The Evil Qi didn't just empower me — it corrupted.
Normally it would have fed on my own body and burned out fast, a technique I avoided because the cost outweighed the payoff.
But I hadn't been eating like myself lately. Months of alien flesh, alien blood, alien everything, meal after meal in a body that adapts to what it consumes — it had been sitting latent under my organs the whole time, waiting for something to trigger it.
The Evil Qi found that dormant material and lit it like a fuse. Corruption met corruption, and instead of cancelling out, they resonated.
The Hive's own biology, already sitting inside me, gave the technique a foothold my human body never could have offered.
The creature came at me again — same tail sweep it always opened with — and for the first time I wasn't reacting to the movement.
I was already standing where it was going to land, spear angled into the gap between plates before the plates had finished shifting.
