The trio continued charging across the open fields, Gold Ship laughing the entire way as the flock of furious chickens pursued her with relentless determination.
Eventually, though, even the chickens had their limits.
One by one, they began to slow. Their angry clucking grew weaker, the frantic beating of wings gradually dying down as the birds finally reached the point where their outrage was no longer worth the effort.
After all that noise and fury, they eventually gave up the chase entirely, turning around and waddling back toward the farm with all the dignity they could still muster. Whatever offense Gold Ship had committed, the chickens had apparently decided it simply was not worth dying over.
Gold Ship skidded to a stop and immediately threw both arms into the air in victory.
"Ha! They sto- Uwahhh?!"
Before she could even finish celebrating, Orfevre's fist landed squarely on the top of her head.
Gold Ship crouched down at once, clutching the sore spot as tears sprang into her eyes. She looked less like a triumphant winner and more like a child who had just been sharply corrected by reality.
"What were you thinking?" Orfevre snapped, unable to hide the irritation in her voice.
Gold Ship sniffled and looked up at her with watery eyes. "B-but they were just chickens..."
"And?" Orfevre frowned. "Do you want to get pecked to death by chickens?! Also what did you do to the cows and pigs?"
Gold Ship let out a dramatic whimper, as if the question itself had been an act of cruelty. A second later, she abandoned all pretense of dignity and threw herself at Evan's leg, wrapping both arms around it like a koala clinging to a tree.
"Uwaaaahhh! Big Bro! Big Sis is bullying me!" she wailed at the top of her lungs, squeezing his leg tighter as if her survival depended on it.
Normally, that sort of behavior would have earned her at least a sigh, maybe even a pat on the head.
This time, however, Evan did not look at her at all.
Instead, his gaze had already shifted somewhere else, locking onto a point in the distance with an intensity that made the air around him feel sharper somehow.
Gold Ship blinked, then noticed the change in his expression. Orfevre also went quiet. Both sisters followed Evan's line of sight.
At the crest of a nearby hill stood several farm animals.
A pair of cows. Two pigs. Several chickens.
Or at least, they were supposed to be cows, pigs, and chickens.
Something had gone horribly, unnaturally wrong with them.
Their skin had taken on an eerie violet glow, as if some foreign energy had seeped into their bodies and corrupted them from the inside out. Jagged horns curled in twisted directions from their heads, black spikes jutted from their backs and shoulders, and their mouths were lined with crooked, pointed teeth far too sharp to belong to any ordinary farm animal. The chickens' feathers had hardened into crude, thorn-like quills that made them look more like living weapons than birds.
And then there were the eyes.
Each creature stared from the hill with the same sickly purple glow burning behind its gaze, and there was nothing animalistic or simple about it anymore. There was no confusion there, no mindless barnyard instinct.
Only a cold, unnatural hostility.
Gold Ship's face lost all color. Her tears vanished instantly.
"I changed my mind."
In one smooth motion, she stepped behind Orfevre and used her older sister as a human shield.
"You got this, Big Bro!" she said, suddenly full of confidence again. She even raised a thumb encouragingly. "Go beat them up!"
Neither Evan nor Orfevre responded to her.
At this point, they had probably become too accustomed to Gold Ship volunteering other people for dangerous situations.
Without saying a word, Orfevre reached behind herself, grabbed Gold Ship by the back of her shirt, and lifted her up without effort despite the younger girl kicking and flailing in protest.
"H-Hey!"
Orfevre ignored her entirely and calmly placed her onto Evan's shoulders instead.
Gold Ship blinked once, then twice.
"Actually, this is safer."
Satisfied, Orfevre stepped forward beside her brother.
Meanwhile, Evan raised his wrist and turned the dial of the Another Omnitrix with calm precision. The device's golden core lit up in response, glowing brighter as an alien hologram appeared on the dial.
Across the hill, the mutated animals let out low, distorted growls.
The sound was wrong in a way that made the skin crawl. It was deep and wet and broken, like something trying to imitate a living creature without understanding what one was supposed to sound like.
Orfevre rolled her shoulders once, then cracked her neck. Her eyes remained fixed on the threat ahead, cold and focused. She bent down, plucked a single blade of grass from the ground, and closed her fingers around it.
Golden aura immediately flowed from her hand and through the thin strand.
