"William?" asked Tracy, the group of Earth's defenders once again gathered in her bedroom. "When you say that Decay has a heart of pure black, is it possible that's just because he's... well... lonely?"

"The heck?" asked Natasha.

"That's what Agatha seemed to think, although obviously she phrased it differently."

"Who's Agatha?" asked Mary.

"The elderly lady he's staying with. I had a quick chat with her yesterday while I was checking up on Decay before school."

"I can tell you what's in his heart, but I can't tell you why it's there," answered William. "Perhaps it's true that a life led in Midnight, surrounded by other Banes and under the authority of the Devourer of Light, would not be conducive to the purity of one's soul."

"Then perhaps there's another option we haven't considered. Redemption."

"Seriously?" asked Natasha. "You think it's possible to stop him just acting good, and make him actually good?"

"Even if that's possible, it doesn't change the fact that he needs to feed on people to survive," pointed out William.

"But he's not hurting anyone. He's being very... uh... charming about it," said Stacy.

"That's true for now, but it is not sustainable," declared William. "If he wants to avoid hurting people, he can't feed from the same person repeatedly. He needs to find new victims each day. Multiple new victims, given how little he's taking from each one. What if he fails to find anyone one night? Will he let himself starve, or will he employ force? The global pool of people willing and able to feed him is large enough to sustain him indefinitely, for sure, but it's not as if they all visit the same nightclub in some sort of conveniently arranged rotation. Decay will need to start moving around between different establishments. Right now, he has it easy, because no-one knows who he is. Will that still be true if he continues this for months? And what about years from now? Never kissing the same person twice, he'll soon get a reputation, and maybe even banned from the city nightclubs. He'll likely be forced to leave the city, and, away from the rift and the passive energy supply that leaks through, he'll need to drain dozens of people each night to survive."

"Can't he just change his face?" asked Natasha. "He seems capable of it. That mafia godfather wannabe obviously isn't his real form."

"Perhaps. Aside from his first fight with you, he hasn't given any sign of using his powers, presumably to conserve energy, but I'm sure he could do something in an emergency. But that wouldn't resolve the issue of not being able to drain the same person repeatedly."

"It's not like he can never drain the same person again, surely? They just need some time to recover. Otherwise, the victims of other Banes wouldn't wake up from their comas."

"You've never followed up on those victims, have you? You see on the news that they 'wake up' and think that they're fine. Yes, they're awake, but that doesn't mean they've fully recovered. They'll experience tiredness and lethargy that could take years to fade. In bad cases, it can be crippling—leaving victims house-bound or even bed-bound—and never fully heal. So yes, it's true that given time to recover he could feed multiple times, but that time is a lot longer than what you're thinking, even with how little he takes, and even then, there could be a gradual build-up of damage."

"Oh..."

"Realistically, if we're going to... remove... him, we need to do so sooner rather than later," said Mary.

"Huh? How so?" asked Stacy. "We should have plenty of time before he runs out of victims."

"It's not his victims I'm thinking about. It's the morality. We talked about redemption, but from Tracy's description, that's already happening. He's befriended Agatha. Or perhaps Agatha has befriended him. Either way, he seems to actually respect her. If that seed grows..."

"That's one hell of an 'if'," opined Tracy.

"Indeed. If it wasn't, then I'd say it was already too late to consider removing him and still call ourselves defenders of justice."

"Argg! When I agreed to be a magical girl, no-one warned me there would need to be all this thinking!" complained Natasha. "Bad guy shows up. We blast bad guy. Rinse and repeat. We should hurry and squish Decay simply for being too bloody complicated!"

"Let's be reasonable. We tried to negotiate with him, and he spurned us," said Tracy. "He wants conflict. As long as we keep William with us to confirm he still has a heart of evil, I have no issues with fighting him."

"Right. Let's just drop an anvil on his head and be done with it," said Natasha.

"He seemed fairly confident that without magical powers, we wouldn't be able to take him out without causing collateral damage," said Stacy.

"Probably just bluster," said Tracy. "He's hardly going to admit to any vulnerabilities. A more fundamental flaw with that plan would be finding an anvil. Might I suggest a girder, or heavy section of pipe?"

"He heads into the city centre to feed. There's lots of high-rise building work going on, some of which he walks past," said Mary. "An 'accident' wouldn't be completely implausible."

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"Okay, so we have a plan," said Natasha. "We wait for him to head to the city centre, climb onto the roofs, wait for him to walk past a building site, then shove a big pile of metal off it and onto his head."

"I'm not entirely convinced that builders habitually leave big, convenient piles of girders lying around, either, but it wouldn't hurt to look," said Tracy.

----------------------------------------

"Huh. Well, what do you know?" asked Tracy, who was in her Shining Nova form, and was peering at a big pile of girders that had indeed conveniently been left on the twentieth floor of an under-construction block of flats.

"And Decay is still heading this way?" asked Mary, who had likewise transformed into Graceful Aqua. All four girls had transformed, their baseline human abilities not being sufficient to leap around between buildings or scale twenty floors of a building which did not yet contain a useable staircase.

"Indeed. If he doesn't turn aside, he'll pass us in two minutes," answered William.

"He's not turning aside; I can see him!" exclaimed Natasha, peeking out of the hole where a wall had yet to be built. "He's on our side of the road and everything."

"We need to get ready, then," said Stacy.

