Chương 25: The Only Win That I Deserve

I suppose I shouldn't count my chickens before they hatch. Before I get stabbed by my favorite child, I still have to beat Peter. Somehow.

I leave my clothes on this time as I square up against my asshole foster brother. I have a few ideas on how to beat him, but I have no idea if any of them will actually work.

It depends entirely on the details of his power, a caveat that I'm running into a lot today. I wonder if that's a major reason behind this exercise; powers are esoteric and the exact details of what they can and can't do are rarely known and often essential. Dealing with that information gap is an important skill to learn.

"Aww, not getting naked for me?" Peter taunts, hands in his pockets.

I shapeshift into him (minus the reproductive system; I'm not terribly interested in trying out a dick and I'm definitely not interested in trying out Peter's), matching his pose and smarmy grin.

"Careful what you wish for," I taunt back.

"Though knowing you, I wouldn't be surprised if you're an exhibitionist."

"It's a curse to be this beautiful," he sighs.

"You'd never understand."

I narrow my eyes at him. Asshole.

"Are you two done with your lover's spat?" Commander drawls. Lover's spat!? Excuse me?

"In positions. Begin!"

Just like all his other fights, Peter walks leisurely towards me, his hands in his pockets. I guess that's my first possible avenue of attack. I match his velocity, accelerating a little at a time to see if he adjusts. Why is he walking like that? Is it a requirement of his power, or just him being an asshole?

"You'll never actually win if you just keep walking away," he points out, maintaining his slow speed.

"Not true," I counter.

"You'll get tired eventually. I won't."

"Morgan, I swear to Christ, if you make me implement a timer on top of everything else I will not be happy," Commander snaps.

Okay. Not going with that plan, then. I slow back down, letting Peter corner me bit by bit. Once he's as close to the edge as I can safely bring him, I shift myself modified tiger musculature and leap over his head, sprinting to the far side of the arena as quickly as possible. Peter gives me a bewildered and slightly amused look, but I just ignore him, shapeshift into an enormous badger, and start to dig.

I could probably get a significantly more efficient digging physiology than this, but I haven't exactly practiced this before now. Wasp acid could potentially help with burning through the loose dirt, but I don't know what kind of toxic gas that might release near everyone else so I just dig as fast and hard as I can, flinging the dirt in Peter's general direction.

"Damn, you found my weakness," Peter calls out to me.

"Getting my outfit dirty. Woe, I am ruined."

He actually has the audacity to wait for me to finish, standing around until I stop flinging dirt around the time I make a hole a foot or two deeper than he is tall. It takes a few minutes, and I assume by his indifference that it's not really a big problem for him.

Still. I have to see.

He peers over the edge of the hole. I stare back up at him.

"What exactly was the plan here?" he asks.

"You know that if I land on you you'll just splatter like paste, right?"

"Try it, then," I challenge him.

He shrugs.

"Okay."

I shrink as he hops down, staying flush to the side of the pit and scampering up in moments. Thin and light, I carry myself up with long claws stabbed into the dirt, watching carefully as Peter lands. It's entirely normal. His feet impact the ground as would be expected, he bends his knees to absorb the force, and he even winces slightly after the seven- or eight-foot fall. The ground is extremely soft from all the loose dirt I threw around and he isn't injured, but that's still a long fall for a human.

Enough to hurt.

And he had to take that fall as a human, because otherwise he'd probably fall straight through the ground.

"Slippery little bitch, aren't you?" he says, gritting his teeth.

"You're the one walking around like it's a Sunday stroll," I point out.

"I guess I'll have to start actually trying then, won't I?"

"I guess you will."

Peter can probably reach out of the pit with his arms, but I doubt he works out enough to pull himself up from that position. Instead, he walks into the wall, lifting his knee up like he's ascending a staircase and simply carving one into the dirt with nothing but his body. One leg up, push in and through the dirt, allow himself to connect with it normally when his foot is the right height, then take another step up and repeat. Interesting.

So he can selectively decide which parts of his body casually shove away matter and which parts don't, changing it whenever he chooses. He seems to always be affected by gravity, so his feet are a likely weak point.

I squat in front of where I expect his impromptu staircase will end, waiting for him to make it to me.

"You know I normally take it slow so I don't accidentally kill someone, right?" Peter grumbles.

"You literally can't sto— agh!"

