At the end of December 1916, Armstrong called Shrike to discuss with her. This time Rodney was not with her and instead waited outside the room in which the two met. The room was next to ventilation machinery that took fresh outside air in and warmed it. The machines hummed behind the room's walls.
As per her style, Armstrong got right to the point. "Do you know of an abandoned farm somewhat close to the place where you go when Envy has its vacation?"
Shrike looked a little confused since he could not guess why Armstrong was asking something like that. "Um, no, sir." Armstrong stared at him. "Uh... Should we look for one, sir? We can, if you'd like."
"There's no need, it's already been found. Have you created a homunculus, another creature like Envy?"
Now Shrike's jaw dropped and he stared at Armstrong, becoming a little pale. "What? N-no, sir."
"Is it possible for you to do that?"
"Wh– – I don't know how, sir. I-I've never seen anything like that in the books..."
"Envy presumably knows something of the subject. Either way, Major General Mustang claims to have found a previously unknown homunculus in an abandoned farm near your vacation spot. If you did not create it, do you know of anyone who could have?"
"..." Shrike seemed somewhat frightened. He did not yet make full sense of the situation. "I don't... what?"
Armstrong gave a small sigh of frustration. "Homunculi are artificial humans created through alchemy. Envy is a homunculus. Mustang found another homunculus near the vacation spot. Envy may know something essential to aid in creating another homunculus. Is there anyone else that you know of who could perform such a feat? Or anyone who could perform alchemy at all?"
Shrike stood with his mouth open and could feel all blood draining from his face. The blood packed up in his brain as his mind tried to wrap itself around the situation. He would have to say that he knew that Envy could perform alchemy, but it had asked him not to disclose that fact, and thus his thoughts were locked in conflict. How could he lie to Armstrong? He had previously imagined himself capable of it, even if only barely, but now that the situation pressed on him, he found he was unable to lie.
Of course, Shrike also did not want to let Envy down, so he just stood silently while the conflicts were flaring up furiously.
"Okay, that expression tells me that you DO know of someone who could do it. Who is it?" asked Armstrong.
Shrike's voice trembled and he struggled to get anything out of his mouth. "I... I promised I wouldn't say, sir."
Now Armstrong looked marginally surprised. "You promised? Really? Well, this is a matter of Briggs security, military security and perhaps the security of the whole bloody world, so you better tell me before it's too late."
Shrike thought whether it was appropriate for her to exaggerate like that, since it sounded like an excessive hyperbole to him. Still, it was incredibly hard to not take her seriously. "...T-the world?"
"Yes, Shrike! I'm not playing around with you."
"But how c– –"
"You don't need to concern yourself with that now. Who is it?"
Shrike was still silent for a long moment before he managed to say it. "E-E-uh, Envy, sir."
"WHAT?!"
Shrike felt as if his heart had just tried to flee right through his spine. He took a step back from Armstrong.
"Envy created another homunculus?!" she shouted.
Shrike just stared wide-eyedly at her and could not get a word out of his mouth – not that he would have had anything to say at that precise moment. He had never seen Armstrong as displeased as she was right now.
"It shouldn't be even able to perform alchemy!" Since Shrike did not speak, she started issuing commands. "Shrike, I need you to make this half of the room and everything in it extremely cold. Can you get inside the walls and draw whatever transmutation circles you need to, so that they are not visible from this room?"
Shrike was confused by the sudden change in topic but welcomed it heartily since he had no idea what he could reply to Armstrong about Envy. Concentrating on something else would mitigate his anxiety. "Y-yes, sir."
"How many transmutation circles do you need?"
"Just one, sir. Preferably in the ceiling."
"Good. Can you activate the circle at a distance?"
"Like they described in that article about alkahestry? No, that's impossible, sir."
"How far away can you position yourself and still activate the circle so that it works?"
"Hm... If I can make a more complex route with more transmutation circles, I can transfer the energy through that route and then I can activate the circle system at any point on that route."
"Then create a suitable route from this room to the next room on the east side."
"Will I direct the heat there, sir?"
"How hot would it get?"
"Er, it doesn't quite work that way, sir. I can heat one particular spot so much that it melts or even vaporises, but vaporising metal isn't a good idea. I can also heat the whole room and its walls but I wouldn't want to be in the place where the heat goes if I have to freeze an entire room."
