You're not thinking big enough. Or small enough, the voice filtered into my brain. Well, he was right. I wasn't. It had taken me months just to locate this Khos'Mirai. How much longer might it take if I used my usual, humanoid way of measuring space? How long would it take me to hunt down thousands of these monsters, when each of them might see me coming? Squaring my shoulders, I focused on the job at hand.
"Figured out that it's useless to fight me?" That many teeth definitely did not fit in so small a mouth as he laughed. And then he struck.
* * *
It was a joy to rip into them—they moved swiftly but not swiftly enough. His canines shredded Ra'Ak-enhanced flesh as they attempted to land blows. A few did land but they were shrugged off as he decapitated one after another. He'd been powerful before but this—this went beyond his expectations. And the reward at the end? Well, that had been promised long ago. It would be in his grasp—soon.
* * *
"Now what?" I sat on a stainless steel table with my head in my hands. The Khos'Mirai—this incarnation of him anyway—had been quickly dispatched, as had the fifty-odd Ra'Ak living inside the planetoid. Machines softly beeped around me as the Ra'Ak-enhanced slept in their small, coffin-sized spaces.
Before I'd killed the last Ra'Ak (who was still in humanoid form), I'd forced him to tell me how many clones of the Khos'Mirai they'd made. There were more than thirty thousand. Thirty thousand, each with guardian Ra'Ak in attendance, spread across the Dark and Light halves of the universe. And each of them was busy creating an army of Ra'Ak-enhanced humanoids. The Elemaiya, Bright and Dark, had unwittingly spread their quarter-blood children across the galaxies, seeding unsuspecting planets with the fodder the Khos'Mirai and his flunky Ra'Ak needed to kill everything. And that didn't include the quarter and eighth-bloods the Ra'Ak had purposely bred.
Me? I'd killed a clone. Not the original as I'd hoped. He was still out there. I would have to find him and his artificially produced brothers and kill all of them. The prospect was wearying. What was it the voice had whispered? That I wasn't thinking big enough or small enough? What did that mean?
"Here." He handed me a tennis ball. "It's the one the cat plays with," he added, flashing me a grin. He'd appeared from nothing and was now sitting beside me.
"I thought you couldn't help me again," I grumped.
"I didn't say that. I only said I couldn't hold your corporeal body together while you did your best to blast it apart with power," he said.
"Picky, picky," I muttered.
"Besides, you can figure this out on your own if you stare at that tennis ball long enough. When you're done, send it back. The cat sort of likes it." He disappeared.
"What the?" I stared at the tennis ball. It was dirty; I could see that, with smudges everywhere. Muddy brown instead of its original yellow, the ball had bits of fuzz missing. They'd been ripped away by an animal that had played with it for who knew how long. What did he expect me to find in this? Under normal circumstances, I might not have picked it up to begin with. And then it hit me.
* * *
"Come." He was old—older than Wlodek—and he and the former Head of the Vampire Council fought together. These had no chance against the two of them. He laughed as he killed the aberrations; their smell informed him they were off. Wlodek said it might be so and he hadn't been wrong. These had intelligence, whereas some of the others didn't. Wlodek said it was the difference between the enhanced and Spawn—Spawn lost their ability to speak and sloughed away their humanoid existence while the enhanced kept both. It was frightening.
"I'll kill you." This one was cornered but he brandished the weapon he held threateningly. His comrades had already fallen and still he refused to give up.
"You can try." The newly conscripted Spawn Hunter took the battle to the enemy.
* * *
It took a while. Forever, if you counted time as the very small do. Not long at all if you are much larger than that. Big enough. Small enough. I was now big enough, although it frightened me—more so than I'd been frightened when Kifirin first turned me to energy and spread me everywhere. At least I'd thought of it as everywhere at the time. My vision had been so limited. I'd only seen a small portion of everywhere. Now, I was so large a presence as to be nearly immeasurable. The worlds around me were microscopic compared to the tennis ball my corporeal hand had held bare moments earlier. Things moved at such great speeds on those tiny worlds. Deaths, births, cataclysms—all happening in a blink.
Had the Khos'Mirai known how good my nose was? How I used that information to ferret out the smallest details about him? He'd probably dismissed it as unimportant. I used it now to sniff out his clones, wherever they hid. If I hadn't had his scent, I never would have found the others so easily. One by one, they winked out of existence, while guardian Ra'Ak and their enhanced warriors roared and cursed.
Like sparks leaving a campfire, the final handful burned brightly before turning to the Ra'Ak dust they were. Except for one. The last one. Who wasn't Ra'Ak at all. He was the true Khos'Mirai—the original.
I was weary, but this one I wanted to see for myself before he was destroyed. It took a great deal of effort and was quite tiring, but eventually I managed to condense what I'd become into a corporeal body.
* * *
"The others are dead?" he asked. The clone I'd killed inside the planetoid looked much like this one, and like him, this one was caged and chained. The difference was this; these chains and this cage were real. The reason I knew? The first one's nails had been carefully manicured and there were no scars on his wrists from years of being manacled. This one hadn't been cared for so kindly and the scars on his wrist were only the beginning of the scars on his body.
"Your clones," I agreed, watching him carefully. "A few of the Ra'Ak and some of the enhanced, too. I couldn't get all of them, they were so scattered."
"They knew not to stay too close, just in case," he blinked at me in the dim light. We were on a dead world; one the Ra'Ak had killed long ago. The Ra'Ak had transformed an old underground bunker to keep this one alive and out of sight.
"Because you told them so," I pointed out.
"True. One of me told them, at least. I'm glad you killed what you could."
"You sound happy they're dead," I observed. His words sounded like truth, but then he wasn't sane. None of them had been.
"I want you to kill me, too," he said, picking at his chains. "I had to do this, you know. If I hadn't, I would have lived in this cage forever. They'd keep me alive forever. You understand that, don't you? I had to do something terrible so somebody would come after me—to kill them and then kill me. I was hoping the last one who pulled me out would allow her kind to keep me hidden or destroy me. The Bright ones—they took one look at me and started negotiations with the Ra'Ak again. After placing the geis, of course. And I did what they told me to do—I did not destroy their race. You and the other did that. Of course they regretted selling me back to the Ra'Ak later, after one of their foreseers saw that I would be at the heart of the destruction of everything." He laughed when he said that. Like I said—not sane.