I was slow, that was for damn sure. The room was big enough for me to fly around in, and unlike last time we'd come out here and gotten thrashed by Tenebrae, I hadn't gone overweight on loadout, so I was at optimal mobility.

There were no excuses, the problem was all me. As the rifle in the Exhuman's hands flashed and belched fire and death at me, I wasn't moving in time. I barely got my arms up to cover my vitals with my weaponry, but could feel myself being punched around in the air as bullets cracked my armor plates and pinged off of my guns.

The issue was, I'd been in suspense, or suspension perhaps more accurately, for nine hours. When entering a combat situation, a combatant has only so many hours of productive nerve in them before they veer into being too sloppy or too hesitant. Mine had been wasted in the hours that I inched towards the ground, the alert, paradoxical tranquility of action long since fading from my mind, and replaced with other thoughts not pertinent to the situation.

Unhelpfully, I had probably spent the last couple of hours reliving my every interaction with Ashton before we had parted, and while facing down my decision was probably healthy in a holistic sense, in the immediate, the only individual it made me wish to combat was myself.

Fortunately, I had Deej to rescue me yet again. I felt a wave of sound ripple through me from my feet to my hair, and then the metal railing before me shattered into fragments, dropping the Exhuman, her large red coat billowing around her, before she vanished into yet another portal, still feet from the ground.

In the moment she was gone, I began moving. I had to force myself back into the mindset of a combat. It was easier to continue fighting than it was to start. I began drills, as I had done thousands of times before, like a soccer player doing footwork training, I flickered from side to side, pushing myself to stop for only the briefest possible instant, enjoying the unenjoyable sensation of my internals shifting back and forth with the outlandish G's I put on them.

She was there again, free-falling now, upside down, rifle at her shoulder, scope over one eye. She had her other eye closed like an ameteur shooter, but that hardly mattered as she trained her rifle on me with unerring precision despite the unusual circumstance of her position.

But I was moving this time, and even before I'd gotten the proximity alert, I had taken evasive action. I moved towards her side, her dominant arm's side, forcing her to extend the gun one-armed to track me and not allowing her to keep the weapon across her body for support.

True to her apparently ameteur nature with firearms, she took the bait, holding the weapon one-handed and firing rounds at me. The first few bullets were reasonably close given her positioning, but the recoil of the weapon quickly sent the remaining spray up...or down, into the floor. I was already moving, rocketing towards her with blades extended, but as I reached her, again, she vanished into a portal.

I considered following her in, but hesitated too long and did not want to risk the possibility of discovering what happened when a portal closed with one halfway through. Still, if she could move as fast as thought, this was essentially a fight against Ashton's comrade Jack, but with a firearm.

I turned as another gateway opened directly above me, and even before I could see the Exhuman emerge, fired two blasts of scattergun laser into it before I had time to realize my error and moved as fast as possible, dipping down briefly to give myself an extra moment before veering horizontally away.

Away from the cascade of molten lava which emerged from the portal like pus seeping from a wound in the air. Even from here, I could feel the heat of it, and my nearest leg blistered just by being near. I felt the superheated air in my lungs and choked.

Panic welled up within me, I heard Siad's voice as he screamed out at the Exhuman's touch. My heart slammed in my chest so hard I thought it might crack my armor plates.

"Pull up, Karu!" Deej's voice crackled in my ear, far away. I blinked and realized I was still heading for the ground, right for the growing pool of lava which Smith and Deej were scrambling to climb above. My altimeter was flashing alerts right in front of my eyes.

I jammed to a halt, feet above the glowing pool, feeling the heat of it on every inch of my skin, reeling from the G's and feeling my vision going. I was still panicking, my heart rate was way too high, I was going to blackout at this rate, and my lack of awareness and the need to react violently was only making things worse.

I flew upwards again, putting distance between me and the pool. Outside of the tunnel vision, in grayscale, I saw melting gun lockers, drooping from the extreme heat.

I forced myself up and out and back into my drills, pitting my muscle memory against my actual memories. I traced an hourglass shape in the air, reversing it at random, flickering up, down, over, down, over…

A portal appeared horizontal to me, and the tip of the rifle emerged, firing blindly into the room in my general direction. I went over, down, over, and then straight into it, blades extended.

Somewhere in the piercing blue of the gateway, we clashed, and my wrist-blade sheared through the metal barrel of the gun, and we both tumbled into the new world, a seemingly endless void with a floor carpeted an inch deep with water every color of the spectrum.

