The flare went first.
Brilliant.
White.
Consuming everything in the room for one full second.
The drone followed it up.
Rising fast.
Positioning.
The serpent's eyes caught the light full.
Both of them.
The green of them going white.
Blind.
"Fire."
The round came from every direction still standing.
Bullets finding scale.
Finding the gaps between scale.
The creature moving through it.
Swimming in it.
Like it had learned the pattern of bullets.
Like it had done this before.
The grenades came next.
Several at once.
Thrown from different angles.
Landing around her.
They detonated.
One.
Then the others following so close together they became one sound.
One enormous sound.
The floor shaking beneath the water.
The water jumping from the floor in sheets.
The mushroom of dust eating the air.
Consuming the ceiling.
Consuming the walls.
Consuming everything with edges.
She came through it.
Hit one of the soldiers before the dust had settled.
Wrapped around them.
The tail finding its grip.
Tightening.
The sound of it was brief.
Then the coil released what was left.
The remaining soldiers closed in.
Shields up.
Swords finding angles.
Surrounding her from every side still accessible.
She swung.
The tail moving like a whip through the formation.
The claws following.
The water turned red.
Fast.
Faster than seemed possible.
Parts of people in it now.
An arm.
A section of something that had been a leg.
Pieces of what the claws had found.
But they didn't stop.
Blades kept finding her.
Cutting.
Opening.
Tearing.
Her right side opened up.
Deep.
Past scale.
Past muscle.
Into the interior of her.
Her core.
There inside the wound.
Glowing.
Dark blue.
A perfect ball of it.
Brilliant against the red surrounding it.
Pulsing with something that had kept her alive and enormous and wrong for longer than any of them could measure.
The red veins around it swollen.
Moving.
Warm light from the core pushing through them.
Keeping them fed.
Keeping everything fed.
One soldier saw it.
Moved toward it.
The green began immediately.
Pouring from her mouth.
Low and spreading.
Finding the water.
Finding the soldier moving through it toward her core.
They knew what it meant.
Went anyway.
The sword found the core.
Hit it.
The crack of it moving through the room like something fundamental breaking.
The green took the soldier at the same moment.
It didn't ask.
Just entered.
They stood there a moment.
Sword still in the core.
The green moving through them.
Up through the legs.
Into the chest.
Finding the face last.
The serpent fell.
Not violently.
Just down.
The enormous weight of her finding the water slowly.
The splash of it reaching every wall.
The soldier watched her fall.
Still standing.
Their hand still on the sword.
Then the green finished what it had started.
They went to their knees first.
The sound of it quiet against everything else.
Their skin already changing.
The color leaving it.
The remaining soldiers stood around them.
Watching.
Unable to do anything that would change it.
The soldier's breathing became the only sound in the room.
Slowing.
Each breath finding less than the one before.
Then finding nothing.
The room held them all.
The living and the dead.
The water red and still now.
The blue crystals throwing their light across everything the same as before.
Indifferent.
Beautiful.
Unchanged.