Nosferatu indulged in the sweetness of life. Relief shone on his distorted face as the intangible fiend stole the vitality of another dying puelmer! The mutilated alien that had been hanging on a meathook did not offer much resistance against Nosferatu's attack. Though the condemned puelmer had no idea what was happening to him, his resistance quickly ceased when he felt that he was moving closer towards death. After losing an internal power struggle and seeing his own compatriots feed on his own flesh, the puelmer crew member did not want to prolong his torture any further. All he wished for at this point was to end his suffering and to pray for revenge against the puelmers who ultimately betrayed him and let him down! "Uu..kiwaaa..." The puelmer was too weak to speak more alien words, but he hoped that his words or the emotions behind them was enough to send the right across. Hardly any puelmer was stupid. The alien that had already been dying for a long time knew that his former alien colleagues would never allow him to die so soon. He still had plenty of organs and pieces of flesh left on his body to grant him mercy at this time! The puelmers delighted in the suffering of others. Cannibalizing the flesh of their own just wasn't enjoyable enough if they couldn't taunt the victim in the process! The dying alien should know, because he participated in this barbaric custom several times himself! He just never imagined that he would be the one to hang on the dreaded hook this time! As he felt his life fading away, the puelmer hoped with all of his meager consciousness that whoever was responsible for sapping his strength would do the same to the rest of the puelmers on this homeship! The mutilated ball of alien flesh twitched a final time as the dying puelmer seemed to regain a touch of clarity before death. As the alien quickly thought about all of the events leading to this regrettable outcome, the puelmer became incredibly enraged! With the last fiber of his being, he pushed out all of his hatred and all of his animosity towards his own kind and hoped that he would still be able to enjoy his revenge after his passing! The crippled collection of alien meat finally died. As Nosferatu digested the life energies he had taken from his latest victim, he also absorbed a lot of additional stuff that came along with his food. The hatred and all of the other desires and emotions the puelmer felt before his death turned into different kinds of negative energy that seemed to acquire a power of their own. These resentments inadvertently merged with the spiritual fiend and contaminated his soul! As Nosferatu moved on to drain the life of his next victim, the puelmer reacted not much differently from the last one. Each puelmer that had been hung on these punishment hooks had already given up on life to an extent. Whoever or whatever was causing them to meet their deaths in advance was doing them all a favor! As the fourth condemned puelmer lost his life, alarms began to ring inside the slightly cramped compartment. While it might not be unusual for the badly mutilated aliens to perish in advance due to unforeseen variables, the more intact and healthy prisoners were not supposed to expire this soon! Nosferatu did not care about whether he had possibly alerted the crew of the ship of his presence. All he wanted to do right now was to finish off the remaining two meatbags that possessed a lot more life than his previous prey! "Hshaaa...!" The fiend pounced onto the next puelmer, and while this alien put up a little more resistance on account of how many less days he had been hanging on his hook, he too ultimately could not defeat the might of the recovering ghost! The round hatch to the chamber slid open by this time. A trio of armored balls rolled inside. The thinner but still armored spikes poking out of their surface extended in such a way to arrest their forward momentum. The armored puelmers beheld the sight of five prisoners first, but soon focused their augmented vision to the final alien hanging from the ceiling. The poor alien twitched a number of times before his many tiny hands finally drooped and lost all movement. Behind this alien was a faint shadow of a humanoid ghost. Nosferatu had finally restored a respectable measure of his original strength! Though he was still far from regaining his prime, he was no longer under threat of dissipating any longer! What was even better was that he regained a lot more cognition and awareness than before. He was no longer operating largely on instinct anymore. Yet all was not entirely well for the spiritual fiend. By feeding on the life of other organisms when he was at his weakest, Nosferatu became far more susceptible to the spiritual contamination of his prey. This produced unforeseen consequences. His toothy mouth cried out in silent pain as his entire shadowy shape started to grow less and less stable! Before the uncomprehending gaze of the three puelmer security troopers, Nosferatu's shadowy energy form suddenly began to sprout over two-dozen tiny arms! These tiny limbs shared a great resemblance to the hands surrounding the ball-like forms of the puelmer race. The only difference was that it looked extremely disturbing and discordant when they emerged from the body of a humanoid! The puelmer security troopers no longer remained frozen at this bizarre sight. They were all smart enough to know that this strange intruder was not only supposed to be here, but also posed an unknown but most certainly considerable threat towards the rest of the ship! "Huuhwa!" "Kakakauual!" "Usehaa!" The aliens quickly reported what had happened while at the same time opened fire at the ghost! Their advanced suits of armor incorporated a range of highly compact weapon systems. An intense volley of laser beams, positron beams, plasma bolts and other dangerous ordinance quickly blasted the dead bodies hanging from the hooks as they saturated the entire space above! A few of the weapons happened to be transphasic, so they penetrated the ceiling and bulkheads and left more severe marks of damage