Lisa sat on the couch, continuing to watch the news broadcast in Bath's absence. She looked on with a smug expression when Bath appeared on the screen, blurry; whoever was filming was clearly very far away from Bath's location.

When Lisa saw people near Bath begin fighting one another, she jerked forward in her seat. 'What's going on?' Then, when Bath lifted up seven people only a few seconds later, skewering them through their upper bodies, Lisa shivered. The infighting stopped; Lisa realized that those seven must have been kursi. "So there were some we didn't get to," Lisa murmured to herself. 'Makes sense. They probably came to the U.S. after they realized most of the world's kursi had been kidnapped by COTD, hoping to use its might to defeat COTD.'

Lisa smiled grimly to herself as Bath roared, pulverizing all the non-Basalith fighters into the Earth. She felt a sick little twinge in her stomach, an uncomfortable heat at the carnage. 'I've still never killed anyone.' She looked at the broadcast, really looked. So many bodies...

Lisa swallowed. 'Dean must've been there.' She didn't know how she felt about that. Someone her age, who hadn't known about any of this before a few days ago. Just a random guy who played basketball. She was more involved in this struggle than he was--it was her Church, after all. And yet, she still hadn't drawn blood.

'I'm going to kill sapients in the future,' she thought solemnly to herself. 'It's inevitable. Right?'

The broadcast's live footage cut off; an anchor took over to explain what had just happened and its global implications. Lisa turned it off, then walked over to the window, looking out. None of the conflict had come to Alens, and Lisa knew it was now safe for everyone to go out. Even the soldiers in the area had left, taking their tank with them. Lisa had heard, rather than seen, them leave a few minutes ago.

It was still fairly early for most college students, just around 11 am. Since classes had been canceled, Lisa wasn't surprised that her suitemates were all still sleeping.

Lisa held out her hand in front of her, feeling the slight nudging of magnetic sense in her muscle and bone. When she was still, magnetic sense almost completely faded away, unless she was actively using it to suspend herself in the air or something similar.

She walked over to the door to go out, determined to be productive with this day off and get a bit more caught up in her schoolwork. She had so many readings to do, it almost made her sick.

'Just gotta make sure I control my magnetic sense,' she noted, nodding to herself. 'Though "control" doesn't mean not use...'

---

Kayt was one of the first to return to Basalith. She was splattered with blood and gore; Nimesh was worse, her entire face dyed red. Unfortunately, there was still a line to enter the bathhouse.

'You can use ours,' Nimesh offered, referring to the bathing pool the wolves had in their basement.

Kayt shook her head. 'It's fine,' she transmitted back. 'Just go; I'll see you tomorrow.'

Kayt dismounted, and Nimesh moved to nuzzle her. "Nimesh!" Kayt hissed as half-dried blood from the wolf's maw wiped onto her already-soiled clothes. With a toothy grin, Nimesh bounded off for the wolf building where the Dawn and Dusk wolves resided.

The line to enter the bathhouse was silent. Actually, all of Basalith seemed silent besides a few sentences here or there. It seemed as though the entire city was in a daze. Kayt certainly felt as though she was in a dreamlike state. She'd done things she'd never even fathomed...she'd given herself over to Nimesh, worked in tandem with the wolf and a few others to build up a fortress and completely exterminate all enemy life within a five-mile radius. Then they'd branched out on their own for a bit, picking off any enemies close to their territorial border.

It had all felt so natural at the time. Riding off with Nimesh, feeling Nimesh's desires intermix with her own, reveling in the violence and the joy of dominating might...She hadn't felt even a semblance of doubt, encountered a single moral hiccup.

She understood why the city was so silent. The people who hadn't left for the fight were still in their apartments or in training, and the squirrels that were normally dashing all over were nowhere to be found. The only people by the bathhouse area were those who had come back.

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She'd been a little too far from the dragon to hear, but she'd heard from others on the way back what he'd told them. 'We have emerged from the trial of blood...indeed.' She didn't feel angry over what had happened. If anything, she felt empty. Part of her was thinking, 'This wasn't what I signed up for.' Her other half disagreed: 'Wasn't it?'

---

Killing people wasn't a totally novel action as far as Edgewood was concerned. However, the number of people he killed was enough to give anyone, including himself, significant pause.

