Ainōryoku Sentai Nightmærangers #25 (Patreon)

The Statement Of Jaselle Alhambra, Part 2

"I really wish we could look more alike," Tammy sighed as Jas carefully folded up her blouse around her underwear so they wouldn't be seen, then as carefully wrapped her slacks around them, her cellphone and coin purse secured in the pocket. She had to remember to keep pulling her heat in constantly, and to be careful with how she moved since her sense of touch was almost non-existent. The points and angles of her body were sharp, and she moved with exaggerated care to keep from damaging her clothes. Jas glowed crimson with barely restrained heat, bright orange lines cracking almost open with every movement. She saw through a black band of obsidian on the front of her face, grown with as few facets as possible so she wouldn't have so many weird angles in her field of view. Other bits of herself picked up vibrations to let her hear, and she augmented that with two fluttering clouds of plasma inside holes where her ears would be. Hearing and sight were all she had to work with. Between that distraction and the strangeness of her whole body, she could almost overlook the fact she was, in fact, completely naked.

Almost.

"Well, it's not like we're just wearing different-colored spandex here," Ate Sanny said as she rotated her arms at the shoulders, the limbs moving with unnatural, inhuman range of motion. "We have different textures, different materials, different transparencies… we were never going to be uniform except for our colors and the shapes of our heads, Tammy. This is real life." She began casually folding up the clothes she had shed in a much more haphazard and careless banner, not bothering to fold them properly, merely rolling them all up into a tube. Jas didn't wince at such carelessness, since she had to be careful with her movements, but she wanted to.

"Yes, this is real life, where we're all stripping naked to use our superpowers to fight, kill and eat a giant spider so we don't end up eating each other, for the noble goal of restoring traffic back to normal so we can sleep in longer in the morning," Kuya Kim said.

"Real life is notorious for being fucked up," Ate Sanny shrugged.

They'd gone over to Kuya Kim's car which had been parked in a dark corner of the underground parking lot near the coffee shop they'd all met. There was no hope of actually driving to their destination. At least, not in any reasonable amount of time. It was midmorning, so the traffic was already thick. Instead they were planning to fly to Makati the way they'd flown from Tagaytay. It was actually a shorter distance, and because it wasn't raining, so Ate Sanny said, she'd be able to make better time.

Of course, before they could do that, they had to get naked.

Kuya Kim had parked close to a wall, and on a casual glance it would have looked like there was no room for people in the corner the car was blocking off from the view of any security cameras or passersby, but he had poured a little pink sand from his hands onto the ground… and suddenly there was plenty of room for all five of them. It hurt Jas's eyes and brain to look at for too long, never mind that the former was currently made of volcanic glass and the latter was either rock, lava or plasma depending on how her insides were mixing right then, but at least they didn't have to crowd disturbingly close together. Tamma had dropped seeds that had expanded into tall, wide leaves to give the girls some semblance of privacy from Kuya Kim while they undressed, and each of them had gone to their separate corners.

They undressed quickly, because even if they were in a corner and Kuya Kim was warping space to make them hard to see, there was always a chance that people would pass by. Willy just turned into water and let her clothes fall off her, stepping out of her shoes and socks and somehow leaving all of it dry, while Ate Sanny was almost as casual, just stripping off her clothes as if she undressed in public every day. Jas tried not to assume anything from it. Perhaps she just felt really comfortable around them?

"They never really show this on TV shows," Tammy said as she stuffed her clothes into her now empty jeans and wrapped the jean's legs around the whole thing to secure it. "Everyone is either already wearing their costume or there's a cut and suddenly they had a wardrobe change, or they used their transformation item or they had super speed…"

"Yeah, well, they probably don't want to use up half the runtime on the episode on getting dressed," Ate Sanny commented. "Everyone done getting changed? Tasteful blank doll anatomy all around? Kim, got rid of all the dangling bits?"

"Yeah," Kuya Kim said. "Can you get rid of this now?"

The leaves—wide fronds that Jas didn’t recognize and suspected Tammy might have just made up—shivered, than seemed to shrink, getting small and smaller like it was growing backwards. Jas was certain it would have regressed back into a seed in a bizarre unbirthing if Tammy hadn't suddenly stepped forward and touched the receding plant. They seemed to fuse with her skin—bark?—before being sucked up into her body, like hairs growing backward into the body as Jas watched with morbid fascination.

"Uh, Jas?" Ate Sanny said. "Your head is burning."

Jas instinctively reached up to pat at her head, but of course she didn't feel anything. She was still pulling in heat, which she hadn't allowed to slip. But she saw the flickering light on one of the windows of Kuya Kim's car. She didn't blink in surprise, because she didn't have the eyelids for it, but she would have. The fascination… that wasn't hers. Well, a little bit was, but most of it was coming from the fire inside. Now that she wasn't feeling it herself, she could feel that the fascination was streaked with curiosity, all of it morbid, like a child who'd seen a classmate do something disgusting and wanted to know if they could do it themselves. She didn't need to breathe, so a sigh of irritation would have just been an affectation, but she suppressed the plasma, and the golden, flame-like halo that had formed around her head diminished, leaving only rough dark stone that slowly began to glow red again from internal heat.

