It definitely felt like I had a lot less skin than I used to. There wasn't a part of me that didn't feel like it wasn't on fire.

But as AEGIS had told me once a long time ago, you're in real trouble when you can no longer feel your burns. Pain meant you still had functioning nerves, which meant functioning skin, which meant functioning things under your skin.

She also advised me not to get burns at all, as she had repeated for all of the different types of injury she was giving me a primer on. Apparently I hadn't quite taken that part of the lesson to heart.

Because holy fuck it hurt. For a minute, I couldn't see or hear anything, could only smell an acrid burning, and could only feel pain. Every movement I made felt like I was straining against my own too-small skin, and that included breathing.

And then, like I was emerging from underwater, vision swam back into my eyes and I blinked rapidly, wondering if they were jacked up or if the whole world had just gone purple on me.

I looked up and realized the purple ended at a point, and that I was looking through Moon's shadow of myself, holding me as protectively as I was holding her unconscious body. Well, as protectively as she could manage, given that her ghost could pass through me like I didn't exist.

I tried to thank her and stir to my feet, or at least stop laying right on her, but as I stirred, I upset her balance and the ghost fell right through me, landing on herself, and unconscious on its feet. I wondered just what the heck happened when I saw more clearly and felt my stomach drop as panic gripped my heart.

Her shadow was...was burned...horribly. Her entire backside, exposed directly to the blast was just a ring of charred darker purple and eradicated flesh, her bleached spine clearly visible as the skin and muscle and fat had just evaporated off of it. It wasn't that she was holding a protective pose around me, it was that she couldn't move anymore, her body melted and fused into shape when the blast hit.

I felt disbelief and sickness welling in me. She looked so...so...sanitized. The blacks and reds of her burned flesh were all just ghostly purple, and through her shell I could see her real body lying there, so peacefully asleep. No blood, no screaming or pain, just this purple floating grizzly mess of a corpse.

I didn't even know she could get hurt when ghosting. She always felt so weightless and ethereal, completely unable to interact with her host, it never even occurred to me she could be. But I guess she could touch anything else...and therefore anything else could touch her. I felt my heart slamming painfully in indignation as I thought of her last moments of consciousness.

I touched her cheek gently, reaching through the twisted mess of nonexistent flesh, and it disappeared into nothingness. A moment later, she jolted awake and gasped for air like she'd never breathed before. Tears rolled from her eyes as she held herself and writhed slowly, probing herself all over with her fingers and whimpering.

"Moon! Moon are you okay? Kaori, hey, hey." I waved fingers in front of her face. I didn't know what to do. She looked completely unhurt but seeing such pain and panic on her normally implacable face freaked me right the hell out.

She began to wail like a lost child at the supermarket, struggling to get out any meaningful noise between her rapid shuddering breaths. I didn't know what to do. I pulled her up and we leaned on the wall together, but still she cried and wailed and screamed pitifully.

And finally, as I'd done before the surge of burning light hit us, not knowing what else to do, I just held her. I had to bend down a little, and kept my arms wrapped around her torso where I wouldn't touch her skin and send her back into her powers again, but almost as soon as I squeezed her against me, her screaming stopped and she just slumped against me sobbing.

"You're okay Kaori. You're fine," I repeated over and over, timing my words to the deep breaths I was forcing myself to take. My shoulder felt damp from the tears, but after a minute, she held me back and we hugged it out for long minutes in the shadow of the wall.

Her breathing slowly returned to normal, and Moon allowed herself fewer and fewer tears and sniffles as she bottled herself back up. As the immediate crisis passed, I realized we still had a heilioist to deal with out there, and I had no idea where Tem was or how she was doing.

But as much as I wanted to find them, Kaori still needed me, and clung to me for another minute before she released the fistfulls of my uniform she'd grabbed and stood up straight again, gently pushing me away with her posture.

"I thank you," she said with a deep bow. "That was unseemly, and I apologize."

