I couldn't believe it really happened.

My new senses would have overwhelmed me had my stone not adjusted my brain. Luckily, I still had Crick's nanobots on my eardrums.

My vision sharpened. I saw everything in crisp colors like through a camera with strong contrast.

We were still in a warehouse-sized room. Fortunately, the walls bore holes from acid Cherub spat. Cherub pulled itself together and pointed its weapons at us.

Kira picked up Layla's body.

And we ran away.

My stone didn't outright stop time for me as Kira's did. However, it increased my thought speed enough to inspect how Cherub aimed its missiles. Then, anticipating the firing time, I and Kira dodged.

Even in our perception, the aim-dodged projectiles flew ridiculously fast. They punctured walls and tore open new escape tunnels for us.

We entered a machine room full of cabinet-sized defunct nanofactories. Kira and I leaped from factory to factory, each jump taking between one-point-eight and two-point-five seconds.

I focused on another long-range transmission. "Captain! I don't need the tree anymore! Make sure it doesn't hit the station!"

Behind us, Cherub split into several "children" again. Its missiles and lasers flew at us from different angles.

A stray laser grazed my back.

Kira destroyed a missile launcher with her blaster without turning around. A benefit of enhanced memory.

The launcher exploded and took the surrounding laser turrets down with it. Meanwhile, Crick gave me a brief confirmation that they got my message.

We reached the end of the room. Kira sliced a hole in the ground with her blaster. She jumped through it and so did I before it closed.

We fell a few dozen feet before hitting the floor below us. Kira sliced another hole. We jumped down into the room below.

It was a big room without much furniture. Only near the opposite wall did we see big nanofactories and piles of debris.

Kira and I leaned against the nearby wall, panting. She did that cleverly. Cherub is big and it has two ceilings to cross to get here. Dissolving an entire ceiling will take time and it won't get much mass through small holes like the ones Kira created. In fact, the ones she carved with her blaster have already closed thanks to the nanotech.

"Let's discuss strategy," I said. "I wish I still had my guns, now that I have enhanced dexterity like you."

Kira put down Layla for a moment. "Strategy? I blew up a ton of its weapons and it didn't even slow down to curse me. This thing's immortal!"

"It's not beyond the laws of physics though. Its abilities likely come from nanobots. That means it needs an energy source and a computer to work. If we find either of them, we can win."

Kira looked skeptical. "Pretty sure it has no central computer. Would be like a self-destruct button."

She had a point there. When Cherub invaded my nervous system, I felt its thoughts, but I didn't feel a centralized brain. It felt more like all of Cherub was the brain. Maybe parts of Cherub also took over the space station and made these doors from before open so weirdly.

That only left one option. "Kira, do you remember anything that looks like a battery?"

"Dunno, you're the one of us who studied physics."

Another point for her. How could I ask her to search without knowing the target?

I glanced left and right, seeking anything that might give me an idea.

The walls dissolved. Cherub didn't bother taking the ceiling. It knew we expected this. Instead, it spun another noose around us.

"Kira," I said, "run!"

She picked up Layla. We raced towards the junkyard near the opposite wall. The piles of debris served as stairs for us to jump at building-sized nanofactories. Kira destroyed our "stairs" with her blaster.

We jumped from factory to factory. They stood thirty feet or-so apart and we tried to take two with each jump. Eventually, we reached a nanofactory near the room's end. Kira carved a hole into the ceiling, allowing us to jump into the cabin above us.

Considering the space station's randomly shifting nature, it wasn't a room we knew. It resembled a storage room whose size fell between "warehouse" and "cupboard". Defunct computers, debris-strewn boxes, and dimly flickering lamps were its only contents.

Since Cherub was a slow climber, we had breathing room for a while.

"Finding that battery won't be easy," I said. "It could look like anything."

"C'mon," Kira said. "I thought you knew more than that. Think of what it uses!"

"Probably antimatter or whatever Layla's ship flies with," I said. "Maybe it's a particle accelerator. Or a super magnet. Or-"

A missile destroyed the wall. Cherub didn't send all of its mass down below. Some of it waited for us on our current floor.

We dodged another missile. Thanks to the new hole, we saw a chance to escape. We ran.