The grass stiffened at once. Within seconds, the fragile blade had become something more like a short dagger, compact and narrow with an edge so fine it looked capable of cutting through steel if needed.
Gold Ship leaned forward from Evan's shoulders, watching with wide eyes. "You really can make even grass look cool."
Orfevre didn't even glance at her. "Not now Golshi."
The mutated animals gave up whatever restraint they had left.
With guttural roars, they launched themselves forward.
At the exact same time, Evan pressed his palm onto the Another Omnitrix.
Golden light erupted outward in a blinding flash, swallowing his body whole and forcing even the charging monsters to hesitate for a split second. That brief pause was all the transformation needed.
When the light finally faded, Evan was gone.
In his place stood a towering humanoid alien with a muscular build and pale white skin. Black pants covered his lower body, but the rest of him looked almost surreal. His face had no eyes at all, only a massive pair of ears and a single wide mouth.
And across the rest of his body, dozens of golden eyes had opened.
They covered his shoulders, chest, and arms, each one moving with independent precision. The golden Omnitrix dial rested at the center of his waist, glowing faintly against the alien's body.
Gold Ship now sat comfortably atop his much broader shoulders as though this were the most natural thing in the world.
"Eye Guy!" He announced.
Eye Guy immediately raised both hands. A large eyeball formed in the center of each palm, and a heartbeat later, brilliant golden energy blasted outward in a storm of concentrated beams.
The mutated animals scattered at once, breaking their charge and shifting into a wide surround to avoid the barrage. Their bodies were fast and erratic, darting through the field as they tried to close in from every direction.
But Eye Guy's advantage was obvious.
The many eyes covering his body shifted and rotated, locking onto each creature from every angle. There was nowhere to hide, with no blind side, no escape from being watched.
The first to reach them were the mutated chickens. Their hardened feathers rattled like sharpened blades as they lunged through the air.
Orfevre moved first; a single slash cut through the evening air.
The aura-enhanced grass blade shattered immediately after striking, breaking into glittering fragments that scattered across the field. It had not survived the force of the blow, but it had done exactly what it needed to do.
One of the mutated chickens split open across the chest and crashed into the dirt, purple blood spilling across the grass in glowing streaks.
Before the second bird could even land, a concentrated eye laser fired from one of Eye Guy's shoulder eyes and pierced straight through its body.
The creature was blasted backward and fell without another sound.
The pigs and cows were next. They continued their charge with no hesitation, barreling forward like mindless beasts driven only by instinct and corruption. In response, Eye Guy redirected several of the eyes on his body toward the ground and fired a volley of energy beams.
Instead of exploding, the beams instantly froze the earth.
The soil hardened in an instant, and towering walls of jagged ice erupted from the ground directly in the beasts' path, forming a brutal barricade of spikes and frozen barriers.
The pigs struck them head-on. Neither managed to stop. Their bodies hit the ice with terrible force and were impaled immediately. Both creatures dropped to the ground before they could even let out another cry.
The cows, however, were stronger. Or perhaps just too mindlessly aggressive to care.
They smashed straight through part of the frozen wall, shattering chunks of ice beneath their weight as they pushed forward.
Eye Guy and Orfevre both leaped aside at the same time, narrowly avoiding the charge as the enraged cattle thundered past them. The impact shook the ground, and the cows skidded across the field before turning sharply to attack again.
Orfevre landed in a crouch and rolled to absorb the impact, then immediately reached down and snatched up one of the jagged ice shards left behind by the broken barricade. Golden aura wrapped around it, reinforcing the fragment until it gleamed like polished crystal.
Behind her, Eye Guy's many eyes began to shift again. One by one, they closed. The energy throughout his body converged toward his chest, gathering into a single point until a massive golden eye slowly opened in the center of it.
The two injured cows turned and charged once more.
This time, they never made it.
The large eye at Eye Guy's chest fired a devastating beam straight ahead, tearing through one of the mutated cows and reducing it to fragments in a flash of golden light.
Almost simultaneously, Orfevre hurled the aura-covered ice shard. The shard cut through the air with a sharp whistle. It struck the second cow directly in the head and pierced clean through, killing it instantly.
For a moment, the field went quiet. Only the wind moved now, drifting through the grass as the last traces of the battle settled over the earth.
Eye Guy straightened, surveyed the battlefield once, and then tapped the Omnitrix dial on his waist.