"You saved me...saved both of us. And you basically died doing it. Please don't apologize for that. You're a hero."

"A real hero would do it with a smile, not break down afterwards. We have wasted enough time on irrelevant matters, come, let's go," she said.

Kaori pressed her hand against my cheek as though to line up my face for a kiss and hovered in front of me, her puffy eyes blinking rapidly as she stared into mine. And then she was gone, and it was only Moon, back on my shoulder, whole and hale again while her body and feelings and fears collapsed at my feet.

"What do you think happened?" I asked as I trotted us back towards the site of the blast. I only made it a few steps before I forgot how to jog and instead ambled towards the scene before us.

The surfaces which had been directly exposed to the blast were just...vaporized. It must have been absurdly, impossibly hot, and impossibly brief. The patches of sandy dirt were craggy sheets of glass like yellowed waves of a frozen sea. The asphalt of the road was bleached white and broken like gravel. A tall cactus was half gone, the side facing the blast simply torn through like Moon had been, pitch black, while the other side looked completely untouched.

There was a circle inscribed in the ground at the epicenter, where the earth had just disappeared from the blast, a perfectly smooth semicircle of yellow glass scooped out of the earth. Part of the house still stood, but what had been in the sphere was simply gone, the half-remains free-standing with the rooms open to the air like they were Hollywood sets.

Badly blackened sets, but nonetheless.

And there, right where we'd left her, still facing the now nonexistent door, though doing it from her butt, was Tem, intact and not blackened like the world around her. In fact, I could clearly see on the ground where she'd diverted the energies flying at her to either side of her, creating a wedge of untouched desert protected in the same way Moon had protected me.

"Tem! You're okay!" I said, finding my feet to jog over to her. She looked back at me and gave a wan smile.

"I am...am okay!" she said. "I am very tired."

"Well you earned a break. Thank God you're alright. Did you divert the light around you?" I asked, pointing at the streaks on the ground where sand met glass. "I didn't know you could do that."

"It's just light," she said, looking confused. "Was that no good? I'm s-s-sorry."

"No, you did good, Tem. Thank you for taking care of yourself. I'm sorry I couldn't do it."

She fell on her back and I thought for a second she'd collapsed before I saw the huge smile across her face. "I did good!" she shouted at the sky. She looked up at me, upside down and began to blush, and then immediately went invisible to cover it. "I am very tired, but I did good."

"Yes, good job, Temperance. Though perhaps show some restraint next time," Moon chided from my shoulder.

"She absolutely saved us. Those lights were right on top of us before she blew them up," I said.

"And I told her good job for it. Are you confused what a compliment is?"

I sighed and turned back to Tem. I definitely preferred Moon be healthy and intact...and not crying...but it frustrated me how quickly she could put herself away and go right back to being kind of a bitch. "You just take a rest here for now while I see how our friend managed," I told Tem and headed for the blast site.

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It was a little easier said than done. The glass was extremely slippery and uneven, and the crests of the waves I discovered could slice through even the tough polymer soles of my boots like they were made of paper, so I had to step carefully to avoid them. If I slipped and fell down, I'd be sliced a hundred ways before I could even finish landing.

And on top of that, Moon had definitely saved me from the blast, but just the ambient heat had definitely given me first-degree burns all over, at least, and moving was painful as fuck. I wished I had some of Karu's combat stims; low-danger, high-pain injuries like this were basically what they were designed to counteract.

But I made it. Walked right up to the edge of the bowl shaped from the blast and peered down into it. And what I saw...took me a minute to realize I was even looking at something, much less figure out what it was.

I'd just expected to see a huge concave mirror, yellow-green from the silica, but instead, right at the bottom was a shifting structure, white as a hole in the world, and impossible to see except in its edges, which wobbled and shifted constantly. It looked like one of those crazy geometric representations of space-time or something, something with straight lines and constantly shifting, but impossible to make out with the complete lack of contrast.

