Anya was left alone.

  All around there was nothing but blood in the grass. Even the necrites had abandoned her. They would return soon, she knew, but in this moment the world had grown dark and empty. There was nothing and no one around to comfort her. There was only death hanging above her head by a thread and the absent hope of a savior from on high. No one was coming and their weapons were useless. Only Judgement held any chance of halting the necrite advance, but in so doing Anya had killed every one of her allies.

  The world was dark alone. Lululu’s orb of light had faded with her death, and now there was not even a single moon to illuminate her in the darkness. Her eyes adjusted to the soft glow of her white skin, but almost nothing was visible, and what was had become oh so gray. The blood at her feet was still visibly red, but closer to the pink mixture it had formed when mixed with melted bone than to what should have been pumping through the necrite horde’s veins.

  She knew what it meant, this missing color. It meant midnight was rapidly approaching and she had some thirty minutes or an hour left until it came to pass. One thing had become clear: it would strip this world and leave it bare, and then… who knew? Anya certainly didn’t, but it would be like the sun went out.

  She laughed as tears began streaming from her eyes.

  “It’ll be like the sun went out!?”

  “The whole fucking world is already dead to me.”

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  “All my friends are dead! All my family is dead! All my fucking hopes are dead and no one’s coming to help me!” She pulled a knife from her boot and stabbed herself in the thigh.

  Even the knife bent before her, broken, sobbing. Its steel could not withstand her new flesh, and her new flesh could not withstand this temperament in blood. She threw it to the wind and continued crying with laughter as the necrite horde approached for the second? Third? Fourth? Fifty-fucking-eigth time. It didn’t matter. They arrived and she screamed and pushed the button and they died. It was all a big joke. A game. Everything her life stood to represent: glory, honor, protection. It was all lost. They had no glory in this battle. There wasn’t even a chance to win. Not now, not at the start, not ever. They had been damned to hell before the unconquerable battle even began as some kind of divine sadism or punishment for the soldiers predestined to fall.

  Punishment for what? She didn’t know and it didn’t matter. As the seconds ticked away in eternity you could be reborn a thousand times out of the brain’s limited capacity to store information. Anya didn’t know how many times it could have happened, or how many personalities she’d gained or lost. It didn’t matter what interpretation of the situation she went with at this point. No matter the spirituality and no matter the many varieties of interpretation, one thing was clear:

  Hell was real and Anya was there.

  She pushed the button and continued living. The necrites did not.

  Why did God give her such vain hopes? The act of pushing a button to kill all her enemies meant nothing against the infinite onslaught. She knew no such thing was possible by manly power, and yet though her enemies should have long been exhausted and unable to keep creating so many skinless bodies— they kept coming.

  She pushed the button again.

  It was clear this power was not something that could be resisted. So many guns and ammunition and for what? They had spent such time and effort to collect them all and it did them as much good as a strapon in a gay male whorehouse.

  The sky continued to darken. Anya pushed the button again.