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Linarite's scream fell upon deaf ears, as those blackened eyes fixed upon Castor as his energy signature drew her attention.

The Prince.

She looked to the senshi around them, to Scylla and Gunn, and Lyra. One by one, her gaze fixed upon every senshi present. To the people she held responsible for every wound upon Wolframite's body. For every moment of suffering that Uranophane had endured. She blamed them for everything. For the loss of her humanity and her life. For the loss of Dioptase, Primase, Helicase, and Marthozite.

Kill them all, she heard a voice whisper in the back of her mind. A voice she had thought silenced when she'd been promoted to General. The youma within her, I can do what you cannot. Release me!

Now, there was no one to hold Aree Cadence's hand and tell her she needed to stop fighting and just be human for a little while. There was no one to worry about her at two in the morning, or wait patiently for her to wake from Elysion's grasp. There was nobody to clean her wounds now, when she needed it most of all, and tell her that it was okay to just be afraid. With Linarite’s... mutilation, the last anchor that held the General to her human life had been severed.

And so, General Tanzanite let go her frail grip on life, and floated forever away into darkness.

The scream that tore from her throat was unnatural. It was a deafening roar of pure, unbridled rage as the blackened skin began to crawl along her body. It latched onto the pale, pink flesh, the scars and the open wounds, and pulled itself over, chewing up human cells and replacing them with those of something.. very much not human. It was something many of them had seen before in battles, when Tanzanite let that darker half take over and lead her into a fight.. but this was different. This time, it was not stopping. It was not halting as it stretched across her face and encased it in a mask of black skin.

The energy signature flared like a raging fire. Her head was thrown back, unintelligible sounds of rage escaping her pale lips as her cheekbones curved out in sharp spikes. Black skin stretched over them, consuming her features as it traveled over the edges of her lips and into her throat, muffling the sound and it reached down into the girl and corrupted her at her very core.

Their superiors had often told them horror stories of what happened when a human had too much too fast, when they were exposed to more of that dark power than they were prepared to handle. It was why the Negaverse required ranks. Try to pump the energy of a General into the body of a human and what do you get?

You get a youma.

The power of the General-King’s starseed, the raw Negaverse energy it had contained, had proven too much for the overzealous General. Her hands clawed at her throat even as black tendrils wrapped themselves around her neck and choked off her breathing. Her own fingers betrayed her, curving into thick claws that raked across her scaly neck, pulling away pale skin to reveal the thick black scales beneath.

The suddenly parasitic skin did not stop at her feet. It crawled out and expanded. It multiplied with incredible speed, growing until it climbed up the twisted support beams and covered the rubble like a glistening black mold. It grew out in sharp spines and spindled formations, jutting into the air and bending back in towards the woman trapped within like a closing flower. It grew until in had enveloped her completely in a fibrous, twisting black mass. Until her screams could no longer be heard from within. It grew until there was nothing left to consume, and those closest to her would have to step back as the parasitics cells stretched eagerly towards them, ready to devour.

One black mass lashed out suddenly, and pulled Zanazziite in from the battlefield. The last thing anyone would see was her outstretched hand, before blackness wrapped around her, and she too was gone. Any who approached the thing risked much the same fate.

It settled at last, a stony mass of thick black spines that twisted up into a strange cocoon-like shell. Inside, though... there was nothing. Even those who could sense energy signatures would only detect the faintest trace of one, weaker even than the average youma should have been. Not the energy of a General, not even that of a Lieutenant. Only Zanazziite's distinct energy signature, that black cocoon and the silent, still body within.

They had been warned, and Tanzanite had not listened.

At first, the cocoon simply sat there, an ominous flag sticking out of the battlefield.

Then, it began to change.

The black husk that surrounded General Tanzanite continued to thicken. Long spindles grew in horizontal stripes across the dim purple glow of the cocoon. They thickened outward, rounding out into curved strips. Dark, oozing patches began to grow all over the cocoon, zigzagging outward across the cracked and scuffed pavement. It went from a single shape to a network of purple-blackness. Smoke rose from the ground until it was so dark that the cocoon was obscured in the haze.

There was a sickening snap. Purple-black triangles broke upward, springing up like roots, their shadows casting long and ominous across the place where the Negaverse and Senshi stood. The shapes bent and churned, taking on a more recognizable form with each passing moment.

Two legs. Two arms. And then -- a feathered tail?

The legs and arms lurched upright, lifting the cocoon with them. The stripes over its glowing husk began to pull outward. They became rib bones. It shifted, hung horizontally from the belly of the beast as a layer of black scales shimmered into existence to protect it. Just as smoke lifted, the massive head of a youma of incredible size and power swung into view -- no, not a youma. A Great Youma.

Its eyes glowed purple. Its beaked mouth snapped noisily. One great clawed hand gripped a nearby building. It pulled itself upright, rising from the ashes of the demolished building. The beast continued to crawl until it was perched high above the battlefields, its talons sending flurries of broken concrete and wiring raining down on the combatants below.

A sounds rattled in its throat. The Great Youma turned its head up toward the stars above. A cry split the sky -- discordant and full of darkness. It would be a battlecry to the Negaverse; to the senshi, it sounded like a death knell. A plume of bright purple smoke erupted past its beak, and then it turned its glowering gaze on to the battlefield.

And then the Black Phoenix took flight -- with Lt. Zanazziite riding between its massive shoulders.