I was too close to her to bring the blades to bear, retracting them both with a thought, but grabbed her by the wrist and struggled to level my weaponry at her, point-blank. She struggled at my grasp and punched at me feebly, though clinging to me so I couldn't drag her off of me and end it with a single shotgun blast.

She hugged at me, and kneed me in the groin, scrabbling at my visor with her free hand. I had only limited hand to hand experience, but knew that an elbow to the nose was better than trying to throw a punch in these quarters, and gave her exactly that. She anchored herself to me by grabbing my hair, and bit the side of my face.

"B-blighted...animal--" I stammered, as I tried to remove her, the feeling of hot blood upon my cold cheeks made the wound seem even worse somehow. How could one so wiry and small be so impossible to overpower? I thought she must be running purely on adrenaline, but even with her mouth and broken nose streaked with blood, I still saw the same cold indifference in her eyes, like I was simply boring her as we both gasped and thrashed with one another.

It was only a few seconds before one or both of us fell and we wrestled on the ground, me just trying to get enough distance to aim a weapon at her, and her clawing at every inch of me she could find, the rainbow-tinted water splashing around our struggle, burning like ice.

Twice, I writhed and fired, unsure if I had an angle, but both times I hit only the air next to her, with her not even flinching as the explosion of gunfire went off in her face. For her part, she'd managed to wrestle a grenade from my chest bandolier and was struggling to hold onto me and prime it at the same time. I knew that one was merely an EMP, but wanted under no circumstances for this fight to continue with me blinded by a dead visor.

This was going nowhere, and if she got the grenade primed, I would be at a severe disadvantage. I had to do something.

With a flick of my eyes and a thought, I engaged anti-missile countermeasures, and from my shoulders, hips, and ankles, small pods open and fired. Flares and chaff filled the air, saturating the area around me with garbage designed to confuse missile tracking.

My hope was that the explosive emergence of such would be enough to distract her as well, at least for a precious moment to land a decisive blow. Her face registered only minor disinterest, but the flares going off in her face did temporarily blind her, and I took the moment to slam my visor into her forehead with a loud crack which I hoped came from her.

She reeled backwards, and both of my arms snapped upwards, firing two loads of buckshot. They went over her head as she disappeared into the floor, the top hemisphere of a blue orb projecting from the ground under her feet. I had half a moment where I hesitated if I should take the shot and finish her, but realized if I didn't go now, I'd be stuck here, presumably forever, and dove head-first into the closing crescent.

I fell forward, back in reality...or familiar unreality at least. The massive chamber with the dozens of portals and gravity fragmented every which way.

I heard a buzz as my comms reconnected with Deej. "--gone? Karu, do you copy?"

"I'm here. We're in the previous room now," I reported tersely as I fell after the girl, evading a spray of gunfire shot backwards at me with her now sawed-off rifle, and she vanished again when I returned fire. I took back to the air and hovered, waiting for her to reappear.

I was actually hoping she'd vanish for a bit and give me a moment to breathe. I'd been noticing a spike in one of my optics readings every time a portal was made, a burst between UV and x-ray, and hadn't had the hands or time to tell my visor to keep on alert for it. I'd gotten as far as setting up an alert but was still seeing the world in x-ray when the alert pinged off right in behind me, and I turned and fired on reflex.

"Mon..." Deej said with an exasperated sigh, as I realized I'd just fired a scattergun into his exosuit. He was fine obviously, but I gave him an apologetic grin anyway.

I had almost finished when the alert went off again and this time I evaded. My vision still wasn't right, so I was flying on instinct here, but I heard and felt bullets flaring past me as I roared upwards, until suddenly...I was roaring downwards. My stomach shifted with spontaneous unease as I breached the gravity bubble around one of the walkways and up became down.

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My jetpack, even more confused than I, almost killed me as it full reversed throttle to correct the spontaneous deceleration it assumed I'd undergone, from some large positive speed to some large negative speed. My head slammed against the now-floor with an echoing metal clang and in addition to the greyscale and tunnel vision from the sudden full-speed burst, now I was seeing spots.

My pack, satisfied to have found the ground, folded itself up. I swore and tried to stabilize the spinning room in my head before the Exhuman took advantage of my disorientation.

I heard and felt Deej fire several times while I put my head back together, keeping her busy and buying me time. I was having a hard time consolidating the fact that I was on the ceiling, but it was the floor, but at least got my optics back into shape. I looked down...or up...and saw Deej and Smith on the floor above me, and indicators of several now-closed portals in the UV/X-ray range, where she had appeared or disappeared recently. There was also this gaudy enormous machine.