I whip out a tentacle from my arm and wrap it around his foot the moment before it touches earth, successfully making contact and yanking him off-balance. He topples backwards, so I keep my grip on him to prevent him from falling headfirst down the stairs he just made. His power compacted it pretty hard.

To my surprise, though, he doesn't crash into the dirt at all, instead continuing to swing downwards and obliterating the ground beneath us as his body passes through it. Shit! I lose my footing, landing on top of him in a disorganized heap when he finally lets the ground act as ground to him again.

"Fuck!" he growls.

"You know what, this works fine, actually!"

He grabs my neck, his grip immutable as he shoves me off of him and down onto my back. My domain flares up in strength as it connects with his resonance-causing power, but his powers up by the exact same amount.

"There we go," he sighs.

"Only a matter of time, see? I'll give you credit, that was a little clever, but there's really no need to draw this out, is there? Let's just get this over with so we can—Jesus!"

I unform the part of my neck that he's holding, getting quite a bit of blood on him in the process but that's just how it is sometimes. I quickly scramble back to my feet, but we're in a weird-shaped pit so I immediately find myself cornered. Hmm. Well, one last plan, then.

"You have a lot of confidence in your ability for someone who's never even been in a real fight," I tell him.

"Your power is good, don't get me wrong, but you can't just treat this like a foregone conclusion."

"Then fucking beat me already," Peter says, shaking his hand out to fling the blood off of it. Every last drop is denied contact with his skin.

"You think I wanna be here in the muck, fighting with you? Like don't get me wrong, I enjoy seeing a woman do some mud wrestling, but I was sort of hoping this would be over by now?"

I sigh, stepping towards him.

"You know what your problem is, Peter?" I ask.

"Oh, I am sure you are about to tell me."

"You don't take anything seriously except running away."

I shrink my domain down to the confines of my body. I don't know if this will work, but playing this perfectly safe just isn't in the cards. If Commander decides that he can't hold me and I can't hold him, she'll probably make me lose on the judge decision. So once I pull my domain in as close to my skin as I can, I start shrinking it even further.

I lose sensation in my legs, perfect knowledge of their internal and external condition replaced with nothing but my pathetic mundane sense of touch. It's funny how quickly I got used to the former but not the latter, given the difference in sheer magnitude of information density. Qualia is just confusing, I suppose. I much prefer knowledge.

Up farther and farther, the edge of my domain ascends past my waist. I can no longer feel the health of my gut biome, no longer know exactly where the waste is in my intestinal tract to plan out bathroom trips. It ascends past my stomach, no longer telling me how full I am, how much more I should eat to expand it to its limit. Higher still, I can no longer feel the movements of my heart. I take my domain and push it outwards, concentrating it in my arms.

Then I pull my domain out from my head, and I collapse like a puppet with broken strings.

All of a sudden, I feel nothing.

Not sight, not sound, not touch, not smell. Only a cloying, humid warmth as my body falls. There's nothing but the sensation of thoughtless meat.

I snap my domain back outwards, encompassing my head again and catching myself before I hit the ground, breathing heavily. What? What the fuck was that? Do… do I die without my domain? Is that normal?

No time to think about it. I very firmly keep my domain restricted to the space between my brain and my arm while otherwise shrinking it down to as small a size as it can go, leaving the rest of my body completely unprotected. But I don't really care, do I? I can just remake it later. All that matters now is being strong enough to hold him down.

My arm bulges with muscle, latching onto his wrist as the density of my domain shoves his aside. His power surges but mine does as well, keeping my advantage as I force my complete dominance into his flesh. He starts to tug his arm away… and freezes in response to the pain as I feel his tissue start to tear itself apart.

As far as his domain is concerned, this arm is no longer part of him, and it is therefore subject to the consequences of getting in his way.

According to our other training class, to dominate another domain to this extent requires a bit over triple the density of the opposing domain. And 'density' is just an explanatory term; dividing the domain volume by a given value doesn't multiply domain density by that amount. The change in power is much more gradual, though the exact strength can only really be determined by heuristics.

But it's enough. I know Peter, and he doesn't study. He doesn't train. He's used to being smart enough and skilled enough by default that he doesn't need to. But when things get serious, talent alone is never enough.

So instead of challenging his weaknesses, he runs.

"... That's the match," Commander announces.

"Morgan wins."