"Can you direct the heat to the outer wall of the Fort then? It's right beyond the corridor over there. It should be big enough to divide the energy more evenly."
"Yes, sir, but I need a some sort of conductive path to the wall."
"There is none as far as I know, but you can create one. Make sure it breaks nothing and that you can remove it later."
"Yes, sir. And this half of the room should be sealed, then it's much easier to concentrate on this place only."
"That can be done, there is an emergency bulkhead over here. Is that it? How soon can you have all that done?"
"I guess in half an hour, sir."
"Do it."
"Yes, sir." Shrike drew out a ladder that was attached to the wall, climbed to the ceiling and opened the hatch that was there. Armstrong assigned two soldiers to assist and watch him.
Half an hour later Shrike was finished. Armstrong then called Envy to discuss with her and started repeating the interrogation she had just conducted to Shrike.
"Mustang's people say that they found a previously unknown homunculus from an abandoned farm relatively close to the place where you go on your vacations. Is this true?"
When Armstrong had said the word "homunculus", Envy's expression had twitched from the shock and Envy could not say whether it had been a revealing or surprised twitch. Numerous questions flooded its brain, but its self-preservation came on top for now and it tried to deny its knowledge.
"What? There's another homunculus?!" it exclaimed, trying its best to not express fear or worry of having been exposed, but enthusiasm for having learned of the existence of another homunculus.
Armstrong stared sternly at it. "So you don't know anything about this new homunculus?"
"No! Where is it? What's it like?" it demanded.
"And you don't know of an abandoned farm near the place of your vacations?"
"No! Why are you asking that? I don't care about any farms! Do you know where that homunculus came from?"
"Why are you so sure this homunculus even exists?"
"...Were you lying to me about it?" Envy stared somewhat offensively at Armstrong and sounded disappointed.
"I said that Mustang said that he found something." She frowned. "If you knew enough about alchemy, would it be possible for you to create a homunculus on your own?"
"What?" Envy pretended to be baffled at her direct questions. It left it at that and waited for Armstrong to speak.
"Shrike told me you can perform alchemy."
"WHAT? And you believed him?" it asked, looking at her like she was being nonsensical.
Armstrong definitely believed Shrike over Envy and now that she had caught Envy trying to lie, even if it did so in a round-about way, she had no reason to think that Envy was speaking the truth about not knowing anything about the newly-found homunculus. Still, she was very displeased about how convincing Envy's lies had sounded. "It's such a shame!" she shouted very disappointedly. At the same time as she said that, she grabbed her sheathed sword and used it to hit a panel in the wall. The panel slammed open and a jet of extremely cold air engulfed Envy. Almost immediately afterwards, another panel opened in the opposite wall and a directed stream of rapidly evaporating liquid came at it. A third panel in the ceiling opened to blow more cold air.
Envy screamed as it felt its body began to freeze and then crack and break as it moved and started to shapeshift defensively. Its clothing froze, cracked, broke and fell off. "You filthy honourless bastard!"
"You betrayed my trust!" said Armstrong as she leaped at the wall and slammed a switch with her hand, causing the heavy sliding bulkhead doors that would separate the halves of the room to start closing. She stared at Envy, not at all coolly since the freezing trick did not seem to be working on it as well as it had worked on Sloth, even despite the amount of liquid and cold air.
Since the streams of liquid and air came approximately from Armstrong's direction, Envy would risk its appendages if it tried to reach for her. Its next automatic response was to shapeshift towards its large true form, but even at this stressing moment it managed to remember that shapeshifting uncontrollably in a too small space next to dangerous machines was not a good idea. It grew only to fill the room as its regenerative powers fixed its broken body parts. For once there was some use in its large form since it kept the streams of cold air and liquid separate and thus the freezing effect was lessened.
