Shunk! Chase's eyes opened, and the axe embedded itself in Chase's pillow, sending up a spurt of feathers.

Melissa C.'s head turned. Chase had rolled out of the way so fast Melissa C. almost didn't know what had happened. Her axe had gone straight through the pillow and into the floor, and she worked it back and forth a couple times to free it.

Chase, still wrapped up in her sleeping bag, rose to her feet. That girl from practice was here! And she was trying to kill her again!

For a second, she struggled to get her hands on the sleeping bag's zipper, but a second was all she had before Melissa C. resumed her attack. Arms bound at her sides and legs strapped together, Chase ducked under one murderous swing, then jumped another.

“Little bitch,” Melissa C. snarled. “Why'd you have to wake up? It could have been over so quickly. You wouldn't even have felt a thing.”

The ruckus jolted Alicia from her slumber. “Chase?” she asked the chaotic darkness. She reached for the lamp on her nightstand and switched it on.

She screamed at the sight the light revealed to her: Melissa C., slashing wildly at a sleeping bag-hindered Chase.

“M-Melissa C.!” she cried. The girl's axe swung and missed again, shattering Alicia's mirror. “Wh-what are you doing?! What are you doing HERE?! Stop!”

“I can't stop, Alicia! I have to do this!” Melissa C. announced. “I know this doesn't make sense to you, but just believe me, Chase MUST die! I'll explain when it's all over!”

Alicia didn't like this answer, so she threw her blanket over Melissa C. “Now's your chance, Chase!”

Chase did a backflip. She hit Alicia's bedroom door feet first, then launched herself off it like a torpedo. Before Melissa C. could switch to heat vision, Chase swung her legs in front of her and kicked Melissa C. full-on in the stomach with her entire careening body weight. With an 'oof', Melissa C. was knocked to the floor.

When Melissa C. finally, furiously ripped the blanket off, she found she was looking up at both Chase and Alicia. The former had managed to shed her sleeping bag cocoon, and the latter looked very stern with her arms crossed over her pajama top.

“I'd prefer it if you explained yourself right now, actually!” Alicia told her. “What's this all about? Fighting and killing? Having an axe for a hand? This isn't like you!” Her eyes fell on the axe and she jumped back. “W-wait! You have an axe for a hand! Aaah!”

“It's alright, it's alright. I have an axe for a hand, and some other weapons and stuff going on. It's a long story, but that's the real reason why I'm so heavy now. All you need to know is this axe isn't for you.” Melissa C. glared at Chase and gritted her teeth. “It's for HER!”

“Why? Why is that axe for Chase?” asked Alicia, recovering from her initial shock. “What did poor little Chase ever do to you?”

Melissa C. cringed. She opened her arms imploringly. “Look, Alicia. Please listen to me. I know how bad this looks, but I'm the good guy here. I know you're really close with this...with Chase. I know she's been really buddying up to you and the rest of the squad over the past month. But there's a lot about Chase you don't know that I do.”

Alicia hesitated. She had a feeling she did know, but she asked anyway. “Like...like what?”

It was hard for Melissa C. to respond. To her, it felt like it was still her versus the two of them. She felt that if she came forward with the outlandish story of the Chase's true identity, Alicia was sure to side with the enemy. “I...need you to trust me,” she finally requested. “I need to know you'll believe me, no matter how ridiculous what I'm going to say will sound.”

Reading Melissa C.'s feelings, Alicia was filled with sympathy. She dropped to one knee at Melissa C.'s side and gave her a comforting pat on the back. “Of course, I'll believe you, Melissa C. I've been on the squad with you for years now. I know you well enough to know that you wouldn't do something like this without a good reason. Now please, tell me what it is. I really want to know. I want to understand, so I can help.”

Once again, Melissa C. was swayed by her captain's kind words. “Well...okay.” She gave Chase a threatening look, then returned to Alicia. “Okay. I don't know what she told you to get you to bring her in, but I can guarantee that it's all a lie. Before she came to Sunnycrest, Chase was a cannibal, living with her vicious, deformed family in the mountains of McGuff's Pass. She hunted, killed, and ate anyone who dared get lost there. It would be a mistake to call her human. She is a cold-hearted, sinister predator to her very core, and she'll eat you and the whole squad if you let her.”

Alicia and Chase were struck dumb. She knew everything. Panic threatened to take hold of Alicia, and she considered denying the story...but she knew it to be true, and Melissa C. looked pretty confident that she knew it was true as well. Alicia had promised her that she would believe her, and since she had no reason not to, she decided not to hide it. She smiled. “Now now, that's not true. Chase has been very good about not eating girls on the squad.”

“Cheer not for eat! Cheer is friend!” Chase agreed sensitively.

“Also, I've talked to her about it, and she's been trying very hard to cut people out of her diet all together. Isn't that right, Chase?”

Chase looked like this was the first she'd heard of it. “Uh, yes. Am try real hard.”

Melissa C. sat up a little straighter, struggling to make sense of this. “Wait, wait...Alicia, you KNEW?”

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“Well...yeah, I did.” said Alicia uncertainly. “But, but most of the squad still doesn't, so let's keep it a secret, okay?”

Chase scratched her head and looked at Melissa C. “Wait...how YOU know that?”

Melissa C. was incensed. “What?! What do you mean, how do I know that? You know very well how I know that, you bitch!”

Chase was confused. “Not know. You not tell yet.”

The brunette rose angrily to her feet and clenched her remaining hand into a fist. Alicia clung to her arm, as though ready to hold her back should she try anything. “Quit playing dumb! Unless you really expect me to believe you've forgotten me! The girl you kept locked up in that cabin for a week? Whose friends you ate?”