"Well… that was an image," Kuya Kim said.

"If she does that without meaning to, it'll be up to you to keep me from being barbequed," Ate Sanny said. "No offense Jas, but that didn't look like it was planned."

Jas ducked her head meekly. Honestly, it wasn't like she could disagree.

Kuya Kim tilted his head. "What about Tammy? She'd be charcoal."

"I'm fairly certain Willy wouldn't let that happen, but only for Tammy."

Willy nodded.

"See? She'd let me burn."

Another nod.

"Willy, don't let Ate Sanny burn," Tammy said. "Don't let anyone burn. Harmful negligence like that is wrong, all right?"

Willy nodded as readily as when she'd admitted she'd let Ate Sanny burn.

Ate Sanny and Kuya Kim exchanged a look. Jas wasn't sure what they were seeing, since Kuya Kim's face was blank pink stone with light white marbling and a band of darker pink to serve as something to make eye contact with—he'd said he could see from every inch of his body, but people had been disturbed at having no features to look at—and Ate Sanny had blank compound eyes on a face made of hard yellow carapace that was all of one piece except for a featureless slit that she used to talk, which was hidden behind overlapping plates most of the time.

"I'll keep an eye out," Kuya Kim said.

"Much obliged."

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Despite the not unreasonable fears of ignition, flying was uneventful.

It was also exhilarating.

The first time Jas had flown, she'd barely been conscious, too overwhelmed with urges that weren't her own and trying to keep from burning everything around her. Thankfully she'd been alone in her uncle's house when it had happened, and she'd managed to get outside before she had destroyed anything. She didn't know if anyone had noticed her flight from her uncle's house specifically, but they'd definitely seen her in the sky.

The second time, there had been nothing to see because of the driving rain and clouds of ash, and she had been a bit subdued and overcome with the shock and realization that she had killed and eaten a living thing because of the urges coursing through her, then a bit embarrassed at wearing borrowed clothes from someone who had to turn themselves into a puppy in a backpack. She had been trying to keep herself in check, even as she dared to hope it was possible to not be overcome by her urges while they had ridden back into the city and she had watched the people around her.

She'd been nervous about Willy, but apparently the tall girl had always been like that. Today that had become very disturbing.

All those worries went away as they'd all linked up as small shapes and Ate Sanny had picked them up and taken to the air.

She couldn't feel the wind around them unless she leaked out some plasma to react to the environment, and the best she could do was feel her external stone getting slightly cooler as she held her heat in. All she could hear was the wind blowing across her, as she perceived it through vibration on her external obsidian. The only sense that really worked and was completely unencumbered was sight.

What she saw was breathtaking.

Everyone down below were so small there weren't even visible, the cars like little beads someone had painstakingly lined up on the ground. Buildings that had looked tall and impressive seemed like too-bright shoeboxes. Ate Sanny had gotten bigger and bigger as they'd gone up into the air, opening wide wings to catch rising heat from the ground and using that to glide them steadily towards their destination.

"I thought you preferred insect wings?" Jas heard Kuya Kim as she just stared at the land below them. Was this what it was like to be the sun, looking down on everything below it? She knew the sun was far away in space, she'd passed her science classes after all, but still…

"Bird wings are more efficient for catching lift and long distance flight. We'd probably confuse anyone with any ornithology cred if they looked up, but I think I've matched the my colored so I blend in with the sky… well, except for you guys."

"I think this is literally the fastest I've ever gone down EDSA. Why are you complaining about being late for work?"

"What am I going to wear when I get there?"

"Ah. Good point. If only you could get to places quickly while fully clothed…"

"Smartass. I hope you're doing whatever it is you do to get to school quick, otherwise it'll be a long flight on the way back."

"Ooh, you're right! This is a good opportunity to get everywhere… "

The air above and around her began to glisten as pink sand began to shed from Kuya Kim's sides spreading out around them on the wind.

"Someone's going to have rough hair down there," she heard Tammy comment.

"I'm trying to aim them away from people and onto buildings. If I do it right, I can warp a path for us all the way back to… well, close to the car."

"How do you aim sand?"

"By cheating. A lot. Hush, I've got to concentrate, I'm not like Sanny who can make more brains so this gets easier."

The land beneath them just flew past, growing closer and farther as Ate Sanny went up and down on the rising updrafts. Jas was glad the urges were being quiescent, allowing her to bask in the wonder that she saw. She'd hoped she'd be able to fly on a plane when she got accepted into university, but they hadn't had the money, so she'd traveled to Metro Manila by boat. Now she was getting to fly—for the third time, she realized, and possibly even more in the future—without a plane between her and the sky.

