Hansen broke free almost by miracle, summoning every ounce of strength he had to pry away Bakunin's massive paw from his chest—the imprint left behind was deep, a testament to how crushing the weight had been. He followed through with a heavy kick aimed straight at the creature's abdomen, which, despite the force behind it and the severity of the impact, seemed to cause no real damage. Still, it was enough to shift Bakunin back and give the soldier room to pull himself free.
…LESS THAN 4 SECONDS…
The man wasted no time going on the offensive. In a moment of pure, frantic confusion, he lunged at the creature and climbed onto its back. As he scrambled up, Hansen tried to make it hurt—clawing, driving his fingertips into the flesh. It was useless. The skin looked like meat on the outside, even withered and decayed. But it held like steel. With every scratch, the sharpened tips of the man's fingers screeched against the surface and threw off glowing sparks. Even once he was on top, Hansen kept at it relentlessly—striking, hammering harder than he ever had—yet Bakunin only seemed to grow more resistant with every blow. That didn't matter to him.
…LESS THAN 3 SECONDS…
He had lost his mind entirely. He swung like a man possessed. With every impact, sensation bled from his fingers. They bent further and further—twisted, warped, deformed by the relentless punishment. After one blow too many, his right hand broke. It shattered. Fingers flew and spun away in arcing streaks of blood, like falling stars. The metacarpals split apart, tearing through the skin and flesh between them, splaying open like a fan—the skin itself stretched thin as a membrane across the ruin. And still, he did not stop. If anything, the strikes grew faster and harder. One after another, without pause, each accompanied by the ragged, distorted breath forcing its way out of him—that guttural, acidic sound that clawed up from somewhere deep, carried on hot, foul-smelling steam that reeked of sour vomit, boiling and crackling from his mouth.
His left hand was destroyed next. Bone and blood exploded in every direction. Hansen drove on with the exposed tips of his broken bones. Every strike hurt more than the last. He did not stop. He only moved faster—pouring out blood by the liter, chunks of bone and flesh floating in the pooling red beneath him, some no bigger than grains of rice, others jagged like broken rock.
Veins began to flutter like loose threads. Tendons snapped one by one. And still Hansen gave himself no quarter. He roared—raw and thunderous—half from agony, half from rage.
Then Bakunin moved again, and threw him back to the ground. The beast had been thrashing frantically to shake the soldier from its back—though in those final blows, Hansen had managed to punch through the back of the creature's skull, cracking the armored plating and exposing the raw flesh beneath.
Bakunin turned on him the instant he hit the ground. It drove one of its horns straight into the soldier's chest.
The pain was unbearable. The man's ribcage was obliterated. He felt his lungs burst, his heart detonate. His ribs dissolved into the pulped wreckage of his own body, impaling themselves through flesh that had already been ground to nothing. Hansen lost the ability to roar. Only heavy, rattling croaks came out—the sound of a man drowning. Blood began to flood his throat. It poured from his mouth in rivers, spraying with every cough, falling in scattered droplets onto the ground and across the armor, between his chest and his own face.
…LESS THAN 1 SECOND…
Hansen began to feel nothing. His mind was buried under static. His head pounded with a violence that seemed structural—the nerves at his temples felt like rebar, rigid and somehow razor-edged. Even the air seemed to disappear. The lack of oxygen, or what little was left of it, turned his nostrils raw and inflamed, as though they were packed with jagged stones scraping upward through his nasal cavity. His throat felt like it was folding in on itself, crumpling like a sheet of paper. His tonsils seemed on the verge of bursting. Not even forced thought was enough to hold on. Hansen was too far under—crushed by that dense, overwhelming torment that, despite everything, still seemed determined to keep him alive. In that moment, the man was nothing more than a suffering, helpless creature. His desperate, suffocated crying could be heard by anyone nearby—and yet no one could do a thing. The soldier faded weakly as the horn drove deeper into him. Every ounce of strength was leaving him.
"I can't…"
He was reaching for something. His mind was rotting. He could feel it more than anything else. He tried to cling to the small pocket of humanity left in him—but like water circling a drain, it was being pulled away with a speed that almost felt insulting given the moment.
"I can't… my little girl is waiting for me…"
Hansen tried to picture something. Everything stayed dark and silent. Even his own voice made no sound. He understood nothing. He only wanted to run.
"I have to live… for her… She deserves that…"
Meanwhile, Bakunin seemed to laugh. "He… He… He…" Its macabre rasping was thick and deep. Its mouth—lined wall to wall with sharpened teeth—was stretched wide, pulled into something that looked almost like a grin. The blood dripping from it fell onto the destroyed, lifeless body of the soldier below, who stared up at the creature with empty eyes.
The monster watched with complete satisfaction. Its presence took on the quality of something clinical—an observation. It watched the soldier collapse and deteriorate, by its own hand. Bakunin wasn't torturing. This was closer to an experiment. In its mind, it had broken through something that had seemed impenetrable. It had brought down a wall.
That conviction made the creature doubly satisfied. On one hand, its pure, driving need to wear things down had been fulfilled—again. Its first encounter with Hansen on the stairwell, followed by the brutal and squalid dismemberment of that soldier in the underground tunnels, and then the complete destruction of Lieutenant Abner's body—that had been its first great success. But it still wasn't enough. On the other hand, its hunger to use, to understand, to condition—and above all, to subjugate—was a far more precise undertaking. It wasn't difficult for it. It had done it countless times. It had an order. And it intended to carry it out as perfectly as possible.
Bakunin let out a first roar of victory.
…LESS THAN 0 SECONDS…
INHIBITOR INJECTION SYSTEM COLLAPSED. PROCEDURE CANNOT BE EXECUTED. ERROR! ERROR! ERROR! ERR—STRESS OVERLOAD. HIRN BRECHER RISK: 93%
Hansen began to shake. Again.
A grotesque sound pulled Bakunin's attention—and with the corner of its rotting eye, it caught it: Hansen's arms and hands were regenerating. Fast. Wrong. Bones erupted like growth, filament by filament, weaving themselves through connective tissue and veins in something that almost looked graceful—a strange, involuntary dance between structure and flesh. The bleeding stopped. The wound had sealed completely. The new organs rebuilt themselves so rapidly that Bakunin's body snapped when it was still lodged inside the soldier's chest.
"Tack." The bone broke clean. From the point of the wound—only hot black smoke, like the mouth of a volcano.
"Uom—"
Hansen drew breath. At first, only small, quiet sounds escaped him.
Then a single massive roar shook Bakunin where it stood.