As soon as the files finish copying onto the flash drive, I eject it and close the folder I was looking in. “Alright, let's get out of here.” I'm already halfway back to the vent when I hear Alice’s piercing scream. I turn back and see her on her knees, clutching her head with both hands. Her halo is shining bright above her. Without a thought I dive at her, pulling her behind the desk and clapping a hand across her mouth. She just keeps screaming, the noise only slightly muffled.

I hear the door click open on the other side of the room. Not ideal, but I'll at least have a slight drop on the enemy. I'm in the middle of constructing a workable game plan when I'm caught off guard by Alice biting my hand, hard. I can hear someone approaching from the right side of the desk, so I shove Alice out from behind it with one foot and duck around the left side. To my chagrin, she lets out an enraged snarl and starts to follow after me. I swear softly under my breath and leap out in front of the desk. Looks like the only person who's made it in here so far is the secretary who pulled the manager away earlier. I take a running start to grab her around the waist and slam her into the ground. There's a slight crack as she makes contact with the floor, probably a rib. A bit unnecessary, admittedly. I'm used to fighting much sturdier stock than administrative staff.

My traitorous companion is still chasing after me, and I turn just in time to catch her by the throat. She swings her arms wildly against my torso. None of the blows that land have any real weight behind them. Seems she doesn't remember any of what she learned over the past few days, not that I'm complaining. After a moment she gets the hint that smacking my abdomen isn't going to do much for her, so she digs her heels in, trying to wrench herself out of my grip. “Give it up!” I hiss. I move to wrap my arms around her neck, only to flinch back when I feel a sharp, burning pain in my right bicep. Only then do I notice that her halo isn't just shining, it's spinning rapidly, and getting hot. Sparks are beginning to fly off of it and its rotation is getting shaky. There's a nasty gash on my arm where it touched me. I've never seen anything like this before, and I can't say this is a good time to have to deal with it. I shove her back and deal a vicious punch to her solar plexus, staggering her. The motion of her halo only becomes more unstable as she drops to her knees, struggling to inhale.

I drop to my knees in front of her and grab her shoulder. “Pull yourself together, Alice. I don't know what you think you're doing, but we need to get out of here. After all that noise you made, I'm sure everyone in the building is on their way here, and I'm not leaving you here to tell them everything you know.”

She stares straight through me, tears running down her face as her lips mouth an unbroken string of words. I have to strain to make out what she's whispering. “...ease please it's too much I can't do anything please I'm dying it's too fucking much please please please I can't do it please I'm not strong enough I'll never…” I don't think she even knows I'm here.

“Alice? What are-” Before I can finish my sentence, she reaches up and grips her halo in both hands. It immediately begins to shred through her palms like tissue paper, spewing out a torrent of sparks in all directions. She doesn't let go, even as the blood starts to run down her arms.

My attention is drawn by another intruder entering the room, and this one's no office worker. He's certainly dressed like one, probably to stay inconspicuous during most of his shift, but there's a flaming sword in his hand and a spiked halo shining proudly above his head. Probably not a good idea to take this guy on barehanded. I glance back at Alice, who seems to be trying to wrench her halo out of its position above her head, before extending my wings, drawing my sickles, and jetting toward the assailant.

I open with a wide swing as I draw near him, which, as expected, he easily bats to the side with a hefty swing of his broadsword. I doubt I'll survive a solid hit from that thing, but I've definitely got the mobility advantage. I let the force of the parry propel me to the side and begin circling tightly around him, looking for openings. He does an admirable job of following my movements and swings his sword down at me with a pretty well-calculated lead. I have plenty of time to leap to the side, of course, but if he'd caught me off guard it would've hit.

I let my jump propel me to the nearby wall, then kick off of it to shoot back at my opponent. Before I can reach him, he grips his sword vertically with both hands, blade down, and taps the point against the ground. For a split second the metal flows like water, and by the time I reach him it's a tower shield that I can already tell my sickles have no chance of penetrating. I finish my strike anyway, delivering a savage swing to the top of his shield, and as soon as my feet touch the ground I plant them and throw my shoulder into him. He reels back, unprepared for the follow-up, and the bottom edge of his shield lifts off the ground. There's my opening.

As soon as there’s enough clearance, I slide under the bottom edge of his shield, between his feet, preparing to hook my sickles around his ankles on the way. Unfortunately, my plan doesn’t pan out. The edge of his shield comes down on my neck, and he starts applying pressure. I’m more difficult to strangle than the average person, but an entire tower shield is a lot of weight for my throat to hold by itself. To make matters worse, he plants one foot on my abdomen, holding me in place as I struggle to twist out from under him. Just as my vision is starting to go dark, I hear an explosion close by and feel a shockwave of hot air hit me. Feels like getting run over by a car on fire. My assailant, having been upright when it hit, fares worse. He’s thrown bodily against the wall and collapses into a slightly singed heap on the floor. Doesn’t seem like he’ll be much more of a threat.

My ears are ringing and my entire left side feels like it’s been broiled. It’s still too early to try to get up, so I settle for looking in the direction the explosion came from. There stands Alice, arms covered in blood, tears still streaming down her face, holding the shattered pieces of… shit, is that her halo? How the hell did she do that?