And I had an idea.

I was light on explosive munitions, they had been the extra weight I'd left behind to make it under loadout capacity, and not very useful besides given the portal nature of the hideout we were raiding...exploding a conventional trap or two might have worked, but an errant blast around the portals ran the risk of closing it and trapping us in here.

Yet something around here was responsible for her being able to project portals wherever she wanted, and with the enormity and obvious care taken in this central machine, I had my suspicions this was it. I took a few steps forward, reached down towards the top of the machine, and placed a blast charge on an important-looking piece of it. Rocketing away, I set my flight controls back to the mostly-manual profile I'd saved a few rooms and several hours back, avoiding my pack malfunctioning again as I crossed the gravity switch.

Once I was far enough, I jammed the detonator and felt the whole room shake with the blast. I heard a scream, and realized it was Smith's, not the Exhuman's.

"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?" he yelled.

"I destroyed a relic of corruption brought into this world by a twisted mind," I said, landing next to him and Deej and watching the machine shudder as explosions rocked its interior.

"You destroyed this world!" he shouted. "That device is the only thing keeping this pocket dimension intact! We have...minutes, maybe, before all of this implodes into unreality!"

"Unreality? That sounds bad," Deej understated. "I think we should leave?"

"That's what I heard." I turned to Smith. "Will this kill her?"

"It will kill all of us!" he screamed, his eyes bugging out.

"Sufficient for me."

Deej picked up the wailing man and we headed for the exit portal. As we went, I noticed the beginnings of gravity wavering, as our steps no longer carried us exactly straight. They passed through the portal and began navigating the labyrinth of walkways, Deej rocketing forward with his suit's thrusters at full capacity, blinking in and out of existence as he crossed walkway after walkway. Whichever the last one was, I could fly and follow directly, but there were so many, I had no idea which were linked to each other, and which to the outside.

Apparently, also, I had more pressing matters, as an alert informed me a portal was appearing on my side. I dove away, taking to the air, and fired. The Exhuman rolled forward under the shot and returned fire before vanishing again

"Less fightin' more hustle, Karu!" Deej shouted at me.

"Easy for you to say," I argued back as she materialized behind me. "She's not trying to kill you."

She fired and I fired back, and both of our volleys were eaten by a portal. A matching one appeared directly behind me, and I could only just begin to move before the bullets reappeared in my back.

I fell forward, like I'd been punched full-force, swearing, feeling the searing, painful tightness in my upper back, and my visor flashed vitals warnings. I was hit, bad, but in the periphery--arms and shoulders and sides. My pack took the brunt of the hit, had absorbed the bullets which would have likely killed me. It was inoperable, and I was doing less than stellar, but I had a few minutes of adrenaline and a pocketful of stims to keep me going if I had to.

I hated the damn things, they had side-effects of increased aggression and 'mental imbalance' and I had to wonder sometimes how imbalanced I was with and without them.

Regardless, without flight, I had absolutely no time to lose now. I couldn't catch up with Deej by flying, and had to sprint after him. As my arms moved, I felt something scraping against the bone in my right shoulder uncomfortably. That would start to hurt unbelievably badly as soon as I took notice of it, so I pushed it as far from my mind as possible and simply ran.

Physical injury aside, running was difficult. As I'd noticed earlier, gravity was beginning to fall apart in here, but I realized that was not entirely true. It was more than reality itself was breaking. At times I would find myself in a slightly different place than I had been, or move a direction other than forward, or find that somehow my momentum had arrested itself, or doubled. It dawned on me very quickly that destroying a technopath's crowning achievement while inside a personal dimensional pocket of theirs was a very poor idea.

Deej entered a portal on the opposite end of the room and did not reappear instantly. The exit, apparently. I took note of which of the many blue spheres it was, pointlessly, and kept moving, my arms and legs pumping with strides as clean and long as I could manage given the unreality of reality.

Made, of course, even more difficult with the sporadic, random assaults by the Exhuman. Every two or three portals, she would pop up at random and have at me. I could do little but avoid her attacks and fire back fruitlessly, hoping maybe I could catch her as she had caught me, but she was too fast, too unpredictable.

I hoped the whole place imploded to hell and took her with it. Ideally, with me outside, but if this was to be my end, so be it.

Deej re-emerged, soaking wet from the look of him. "It's collapsed!" he shouted, unnecessarily loud in my comms.

"What is?"