Good. I'd never let myself live it down if I lost to him. I took some damage, so I'd better heal that before letting go of… wait. No, that's… not me. That's Peter's arm. Isn't it?

"Uh, mind letting go?" Peter asks, and I drop his wrist, letting my domain snap back to its normal skin-covering configuration. That was… odd. I've never gotten confused like that before. I guess having my domain only covering part of my body mixed my instincts up a little. I'm not used to having a sense of touch but not a sense of biology. I probably—

"Morgan, get off the field," Commander orders.

"Oh, right," I say automatically.

"I mean, yes ma'am."

I look at my arm as I walk back into line, flexing it and shifting it in a dozen different ways to remind myself of the feel of it. It would be embarrassing—and potentially fatal—to try and shapeshift something but end up doing nothing because I got confused about whose body was whose.

Of course, in the back of my mind I can't help but ask: is this body mine?

And if not, what is it? What am I? Why did that power insist that I didn't exist until the day I got my own? I'm not any closer to finding answers to these questions, but I at least know a little more about where to start looking.

"Woo! You kicked his butt!" Anastasia cheers as I return.

"You were like 'gotcha!' and he was all like 'waaagh!'"

She flails her arms and pantomimes falling over backwards, eliciting a slight chuckle from me.

"Well, I couldn't let you face someone that lame in the finals, could I?" I manage to smile.

"Is he okay, though?" Maria asks.

"He was clutching his arm like it really hurt."

"It probably did," I shrug.

"He's going to have a nasty ring-shaped bruise. In retrospect I probably shouldn't have tried to win that way, since it risked him pulling his own arm off if he panicked."

She blinks.

"Oh, uh. Okay."

Right. That was probably a little too nonchalant.

"Anyway, I actually have a question," I quickly deflect.

"Has anyone here disconnected their domain from their body before?"

"Oh, yeah, I do it all the time," Christine nods.

"Uh, you do?" I ask.

"Yeah, pretty much any time you're not around," she nods.

"I'm not really a huge fan of having constant physiological awareness of my gross little meat mech."

"Your what?"

"... My body," she clarifies.

"I just keep my domain on me when you're nearby because I don't want you to have awareness of it either."

"Huh," I say.

"And it's totally disconnected? Like, from your brain and everything?"

"Yeah, are you kidding?" Christine grimaces.

"I don't want my power anywhere near my brain. Can you imagine what would happen if I took it apart?"

"Yeah," I say, imagining that. There are a number of ways you could deconstruct a brain the way Christine's power does. Her power seems to preserve separated objects in such a way that they can be recombined as if they were never separated in the first place, so it's not unreasonable to assume that she'd be fine if she took herself apart and put herself back together again. The question is mostly whether or not Christine could put herself back together. Can a separated brain think?

Can it conceptualize itself enough to order itself to recombine? With certain methods of separating itself, the answer is almost certainly yes, but how many times can you break it before you count as dead? Worse, how many times could you break it before rendering yourself permanently trapped in an exploded state, alive but functionally braindead beyond maintaining your power?

"O-okay, well stop imagining it, that's weird," Christine says.

"Anyway, why do you ask?"

"Because I tried to separate my domain from my brain and it made my whole body just… turn off. I lost all sensation and would have collapsed if I hadn't put the domain back."

"Huh," Christine says.

"Don't do that then."

Thanks Christine, very helpful.

"Curry! Patrova! You're up!" Commander barks, and Anastasia jolts to attention.

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"That's me!" she grins.

"Avenge me, Ana!" Maria says, pumping a fist. For a moment there, I swear her eyes are yellow before she blinks.

"Yeah! I'm gonna kick his butt!" Ana agrees, pumping a fist back and then slamming her arm down to give Maria a high-five. She bounds out towards the field, clawed fingers twitching as she gets into position facing her opponent. He stares back at her, a disquieted look on his face.

"... Commander," he says, "I'm not sure I'm comfortable fighting a child."

"Well, too fuckin' bad," Commander snaps back.

"It's the goddamn apocalypse. We don't have time for the laziness you call 'principles.' You will spar and you will learn, recruit."

"I'm just not confident I can avoid hurting her, Commander."

"Ha!" Commander laughs loudly.

"Oh, I wouldn't worry about that, Curry. She's gonna kick your ass. Square up."