A vast hallway revealed itself to us with countless doors peeking through its walls. We picked a door at random. Given its size, I guessed it used to be a living cabin for a small family before that plague killed everyone. Furniture of rotten wood scatted across the floor, forming a sharp contrast to the destroyed machines from the factories.

Through another door, we got to the next room. And to the next.

I was sick of running away.

"Crick!" I transmitted. "Destroy the solar panels! Or cut them off the station, I don't know!"

I was at the end of my ideas. I had no idea where to search for Cherub's energy source, so my last hope was to shut down the whole station.

A laser pierced my leg. My new nerves transduced pain normal humans couldn't imagine. I fell to the ground.

Kira lay next to me, her armor beaten up by holes. Layla's had new puncture marks, too.

The walls around us dissolved. This was a small room, so it wouldn't take Cherub long to enclose us. We could have carved a hole in the ground, had we not feared that more of Cherub waited for us. Or we could have jumped through the ceiling, had we still had the energy for it.

The ceiling crashed down, spraining my diamondoid bones. Cherub's slimy mass had eaten up anything that gave this room its integrity. Slowly, it consumed the floor that had fallen on us, too.

A tendril of Cherub grabbed my hand. With the other, I pushed off the portion of the ceiling that remained of me and gave it for Cherub to eat.

"You told me you wanted to feed me," it told me through my nervous system. "You told me you accepted me as your master! I'm becoming weaker now. What did you do to me?"

Crick did it.

In the nick of time, I received the transmission I needed. "Human, I destroyed two critical panels. I do not know why you require such an undertaking. Since I presume you do not want to doom the remaining inhabitants to certain death, I left most of them intact. Do you have an enemy that needs the energy?"

"Yes," I answered. "Awesome work! Let me do the rest!"

"What did your friend do to me!" Cherub asked.

"Listen, this ends now! Option one is you release us and all those whom you ate and tortured. Option two is that we destroy the solar panels you need to stay alive and take you with us."

Cherub loosened its grip. Its message felt like a faint whisper. "Never!"

I pulled my arm out of its tentacles and got up. Kira already stood as straight as a pin. She held Layla and cracked a confident smile under her visor.

She noticed it, too. Cherub had stopped crawling closer and pointed its weapons at the ground.

"The God started bleeding," she said. "Wanna end its faith in itself?"

I nodded. She turned around and gestured me to do the same. I knew what she was going for.

We walked backwards to the center of the room until we covered each other back-to-back. The downside was that only Kira still had a weapon, so we couldn't cover more range than usual with our shots. The upside was that I felt badass as hell.

We stood at the center of a circular area Cherub decided to keep free from its slime. Bubbles of protoplasm popped on Cherub's skin. It had dissolved literally all walls this floor used to have. I could see far enough to make out two Primogenitors, a juvenile Terrapod and a horned alien forced to worship this egomaniac.

"This is your last warning!" I said.

Cherub raised its weapons, pointing all lasers and cannons it had at us.

We jumped.

It fired.

In the seconds we hung in the air, I and Kira had a true spectacle to gawk at. Cherub's projectiles destroyed its own weapons. Detonating laser turrets blew holes in the floor, the shrapnel of former cannons tickled to the ground, and a defeated slime monster fled from the fire it caused.

We landed when the sparks did.

Cherub opened holes through which it disappeared like water through a storm sewer. It left the aliens I had seen - the baby Terrapod, the two Primogenitors, and that horned one - behind. They were still intact, although they looked unhealthy. Their skins were sallow and their gaits like those of paper figures. I couldn't see what happened to Cherub's other victims, but I hoped they escaped, too.

"Captain," I transmitted, "we defeated that enemy for which we needed to reduce the energy. It left some of its victims behind. Better tell your superiors to bring us some automated ships to retrieve them. Here's our location."

After split-seconds of lightspeed delay, Crick answered. "Your request can be arranged. However, I must first know how far you are with your mission. You desire to turn one of our enemies into an ally."

"We're working on that right now. We should be done in a few minutes. I'll tell you more later. Lucas over!"

Kira put Layla down.

"What's with her?" I asked.

"She's not dead," Kira said. "She's soon going to wake up."

Layla's arms twitched.

"That's not good," I said. "We need her unconscious for the interrogation!"

I planned using the VR cable Crick's robot gave me to make Layla think she was bound and gagged in our spaceship. Like that, we could pressure her more easily. It was the same tactic Sye had used on me before.