The thought sent a momentary pulse of nervousness through her as she realized what she was thinking, but the wonder continued unabated. To be the sun upon the sky, gazing down at all those below, heat and light unending…

…

That… wasn't her wonder?

Ate Sanny, Kuya Kim and Tammy continued to chatter as they flew even as Jas grew very, very still.

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They flew over the Pasig River, the locally infamous polluted waterway flowing darkly beneath them. Below, many of the roads were heavily congested, though still moving, as cars had to take away roundabout routes from the areas that had been cordoned off by the military.

The cordon began at the intersection of Buendia and EDSA, cars all being turned aside to the right by a line of concrete barriers and soldiers. Beyond that, tanks, trucks, mobile artillery, and tents stood on the road, blocking the way. In the nearby gas station, a few food trucks had managed to be allowed parking and were surrounded by off-duty soldiers eating, while the rest went into the nearby mini-mall. Beyond that point, heavily armed soldiers in fatigues of various kinds moved. There were also soldiers on the tops of buildings, manning mortars or tube like weapons, or wielding very long guns. Other were standing behind tanks and other heavy vehicles. Placed seemingly randomly on roadways were metal shipping containers that were open on both ends, with walls of sandbags and concrete road barriers.

Many trees had clearly been cut down in the area, the fresh stumps gleaming of pale wood, and there were piles of sacks with metal plates on top of them  scattered on the road that the soldiers and vehicles were avoiding, going far around them.

"If I had to guess," Ate Sanny said, "I think those piles are explosives. Like giant landmines for if the Gagambuhala gets that low. The sacks are probably sand, maybe concrete under the steel plates, to try and contain the blast, then in the center there's a bunch of explosives that's supposed to blow upwards and send the plates up like shrapnel."

"That sounds really dangerous…" Tammy said, sounding mildly horrified.

"Well yeah, it's for killing a nigh-unkillable giant spider," Ate Sanny said. "They had to evacuate those condos and homes near them, I'm not feeling anyone in the buildings within a hundred feet of those things."

"There are people still living around here?" Kuya Kim exclaimed, his words physically vibrating Jas hanging beneath him.

"Don't you watch the news? Only 25% of the people here consented to be evacuated. Some of the office buildings actually tried to stay in business and make their employees keep coming to the office, since the Gagambuhala hadn't been reported to be eating people, unlike the Charm Dog in Pasay or whatever that thing is in the bay. It just built webs."

"Then why did the military go after it?" Jas found herself asking.

"Because it's big and scary and it's crashing the economy because it scares foreign investors and employees. And there might actually be some building damage, though it was mainly broken glass and crumbled facades. I mean, look at its nest."

The large ball of thick web and debris hung over the street, lifted off the ground by hundreds and hundreds of absurdly thick, grayish cables. Pieces of cars, buildings, waiting sheds, trees and other debris covered the outside, bound together with the web like mortar cement.

"There used to be a big hole underneath for the Gagambuhala to get out through, but it looks like it was sealed up," Ate Sanny said. "There's only an air hole now, big enough for its drones."

"It has drones?-!" Kuya Kim exclaimed.

"Not the way we have them," Ate Sanny said. "We've got pictures of small, robotic spiders coming out of that hole to repair the nest, add more webs or salvage the nearby buildings for parts."

"It's… making robots." Kuya Kim sounded stunned. "A giant spider is making robots… what the fuck?"

"This is not new, it did that months ago. Don't you listen to the news?"

"No, it's either pointless or depressing."

"Well, change it, there's monsters in the city, and sometimes the news talks about them in between shilling out their channel's new TV shows, celebrity drivel, and who was killed or raped that day."

"So, pointless and depressing with occasional sprinkles of mind-numbing horror."

"Just like real life!" Tammy exclaimed cheerfully.

Ate Sanny circled around and eventually alighted on one of the few buildings without a military presence, though some sandbags and some sort of sealed box showed they'd been there. They landed, which resulted in them bouncing on the ground as Ate Sanny's tentacles—wait, she'd been carrying them on tentacles?— struck the hard cement of the roof.

The four of them quickly unlinked and began to grow, rising up in people-shaped form as Ate Sanny made several disturbingly biological sounds as she reformed from winged and tentacular and back into her tall humanoid form, with its overlapping yellow plates at the joints, hard exoskeleton, elongated-looking limbs and compound eyes. Two pairs of long, dragonfly-like wings began to grow from her back, flowing down and flapping like a cape.

