A/N: Glad to hear you guys enjoy this version. I hope it will continue to interest you. I can make no promises for the future, but I have a streak of inspiration that will lead to a satisfying ending this time. As long as people remain interested, I will keep updating.

Interesting man, Sergeant Petrov… Well, not outwardly, but very much so on the inside.

Many, like myself, served their three years in the PDF and took the first release deal they were offered. Petrov didn't. He's not a killer, not even much of a fighter, he's a thinker without a backbone, a skilled leader with zero sense of initiative.

As a Non Commissioned Officer, Petrov enjoyed some degree of authority without the need to make judgement calls, a comfortable and challenging niche in which he thrived.

Using my father as bait was not his call, though he did not disagree with the strategy. A simple trap, easily set and easily sprung.

But then, the one thing Sergeant Petrov feared happened; he lost control. With no officer to tell him how to react and nothing in his training to dictate the right course of action, he made a judgement call and got himself killed.

Innocent hardly applies to him, though. The orders he carried out over his thirty years of service, the ones he remembers fondly as having propelled his career forward… Why am I not shocked by what he did? By how he never thought of his victims as people. Words like Meatsacks, Apes, Skinnies and Crickets are all he ever fought…

Man's never left Baria, never killed anything other that Imperial Citizens.

Should I judge the man or the orders. All from Governor O'Ran, all from the Imperium.

The clock over my couch strikes twelve. Baria's day/night cycle lasts thirty-one hours, but the human body has difficulties adapting to schedules different from Terra's. The twenty-four hours cycle is still in use aboard merchant vessels and, as such, clocks on relay worlds like Baria will usually have two extra hands, slower and visually distinct from the others. Whether the numbers displayed are Terra time or Baria's depends on the clockmaker. This one shows only 0, 25, 50 and 75, a clever way of telling people how much of the cycles is completed.

Who should be credited for that clever little idea? The Magos supervising the artisan guilds or the clockmaker himself? Should credit go to the creative soul or to the one in power who allowed this creativity to flourish? Both?

That man and his boy who thanked me for saving them from a mess I caused, would he thank Dana if he knew the whole story? No, I went out of my way to save them, it's not my abilities he was thankful for, it was my initiative…

Mathias… He's the one contemplating this, his personality is pushing these thoughts onto me. Why?

Olenk. She didn't order my father's death, caused it, but didn't wish it. My rationale here is that I cannot allow others to die because of me, but how is she excluded from that category?

Major Olenk… Is so adorably tiny I could never bring myself to kill her anyway. She walks in and spots me right away, her head snaps like a surprised gopher and bright brown eyes lock onto mine right away. She's out of uniform, wearing a t-shirt one size too small with pats two sizes too large… That's not a fashion choice, it's just the PDF being too cheap to provide enough overalls in size medium.

I must have developed a taste for muscular women somewhere along the way, because the petite woman's chiseled forearms, covered with scars with a few veins showing in places, don't keep me from wishing I'd met her prior to getting engaged and turning into a shapeshifting freak.

More important right now is the fact that she scares me. A man looking like that is just any bullet-head military jock with access to a gym. A woman with that physique has it for a reason; killing.

"Who are you?" She barks, pulling a little square device from her belt with one hand and drawing her gun with the other. "Possible intruder in Pyrrhus Facility," She barks in the box, "security forces stand-by!"

I don't look like Petrov anymore. Can't let it slip that I did not mean to appear this way. "We need to talk." I remain seated. She's not jumpy, her gun is tiny, useless, but she's got it pointed so squarely at my eyes that I can see the cartridge down the barrel. It's not conventional ammunition. "Do not waste this opportunity, Major."

She kicks the door closed and plants herself squarely in the way. "Identify yourself or I will open fire."

"My name is Jan Rey." She opens her mouth. Freezes, blinks twice, then speaks into her tiny vox caster.

"Situation appears normal, investigating now, will report every two minutes, Olenk out." Her eyes never left me, but I can tell her whole focus is my head and her gun right now. "Talk."

Where to start? Talking wasn't part of the plan, but if I don't make this believable, she will realize how little control I have over my new powers. "I'm sorry for the men I killed, I was scared and angry, but both of them were exemplary troopers, they performed their duties to the letter."

She snorts, "Yeah; they died."

I can't chuckle, can't even smile. She's hurt, sent these men to the slaughter and hated it.

"Look, I am willing to surrender." No I'm not, still her face is something to behold; eyebrows vanishing under her dirty hairs, jaw going slightly slack and even her nostrils seem to widen to absorb the shock.

"What do you want in return?" Notice how she does not lower her weapon. We will not be going anywhere here, neither of us trusts the other, neither of us is willing to tell the other anything that could be used against them.

D

She's nervous, fidgeting with her vox caster, although nothing else about her demeanour indicates tension of any kind.

E

"Nothing, this is not a negotiation. We need to be on the same page; someone did this to me, I will find them and I will get answer, then we can discuss my future."

P

"And I should just let you run around Baria until then, is that it?"

L

"You don't trust me, I understand, and believe me, it's mutual, but something else is going on here, something that threatens both of us. Without my cooperation, you will never find out what it is, not until it's too late."

O

She flinches, stops tapping her caster for a moment, then shakes her head briskly. "I can't accept that, but if you want to work with us, we would welcome your help. We can make sure you're not a threat and you can get your answers."