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I manage to roll over and push myself up onto my hands and knees. “What the hell did you-” I'm interrupted by a coughing fit that wracks my entire body. When I open my eyes, I see fresh blood splattered on the floor in front of me. I should focus on getting out of danger, first and foremost. “Have you gotten ahold of yourself?”

Alice looks at the shards of halo in her mangled hands, then at me. “I… I think so…”

I force myself up to my feet. It's pretty hard to keep my balance. We'd better leave before anyone else arrives, neither of us is in a state to fight. “Alright then, back into the vent. I'll boost you up. Do you remember the way back to the closet?”

She nods, dropping one of the pieces of her halo onto the floor. She holds onto the other for a moment, regarding it carefully, and sticks it in her pocket before walking over to the vent we entered through. I give her a quick lift up before jumping to reach out myself, which sends a sharp pain shooting through my torso. Probably best not to do any more acrobatics until I've gotten Penny to give me a look.

We make our way back to our exit silently and without incident. We can hear various workers and guards rushing around in the rooms and halls we pass but none of them seem to have thought to check their ventilation system. Before long we've made it out of the building, and from there it's not far to the nearest manhole cover. From outside, you wouldn't even know there's anything wrong inside the office building.

Once we're underground we keep moving for a while, until I'm sure that we're far enough away that nobody who might stumble onto us could connect us to the mayhem in the office. As soon as I'm confident we've made it out, I let myself collapse against the tunnel wall. I've been running on pure adrenaline since Alice's eruption, and it's starting to catch up with me. I spend a few minutes just catching my breath, before turning to look at Alice, no longer glowing like she did the last time we traveled underground together. I wouldn't even be able to see her without my darkvision. She's sunk into a seated position against the opposite wall, arms wrapped around her legs and face buried in her knees as sobs wrack her body.

I still don't really understand what went on in there, but I'm less concerned about it now than I am about catching my breath so we can make it back. Whatever that explosion did to my internals can't have been good, and I'd rather get it taken care of sooner than later.

Once I've pulled myself together as much as I think I'm able, I stand and walk over to Alice. “Are you injured, other than your hands?”

She looks up at me for a moment, tears streaming down her face, before shaking her head. “I don’t think so. And my hands aren’t… as bad as they look.”

“Well, we should head back to Penny’s and get it taken care of anyway.”

She nods. “Yeah, they're… it hurts a lot.” She stands up and I lead the way back to Penny’s place without incident. Penny answers almost immediately when we knock, and her eyes widen when she sees Alice. “What happened out there? Where’s her halo?”

“Medical attention first,” I reply.

A moment later, we’re sitting at the kitchen table again while Penny and a pair of dolls tend to our wounds. Penny’s mainly focusing on me, since most of the damage I took from Alice’s halo exploding is internal. Each of her dolls is focused on bandaging one of Alice’s shredded hands. “So how exactly did this happen?” As she asks the question I can feel wounds in my internal organs knitting themselves back together.

“She pulled on her halo until it exploded.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s… about what happened, yeah,” agrees Alice. The dolls are just finishing up on her hands.

Penny stops what she's doing and looks back and forth between the two of us. “That's… what does that mean?”

“I… I'm pretty sure that-... that office belongs to the god I'm bound to.”

“The god you were bound to,” I correct.

She pulls out the halo fragment she stashed in her pocket earlier. It's completely inert, faded from its previous shining gold to a dull yellowish brown. “I… I guess so? Anyway, I saw his insignia, on the wall in the hallway. A circle with a dot in the middle. Herrid. And then everything just got… so loud, and bright, it was agony.”

“I suppose it would be,” replies Penny. “I mean, you realized midway through the mission that you were acting in violation of your oath. I can’t imagine the halo would’ve responded well to that.”

Alice nods, still staring at the broken piece in her hand. “Yeah, it was… It was awful, and I just needed it to stop, and I started pulling on it and… It was tearing up my hands, but I didn’t care, I needed to escape from it so bad, and it eventually just sort of-... popped.” She looks across the table at me. “I thought you said it'd take a long time.”

“I thought it would. Never seen a halo just… shatter, like that.”

“Me neither,” Penny chimes in. “I’ve never even heard of it, let alone seen it.”

“So this… shouldn’t be possible, right?”

“I mean, I’m not really an expert on halos, there’s lots of stuff in this world I haven’t seen.” Penny returns to repairing my wounds as she continues speaking. “If I had to guess, I’d say realizing midway through an act of espionage that it was being perpetrated against the god you were bound to was probably a bit more of an… extreme situation than the thing was really meant for. It sounds like it provoked a similarly extreme response out of you, more than it could stand up to.” Alice doesn’t reply, and Penny finishes patching me up in silence.“Alright, that should do it. Don’t go exerting yourself for a few days, though, there’s only so much magic can do. Now, did the two of you get what you were looking for?”

I nod, pulling out the flash drive. “There’s definitely something going on, they were not happy that their shipment of cores didn’t arrive. Didn’t really have time to root through everything, but we’ve got a lot of files on there. Something about ‘combat dolls’.”

“I can’t say I like the sound of that.”

“Didn't think you would.” I place the flash drive in her hand. “Have at it, I'm gonna go get some rest.”