Viska could not get back up.
She lay deep in the crater gouged into Bulwark Star's armor plating, her curled dark-red figure trembling nonstop as suppressed laughter squeezed from the depths of her throat.
At first, it was faint and broken, like the wheeze of a damaged bellows. Then it gradually grew louder, brighter, until it finally burst through the last line of reason—
"Ha... haha... hahahaha—!!!"
She suddenly raised her head.
That little face, identical to Pandora's, was now covered in cracks and grime. Her features had twisted completely under extreme madness. In the depths of her crimson eyes, the last trace of clarity that belonged to "Viska" went out, replaced by a pure urge for Destruction.
"Over?" she rasped, repeating Sandora's words with venomous mockery dripping from her voice. "No... this is only the beginning!"
"What I can't have... no one else gets to have either!!"
The final syllable became a piercing scream.
Bzz—
Centered on her small body, a surge of dark-red psionic energy far deeper and more ominous than before erupted with a roar. This was not energy controlled through Bulwark Star, but everything she could squeeze out from the deepest core of her life, from the foundational structures completely corrupted by the Abyss.
Dark-red flames shot into the sky, staining the space within several hundred meters a filthy blood-red. The shattered dark-red skirt armor on Viska's body peeled away inch by inch.
Her body began to change grotesquely—beneath her pale skin, deep-red energy veins bulged like living things, emitting a lava-like dim glow. At the joints of her limbs, skin and muscle tore apart under the swelling internal energy, splitting into cracks deep enough to expose bone. No blood flowed from those fissures, only boiling dark-red psionic energy.
She looked like an exquisite porcelain doll