He blinks in surprise, but the last two words are said with such finality that he settles into a combat stance more or less automatically. His face seems to set with determination after a moment, perhaps motivated by Commander's assertion of his weakness.

"Begin!"

Anastasia stabs her wrist as she's done at the start of every fight, the wound from the last duel having healed shortly after the fight's conclusion. Blood trickles out around her claws and gushes forth when she removes them, swirling above her palm as Curry splits into his duplicates, moving to surround her just like he did as Maria.

"Woah," Anastasia says.

"They're all real, huh?"

"I'm afraid there's only one of me," Curry answers.

"That's true too," Anastasia agrees.

"Neat!"

She splits her collection of blood in half, firing at the two closest Curry copies. One target dodges, but the shot on the other appears to connect… and of course, pass harmlessly through. Anastasia frowns, the blood bolts twisting around in the air and striking through their targets a second time on the way back, again to no avail.

The blood rejoins her, orbiting around her as Anastasia starts to run towards the Curry staying in the back. She opens her wound wider along the way, more blood spilling out to join the rest into a thin, spinning disc whirling around her like a cross between a hula-hoop and a sawblade. One of the Curry bodies reaches out to try and grab her, but the disc quickly reorients itself to intercept with the hand and Curry just passes through.

"Can you do anything else cool?" Anastasia asks him. He just frowns at her.

"Oh. Huh. Well, okay."

The disc suddenly fires towards the furthest Curry, deforming in the air as it twists to wrap around him. I expect it to pass through him like things always do, but to both my surprise and his it wraps around his shoulders and pins his arms to his sides, locking him in place.

"If you could just make like, two or three more, this would be really hard," Anastasia tells him. Behind her, the two still-free Currys try to grab her and completely fail, remaining intangible.

"Patrova wins," Commander calls, and Anastasia releases her opponent. Shortly afterwards, chaotic, twisting strings of crimson snake out of the intangible clones, whipping around with enough strength to cut something in half.

Ah, I get it. She distracted him with the big, flashy mass of blood while sneaking much smaller weapons down her body and into the grass, where they slithered into the illusions. I guess he couldn't become one of the illusions if there was something in it?

"You can take five, Patrova," Commander tells her.

"Then be back up here for the final match!"

"Okey-dokey!" Anastasia agrees.

"What was that?" Commander snaps.

"Okey-dokey, ma'am!" Anastasia corrects.

"... Better."

Anastasia giggles and runs back towards us, bringing along her collection of blood. She didn't do that the last few times, I note. Not gonna go easy on me, is she?

"Woo! Nice job, Ana!" Maria cheers.

"You totally could have beaten him," Anastasia answers.

"He's just a cat in a box."

Oh?

"What do you mean by that, Ana?" I ask.

"I'm gonna guess you figured out how his power works?"

"Yeah," she nods.

"He's all of them and one of them. Like. Um… how do I say this… so if a cat is in a box and it's sleeping, maybe it's not sleeping. Maybe it's dead! And you don't know until you open the box. He's only one of them, but he's all of them until you open the box."

Hmm. I might get it.

"How exactly do you 'open the box' in this analogy?" I ask.

"You check all of them," Anastasia shrugs.

"I don't think he controls it, he's just whichever him is the best for him to be at the time. So you just have to be killing the other two while you grab the third. It's way better to be grabbed than dead! Not that I'd kill him. You'd have to kill all three at the same time to do that. Or more, if he could make more than three! I bet he can if he tries hard enough."

"That's really neat, Ana," I tell her.

"How did you figure all that out?"

"Well I watched all his fights," she answers.

"But then when I felt his domain, it was really obvious. He was in one place and three places. He was both at the same time. That was the only explanation that made sense anymore."

"You've got a really good intuition," I tell her, rubbing her head. She beams with pride.

"Do you think it'll be enough to beat me, though?"

"I coulda beaten you while we were escaping the Queen!" she insists.

"But now… I don't know. You've eaten a lot of food! You're nowhere close to running out of energy, right?"

"Yeah," I nod.

"Back then I felt like my reserves barely had a single meal in them at a time. Now it feels like I ate an entire house. I don't think you can make me burn through it, even if you chopped me to bits."

"It's not like I was ever going to do that!" Anastasia pouts at me.

"Capture without hurting, right? That's the rules!"

"That's the rules," I agree. You hurt yourself enough already.

"Then I'll just have to overpower you!" she insists.