Tammy became a figure roughly the same size and dimensions as she'd been before, her body dark green and smooth like bamboo, which transitioned to a silvery paleness just past her elbow and knees, making it look like she was wearing boots and gloves. There was a ring of flower petals at her wrists and neck like ruffles. Her head was smooth, with two small holes in the sides and a triangular area of black spots in front for the plant organs she used for eyes.

Willy looked exactly the same as she had been when Jas met her, a figure of transparent ice that was somehow tinged just the slightest bit blue. Jas suspected that like Kuya Kim, she could see from every point in her body, and that the white, frosted ice band on the front of her head was less for something to make eye contact with and more because Tammy had asked her to look like that.

Kuya Kim was also reassuringly familiar, a borderline androgynous masculine figure made of pink stone that looked transparent at the edges. The dark pink band on the front of his face was the only difference, which made it slightly easier to tell which way was his 'front', so to speak. Only Ate Sanny's body really had joints. The limitations of things like which way they were facing were only as limiting as they let it be.

Jas looked down at herself, the obsidian on her face bulging out slightly to widen her field of view in imitation of her eyes looking downward. Dark volcanic rock so hot it was glowing red, occasionally cracking with orange lines of almost lava. She'd made her feet and hands out of obsidian as a safeguard in case she had to touch something, and admittedly because it looked nice. They glowed a little from the plasma contained within, but that was fine. The plasma was hotter than it was bright, and she was still drawing in heat.

"Well, don't we all look impressive," Ate Sanny said. "Short, but impressive."

"I'd be tall too, but I can't control my body very well when my mass is distributed like that," Tammy said. Her head didn't change, but from the tone, she was pouting on the inside. Probably. Tammy shook her head then, and clapped her hands. There was a dull sound like… well, like two pieces of wood slamming together. "Okay, plan time. The last three times we went up against the Gagambuhala, it didn't go well. It managed to surprise and ambush us, despite being a spider the size of a building, and manage to catch us in webs."

"Did it shoot webs at you or did you fall into them…?" Kuya Kim asked.

"Not all spiders just weave a web and call it a day," Ate Sanny said authoritatively. "Some build nets that they hold and use like glue traps, using the adhesive to make it stick to prey, wrapping the prey up so they can't escape, and then eating them. But don't worry, of all of us here, I'm the only one in danger of that, and I plan to send as many drones as possible so it can't get at the real me."

"So… it came at you hold glue and wrapped you up in it?" Kuya Kim sounded amused.

"Then it injected us in digestive juices and waited for me to melt inside my own shell before eating me by drinking my insides out like I was a pack of juice," Ate Sanny said blandly. "It sucked. Fortunately, none of you have that problem, except possibly Tammy."

"Not anymore!" Tammy said proudly. "I'm layered hardwood now, and my sap is as alkaline as I can get it to try to bring the acid down. The plan is for Ate Sanny to stay back and keep an eye on both the military and the Gagambuhala while we get into position. We get in close and Kuya Kim does that space warp thing of his so that the Gagambuhala doesn't escape and we can keep the damage to the surroundings at a minimum. Then once it's contained, Ate Jas flies in and sets that nest on fire and the Gagambuhala with it!"

Inside Jas, eagerness roared, a burning flame that was terrifyingly familiar. It was the same eagerness that had made her fly to Tagaytay, a desire to do something…!

Jas tried to clamp down on it, but the urge was powerful. She could feel her limbs shaking, feel her insides changing from lava to plasma, feel her grip on her heat slipping…

"Ate Jas, do you think you can do it? Otherwise we'll have to come up with a different plan."

She tried to handle both at once, tried to keep in her heat even as she sought to quash the urge, to push it aside she can think logically, rationally…

"I-I can do it," she said. Her voice came out smooth and even. The shakiness was all inside her. "I can burn it."

Tammy nodded, oblivious to her turmoil. "All right. Willy, if Ate Jas is too hot or doesn't seem like she can control her power well enough yet, I want you to ice her as best as you can so she can calm down."

Jas didn't blink, but she was surprised.

"If you go out of control, try to let us know and keep the heat down," Ate Sanny said. "We'll take care of the rest. I promise, I won't eat you, all right? So try not to eat me." There was no reassuring smile, but she did give Jas a thumbs up.

"How do you control it?" Jas said quietly. It wasn't a whisper. Whispering required breathing.

"Experience," Ate Sanny said. "Having a reason to hold back. And knowing that sometimes, you can give into your urges."

Jas stared, because she couldn't blink.

Give in?

"You'll find your way of dealing with it," Ate Sanny said. "And if you can't, I'll hide behind Tammy so Willy will protect us both." She gave Jas another thumbs up.

Jas hesitated. Then she nodded slowly.

"Okay…" she said. "Okay… I think I can do it, Ate Sanny. I'll burn the webs and nothing else."

Inside, the fire burned. But wasn't that what she needed to do?

Didn't she need to burn?

She didn't have eyes to close. But Jas prayed.