For the next week there were no new hospital bombings, yet the mass of husk civilians and husk hosts continued; vaguely Mia wished she could alert the dreadnought somehow that she no longer needed the motivation. This thought of communication began his gradual coalescence in Mia's mind to a human figure, regardless of her whims against such.

  She continued to fight alongside Marisa and climb in the rankings, assisted by Aimee as she could be; she learned well the ratio of fire to ice scarabs to create steam and other vapors, the boiling and melting points of various materials, the extension of her own durability into what she was manipulating; to melt at a far higher temperature than normally physically possible so that a flood of oil which could disintegrate a civilian could actually harm another host.

  Murder was something she enjoyed, and was beginning to become adept at. There was training and education and her usual hobbies; she had far more time for them now; but it was the needed weedings of killings that her profession was for, the punctuation to which the tedium of all sentences led.

  They were in the middle of a grocery store's produce section, at the corner of the store, when Marisa handed her tablet to Mia. "Here, wanna scan it? I'm gonna go look at the desserts. Uh, do you think they'll give us a discount for saving everybody, or... no...?"

  "Aren't you just going to steal them anyway?"

  "Well yeah, but like, the offer would be nice."

  Mia shook her head and went over to the still-beating heart to scan. Blood still dripped from his corpse, and Mia felt strangely uneased for a second; in the next second she swept back from the corpse just in time to avoid the maw of Mizuchi shooting out of it and towards her; she lashed back with a whip of flame and it retreated within, disappearing from sight as Marisa caught up beside her.

  "Here we fucking go again." groaned Mia. She shouted: "Shouldn't you be getting your heart ripped out again right now?!"

  "Oh, the dykes have jokes now!" shouted Rayaka's voice; Mizuchi burst randomly out of the produce misters ahead, until another whip of flame scorched them away and it was temporarily gone, Mia waiting for where he might appear again.

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  From a nearby shelf of sodas, Mia heard a thrashing, bottles & liters splitting open and bursting; their liquid coalesced into a single stream, a single pool from which the head of Mizuchi sprouted; Marisa hit the pool with a Boudoir-cloth that rapidly absorbed all of the liquid it could, but the serpent thrashed its head into the ceiling and the sprinklers burst open; again Mia stood, unperturbed, as Marisa shot Boudoir's strands into the ceiling and redirected the spray of pipes to behind Mia.

  Mizuchi wilted in the soda-puddle ahead as the water-puddle expanded behind Mia. She tapped her foot as if expecting something; she had been attacked several times by Rayaka in recent months and had learned he was a rather predictable host. She waited one second, then in the next turned to face Mizuchi swaying up within the sudden pond behind, but Mia shouted for Worldwide and a swarm of her new scarabs froze him solid, and from within its maw Rayaka shouted: "-oh fuck when the fuck did you get th-"

  A hundred Boudoir-bullets shot out from Marisa’s glove as Mizuchi desperately thrashed, bits of ice cutting and slicing at him from below as a dozen bullets tore his face to pieces; another scarab swarm sought to freeze his blood but it was too late as he & Mizuchi shrank through the sudden liquid and were gone once more, if heavily wounded.

  "Fuck me." said Marisa. "Ugh, we need like, an instant kill on him or something, but... I don't even know if we're supposed to be killing him, you know? Aimee could do it, but- fuck."

  Mia frowned. Perhaps Worldwide's next ability would end this foolishness. She observed to Marisa the comment Rayaka made of her ice and that the movements the dreadnought made were clearly not known to his subordinates. She recalled again that laugh he had erupted into at the hospital; it seemed not a laugh of mockery of her nor a laugh of enjoyment of using others without their awareness, but rather a deeper sadism; he had appointed Rayaka to a position of importance primarily so he could fail and be humiliated. Again she felt the narrative tighten around herself, and though narcissistic, believed it to have all been constructed for her entertainment alone.

  Years on, a hesitant sympathy would pervade her when she thought of the man, for the deaths of hundreds of civilians & hosts were, years on, not things that concerned her more than the provenance of herself. He had held an offering of emotion away from deeper reasoning that Mia could only assume would be known to herself eventually. In some ways it was the diminishment of him that made him legend moreso to Mia, albeit eventually a dead one.