Eventually, Alesha realized she'd left behind her children, and in a panic, she decided to try and retrace her steps.
She still didn't understand this irrational attachment to the strange, fleshy egg sacs that morbidly grew in the cavity where Collin's heart had been. Nothing in the skill description specified that she'd feel motherly attachment to her offspring. Did skills come with unwritten side effects?
If so, what other, unwritten side effects of her skills might she run into in the future? Had she already experienced any?
These thoughts were better suited for another time, though.
For now, it wasn't hard to follow her own scent in order to figure out where she'd come from and retrace her steps.
As she left the city's boundaries, Alesha saw more remnants of the war long past. Wrecked fighter jets had aged significantly after crash-landing, as if exposed to the elements for an extended period. Various other army vehicles had been torn asunder, crumpled like paper, or squashed. Mech suits, autonomous robotic soldiers, and full-body super armor in various states of destruction littered the area, some of them largely intact but the better part of them mostly destroyed.
Many of the still-intact armaments housed the broken skeletons of their pilots; others were empty. All had been treated unkindly by the effects of time and nature.
Additionally, a few oversized skeletons hinted at the beasts the humans had fought.
As she left the city, Alesha felt those strange cravings begin to return.
She stopped in her tracks.
What exactly was it her body was craving?
Why was it so hard to resist?
And why was the craving mitigated when she was in the city?
[Your body craves Chaos,] Rogork explained. [You've been too long deprived of it, and your very soul is rejecting the natural order of the world. You're lucky this place has remnants of Chaos left over from the war that happened here.]
"Okay, but how do I make it go away?" Alesha asked.
[Simple. Either spend a few days in the city, or use your Chaos Energy to create Chaos wherever you are.]
Alesha clicked her tongue and blew Chaos Fire at some nearby debris. The material of the metal plating morphed from aged metal into pristine crystal, black bone and gel, mixed together in a marble-like pattern.
She picked up the transformed piece of metal with her teeth and started carrying it with her.
A strange sense of comfort came from her teeth as she did so, as if the thing she was holding emanated a soothing, intangible aura.
Why did my stupid idea even work? Alesha thought as she continued backtracking along her trail, trying (and failing) not to drool all over the Chaos-ified scrap metal as she did so.
[Because you followed my advice, obviously,] Rogork said, claiming credit for the idea.
Alesha rolled her eyes.
Shortly thereafter, Alesha found herself in the little cave where she'd woken up before. Collin's body was still there.
She was feeling sleepy again, so she set down the Chaos-ified piece of debris, went off a short ways to breathe more Chaos Fire on other objects, then brought back the other Chaos-ified objects to create a kind of nest.
She wanted to make sure that craving didn't take over again, so she repeated this process a few more times before calling it good enough. Alesha used up all her Chaos Energy in the process.
By the time she was done, she had a decent-sized nest formed, one that any 1st-class Chaos Dragon might have envied.
She pulled the vampire's corpse into the nest and placed it gently nearby, then curled up and quickly fell asleep.