Envy turned its head toward Armstrong and just barely saw her trying to hide behind the heavy sliding doors. It stretched its arm at her quickly but hesitated at grabbing her since its arm would get squished by the doors and it would lose the appendage. Armstrong had precious little space to dodge into, however, so even though Envy hesitated, it managed to slash rather deep into her thigh until it decided that it would rather save the rest of its arm because Armstrong had somehow managed to draw her sword and cut off three of Envy's large clawed fingers. At least the pain from the wound stunned her enough so that she did not manage to cut off the rest of Envy's arm right then. Only after Envy had started withdrawing its arm, it realised that it would have had time to kill her, and some lost arm would be a small enough price to pay for her death. Now it certainly would not have a chance of killing her, so it instead spewed an ultimatum at her. "I won't kill you if you let me get out of here!" it shouted at her at the last moment before the large sliding doors closed, just barely seeing her crawl toward the smaller door at the other end of the room.
Envy turned around and pressed its now rather large body against the streams of liquid and air to keep them from affecting anything more than a small part of its body. It had to escape. It knew that it was rather near to the outer wall of Fort Briggs, and in front of it there should only be a small corridor before the outer wall. It was a fortified wall and a fortified corridor, but Envy thought that it would be able to force its way through.
At that moment, Envy felt itself and the room start to get extremely cold, even without the interaction of the liquid and cold air. It screamed in agony as its body froze and crystallised. It kept on shapeshifting into anything, just to keep its body in some sort of motion. Of course, doing that shattered its frozen parts thoroughly.
Envy grew in size as it shapeshifted and managed to break and tear the walls next to it just enough to stop the annoying streams of air and liquid, and to its great relief, even the coldness that had been caused by Shrike's transmutation lessened considerably because Envy bent the ceiling and thus modified the transmutation circle that was hidden within it. Envy then tried to ram right through the back wall of the room. That turned out to be much harder than it had anticipated, but it managed to make the wall give in after a few attempts and some broken skin and bones and body parts that had shattered due to the cold. The instant it stuffed its body out of the room and into the corridor, it was shot.
From a tank.
With an explosive missile.
Since Envy was approximately the size of the corridor, there was no way it could evade and no way for the tank to miss. The force of the explosion tore its body apart and reduced it to literally nothing but its Philosopher's Stone. With the smoke and the few non-exploded remains of its body disintegrating all around the explosion site, the tank drivers apparently did not see what had happened because they fired another explosive right down the corridor.
The Philosopher's Stone that was Envy bounced back into the room where the freezing attempt had occurred. It started regenerating right away but could not scream because it had no organs for that yet. As soon as it was even vaguely aware of what kind of body parts it had, it made its best to concentrate, stop regenerating and instead just reform its body. It succeeded, but by then it was promptly shot from a small slit in the large closed sliding door – and of course this shot had to be explosive too. It blew away Envy's right arm and half of its upper torso.
At least the heat draining had stopped.
Envy wanted a way out, right away. The rapidly evaporating liquid still dribbled from the wall where Envy had smashed and torn it, so it dived straight into the hole and past the pipe that was spewing the liquid. It tore its body and almost lost its feet on the sharp and broken edges of the tear but managed to get in so that it was relatively safe, or at least out of anyone's sight. Grimacing in terrible pain, it reformed its body without fully regenerating again, shapeshifted immediately into a small and wiry humanoid-seeming animal and started off inside the wall and along the pipes. It passed a couple of surprised soldiers who were apparently operating the liquid pipe, but managed to escape them by fleeing deeper into the insides of the wall.
Envy ran for a long time, the first few moments nearly blinded by the awful pain it had just endured. At least its powers still worked and the pain stopped soon. It felt extremely off because of its very reduced mass and it had trouble controlling its body, also because of the odd form it had taken. Despite all the inconveniences, the small and light form was what it thought was best for moving inside the walls.
Envy soon started hearing instructions on the Fort's announcement system. "Code 5 and 14. There is a hostile enemy inside the Fort. The enemy is a shapeshifter and can therefore take the form of anything or anyone. All personnel are ordered to stay and move in groups of two or more at all times, no exceptions. Two minutes from now, everyone who is alone will be shot first and interrogated later. The enemy is most likely inside the walls of section E1. Second Lieutenant Schofield and team, report to Major Rodney in entrance E1-north-K1."