"You're gonna get got!"

"We'll see," I smile.

"You'd better watch out, though, or I'll trap you in an inescapable cuddle!"

I grow a few more tentacles and wiggle them around for emphasis, causing her to laugh. God, she's such a wonderful kid. I just want her to be happy. I can't let her win, though. I need to be more valuable than her, or I won't be able to pressure the military into keeping her safe.

"Alright, finalists! Get your asses up here!" Commander orders. Geez, already? Well, I guess that's fine. Anastasia's wound from the last fight is already scabbed over, and she seems excited to get started. The blood floating around her head rushes out and circles me once as her domain blends happily with mine. When we start walking onto the field, though, that overlap becomes the usual fight for dominance instead. We're competitors, after all.

"Alright, you two! Welcome to the finals," Commander declares.

"Now, which one of you will take home the grand prize?"

"Prize!?" Anastasia chirps.

"There's prizes!?"

"Are you ready!?" Commander continues without answering. I respond by yanking my shirt and bra off, replacing the skin underneath with crystalline scales. I shapeshift my feet as I lift one leg, then the other, letting my shoes and socks fall clean off before letting my shorts follow them. I don't need pants because I don't need legs, not when I can just sink the core of my body into a ball and extrude familiar blue tendrils out in every direction.

Anastasia tenses as she watches me shift into the Angel I killed, the cheer falling from her face. She brings her arms together, each set of claws resting just above the other arm's wrist, waiting for the call.

It is odd, finally using the Angel's full brain. I chose the form for a few reasons—because it's fast and good at grabbing things, because it would motivate Anastasia, and because I want to remind the members of the military watching us what I've accomplished. But I also chose it because I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn't afraid of it. That I'm through worrying if one nervous system or another would cause me to lose myself. That I can use every set of instincts at my disposal and not need to fear.

And what a set of instincts they are. The Raptor was so straightforward by comparison, so focused.

Have a task, optimize for task, complete task. The Angel is the opposite of this: the moment I make the shift, my awareness suddenly explodes in dozens of different directions, tracking every single individual living thing around me at all times. It's overwhelming and unpleasant, but… surprisingly manageable. My constellation of eyes flicks between targets with instinctive ease, drinking in every action, every movement, every ally, and every threat. Like I was made to know.

"Morgan! Patrova!

Begin!"

There's only one target I need to focus my attention on: the small Emissary, deadly and dangerous but here only to test and be tested as allies. More than allies? Way more than allies, but I don't have time to investigate why that feels so strange. I must capture it before it captures me.

I roll forwards, tendrils stretching and replacing each other as legs one after the other. Reciprocation's Emissary responds by violently pulling its arms apart, cutting long, deep gouges down the length of its wrists and palms. Blood pours out, and the Emissary (Anastasia, I remind myself. What's all this Emissary stuff?) quickly forms it into a web to block my advance.

I charge right through it, trusting my domain to destabilize her control enough for my momentum to break through. Her eyebrows raise with surprise and she pulls the blood back to herself, letting the newly-bled supply support her as she leaps out of my path. I extend a tentacle to grab her, but I barely miss—no! I grow a second tentacle out of the tip of the first, the flesh exploding into place and tightening around her waist. Got her!

Anastasia's blood mass finishes catching up with her in that same moment, though, her own domain shrinking and strengthening as the distance closes. Blood flows into the gaps between my scales, filling the tiny spaces within my grip. With a grunt of effort, she forces my limb away from her, and though I try to pull her in and wrap her up even further, I'm too slow. She breaks free, her blood yanking her off in a different direction and counterattacking at the same time.

Red washes over my eyes, blocking my vision, but I can still feel her domain. I leap away from where I think she is in a quick reversal of momentum, the blood covering my body suddenly pulled off an instant before I can bring it out of her reach and render it inert.

She's going to keep gathering it, keep getting stronger, and I won't consider myself to have won if she ends up passing out from anemia. I have to take her down fast. I unshift my crystal scales, pulling them back inside me and into nothingness as I shift my skin to produce and secrete a sticky mucus instead, to improve the surface area and grip of my next capture.

Anastasia isn't just waiting around for me to be ready, though: she rushes towards me, blood wrapped around her chest and arms like a harness, accelerating her towards me at high speeds. I reach out to intercept her, but a crimson barrier shoves my tendril aside and starts swimming up to my core, resisting my attempts to break free a second time.