Golden light surged around him again. When it faded, Evan had returned to his human form.
The three siblings stood in silence, looking over the mutilated remains of the mutated animals scattered across the field. Violet blood stained the grass in ugly streaks, and the faint glow still lingering from the creatures made the whole place feel wrong.
"That's definitely not normal," Gold Ship said at last.
"You think?" Evan replied, unable to keep the dry edge out of his voice.
Orfevre folded her arms with a shrug. "This isn't the strangest thing we've seen."
Gold Ship then tilted her head and hopped down from Evan's shoulders, wandering toward the edge of the field. After a moment, she rushed over, crouched low, and pointed at the ground.
"There are footprints."
Evan and Orfevre walked over.
Pressed into the soft earth was a trail of footprints, each one faintly glowing with the same eerie violet light as the mutated animals. The strange energy in them had not yet faded, suggesting that whatever had made them had passed through only recently.
The footprints led deeper into the countryside, stretching over the next hill and disappearing into the darkening distance.
The three siblings exchanged one brief glance.
Without another moment of hesitation, the three of them began heading after the glowing tracks, disappearing into the growing darkness as the evening settled further over the fields.
The three of them followed the glowing trail of footprints through the wheat fields, the tall stalks parting around them as they moved deeper into the field. Eventually, the footprints led them into a small clearing.
Between a grain silo and a weather-beaten tool shed, a shallow hole had been torn open in the ground, and from within it radiated a bright, pulsing purple light. The glow flickered every few seconds, as though something alive was breathing beneath the soil. Standing at the edge of the hole was the creature responsible for the excavation.
At first glance, it looked like something straight out of one of Earth's old horror movies.
It had the shape of a mummy, wrapped head to toe in torn, dirty bandages, with long strips hanging from its arms and torso like ragged limbs of cloth. But unlike the dusty movie monsters, this thing was moving with purpose, and through the gaps in its wrappings, two glowing purple eyes stared out from the darkness beneath its hooded face.
Orfevre frowned deeply the moment she saw it.
"What the hell is this?" she asked, clearly thrown off by the sight of a living mummy digging its way back into the dirt.
Gold Ship, who had already retreated behind her older siblings the instant they arrived, peeked out nervously from between them.
"Uhh…" she said, trying to sound confident and failing miserably. "I think this is a mummy that got lost on its way to Egypt."
Evan's attention had already shifted to the hole itself. The light was not coming from the dirt, nor from the mummy's wrappings, but from something the creature was drawing upward from below.
A crystal, unusually large and glowing an intense shade of purple, emerged from the hole in the mummy's bandage-wrapped hands. The thing clung to its body for a second before the mummy absorbed it into its wrappings, the light sinking beneath the cloth.
Then the mummy heard them. Its head snapped toward the siblings with a dry, chittering noise that was somewhere between a hiss and a click.
The next instant, it sprang from the hole and launched itself directly at them.
Orfevre reacted first. Without hesitation, she scooped Gold Ship up by the back of her collar and rolled away to the side, putting a safe distance between themselves and the incoming attack. Gold Ship let out a startled noise as she was dragged along.
Evan stepped forward instead of backward. He brought his wrist up and pressed the Another Omnitrix down.
Golden light erupted outward in a brilliant blast, flooding the clearing and forcing the mummy to recoil mid-lunge.
The transformation completed in a heartbeat.
"Sludge!"
His mud-like body rippled with dense, heavy mass. The creature's bandage-like tendrils whipped toward him without delay, but the attack merely struck his body and sank into the thick sludge without causing any real damage.
Sludge answered by swinging an arm forward. His arm formed into a massive spike-like mass and slammed directly into the mummy's head with a heavy, wet impact. The force sent the monster flying backward through the air before it crashed hard into one of the support beams holding up a nearby water tower.
The mummy, however, was not done. It pushed itself back upright with a jerky, unnatural motion, then stretched its arms wide and lashed forward with its bandage-like fingers. The wrappings expanded and twisted around Sludge, tightening with the force of a cocoon as they tried to bind him in place.
But Sludge's mud-like form slipped and oozed through the gaps in the wrappings, escaping the hold before the bands could fully close. He surged forward again, preparing to press the attack, when a sudden engine roar exploded from the barn nearby.