Even though it was still fleeing and should have been thinking about how to solve its situation, Envy could not help but think what had happened to its homunculus child. Even if Armstrong had seemed like she had been suspicious of Mustang's claims, Envy assumed that it was true that Mustang had found the child. But what had he done to it? Envy had instructed the child to stay away from humans and not kill them unless its own existence was in danger. Since the information about the child had made it to Armstrong, the child had either been captured or killed. Perhaps it was also possible that it had fled. Envy did not think that Mustang's people would have bothered to capture it, but after a while it remembered that humans had the tendency to be extremely wishy-washy. Even Mustang could be like that. Therefore, it had hope.
After a while, Envy noticed that the soldiers started opening parts of the wall. It wondered what was going on before it remembered that Briggs's wall sections were separate from each other. Envy could not get to every place in the Fort just by moving inside the walls. It would have to come out of the wall or go into the right pipe if it wanted to get out of the current section.
Now Envy understood why the announcement had told the soldiers to be in groups. Envy was a single creature, so even if it tried to shapeshift into a soldier, the others would harm it first, then discover it was the shapeshifter and then harm it more. It cursed whoever had come up with such a stupidly simple way of making its ability to masquerade as a soldier useless.
Envy considered going into the ventilation shafts. Its biggest problem would be navigating in the piping. Inside the wall, there were just enough cracks to let a barely sufficient amount of light in, and now that the soldiers were opening the wall panels, even more light came in. In the piping, there would be no light at all, and even enhanced vision would not work without any light. In addition, even if Envy could see inside the pipes, there was no way for it to know where it was exactly. Even Shrike could not remember the pipes' routes by heart, and Envy much less so since it was not really interested in ventilation like Shrike was. It also had no idea where each pipe went. The pipe route maps were really hard to get to see at all because they were a considerable security risk.
Its next idea was even worse. It decided right away that it would not seek out a toilet and flush itself into the plumbing. That would be disgusting and it had no idea what waited it at the end of the plumbing.
Envy also discarded its idea of just attacking the soldiers and killing them until it had carved a way out through their corpses. It could feel that its Philosopher's Stone did not have all that much energy and it had no idea how many times it could die before running out. It was still many, but if the soldiers were shooting at it with tanks and explosive bullets, even many would probably not be enough.
It sat down inside the wall and pondered its options. After a while, it noticed that the soldiers were taking more of the walls down. It needed to do something quickly. Finally, Envy got a usable idea: while it was hard to know where a ventilation pipe exited, it was obvious where it came from. At the beginning of each pipe was a ventilation machine, and Envy knew where the main machine for this section was. It was somewhat stunned that its work on things related to ventilation had proved to be useful.
Envy opened the valves of one section of a ventilation pipe and slid its body inside the pipe. It could not close the valves, but it manoeuvred the pipe back in place so that people would have to at least try to open the valves to find out that the pipe had been opened but not closed – as long as the pipe did not dislocate by itself. The inside of the pipe was dark, but there were no notable obstructions in it and the only thing Envy had to do was follow where the air was coming from. It changed into a snake and slithered away, breaking all the filters it came across. At least moving as a snake was similar regardless of how little it now weighed.
It did not take long for the pipe to merge into a larger ventilation shaft. After that, Envy soon came to the large ventilation machine. Some faint light emanated from the machine and Envy could see again. The air flow was not so powerful that it would have particularly hindered Envy. Envy could see the fan blades rotating at a high speed and it wondered how it would get out. It could of course grow again and burst out of the pipe, but that would create a lot of noise and it did not want to be noticed if it could avoid that.
After observing the fan blades for a moment, it recalled that the filter in front of the fan was also replaceable; it could break the filter and then slide a part of itself into the ventilation machine and outside of it into the room to see whether the coast was clear. It transformed so that it had a sharp blade for a hand and broke the filter, cutting a piece out of it. Having done that, it started extending a finger-like appendage with an eye on its end into the machine. It soon found a grate through which it saw into the room.
The room was not unfamiliar to Envy since it had been there before. The ventilation machine and three others like it were in a hall right next to each other. It saw only two people in the room: Shrike's acquaintance Mil and another member of the ventilation team whose name it did not remember. They would be easy to take down.
Envy withdrew its appendage and decided to cut through the pipe on the side of the wall so that the two men could not see it. The machines made so much noise that they would drown out the sound of the cutting if Envy was careful. It transformed an appendage into a blade again and started sawing. Since it could not get much leverage in the small shaft and in its small form, it took a while until it managed to cut a large enough hole to squeeze through.