"Got you now!" Anastasia declares.

Like I'll give up from something as small as this. I rapidly shrink my body, slipping out of Anastasia's grip as I turn into a little tiger cub and leap directly at her. I shift back into a mass of mucus-covered tentacles in midair, wrapping around her and squeezing tight to lock her in place. With a much squishier, sticker configuration, my body clings too tightly to let her blood find a place to slip between us and break my grip.

She does her best to wedge it in anyway, crimson fingers grabbing and pulling all over my body, but I just keep holding on even tighter, steadily growing my frame and improving my musculature to keep her locked down.

Then I feel her flinch, and blood starts pooling between us and forcing me away. What just… oh, Division damnit. I can feel it through my biology sense. She dug into her own body to tunnel beneath me and get herself leverage, covering the entire front side of herself in wounds. The blood doesn't just push me away, there's now enough of it to encompass me like a bubble, completely surrounding me and lifting me into the air.

Anastasia pants, hunched slightly over on the ground as blood trickles up into the air from a dozen different wounds, reinforcing my prison.

I thrash around to no avail, so I try shrinking again and immediately get recaptured when I try to make space. Anastasia's domain suddenly feels stronger than it did before, her power rising as she accumulates more damage. The bubble of blood is larger than she is now, large enough to drown me, her body producing the liquid at impossible rates but clearly at the uppermost edge of its limit. I just have to escape!

I shift into a dolphin, then a shark, flailing around to try and escape before I finally settle on the body of a swordfish, kicking my tail as hard as I can and swimming out of the bubble in a powerful burst of speed. The blood moves to follow me, though, catching me out of the air and increasing its pressure. I change tactics, growing into an elephant to simply become too big to encompass. Anastasia adjusts immediately, though, splitting her bubble up into four tendrils that wrap around and lock up my joints.

So I unform my body from the feet up, starting the growth of my new form from the tip of the elephant's trunk, dropping a Raptor out of the air as the elephant is absorbed up into my tail.

Anastasia takes a step back, her eyes going wide as she motions with her arms, her blood shackles twisting into spikes that intercept and impale me in midair. The sudden pain and injury shocks me, and it only multiplies as the spikes widen into cutting blades inside my body, shearing me in half. The back half of my Raptor body falls dead, and noticing the sudden shift in tone I change the front half into a Barbie-doll-censored version of Lia's body, landing in front of Anastasia and wrapping her into a hug.

"Hey, hey!" I breathe, trying to calm her down. Is she hyperventilating? Her eyes aren't focused. She's lost too much blood.

"It's just me, it's okay, you're okay."

"L-Lia?" She asks blearily, her blood swarming around us like an angry hive of wasps looking for something to sting.

"I'm here. Lia's here," I promise her, holding back a wince.

"Liar," she whispers.

"You hate it when people call you that."

I freeze for a second. I can't help it. I flounder for something to distract her with, but it's too late. She felt it. And honestly, I hate how that has become my first reaction to everything.

"... Yeah, you're right," I whisper back as quietly as I can manage. I don't have a choice. Any other answer would destroy the trust between us forever.

"But I'm still here for you, okay? No matter what I look like and no matter what my name is. I'm still me."

She starts to cry, squeezing me tighter and burying her face in my shoulder. What an end to the tournament. But I suppose this is the only win that I deserve.

"Did I get the monsters?"

"You did, hon," I assure her.

She gets halfway through another nod before passing out, the blood dropping out of the sky and drenching both of us in red. I flinch under the impact, but my focus is on her body, forcing my domain through her somehow-empowered one to check up on her physical condition. To my relief, it looks like she just pushed herself too hard. Her wounds are shallow and her body is rapidly healing her while replenishing the blood she lost.

Her domain steadily weakens as her wounds close, confirming my suspicion about where that surge in power came from.

I don't know how, but I am going to find a way to strangle whatever god that thought to give this power to a child.

Also, note to self: Anastasia is still traumatized by the sight of aliens. Because of course she is, you fucking dumbass.

"Well," Commander says, sounding a bit frazzled for the first time since I met her.

"I guess you win, Morgan."

I lift Anastasia up in my arms, trying not to think about how effortlessly light she is. Around us, everyone stares our way in stunned silence. Are they awed? Impressed? Scared? Judgemental? I don't know, and frankly I don't really care to know.

