Episode 17 (4/20/01)

The swarm of vampire bats was pelting her from all angles. Their fangs and blinding, swatting wings hurt almost as much as the beating she took from Fritz, but Silverbullet still managed to do them some damage. Groping with but the sight of one squinted eye, she grabbed a bat by the right wing and balled it up in her hand until it squealed in an almost human voice for release. Silverbullet only did so semi-consciously (talking bats no longer fazed her as they no doubt once would have) since she was still trying to wade through six others. The youthful lieutenant Silverbullet ran through recently, the one Captain Rancor ripped the fangs from, floundered to the ground feeling at a fractured arm. Rancor himself then broke off from swarming Silverbullet, actually double backed to the lieutenant, and with a quick, clean stroke, decapitated the junior officer with a rather long blade one could imagine being issued to officers in olden times. Only young when bitten in 1945, the Nazi's undead body immediately deteriorated to its natural (as opposed to its supernatural) age and soon crumpled to dust. Captain Rancor then strode away, stormed out of the arena, turned back into a bat and flew out of sight.

Silverbullet, meanwhile, was still surrounded by bats she couldn't seem to shake and which were actually starting to scratch her metallic skin. Just then she felt -- heat. Fortunately, it felt as though it was in a direction away from the small crowd of humanity that was watching two humans pitted against each other in the arena's "squared circle" by the vampire officers. Now those officers were bombarding in bat-form a silver-skinned woman already being whispered about by the captives of this blood camp with the fervent hope that she'd be able to face these beasts of darkness on equal footing. Even the two humans who were fighting stopped to watch Silverbullet grab another bat to bite its head off in a berserker fury. Then, calming down a bit, she threw the bat aside (away from where she thought she heard the crowd) and remembered to home in on the nearby heat source that had suddenly flared up.

In the next room, a couple of werewolves had started a fire in the middle of said room to cook what they consider dinner. Their patrols left little time for them to do more than eat a body raw (and awfully dry, since the vampires usually drain the corpses of blood before they're allowed to be eaten by the Wolf Pack). Now Chad and Tomas were going to cook their extra obese human like civilized monsters.

"This-is-going-to-be-good," Tomas growled, in that guttural mode wolfmen speak in.

"They'll-smell-the-burnt-human-though!" Chad barked in warning.

Silverbullet certainly did. But by this point, the smell of charred flesh, the sight of horrors come to life and the stories of caged humans were becoming more and more mentally commonplace for her. She had psychologically adapted to the presence and interaction of these wild things to the point where focusing on what was desperately needed (to warm up/loosen up enough to morph her shape again) wouldn't be a problem. For their part, Chad and Tomas were afraid not of the silver stranger who had suddenly burst in on their dining experience, but of the six vampire bats who followed her in. Should they survive the stranger, they'd be in big trouble later for the fire to be sure.

And not just for frying a human close enough to other humans for them to possibly rebel against what they smelled, but for how the heat from said flame melted Silverbullet just enough for her to regain full metamorphic mobility. Stepping away from the fire once warmed up, Silverbullet turned both of her hands into giant fly swatters and proceeded to brutally slap down each bat that had smothered her. In one bat's case, the refusal to cease hovering overhead cost him dearly. Silverbullet didn't bite, she simply used her head. By imagining an inverse iron maiden, foot-long spikes shot from all directions out of her metallically malleable skull, and a couple of those spikes caught the bat -- splitting it in two. A severed, rapidly aging body changing from bat to human, then flopped to the ground, and upon seeing this, Chad and Tomas ran out of the room -- leaving behind the corpse they were about to roast.

It's not always going to be this easy, Silverbullet took a moment to contemplate. Soon, they'll all have things that spray cold, or some kind of defense against me. Like the plague they are, they'll come back even stronger in the same way a mutated virus does...

TO BE CONTINUED