Envy was still the wrong size and it was not entirely sure if it could shapeshift quickly enough to take the men by surprise. The form was easy to change, but it also needed more mass, and changing that was not quick. It settled for increasing its mass as much as it could without growing too large for its hiding place.
Envy jumped at Mil and his partner and succeeded in taking the two men by surprise. Mil managed to hit Envy with his fist, but Envy was not damaged by it. Envy, then again, smashed their faces right in. Then it realised that it could have knocked out just one of them, shapeshifted into the fallen one and forced the other one to walk with it so that the soldiers would not shoot it because it was alone.
Then Envy thought that they probably would not have cooperated even if it would have threatened to kill them. Briggs soldiers and their loyalty! Envy could not deny that while it had been one of them, it had sort of liked the trust they had in it, even if it did not exactly return that. Now it was them against it and it hated that.
Envy made a few angry faces and pondered what to do next. Since this ventilation centre was a circulator for clean indoor air, it was not right next to the outer wall, but it was somewhat close. Envy tried to recall the route to the closest loading area and thought that it remembered the way well enough.
Then it only had to get there.
Envy again considered just running through the corridors and taking any damage the soldiers threw at it, but the route was still long and the thought of getting blown up was repulsive. It tried to come up with alternative ideas, and after looking at the soldiers' bodies, it thought of one. It could not sneak out alone, but it could hide one of them and pretend to be trashed out along with the other one. That ought to make the other soldiers think it was who it presented as.
Since it knew Mil's name and how he sounded and had even talked to him before at some point, it hid his body in a closet and grabbed the other one. Having done that, it checked that the door to the room was closed but not locked or fortified. Then it transformed one of its arms much larger, ready to thrash two of the ventilation machines.
Envy crushed the machines, transformed its arm back and jumped right through the door, holding the body of Mil's friend.
"Aaah!" it shouted in act as it crashed in to the wall beyond the door. It glanced into the direction where it was supposed to go and saw a trio of soldiers taking aim at them. They were startled at the sound of breaking machinery. "Aagh! It's in there!" it shouted and started stumbling upright and pulling the other soldier's body with it. By now it knew that Briggs soldiers tried to save each other unless it was utterly hopeless. It made its way toward the trio who came at it and were now pointing their weapons past it. Two other soldiers came around the corner, ready with their weapons. One of them shouted down the corridor that they had found the enemy, and Envy heard some acknowledgements.
"What happened to him?" asked the other of the two soldiers.
"It... something broke the ventilation machines and him hit and made us crash through the door. It hit him in the... he's... is he..." Envy mumbled like a stupid human and checked that the soldier it was holding had a bleeding but not serious would on his head and he was unconscious. "I should take him to the medical room. Would... can you come with me?" it asked from the two other soldiers.
At that moment, even more soldiers came in, among them First Lieutenant Massena and Shrike. Shrike looked incredibly serious.
"I'll go," said one of the two soldiers. He handed his gun to Envy and picked up the unconscious soldier. He and Envy started heading down the corridor and passed the other soldiers, Shrike among them. Envy could not help giving Shrike a mean glare.
Shrike continued on his way, but stopped after a moment as Massena started issuing commands to the soldiers. He frowned deeply and looked after Envy and the other soldier as they disappeared behind a corner. He looked back at Massena and then at the empty corner.
"Uh... sir..."
"What, Shrike?"
"I um... I think that Mil... the soldier who just left... that he was Envy?"
"What?"
"I think Mil was Envy."
"What do you mean?
"Um..." Shrike had no idea why Massena was not getting what he was saying. "I'm sorry, sir... Ah, wait! I uh, I forgot... Um, the shapeshifter we're looking for is Envy. Envy is the shapeshifter."
"WHAT?"
"Uh... uh... I mean... I think Mil was the shapeshifter."
"And Mil was...?"
"The soldier who just left, sir."
"..." Massena was speechless. "You! Is the room empty? Check it!" she shouted at the trio of soldiers.
They advanced carefully and took a quick look into the room and then a longer one. "Seems so!" shouted one of them.