"Apologies," I say.

"I think we might have gone a little overboard."

"You think?

God, what are you idiots standing around for!? Get her to the infirmary!" Commander snaps at a couple of the soldiers nearby, who jolt to attention and grab a nearby stretcher.

"She'll be alright," I promise.

"Her body heals extremely fast."

I of course help load her onto the stretcher anyway. There's absolutely no reason not to get her medical treatment, and while I'd love to take her there myself I suspect Commander will want a word with me. As they take her away, I briefly shift my brain back into the Angel's, patting Anastasia's sleeping domain with my own.

Reciprocation's Emissary.

The title feels right. What does it mean? I hope it's not the name of the god I've just declared beef with. Getting aggressive against a deity named 'Reciprocation' sounds like it could earn me a Darwin award.

Oh, well. I meant it.

I head towards my clothes after making sure Anastasia will be safe, shapeshifting my arm into a modified Raptor tail-maw to pick up and swallow the back half of my body that I dropped earlier. At the same time, I adjust my skin enough to drink the blood on me through it, getting myself nice and clean before I pull my clothes back on.

"The hell did you do to her, Morgan?" Commander demands.

I finish standing up from putting my shorts back on, swallowing my corpse and shifting my arm back. I take a deep breath and look her in the eyes, but all I see is red.

"... You've got something screwed up in your head to have the nerve to say that to me, ma'am." I tell her.

"Excuse me?" she growls dangerously, but I'm not letting her get away with that. Not now.

"What the fuck did you expect to happen!?" I snap.

"You were watching the match. I never hurt her once.

She did it all to herself, because that's what her power is, and every fucking time she uses it you just stand there and smile.

What the hell do you want from me, huh!? Tell her to hold back? Encourage her to practice less? You're sending her back out there to die, Locke.

If you wanna tell me she took it too far, then look me in the eye and tell me she won't need to. Tell me she doesn't have to fight!"

"You're out of line, recruit," Commander warns.

"I'm not even in Basic Training yet," I fire back.

"You're not my CO, you're just my keeper."

Her domain slams into mine, yearning and loving and promising and demanding. But we're too far away, her power takes too much penetration, and she told us to work on domain strength so I've damn well been working on domain strength. I weather the assault unaffected, just continuing to stare her down.

She scowls at me, but after taking a deep breath she retracts her attempt to control me, waving me off.

"Fine," she says.

"I take it back. I was watching. You followed the rules."

You're goddamn right. I relax a bit, crushing the anger back down now that it's no longer useful. Honestly, I doubt that outburst was a good idea, but it went about as well as it could have.

"I see it now, at least," Commander says idly.

"See what, ma'am?"

"How you became a wing ripper."

Oh. Of course. I got away with it because I'm strong. She's being nice because she can't control me anymore.

"So what do I win?" I ask.

"Hmm?"

"What do I win?" I ask.

"You said there was a grand prize."

"Oh, right. Come here," she says, waving me over. I frown, approaching carefully as she pulls out a wallet and hands me…

"... Is this a Waffle House gift card?" I ask.

"Congratulations," she drawls.

"I… I can't even use this."

"Eh, you're getting close to graduating our little class here," she says.

"There will be a bit of a break when you do so you can visit your loved ones and relax a bit before Basic. At which point you'd better pray you never have another outburst like that or your whole platoon will be hating you more with every lap you'll all have to run."

"I'm surprised you'd let us out of your sight like that," I admit.

"Come on, Morgan! Surely you're smart enough to know how hard we'll fall on your ass if you try to make a run for it. You're a lotta things—literally—but stupid ain't one."

"I suppose that's one of the many things you teach us here, isn't it?" I sigh.

"Now you're getting it," she grins.

"Nice job winning our little tournament. We'll be expecting great things from you, wing ripper."

I give her a firm nod.

"I'll earn the title as many times as it takes."

She nods back.

"That's what we want to hear. Now get gone, class dismissed."

I nod one more time, put the gift card in my pocket, and walk off. I hadn't really considered that we'd get a bit of time off. It's surprisingly intimidating, all things considered. I'll have to play the part in front of Lia's family after all this time, and I'm definitely not looking forward to that.

But more importantly, I'll get to see Emily again, face-to-face. And I'm finally going to force her to tell me what her deal is, no matter what it takes.