The Hybrid's body staggered, taking one, two unsteady steps forward, as if it hadn't yet realized it no longer had a face to see with, a brain to command it.
Then it dropped.
The massive corpse collapsed like a felled tree, crashing onto the store's floor with a bone-jarring thud that rattled the shelves and sent dust drifting down from the ceiling. The half-lance I still held tore free as it fell, leaving me standing there alone, chest heaving, arm still outstretched.
For a long second, the only sounds were my own rough breathing and the slow dripping of blood from the ceiling, from my hair, from the ruined thing at my feet.
I exhaled shakily and lowered the lance fragment, my muscles burning, my right arm still faintly glowing as the wind blades slowly unwound and evaporated into nothing.