Everyone turned. A tractor came bursting out of the darkness like it had been possessed.
Its headlights blazed to life, glaring white against the shadows, while the front of the machine looked almost like some kind of twisted grin. A red glow shone from beneath the half-open hood, casting an unsettling light across the metal frame. Most alarming of all, there was no one driving it.
The living tractor sped straight toward Sludge.
Before he could fully react, the machine slammed into him with enough force to send him splashing across the ground in a thick spray of mud.
Sludge rose slowly, his body reforming from the impact just in time to see the tractor turn and charge at him again.
This time, he did not resist. Instead, he let his body go loose and fluid, allowing the machine to crash directly into him. The tractor's front end plunged into the sludge of his form, but instead of being thrown aside, Sludge clung to the vehicle and began to seep into it from every crack and seam.
The tractor shuddered. Its engine sputtered. Then, little by little, it slowed to a stop. A few seconds later, the strange living machine lost its unnatural motion entirely and returned to normal, standing still as though it had never moved at all.
Sludge pushed himself up from the hood, now holding a small metal bug in one hand. It was twitching violently, blue sparks crackling across its frame.
The creature had been inside the tractor all along.
While he had been occupied, the mummy let out another rattling hiss. Its bandages had wrapped around the base of the water tower now, and with a violent tug, it tore free the support beams holding the structure in place.
The tower lurched. Then, with a groan of collapsing metal, it began to fall directly toward Sludge. Just before the water tower came crashing down, he slammed the dial on the Omnitrix again.
A beat later, the heavy form beneath the falling tower vanished.
A few seconds passed in tense silence before Grey Matter crawled out from underneath the hood of the now motionless tractor, his tiny grey body in black and white clothes emerging with a cautious glance around the clearing.
He looked first toward the fallen water tower, then toward the hole in the ground, then toward the barn. Neither the mummy nor the strange bug was anywhere to be seen.
"They escaped…" Grey Matter murmured.
Gold Ship hurried over as far as Orfevre would allow her before stopping short, still half-hidden beneath her sister's arm.
"You okay, Big Bro?" she asked.
Orfevre, still holding Gold Ship in one hand as though she weighed nothing, stepped closer and frowned at the mess of disturbed dirt and broken machinery.
"The hell was that?" she asked, sounding more confused than alarmed now that the immediate danger had passed.
During the fight, Orfevre had kept her distance with Gold Ship beside her, staying alert in case the mummy decided to turn on them next. She had trusted Evan to handle the enemy alone and had chosen to keep their younger sister safe while he fought without distraction. It had been the sensible thing to do, and it had worked exactly as intended.
Grey Matter adjusted his stance and looked over the scene with his usual analytical focus.
For a few seconds, Grey Matter remained silent while his small mind raced through the possibilities.
"From what I can tell," he said at last, "that mummy and the bug were working together. If they were separate beings, then the bug could be some kind of advanced nanomachine, and the mummy might be an undead creature of some sort."
He paused, narrowing his eyes as he thought it over.
"But the mummy wasn't affected the way an undead being should be by my [The One Who Rules Over The Dead]. And if that bug were truly a machine controlling the tractor, then the tractor shouldn't have just returned to normal like that."
Grey Matter folded his arms and continued his deductions aloud, his voice calm and deliberate.
"After eliminating the other possibilities, there's only one conclusion left."
Gold Ship tilted her head. "What conclusion?"
Grey Matter looked toward the darkness beyond the field.
"They're aliens."
There was a beat of silence.
Then he added, almost matter-of-factly, "After all, an alien werewolf already exists. An alien mummy isn't really that much of a stretch. And an alien insect that can control machines? That's not exactly impossible either."
Orfevre let out a long, tired sigh and pinched the bridge of her nose.
"Great," she muttered. "Another alien incident."
Gold Ship looked up at her, then at Grey Matter, then at the broken clearing around them.
"So what's Big Bro planning to do now?"
Grey Matter glanced once toward the direction the creatures had escaped, then back at his sisters. The violet glow in the dirt was already fading, but whatever had caused this was clearly still nearby.
"We go back for tonight," he decided. "I'll keep watch in case they come looking for us again. Tomorrow, we tell Grampa and see whether he knows anything about this."
Neither sister had any reason to argue.
And so the three siblings turned away from the clearing and began heading back through the barn where they were staying.