Now that she came back to her senses, we had to ditch that plan. Plus, it felt dirty to emulate Sye anyway.

Contrary to my expectations, she didn't stand up to fight or run away. She pulled her knees to her chest and hugged them, assuming a defensive position.

She sobbed. "Go away!"

"The monster is defeated," I said. "It's not gonna hurt you."

"Don't care. I'm the real monster here!"

Kira stepped between me and her. She wanted to stop me, to give her time to cry.

I couldn't listen, I had business.

"Ay didn't tell you whom you sold the aliens to," I said. "He didn't tell you until it was too late. Be angry at him, not yourself!"

"You always want to play the hero, don't you!" Layla snapped. "What are you waiting for? Fry my brain, put a bullet in my skull or whatever. I'm still your enemy!"

"You aren't," Kira cut in. "I came here for one reason. What happened to you after our abduction?"

Layla uncurled herself. Instead of snapping at Kira, too, she got to her feet and looked at her with no expression I could discern.

"When we met these guys, they knocked us out," Layla said matter-of-factly. "I woke up in some meat room again. It was in their ship, you know. I had no idea where I was or what happened to me.

"Then, you came in." She looked at Kira as she said this. "I was so glad to see you again. When I asked you where we were, you told me we were on the ship of a dude called Mustafa Ay. You told me he was some weird bloke who got lost in Antarctica and then found an alien space magic stone or something."

She gave us time to take everything in. Kira presumably already noticed the differences between her account and Layla's, but still chose not to interrupt Layla.

"You told me he had a big plan. He wanted to release some AI that would propagate through the galaxy and assimilate us all into itself. It'd make us happy forever. I thought this was crazy."

She paused to give Kira time to reply. She didn't reply yet.

"I asked you if you didn't want to go home, like me. You asked me why you should. You had your parents that put you under pressure and you were sick of being my babysitter."

"I never said this," Kira cut in. "Ever."

Layla continued. "I asked you what that meant. You explained that you and your family helped me when I was poor. You asked your parents to give me a place to sleep when I ran away from home." Tears formed in her eyes as she spoke. "That was when we were sixteen and when we became friends.

"You told me you never wanted a friend. You only stuck around with me because I was dumb and easy to manipulate. I couldn't believe that you really said this. After all these times I helped you in college or when mean girls bullied you, I couldn't believe you said something like that."

Now, Kira was on the verge of tears, too. "Layla, how could you believe I did?"

"What happened next was that I thought you were brainwashed or something. I tried to beat some sense into you, but you were too strong. You had this singularity stone and I didn't. Then, you went away.

"Mustafa came to me and he understood me. He said I was suffering from clinical depression and so was he. He said the whole world would be so much better if no-one could feel pain again. I-it was hard to disagree with him. He gave me my singularity stone, and I had so much fun with it. It made me a super-inventor and I even upgraded your laptop, Lucas, just because I could. Just by being around, he made me calm down. He seemed like a guy I could trust, but he only made everything worse."

Layla needed a break. Since Kira didn't reply, I had to. I didn't care if it was tactless, as Ay or Cherub could appear at any moment.

"Ay manipulated you," I said. "Kira told me what really happened and this conversation never took place. He probably used a VR and probably even soothed you with his singularity stone to make you think otherwise. This man is a good liar. I mean, he also convinced you that it was good to capture and sell aliens to this monster we just faced."

"Yeah, I noticed that, too, professor."

"Then why did you believe him in the first place?"

She shook her head. "There's so much you don't understand. Do you know how people felt during the corona lockdown, one generation before us? Isolation does horrible things to the human mind. I was alone in space for months! I had only two people to talk to and both of them were crazy! Everything sucked so much and I needed someone to blame everything on."

She then opened her arms and hugged Kira. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be," she answered. "Everything will be fine."

They parted.

"It won't," Layla said. "This dude's invincible. He came here to kidnap an alien, you saw it before. This alien can look into the future."

"We know," I said. "And we promised to save it."

"But how? I mean, you can do whatever you want, but I'll stay here."

I turned away from her and then focused on a long-range transmission for Crick. "Captain, our mission is almost completed. I'll soon leave the station. But before that, I'll make sure that Dr. Mustafa Ay doesn't leave it alive."