Alicia was somewhat surprised. “Wh-what? Chase? Did that happen? You tried to eat Melissa C.?”

Then, Chase's fingers snapped. She remembered. “Oh! You...you last girl! I shoot with arrows?”

“Yes!”

“You chase through woods, fall in spike pit?”

“Yes!”

Chase looked at her for a moment, remembering more and more. Then, the happy aura of enlightenment darkened into sad realization. This was also the girl who led the cops to her house. It was her fault Chase's family was dead.

But it wouldn't help the situation to bring this up. What Chase wanted was to drain the bad blood between them and move on as friends. She now understood why Melissa C. hated her so much, and her hatred was justified. Chase was the one in the wrong here. Acting as though Melissa C. had wronged HER would only make things worse.

And so, she forced out a smile. “Mel C. did look yum. That true. You looked most yum, was save for last. Was much sad when no eat. But now we team. No want eat Mel C. no more. Just want cheer with.” She offered her hand. “Friends?”

This was the straw that broke Melissa C.'s back. She threw Alicia aside with a snarl, and swapped out her remaining hand for a large, toothy buzzsaw blade. It resembled a very vicious pizza cutter. “As if! I'll never accept you as a friend, you monster!”

The blade concurred with a serrated howl as it whirled to life. Melissa C. leapt at Chase, thrusting the spinning blade at her enemy's chest.

Chase dodged out of the way, but Melissa C.'s speed was incredible. She twisted for another attempt, this time a quick horizontal swipe aimed at Chase's throat. Chase dodged again, not fast enough to keep a thin red nick from opening on her cheek, and already Melissa C. was following with her axe, swinging it upwards at Chase's stomach.

Chase put her hands on Melissa C.'s shoulders and flipped up and over the cyborg's body, the axe slitting the air with a scream. She landed behind Melissa C., and aimed a high, spinning kick at her head.

Her foot connected right below the girl's cheekbone, but she may as well have been kicking a bronze statue. Melissa C. barely moved, barely acknowledged the blow. In fact, a statue may have had a bigger reaction. Chase stepped back to put some distance between them as her enemy turned around. Clearly, she wouldn't be able to fight her hand to hand. She needed a weapon.

Whoomp. A pillow hit Melissa C. on the side of the head. The cyborg growled and looked over at Alicia. The redhead was huddled on her bed. She threw another pillow, which Melissa C. caught with the buzzsaw blade, splitting it and sending feathers flying everywhere. “Quit interfering, Alicia! I'm doing this for us!”

Chase took advantage of this distraction to look around the room for a weapon. The chair at Alicia's desk? It would just break. Maybe one of Alicia's trophies? They weren't real metal. They were probably just plastic. She needed something hazardous, something deadly. But Alicia's bedroom seemed to be short on things like that.

Alicia was out of pillows to throw, so Melissa C. resumed her assault. Chase tried to fight her the best she could. She aimed blows at Melissa C.'s body, face, everywhere, but she could not find a chink in this unstoppable girl's armor.

The buzzsaw reeled towards her face, a spinning centrifuge of death. She ducked under it, but this seemed to be what Melissa C. was anticipating.

A mack truck hit Chase full on in the chest, sending her flying. It wasn't until after she collided with Alicia's bookcase that she realized Melissa C. had laid her shoulder into her. Books and knick knacks rained down on the stunned girl. What an impossibly strong hit. This girl was a tank.

The next thing Chase realized was that she wasn't breathing. The wind had been forced out of her by the hit, and it would take some doing to get it back.

Of course, Melissa C. had no intention to give Chase time to collect it. She turned the axe back into a hand, and used it to grab Chase by the nape of her neck. Casually, with as little effort as somebody might toss a tennis ball, she flung Chase back across the room, where she collided with Alicia's dresser.

Chase struggled to find her feet, but Melissa C. found them first, sweeping them out from under her and sending the cannibal tumbling back to the carpet. Melissa C. lifted the girl by her hair then slammed her face against the edge of the dresser. The shattered glass from the mirror, which had come to rest on the dresser's surface, rattled and danced from the impact and was glazed with a thick splurt of blood. Alicia screamed in horror.

Melissa C. turned the dazed girl over, sitting her up with her back against the dresser. Blood streamed from Chase's nose in twin rivers, and her cheek was already bruising. The cyborg raised the buzzsaw for the killing blow...

And then there was a knock at the door.

“Alicia?! Chase?! What in the world is going on there?” Alicia's mom. The knob turned, but the door was locked. “It's one in the morning!”

Melissa C. looked at the door, then back at Chase. With a crooked smile, she turned the saw back into a hand. “How disappointing. Looks like we've been interrupted. That's too bad. I really want to kill you, but too many witnesses might be a problem.”

As Melissa C. backed off, Alicia jumped off the bed and rushed to Chase's side. “Oh, Chase! Oh, Chase, you're bleeding!” she whimpered, cradling the girl in her arms.

“You know what? Maybe this is a good thing,” Melissa C. continued. Her eyes and demeanor seemed uncharacteristically charged, almost manic. The thrill of being so close to murder, of holding someone's life so fragile in her hands, had left her giddy. “Now you know you're no match for me, after all. You know I can kill you any time, anywhere. I'm sure that'll hang over your head quite heavily, Chase. I think it'll do you good to be a little scared for once, don't you? It'll be a fresh experience, won't it? To be the one who's hunted, rather than the one who's doing the hunting, for a change?”

She walked to the window, and threw a leg over the sill. “Well, see you next time. And Alicia, sorry about your room.” With that, she lifted her other leg over and dropped out of sight into the darkness.