Taylor moved through the vent. The moth's wings were tattered and full of holes where the shots had pierced her. She scooted along in the dark, a tempest of wind flowing over her. She could hear the assailants on the roof firing, closing in on Marlowe. They were overwhelmed. Taylor couldn't get back up the vent, not without being killed. Charlie would die in moments, surrounded by the black-armored troopers. She would be trapped in the vent. In her mind, she wondered if this would be her last day on Earth.
She wanted to flee, to fly away into safety. But she couldn't relinquish herself from the need to act. Never.
On the astral plane, she was aware of a spirit to the physical world. Far beneath her was a glow, a vibration. She joined it, reaching out from within the vent, drawing a link. She felt herself carried into this other world, emotion plucked from the depths of her soul and brought to the fore as she wound her way into the Irreal. She wanted to beg and then cry, and then she felt an anger build, before it bled away and a great sense of the universe's vastness settled upon her. Her soul shone like a lighthouse, trying to materialize Insect Spirits, breathing them into existence at a point in physical space, at the opening of the vent.
The roof's air seemed to shudder under energies pouring into the world. Alien spirits writhed and weaved among a black-armored troopers, seeking his body as a vessel. Lights blazed around him, throwing off flashes of sparks and lightning while an unknown power flowed through him. The trooper thrashed like a lunatic, jabbing and slashing the air with his fists as if he sought to be free of the constraints of the human frame. Fires blazed in its eyes.
Then, in some horrible, terrifying morphing disaster, the man's face split horizontally and lips opened wide in a silent scream as massive, serrated fangs erupted from the red flesh. His entire lower face and jaw burst outward, revealing a fanged maw ringed by insect-like pincers. The lethal tips sprouted full-length, spasming and jerking beneath human eyes and nose. It writhed and jerked, body parts melting then hardening from human to cockroach. It looked around, eyes bulging with panic, the legs breaking and reshaping into an insectoid form, while the tips of his fingers swelled and his hands and split open to unleash a storm of barbed claws.
It was terrible. The host opened its mouth in a roaring shriek. He staggered back, stumbling awkwardly on two legs, clapped his shifting hands over his face, tried to shut out the unearthly shriek of his own voice as it morphed into a inhuman chittering click.
For a moment, his comrades were struck speechless. They felt almost as if passive observers, looking down at one of those horrendous worst-case scenarios they used to run through in virtual reality. As the Cockroach Spirit came into full being, they had never seen anything so simultaneously beautiful and repellent, an alien creature that evoked both a potent loathing, and a perverse sense of power that gnawed at the pit of the stomach.
All traces of humanity gave over to an insatiable hunger for flesh. It attacked. The other troopers turned on it immediately. The suited man next to him raised his gun and shot the monster four times in the head. The first bullet went through his eye socket, ricocheting through the brain while the next shots hit the top of his head straight-on, avulsing his brains. It staggered backwards, antennae waving madly and pincers snapping like the jaws of a steel trap, shrugging off the loss of it's head [http://insects.about.com/od/morphology/f/Do-Insects-Have-Brains.htm]
Even before the Cockroach Spirit was gunned down, the astral presence had grown stronger and stronger. The leader saw the members of his squad spasm and twist as the first trooper had, the same ghostly, unearthly auras transforming five of them into more of the Spirits. They flailed as husks, drained of their essence, as though merely fuel to power the transformation of the Insect Spirits that leapt from their forms in a flurry of slicing claws and mandibles.
The rest of the squad was torn to pieces. The six creatures moved with fearsome relentlessness, their razor sharp claws opening arteries and severing limbs with every movement. Their commander was the first to die, a monstrous claw impaling him from behind and lifting him into the air in a fountain of blood. Even as he died, his trained fingers were locked down on the trigger of his weapon, blasting away. At last, the rifle fell silent as his magazine reached it's end, though the roof was still deafening with screams and gunfire. His unit were slaughtered in the caress of razor claws, their lives torn from their quivering flesh. They tore bodies asunder, rended flesh and drank the blood from their veins. The killing continued unabated, though the shrieks of terror and death as blood ran in rivers and flowed as waterfalls off the side of the building.