"I guess boons turn us into more than just physical monsters," he chuckled bitterly to himself, clenching his fist. Most of the people of Basalith had been civilians just a few days ago, and here they had destroyed a heavily armed force of U.S. soldiers. It hadn't been clean; it had been messy beyond any human battle he'd ever seen. No battle was pretty: people got blown up, their faces ripped apart by bullets, their bodies left in pieces. But this one...

Edgewood wondered how long it would take for some of the bloodiest areas to be clear of red. How much rain it'd take to remove vestiges of vicious, up-close combat. Animal combat.

He was still walking back. When the fighting stopped, he broke off from his group and walked back alone. There were people all around him in the same boat, trudging back through the war-zone. The carnage seemed to grow worse the closer they were to Basalith, the city resting at the nucleus of the battle.

Halfway back, the raptors had found him. Edgwood hadn't done anything, hadn't said anything, but they'd found him sure enough and decided to flank him. He wondered if they surrounded him now because they realized how helpful his techniques were in battle. Honestly, he was too drained to even care that three-hundred or so raptors were flanking him like the Queen's guard.

People around him, also confused and moderately bewildered by the raptors' deference to one man, kept their distance, giving all the raptors and Edgewood a good hundred feet of clearance.

He started to address the raptors as they got closer to Basalith. While they couldn't understand him fully, and he wouldn't be able to understand him, he knew how to inflect his voice to make it easier for them to comprehend.

"After washing off, come to specialized educator training room 02-C," he grunted, though his voice carried through the densely-packed raptor ranks. They didn't respond, though he knew they'd heard. He was thankful for their silence: if war was anything, it was loud. 

---

Dean managed to break away from Virigard and the other jerboas after fifteen minutes of insisting that he needed to wash up. Virigard, looking down at her absolutely scarlet hands, had giggled.

"If you were careful like us, you'd be fine with just a sink."

Dean snorted. "I'm not an assassin like you guys," he argued. "I'm made to take a few hits while dishing them out." She'd just given him a buck-toothed smile. "Anyways, I need to leave, seriously, I promise I'll come back once you get some coke."

Virigard pouted, the group of jerboas who were also clustered around Dean joining in. "Okay," she sighed. "I'll show him the way out, everybody. Say bye to Dean!"

"Cya!" "Bye!" "Come back soon!"

Virigard bounced off toward what Dean presumed was an exit, leading him through a meandering maze of tunnels until, after five minutes of high-speed movement, they arrived on the surface.

"A sewer?" Dean mumbled to himself as they emerged from a manhole.

Virigard completely ignored the comment. "Thanks for coming, Dean. It was fun to work with you!"

"Same to you, Virigard. I can't wait to see what you think of rum coke." 'Thank god I didn't just say that to a girl,' Dean thought to himself. 'Well, a human one.'

"Me too!" With that, she dropped back down into the caverns below.

---

Herod hadn't been directly involved in most of the fighting himself, taking on the role of caretaker near one of the land-shaper shelters. He hadn't had all that much to do, given that very few of their number ever got injured. A few received weapon-fire from soldiers who got in some lucky shots, but for the most part, the enemy combatants were unable to deal any damage.

'So guerrilla warfare doesn't work very well against forces who can detect hidden opponents, snipe them from thousands of feet away, and close that distance nearly as fast as a crouching soldier can ready his gun. Good to know.'

Herod felt a growing sense of pride in Dusk faction's accomplishment. 'We came, we saw, we conquered.' Ever since he started on the director profession, he'd worked on delegating much of Dusk faction's activities to others. The result had left Dusk faction a bit less centralized than Dawn faction, but in a good way. He liked the direction that Dusk faction was going.

Where Dawn faction relied on Maya's guidance like she was the mouthpiece of the Dragon herself--which Herod knew was false--Dusk faction was a lot more down to Earth. They worked kind of like a monarchy, with Herod as the monarch, the figurehead, and the rest of the faction led by people who'd been elevated up by other members of Dusk faction in public elections.

Not that Dusk faction didn't preach Church doctrine; it did. But while Dawn faction gave services that focused on mysticism and "feeling" the Way of the Dragon, Dusk faction focused more on the logic behind the Way and how best to live a life in pursuit of self-determination. In a sense, Herod was trying to shape Dusk faction into the kind of religious organization he wanted to be a part of.

He hoped Maya was doing the same. He really hoped she wasn't just concentrating power for its own sake...