My brain struggled to contexualize it but the longer I stared the more I didn't understand. Ideas came to the tip of my mind but never further, lost in the confusing, oscillating white.

That is until one concrete idea manifested that was inarguable.

Move.

I slid backwards from the edge as golden-white tendrils of light snapped at me from the impossible shape like a whip. Like a dozen-headed whip with snakes made of light. Whatever the fuck I was looking at down there, it was our Exhuman, and it was looking back at me long enough to decide to finish this fight.

I struggled to get my feet under me as they slid on the lumpy glass and get some distance from the growing tendrils, but I only made it a few steps before they were bearing down on me directly. I was about resigned to just launching myself over the razor glass and hoping the damage it did to me was less than the lights, when one of them tore silent through the air towards me, only for ghostly purple blades to materialize and cut the light into a shower of sparks.

I was captivated watching the lightshow as another couple blows fell and again Moon parried them away with my powers. I realized that where the whips struck the blades, both of them erupted. The sparks were from the swords exploding. The light just dissipated in a flash which left black spots in my eyes.

"Do you plan to help? Or do you prefer to watch us both slowly die?" Moon asked, and I remembered myself and reinforced her handful of swords with my own. I wouldn't exactly call it an effort to make more swords, any more than going up a stair was, but when doing it a hundred times, I knew the weird non-physical fatigue which Exhuman powers laid across one's body.

But still, the impact of the blades and tendrils was so damn bright and flashy, my eyes had a hard time not jumping to them every time our powers collided. Now that Moon and I were slowly pushing the tendrils back, I brought us back to the edge of the bowl again and hovered there, not sure if I should take the plunge and slide down to where I wouldn't be able to escape. But out here, I couldn't reach the middle with my powers.

I settled in indecision, not pressing forward stupidly and holding fast, telling myself I was 'waiting for an opening', when in truth, I was just constantly being distracted by shining flashes around my head. Our powers seemed similar enough that they dissipated each other's cohesion and let the energies in them run amok. I guessed something similar happened with Tem's laser...except she tended to put so much unnecessary energy into her attacks it pretty much annihilated everything when it ruptured.

Experimentally, I threw a single large bulb at the wavering geometric thing and it struck and dissipated, discharging into the ground like it had hit something solid. I found time between fending off more tendril swipes to fire one into one of those, and it exploded the same way. I wasn't sure what I was learning here, but it didn't look like I could pick off the target at range.

Honestly, while Moon and I were just almost roasted alive and had the physical and mental scars to prove it, it felt almost peaceful right now. We were holding off the lights without too much effort, and they seemed stuck at the bottom of the smooth glass bowl Tem had helped them make. Nobody was really injured but me, and I hardly counted, and I'd won against the impulse to charge in.

My thoughts drifted for a moment as to how the others might be proud of me for not being an idiot for once. It felt like AEGIS and Karu were always trying to get me to think before I acted, and doubly so for Cosette.

Of course Karu and I guess AEGIS now would want me to put down this Exhuman now that I was in relative control of the engagement. That's not what I wanted to do though, I was never and would never be an icer, and a startlingly simple solution. As soon as I remembered it wasn't a geometric thing down there but an Exhuman behind it all, well…

"Hey!" I shouted into the crater. A tendril snapped towards me and it and a purple sword detonated into sparks and light. "Hey! Stop attacking me, I want to talk!"

"XPCA Lies!" a young woman's voice yelled back at me, as suddenly the number of attacks bearing down on us seemed to double.

"Perhaps do not antagonize them," Moon grunted, as both of us suddenly had our hands full in repelling the onslaught.

"I wasn't antagonizing them, I was trying to talk to them, damn it." I felt hot sparks as one attack slipped through Moon's defenses and I caught it only in time. "Hey, I'm serious, stop attacking down there! I just want to talk!"