"How? I mean, the girders are already right on the edge. We just need to push them."

"Just keep an eye on him and shout when it's time for us to push."

"No, whisper," corrected Mary. "We don't want to alert him."

"Okay..." whispered Natasha, watching the approaching Bane carefully and wondering how long it would take a girder to fall twenty stories. "Three... Two... One... Now!"

The other three girls pushed, their superhuman strength easily sufficient to move the weighty pile of steel.

Of course, pushing a weighty pile of steel across a concrete floor resulted in some amount of noise, and Decay had already been proven to possess above average hearing.

Decay looked up, just as several tonnes of steel rained down.

If the sound of the girders scraping across a concrete floor made 'some' noise, the amount of noise generated by those girders slamming into a concrete pavement after a twenty story drop should have been described in such ways as 'lots' or even 'deafening'. The fact that nothing but silence came up from the streets below was therefore rather surprising to the girls.

Or at least, all the girls other than Natasha, who was still looking over the edge.

"Uh... Girls?" she said carefully. "Was he supposed to catch them?"

"Catch?" asked Mary, running up and peering over the edge herself. Down below, Decay was staring upwards, his eyes scanning the various floors of the construction site while a dozen girders hovered in the air, held by bands of shadow that had risen from the ground. Where they contacted the metal, it lost its lustre, the colours shifting to browns and blacks as the material corroded.

The eyes of the Bane met Mary's, his expression instantly warping into an arrogant sneer.

"Run!" exclaimed William as Decay moved, his joints bending in ways that no human's had any right too as he leapt at the half-finished building, clinging to the wall like a spider, despite a lack of handholds, then moving up it at a sprinting pace.

"Where to?!" exclaimed Natasha. "We need to go down, but he's coming up!"

"We can fight!" argued Tracy. "We're all transformed already, so he can't take advantage while we're defenceless like last time. Just stick to punching him instead of magical abilities."

"No, we can't beat him," said Mary. "Those black ribbons of his are too fast to dodge, and we can't break them. We won't get close enough to punch him."

"Over here! Jump off the back!" shouted Stacy.

"Too late," declared Decay as he climbed over the wall and pulled himself upright, bones popping and clicking as he moved. His transformation had slipped enough that there was no way he could pass as human, even in the faded moonlight, his hands distinctly ending in 'claws' rather than 'nails', and his grin far too wide for his face, with contents that were far too pointy.

Mary took a step backward, but stumbled; she was trembling, and her breath caught in her throat.

"Mary! Don't panic! We're with you this time," shouted Natasha, noticing the effect Decay was having on the poor girl.

"And you think that will make a difference?" sneered Decay.

For a moment his trousers rippled as muscle shifted beneath, and then he erupted into a whirlwind of claws and shadow.

This time, the girls weren't caught completely defenceless, and were able to work together, but it soon became obvious that they were outclassed. They still had their superhuman strength and speed, but so did Decay. Alas, Decay also had some rather nasty claws.

"What the hell?!" exclaimed Natasha as she barely managed to dodge a swipe, Decay's claws missing her skin by millimetres but instead slicing through the fabric of her dress as if it was nothing more than satin. Given that it was satin, that wouldn't normally come as a surprise, but it was supposed to be magical satin. "When we fought Violence, he had a bloody machine gun, and he still couldn't poke holes in us. These costumes are supposed to be bulletproof! How's he cutting them?"

"Our magic doesn't work against him! That's kinda the point!" shouted back Tracy. "You need to dodge, not block!"

"The yellow one's a bit slow on the uptake, isn't she?" laughed Decay as he launched a few more swipes. Strips of fabric fell from Natasha's body as he sliced chunks off her floaty dress.

"Hey, I have a name, you know!"

"That's nice, but given that you've never introduced yourself, how do you expect me to know it?"

He spun to counter a kick from Tracy, grasping her by the shin and tossing it upwards, flipping her backward. She turned it into a neat somersault, landing on her feet, but it still took precious seconds to recover.

Stacy picked up another girder and swung it, but Decay simply conjured another of his solid shadows, blocking the oversized weapon. Its sudden halt wrenched it out of Stacy's grip and it crashed to the floor with an almighty clang.

"Ahh! What do you think you're doing?!" screamed Natasha as the last of her dress gave up its attachment to her body, leaving her standing in little more than her underwear. "Pervert!"

Mary watched the scene impotently, caught in the grip of fear. She hadn't thought she'd been too badly affected by her first loss against Decay, but now that she was before him once more, in the middle of a fight, she couldn't stop shaking. The memories of being trapped rose up unbidden, threatening to overwhelm her. Bound up so tightly it wouldn't have been surprising if she couldn't breathe even had her mouth and nose not been covered, completely helpless as he pressed a claw against her neck. The sight of his face sneering at her as he robbed her of her sight, leaving her completely senseless as she waited for her end.

"Mary!" shouted William. "Snap out of it! You don't have to fight, but at least think up a way to escape."

Mary blinked.

That end had never come. She hadn't taken so much as a scratch, her only wounds being mental in nature. Even now, in this fight, none of the four had taken any wounds. Had Natasha really been dodging so precisely that Decay had ended up undressing her without so much as nicking her skin? Of course not. He couldn't hurt them. Maybe, if they were actually a threat to him, things would be different, but for as long as he had the power to simply toy with them, he was forced to.

She stopped shaking and took a deep breath. "We surrender," she declared.