"...that couple. Did you kill them?"

The kid turns their grin to Morgan before looking at Zash again. "You should've listened to your friend. People always assume, when they see adults and a kid, that the kid must be theirs, right?" They lift their hand to touch the front of their hat. "But we're truly touched..."

"...that you came back for us," they finish, and as they pull their hat off their appearance changes, their pupils contracting into slits, a thick bumpy fleshy collar emerging around their neck.

"Yeah, okay, fuck this."

Gigantic laser gun! It's BLASTING TIME. The worm around them, not the kid, because she's increasingly suspecting that the kid is... just some kind of puppet thing.

The various smaller bugs now try to intercept the laser and absorb whatever they can of its power. The kid jumps out of the way of the laser blast anyway, and the bits of the shot that aren't absorbed by the bug are still bad enough that they carve a hole on the worm, showing that it's... well, not underground, at the moment.

"So rude!"

"Who are you?" Zash is still not going to waste bullets on the small bugs but he's considering wasting them on whoever—or whatever—this kid is.

"Humans and their names... But we guess some of your friends have called us Zazi the Beast."

Definitely some Nai-adjacent involvement, here.

"You started it, kiddo! Zash, I say we bail out of the available exit!" calls Morgan, who is in fact still blasting and working to make that hole to the sky bigger.

Zash looks between the hole, the kid, and Morgan. "Can you kill the worm?"

"Ah! Figured us out, have you?"

They pull a strange bug mask out of the back of their head, and a set of wings shoots out the sides of it, buglike but powerful enough for the kid to take flight. "Well, good luck! Be seein' ya."

"What, murder's fine if it's not human?! Inconsistent much!?! I was just going to get us outta here!"

"Had you ever seen a worm this big? They don't get this big. The kid could send the worm somewhere inhabited."

"Oh damn it fine, I'll try, but you're giving me mixed signals here!!"

Maximum power and maximum laser slicing, then, aiming to carve this thing into itty bitty pieces instead of just ripping a hole out.

That works. Zazi doesn't seem to mind, though, and just giggles at it before flying out of the hole with a myriad other worms.

And now they need to go because a collapsing gargantuan worm is not a good place to be.

Yeah, yeah, but if it's all the same to Zash she'll let him do the heavy lifting of getting them out of the gargantuan collapsing worm, thanks. So inconsistent.

Fine. He can do that, if she insists. Bridal carry her and her gun like they weigh nothing and jump out.

And they can watch from a very nice vantage point as the enormous thing—a kaiju much more than a dinosaur or a whale—loses hold of itself and ponderously collapses, gushing blood soaking the sands.

"Well. There's dinner sorted, I guess."

He starts laughing, mostly in relief, and he drops back on his ass on the sand to watch the spectacle of the weight of the creature resettling in itself.

She flops back to a seat next to him.

"Still super weird to be fine with killing worms, but not humans, though. Where does that leave weirdos like us, huh? Do you have a flow chart or something for me."

"If it's a person it's bad to kill," he explains. "...though I confess that after today I might be needing to revise what I think a person is."

"Ahuh. And what if that person is going to go and kill other people. What then."