Y

Tempting, a free pass back into the ranks of humankind. "No, I can't afford to be put on a leash…" Olenk is too smart, too ruthless. I have this one opportunity to kill her, but I need to make it quick. "Besides, you just signaled your security force, D-E-P…"

*Bang!*

Monologuing gets you shot. Noted. My face is now a sorbet dripping along the clock. I see that, then Olenk shoots again, blinding me once more.

"Bring the cryon guns!" She roars as I drop to a knee, fumbling around in the dark for something to use as cover. I use my forearm instead and it gets blown to pieces, but buys me enough time to look around. The first shot spun me around, so I faced the clock for a moment, then the other shot knocked me aside, into the beer fridge. Olenk's on my left, the clock is to the right, behind me, the bar behind and to the left of the major and the only hard things nearby are the two fridges, mine and the one by the bar.

I try to lift it up and toss it at her, but the door comes clean off. Still, I use it as a shield and the next round turns it to shrapnels, tearing out a chunk the size of a watermelon into it. I throw the useless piece of junk straight towards Olenk, but she kicks up a barstool into its path and knocks it off target just enough that she can lean out of the way. She fires again, blinds me again.

She saw me regrow an arm, rip out a four inches steel door and throw it at her, but she stands her fekking ground.

I'm in love. She needs to die right now.

Again, my arm is blown to pieces, but I have a few seconds of spatial awareness in return. Olenk fetches something from her belt with the hand holding her caster, a magazine, and flicks her gun sideways to eject the spent magazine before slamming the fresh one in.

She does this in the time it takes me to rear up for a leap.

I aim for the throat and make it halfway through the room before she has focused from her gun to me. I can see her pupils shift as they try to reacquire her target.

She works the slide and, in the same motion, discharges her weapon in the ceiling.

Stucco and plaster fall between us, the thin white powder completely failing to…

My head splits like a melon. Something exploded exactly where she shot. Proximity detonated explosive round? Gas pipe? Doesn't matter, I keep going and… Get shot in both knees from behind.

Olenk grabs the back of my shirt and drags me off the ground. I regenerate in time to see her toss me a short way behind the bar, then she shoots again.

Boots beat the ground and the door slams open. "No!" Olenk is pissed, "We need him alive, I said cryon weapons!"

Somebody else replies, on the same tone, "Fekk that! O'ran's orders, this freak dies here!"

Olenk is gone by the time I've recovered. Probably dragged out by the Royal Guards I'm now facing. They have pump action rifles in hand, five of them, and are all forming a firing line. The first round hits me in the jaw, then they hit me everywhere. Flesh melts off, bones and tendons snap as they are chewed through.

These guys lack the Arbites' discipline and just unload all they've got as fast as possible.

I don't try to regenerate, ignore the raging hunger that fills my blood and hold back. They all wear standard issue Flak armour, short sleeved models, I saw that much in the short glimpse I caught.

That's good. I stand my ground, shielding myself with tattered limbs, crouched with my head tucked in, and wait.

Eventually, they all need to reload at mostly the same time. Then I regenerate. Bones, skin, organs… Are omitted.

I produce blood, gallons of it generated out of seemingly thin air, introduced to an opened circulatory system. The power in that explosion of gore knocks me back through the building's outer wall and along the pavement, where I leave a deep trench over twenty meters.

Even at this distance, I hear the dying screams of the Royal Guards as the green substance, blasted off my body by the pressurized hemoglobin, begins chewing its way through every bit of exposed skin in the room. My body struggles to regenerate, my clothes are fused to the skin in places, bones are missing and large chunk of flesh in the chest and thighs are missing.

I need to leave and recover, eat something, replenish my reserves… I take three steps before getting something stuck in my left knee. A blade, the size of a hedge clipper has somehow dug itself in the tender nook behind my leg and it hurts even more than you'd expect.

I go to scream but Olenk, charging out from the aquila statues, beats me to it. Brown and green are all I see as her boots fly on either sides of my head before she squeeze her knees, carried by her momentum, and spins my whole upper body into a clumsy waltz that ends with me eating skak, headfirst into concrete, and her flying off out of sight.

"How the Fekk are you only PDF?!" Is all I can say.

She's holding the smallest force baton I've ever seen, along with something similar to a paint gun. Her stance is devoted fully to stability; baton in an ice pick grip, wrists interlocked to support the gun hand, feet planted at shoulder width. This woman has given retreat a single glance and spat on it.

"Baria's Regiment is men only." She surprisingly answers.

"Oh." And I charge, going for a wide hook that would shatter steel. She flows like a dropped silk scarf, wrapping around my waist, under my arm. The force baton hits me under the ribcage and my knee refuses to bend anymore, frozen solid by that paint gun of hers.

Alright. I… Can't kill Major Olenk. Not for moral or strategic reasons, because I am physically unable to get the best of her.

The knife in my leg has a serrated edge, it gets stuck on bones as I yank it out and I need to try twice before retrieving it.

I mock a stance similar to hers, ice pick grip, crouched low… And then force my wrist to spin until bones break and skin tears. The blade slips out, straight towards the unprepared major, and catches her in the forearm… Doesn't dig in, hitting hilt first and kocking her aside with the force of a two hundred pounds man body-checking her.

Bitch is up, her arm now articulated between the wrist and elbow, before I make it halfway out of the compound. She not going to catch up, I'm fast, even with a fekked up leg. But she still picks up the knife and nails me in the neck with it. Doesn't knock me off balance, doesn't even slow me down and just falls off as soon as I jump the perimeter wall.

That was close.