, bang, bang, bang,” she sang, teeth gritted, “just like flickin’ my goddamn bean.”
The rounds tore through Brahne like scripture through heresy. They howled, flailing backward. Blood. Not red, but thick and violet-black. Splattered against trees that instantly began to rot where it landed.
Sammy panted. Sweat poured from her scalp. Her jacket was soaked through, ribs bleeding freely, and Old Reliable glowed white-hot.
Brahne’s movements slowed. They sagged, staggered, eyes closing and reopening like faulty lenses. Their mouths choked on their own song. The wounds didn’t heal fast enough now. The holes multiplied too quickly.
The forest began to scream.
It wasn’t sound. It was gravity bending.
The Hollow Throat had been triggered.
Sammy felt it before she saw it. The way the trees leaned inward, their roots tearing free to slide toward the collapsing mass that had once been a man. Brahne folded in on themselves, their body imploding with slow, dreadful finality. Every voice in them cried out at once. Anger, joy, sorrow, hunger, all of it. Their mouths tore open one by one, then closed, inverted, collapsed.
Space around them caved inward. The air screamed. The dirt tore itself loose. Trees snapped in half as they were pulled forward. Rocks shattered. The memory of the ground itself seemed to twist and vanish.
Sammy stood her ground.
The pull hit her hard. Her boots slid, her legs shaking, cannon arm braced against her side. Behind her, the forest bent forward, trying to climb into the void.
She snarled, bent her knees, and planted herself.
With her free hand, she reached for the dial on the Hyperbeam.
The weapon hummed, low at first, then louder. It wasn’t the sound of energy. It was the sound of a promise. Vox Victimae. She turned it to maximum output. Every vein in her arm lit with fire.
“Not today,” she muttered. Her eyes locked on the spinning core of the collapsing creature. Man. Whatever it was.
“You ain’t swallowing me, you discount abyssal guppy.”
She let the Hyperbeam scream.
It erupted with the fury of a dying star. Light burst forward in a spiral of searing gold, a column of wrath honed down to a single point. It met the heart of the collapse and didn’t stop. The world shuddered as the beam tore through Brahne’s folded mass, punched a hole clean through the event horizon itself, and kept going. Reality peeled back like a wound around it. The implosion sputtered, choked, and blinked out of existence.
Gone.
The wind stopped.
Silence fell like snow.
The forest, what remained of it, slumped like an exhausted animal. Trees leaned but didn’t move. The air hung still, as if uncertain whether or not it had survived.
Sammy didn’t speak.
She stepped forward, slowly, dragging her feet. Her arm trembled. Her cannon hissed as it powered down. Blood ran down her side, soaking her belt. Her fingers twitched, looking for something to hold.
There, in the moss, sat the bloody toy again.
She crouched. More fell than lowered. And picked it up.
It was heavier now. Wet. Matted.
She lit her cigar with shaking hands, drew in a breath thick with ash and copper, and stared at nothing for a long moment.
The trees didn’t speak.
The air didn’t sing.
Just quiet.
Sammy took one long drag, eyes burning like reactor cores behind cracked lenses.
“Try harder next time, fishfuck,” she said, smoke curling from her lips.
Then her knees gave out.
She hit the dirt flat on her back, the toy cradled to her side, her cannon still smoking beside her. Blood soaked the moss. Her breathing slowed. Her eyes flickered once as she closed them.
Still Sammy.
Always Sammy.