behind! Yet for all of this intensive firepower, Nosferatu remained almost completely unaffected! He was a completely different enemy than the puelmer troopers had ever encountered before. Weapons that were proven to be highly effective against other races produced no discernable results when employed against the humanoid fiend with puelmer arms sticking out of his body! "Hishaaa!" Of course, Nosferatu wasn't going to allow these aliens to fire at his form forever. He quickly dove down in an attempt to sap the relatively weaker and younger of the three alien guards of life. "Kohaya!" All three spherical suits of armor began to project multiple transphasic energy shields that happened to layer on top of each other. This was a common tactic of the puelmers and several other advanced alien races. By combining the defenses of multiple individual soldiers together, they could resist the attacks of hostiles, especially when they enjoyed a numbers advantage! As Nosferatu clashed against the first transphasic energy shield in his path, the fiend screamed in pain and frustration, but only for a short amount of time. As the fiend faced the armored puelmer soldiers, his chaotic mind began to recall all of the hatreds and the resentments that his previous prey held towards the former comrades who had condemned them to death. The surge of animosity welling from the depths of Nosferatu's spirit seemed to give him an additional boost of strength. The fiend uttered a silent roar before his intangible form overcame the resistance of not just the first layer of transphasic energy shields, but also the other two layers! Compared to the main shields of the puelmer homeship, the weaker ones projected by the armor of the alien soldiers were much less capable of stopping the fiend from reaching his next victims. The fiend immediately phased through the armor of the first puelmer trooper and began to prey on the alien's healthy spirit! Despite the much greater strength of this relatively strong soldier, Nosferatu attacked with much greater fervor than before. Not only that, but his unusual puelmer arms grabbed and clawed at the alien's spirit and body as if that would help inflict additional damage! "HUKKAAA!" The tormented puelmer soldier lost his concentration and even began to roll around in panic, causing him to collide against the bulkhead and the armor of one of his colleagues! Though he put up a lot of resistance, Nosferatu's greater strength and familiarity with the puelmer psyche finally enabled him to gain the upper hand! As the soldier slowly lost his life, the spiritual fiend gained his largest boost of strength since he infiltrated the puelmer heavy cruiser! It took a lot less time and effort for Nosferatu to finish off the remaining two puelmer soldiers. However, the puelmer crew had become much more aware of the threat that had somehow sneaked aboard the homeship. Many puelmers became more alert and a lot of security systems came online! It was a pity that few if any of these measures were effective at killing or repelling the spiritual intruder. While Nosferatu deeply wanted to move towards the nearest cluster of puelmer lives, his orders were clear. His main priority was to destroy the warp drives of the puelmer heavy cruiser! If he did not complete this order, then he would probably die regardless of how many puelmers he was able to drain! "Hisshaaa..." Finding the warp drives of a fairly large alien ship was extremely difficult. Even if the puelmer vessel was not as large as a human capital ship, her volume was still large enough to make the search difficult! Normally, the Phobos was supposed to send out dozens of fiends, but now that Nosferatu was on his own, he wasn't able to cover as much ground! It just so happened that the fiend just happened to absorb a lot of scattered thoughts from a bunch of puelmers. As soon as the spiritual entity thought about this topic, he gained a faint and almost subconscious idea where they might be located. Nosferatu's eyes gained more purpose. The fiend immediately sunk down the decks and moved towards the center of the massive ship. Soon enough, he reached the primary engineering bay where at least one of the warp drives were located. The puelmers were prepared for his arrival this time. Two-dozen armored puelmer troops immediately opened fire as soon as they spotted the faintest hint of a shadow that didn't belong! None of the attacks dealt any substantial damage to Nosferatu. When the puelmers saw that their massed attacks didn't produce the results they desired, they quickly tried to block Nosferatu's passage instead. A large grid of transphasic energy shields came online in order to protect the warp drive and isolate any possible enemies. While they may have been strong enough to block the phasing ability of Lucky, Nosferatu was a different kind of life. He did not possess a physical body to begin with, and his odd experiences had somehow made him a lot more effective at forcing his way through the weaker interior transphasic energy shields generated by the puelmer homeship. The alien soldiers all uttered angry noises as Nosferatu successfully managed to reach the alien warp drive! The device was considerably tougher and more resistant against tampering than ordinary drives. Yet for all of its advanced design, it could do little to stop a reinvigorated fiend tearing apart the more delicate and fragile internal components. The warp drive quickly lost the ability to function properly as the fiend inflicted damage without encountering any effective opposition! Though Nosferatu found to his annoyance that he couldn't finish off the puelmer warp drive entirely due to its more advanced design and better construction, it would still take a fair amount of time for the puelmers to undo the damage! Now, the fiend just needed to take out the backup warp drive that was located in a different section of the puelmer heavy cruiser. As long as he fulfilled his primary objective, Nosferatu would be free to prey on the lives of all of the delicious puelmer souls contained within this homeship!