“Leave him to me,” said the woman in the yellow armor as she calmly approached him. “This one is mine.”
A feral grin flitted briefly across Lupus’ face. What few of the human soldiers that remained lowered their guns as their captain made her way towards him, a slender curved black blade in the grip of her left hand. It was rare to find a worthy opponent amongst human scum, and this one’s impressive skill gave him some measure of hope that she would put up a decent fight. Lupus settled into a battle-ready stance as she stopped just five feet short of being within arm’s reach.
“I hope you’re ready to die, you filthy muto.” She pointed at him with her blade. Despite the seemingly calm tone of voice she used, Lupus sensed an undercurrent of wrath lurking just beneath the skin.
“Are you?” He returned, seeing an opening.
The human said nothing, though her single blue eye narrowed dangerously as the taunt hit home. She too settled into a stance that echoed his, but twisted her grip around on the blade in a backhanded manner. Distantly, some part of Lupus noted how there was a certain nip in the air now, in spite of the blazing fires all around.
He blinked when he shifted his gaze slightly to the side. The fires were going out one by one.
She attacked then, without a single war cry or hint of motion. Her diagonal slash hit nothing but air as Lupus sidestepped the attack, then countered with a one-two flurry of cuts. The human spun to intercept, catching the blows with her blade before pressing a rushed sequence of slashes that saw Lupus backpedaling in an effort to avoid them. A streak of doubt crossed his mind as his body raced to catch up with the ever increasing speed of the human’s assault. Her form was not perfect; she left a tad too many openings, and her wild attack patterns suggested that they were strung together on a whim, lacking any strategy or real skill. And yet there was something about the way she moved and the speed of her attacks that seemed strangely familiar…in a not very human way.
On her next swing, he brought his blade up in a violent clash that locked the two swords together.
“You’re good.” A scowl furrowed his brow. “Almost too good…for a human.”
Something about the comment incensed her, for with a cry she kneed him in the gut, forcing him to break the deadlock. Before he could recover, a ceramic armored boot ploughed into the side of his head, sending him flying.
The human’s face was livid. “How dare you…HOW DARE YOU COMPARE YOURSELF TO ME, YOU FUCKING MUTO?!”
At the back of his mind, amidst the storm of pain that was his head, something clicked.
Ai Ishimaru watched as the rider got to his feet, pressing a hand to the cut on the side of his face. Captain Page barely gave him any time to react as she charged at him with a blitz of attacks. She had never seen the captain so furious, and there was something strangely hypnotic yet terrifying about how fast she was moving. For a second, she could have sworn there was a shimmering glow coming off her captain.
A mysterious sizzling sound drew her attention back to her surroundings, and it wasn’t until a soldier beside her cried out a warning that she realized what was happening. High above them all, a ball of energy was forming out of lashes of static lightning. As she looked on, any and all loose material lying around, from bits of rock to discarded weapons to the mangled corpses of her squadmates began to float towards the energy ball.
“The giant muto,” she realized. “It’s…it’s reconstituting itself…”
Snapping out of it, she turned to the men behind her. “Don’t let that thing regenerate! Open fire!”
Lupus sensed the tacgod’s rebirth long before the humans did, but he had no time to find solace in the fact. The female captain kept piling on the pressure of her assault, and it was all he could do to just barely stave it off. A faint eldritch light streamed off her like hot air as she fought, further confirming his suspicion from before. The knowledge stole what little joy there had been in the fight, and made the conflict seem to last a lifetime.
Screaming incoherently, she attempted to skewer him with a fierce jab, but he swatted the blade away with his own. He spun around and low with a swipe that attempted to cut her legs off at the knee, but she easily flipped over the sword, took a half-step back before bringing her arms around for an overhead smash. Lupus dived out of the way, snapping out of the side-roll at the last minute to deflect a vertical slice intended to take his head off.
“Damnyoudamnyoudamnyou!” Some of her words made sense as he evaded another flurry of slashes. He was growing tired of the fight already, and with the now completely berserk nature of his opponent, he could have ended it at any moment of his choosing. But he had to stall for time; time that the old one would need to rebuild his body from scratch…
Gunfire opened up once more, and the partially reformed tacgod roared.