"Talk as much as you want to, pig! You can't fool me again."

"I've never even met you before. Just calm down, Jesus."

"Oh I'll give you calm, you XPCA pube."

"Pube?" I asked Moon, but then had to move when an entwined mass of her attacks barreled down on us, crashing through our aligned defenses and only diminishing instead of disintegrating entirely. Lights strobed and sparks flew everywhere as it came smashing next to me, striking the glass and erupting in a fountain of lights scattering from the glass.

"Hold still and let me cream you!" the girl screamed at us.

"Why the fuck would I ever do that?" I yelled back. I peppered the whole area around her with bulbs, not because they did anything, but because I was getting annoyed with how one-sided the attacks were going at the moment.

"Because I'd enjoy it, duh."

"Life is full of disappointment. Now will you stop attacking me so we can talk without the freaking fireworks or what?"

"Sorry, you'll just have to be disappointed too."

"Look you idiot," I said, perhaps not as mediative as I'd felt before being called a pube. "You're stuck down there, and if we just wanted to kill you, I'd just call down some missiles down there."

"I'd like to see you try! I'll take your damn missiles and cut them out of the sky. I'll jam them up your butt until your eyeballs explode. XPCA lackey! Exhuman traitor!"

She punctuated her insults with swipes at us with a handful of tendrils from either side which took all of our depleting stock of swords to block. "Jesus Christ, calm down. My point is, I obviously don't want you dead, so fucking stop--" I cut another attempt on my life out of the air "--attacking us!"

"I'll stop when I'm dead!"

"Who the fuck pissed in your breakfast that using your words is so damn impossible?"

"The XPCA! Open your friggin' ears, moron!"

"Moron? I'm not the one stuck in a pit attacking the only one who can get them out, dumbass."

"Nitwit!"

"Twatclown!'

"Stupidhead!"

"Nerdburger!"

"Turdeater!"

"Assrash!"

"Can I go back to my body now?" Moon asked.

"I was winning," I informed her.

"Were not! Douchesucker!" she called up.

"I pronounce you both losers," Moon said with a heavy sigh.

But the truth is, I did feel like I was winning. Not at insulting the girl inside the white fortress, but at getting her to talk to me. As each of us yelled our frustrations out at the other, the rate of her attacks was slowing. Maybe she was just getting slow, maybe she was getting distracted. But on a very primal level with no basis on evidence, I thought I was getting through to her.

After all, this was pretty much exactly how I'd wormed my way into the hearts of AEGIS, Saga, and Karu. We met. We fought. They tried to kill me and I wouldn't have any of it. And now they loved me. Not that I needed anyone else to join that particular club, but anything was better than this.

My suspicions were all but confirmed when I saw a hint of color in the unseeable white below and realized I was looking at a pair of eyes. The same eyes I'd seen for an instant through the crack in the now-nonexistent door of the building which used to stand here. Within the fortress she'd made of unknowable white, she'd cracked open a tiny hole to look at me and see who it was she was trying to kill.

I nodded at her and gave a small wave.

"Hey. I'm Athan. Can we talk?"

"No. Shut up. I hate you," she said, but didn't close her tiny slit.

"Come on. I might be wearing XPCA black, but under that, I'm just a guy. Just an Exhuman, like you."

"You're a sellout and a liar and I still hate you."

"I don't think we're so different. I hated the XPCA too for the longest time, and then I realized...if I was gonna change the world, I had to do it from within. If you think we're all liars, then do something about it. Join the P-Force like I did. Then you'll know for sure there's one XPCA who isn't a liar, right?"

She looked at me funny as the attacks stopped, our swords and her tendrils hanging in the air.

"Awesome," I said, and her attacks flinched towards us as I spoke, but she didn't resume. "Welp, if you don't mind, I'm gonna do something really stupid."

"Wait no, stop you moron--!" she shouted at me as I stepped forward and slid down the smooth glass embankment right towards her.