"The tunnel ahead, the glass water chamber. It's flooded, I can't get across."

I swore again. That was our only exit, and we probably only had another minute or two, based on the increasing numbers of spatial irregularities I was running into, before this reality stopped being.

"Deej!" I shouted at him from a walkway near him. He looked and located me. I jumped towards him, feeling gravity lose its grip on me as I flew away from the platform, and plummeted over empty air and the ground dozens of feet below. He darted to the edge of his ledge and extended an arm, catching me and pulling me into his arms and his gravity.

We both knew thanks were unnecessary, and so I walked through the portal to the water realm.

It was as he said. There were pieces of a shattered dome surrounding this portal keeping it dry and intact, a blue orb in the distance, looking like it was a hundred feet away, and everything in between was black water, filled with spatial distortions and hungry creatures of the deep. There was a small air pocket left on this end, but no promise of such a thing on the other side...for all we knew, the next room was flooded as well.

My pack could have carried Deej and myself through the water if he left behind his exosuit, but it was defunct and without his suit we would be all but helpless against the wildlife.

I pulled my head back through into the multi-gravity room and swore again.

"What can we do?" Deej asked.

"Kill an Exhuman, like we came here to do," I muttered.

"This might not be the time for that," he replied.

"What we need," Smith said, and I had forgotten he was there in Deej's arms "is Aesa to start working. She can buy us a few minutes to think at least...I think."

"And how do you propose we do that? She seeks naught but my death."

"She seeks to work. You are just a threat who happens to be in the way. I bet if you put down your guns, maybe she'd realize you aren't interested in stopping her anymore, and would probably stop attacking you."

"You bet, maybe, probably?" I repeated. "This is ludicrous."

As though to punctuate my thought, she appeared across the room and peppered the three of us with gunfire. We took shade in Deej's arms.

"Are you engaged to that Exhuman or not? How can you not know a thing about how she operates?"

"Well, I'm not usually trying to kill her," Smith said pointedly. "And she's not the one I married...look, I hope she just warms up fast."

"Warms up? To us? Doubtful."

"No...from the cold. You'll see. Or maybe you won't, in which case it won't matter."

"I tire of you speaking in circles, little egghead."

"And I tire," Deej said "of ja consistently making the situation worse, Karu. Drop the guns and we'll see what is. Unless ja'd rather die here?"

I glared at him.

A few hours ago, I might have even refused, petulantly. I was here for redemption, here to find myself, to kill an Exhuman as I had done so many times before. I was here to locate the old hunter within me and drag her back into my life. She was purity, she was purpose, and I was craven and sin.

But in those hours I had spent in frozen solitude, with nothing but my thoughts, I had long suffered the company of myself. I had no distractions from my mind, no punishments to inflict when my thoughts grew uncomfortable, could not even move. For hours.

It was a humbling, aggravating experience, and one perilously close to maddening, I thought. As though all of the sins I had thought to escape had come into this sacred domain of purity and death with me.

Which...of course they had. I had been deluding myself to think there was an old me to find. I was myself, and that was all there was to it. No amount of shock nets or confessions or self-scarring would change that. I had hung there, mostly in anger at being trapped, yes, but also in despair at being unable to escape myself, even on a suicide mission.

The thing was...once I accepted that, stopped treating my sins like a part of myself I could simply beat or will away, and was stuck with the cruel realization that implicit in them being my sins was that they were mine...I simply...felt less bad.

It made little sense. By all merits, accepting that one is a flawed, failed, corrupted being should be reason to find despair, not escape it, yet I was just...relieved, in a way. Happy to finally be something, even something flawed without pretension. Happy to stop holding myself above myself.

I was far from satisfied with being a sinful, craven being, yet they often said that the first step towards recovery was acceptance, and as much as I had professed my sins, I had never yet accepted them.

I loved Athan. I was head-over-heels for him. The thought of his touch made my heart sing and my spine trill and my toes curl, and if I ever made it from this bizarre world, I would find him and I would tell him that. I would begin seeing a therapist again, and I would live. Surely after acceptance, there were other steps, and those I would follow. I could not simply beat my own problems out of myself, no matter how hard I struck.

A few hours ago, I might have refused Deej, holding onto my weapons and the idea of vengeance, of righteous retribution, that I was God's chosen weapon against all evils, here and elsewhere. But here and now, I was just a broken girl who was afraid of losing the one piece of herself she'd just found.

The guns clattered against the walkway as I stripped them from the weapon hardpoints on my wrists and threw them to the ground.