“NO!”
Seeing that time was up, Lupus parried the next blow hard enough to stagger the human, knocking her weapon clean out of her hands. In a flicker of pseudomotion, he closed the gap between them and smashed the butt of his sword’s hilt into the center of her face. He kicked her back as he switched hands on the blade, then rushed in again with a single sure strike.
For a moment both combatants froze. Then the human female screamed in agony as her left arm fell off her, sliced off at the weak elbow joint of her armor. Lupus ignored her as she fell to her knees, instead turning to the line of humans further back that were shooting at the almost fully formed tacgod towering above them. He was about to take action when he felt movement coming from close by. He jumped back as something large crashed into the very spot he had occupied just seconds earlier, forming a small crater on the ground.
A tall gangly creature with mottled flesh rose out of the crater, a green glow pulsating in the hollow of its mouth. Feeling sickened and enraged, Lupus cast a glance around and found one of the human soldiers swaying on his feet, a bloodied strange skullcap fitted on his head. There was a savage yet pained grin plastered on his visage.
With a triumphant roar, the tacgod dropped to the ground, its material humanoid body fully remade.
“Abomination!” Lupus hissed. He freed his gun, then fired two quick rounds before holstering it away again. The first shot tore out the human’s throat, downing him immediately, while the second ripped a hole in the forehead of the creature, its momentum knocking the head back. The abomination’s limbs grew slack, but the mysterious light in its mouth began to grow exponentially, shooting out incandescent crackles of power into the ground. Sensing the immediate threat, Lupus started to back away when the ‘human’ female grabbed one leg of his pants.
“Oi, muto.” She ground out the words past gritted teeth. “Finish what you’ve started, dammit!”
Sparing her a look of disgust, he calmly replied; “I don’t kill my own kind.”
Shrugging off her grasp, he bolted towards the outdoors. Once he cleared the broken gates, he whistled a brief tune, and seconds later, the bike streaked to a stop before him. He hopped on, gunning the engines to full throttle even before he had settled down properly. The sense of danger searing down his spine intensified as he sped away from the vicinity of the Heavy Compound. Fighting off the urge to look back, he squeezed every possible bit of acceleration out of the bike, hoping against hope…
There was a clap of thunder, followed by a sudden and total silence that raised the hairs on the back of his neck. A minute later, a jet of radiant green power burst of the man-made building, searing at the sky like a spear made of lightning as it consumed the structure, all in that eerie silence. A shockwave of dust and grit raced outward from the blast zone, washing over the rider before speeding on past. Coughing and spluttering, Lupus yanked back on the steering triggers, bringing the bike to a controlled crashing stop that flung him clear off the vehicle…
When he came to, he found himself covered in a layer of strange fine greenish-white dust. Shaking the dust off as he stood up, Lupus first dedicated himself to the task of finding and retrieving his vehicle, which lay some twenty feet away from him, coated in the same dust. Then he looked back southwest, and what he saw there staggered him.
Glinting there in the fading sunlight, the bad place had been warped into a gigantic, jagged green crystal.
Night fell fast, and when the full moon was out over the wastelands, an odd cracking noise filled the area that used to be Heavy Compound #17.
A hand broke out of the colossal crystal, small and human-like. Then another hand smashed out of the crystal, and eventually, an entire body crawled out of the hole in the crystal. Captain Melinda Page, formerly of the Gargoyles stood in the moonlight, panting and gasping for breath. Her bright armor had been badly singed and cracked in places, and her left arm was green and glasslike in texture, catching the moonlight with alien colors. Her hair had also changed color, and a section of her face had been scorched black. She reached up to rip away the eye patch, revealing both eyes as she looked up at the moon.
One was a normal, human looking blue and the other was a startling dark red like blood. Both of them gleamed with a mad light in their depths.
“DAMN YOU, BLACK RIDER!” She howled at the heavens.
Miles away, the rider suddenly and inexplicably sneezed.
A sinister rival is forged out of hatred! Where will the rider go to next…?
Gryphon's Nest 2.0 
Once again, WHOA.