"Check it thoroughly!" Massena turned at her troupe. "Shrike, you four, with me. The rest, help them." Having said that, she started running after Envy, the soldiers following her. "Shrike, explain this to me better now! What are we doing?" she barked, obviously frustrated.
"S-sorry – –"
"Stop apologising and answer me!"
The words caught in Shrike's throat. "U-uh... The soldier, Mil... the one with long hair... was the shapeshifter."
"How do you know that?"
"...I-I know Mil, and I thought he acted oddly."
"Okay. Are you sure about that?"
"Fairly..."
"I didn't want to hear that. Okay, when you see him, don't shoot to kill."
Shrike's stomach stung and he felt hopeless.
Envy came to a fork in the corridor where they would have to go on a different route if they were going to go to the medical room. Luckily the soldier who was carrying the unconscious one was of lower rank than Mil, so Envy just issued commands.
"Where are you going? Follow me!"
"But... sir, the lift is that way."
"No it isn't. Are you new here? Come on." Envy smirked widely as the soldier obeyed it and followed. They ran past two small groups of soldiers. They both asked where they were going, and the first group accepted their destination without argument, but the second one, which was close to the loading area, noticed that something was off.
"The lift is that way!" said the highest ranking officer, a sergeant, to Envy.
"No, it isn't, sir. It's right behind here."
"I tried to tell that t– –" started the private who was carrying Mil's partner's body.
"That way is the loading area."
"No... Really? It is? Oh... darn it," mumbled Envy. "I... I really thought it was here. I must have a concussion. I-I feel dizzy." Envy started staggering toward the door to the observation room of the loading area.
"Hm." The sergeant frowned. He looked at one of his soldiers. "Okay, go with the private to take the injured one to the medical room." He turned to another soldier. "You, go check whether he's okay and try to get him into the medical room as well."
"Yes, sir." The second private went after Envy. "Sir, are you okay?"
"I... I think I just need to sit down for a moment." It opened the door to the loading area observation room and went in, the private following it.
There were two soldiers in the observation room. They looked inquiringly at Envy and the private when they came in.
"What are you doing here?" asked one of them.
"I'm dizzy, I think I have a concussion," said Envy and closed the door.
"You should head to the medical room."
"Yeah... Yeah, I guess, but I don't think I should walk right now, so unless you'd like to carry me, I think I'll just sit here for a moment."
"Okay. Well, I can phone for someone to bring a stretcher, they can take you."
Envy definitely did not want the soldier to phone anyone. At least the previous group seemed like it was not following Envy past putting the one private to look after it. Therefore, Envy attacked both the soldier who was about to make the call and the private standing by the door and knocked them down forcefully. Both of them were either knocked unconscious with the one blow or killed straight, and Envy turned to the third person who was sitting at the control panel and now looked very confusedly at Envy. While he was taken by surprise, he managed to pull out his pistol and shoot at Envy. He hit it in the shoulder, and then Envy promptly smacked him senseless as well.
Envy thought that the gunshot must have been heard outside as well, so it shapeshifted its body larger to block the door that it hoped was fortified in case the soldiers tried to shoot through it. It then went to look at the control panel and quickly found the emergency door opening mechanism. It knew the doors would open quickly, so it instead started securing a clear way to the exit. It would somehow need to go through the glass window of the observation room, and of course the glass was fortified. Still, Envy had no choice but to try, so it grabbed the portable machine gun that the first soldier in the observation room had had and started shooting at the window. The bullets made cracks and dents, but the glass did not break and the bullets did not go through. Envy made a rough circle with its firing before the ammo ran out. After that, it grabbed a heavy semi-automatic rifle sitting in the corner of the observation room and shot at the glass again. The rifle managed to actually make a hole in the now weakened glass, but the window did not shatter. Envy fired five more rounds until the rifle was out of ammo as well.
The window still was not broken.
Envy could see soldiers in the loading area. They had noticed its doings a while ago and taken firing positions and one was calling for backup. Furious, Envy grabbed a chair and threw it at the window. The chair broke into splinters. After two more seconds of thinking, Envy pushed the fallen soldiers out of the way and picked up a piece of control machinery, tearing it right out of its place. It weighed quite a lot and Envy was not in an ideal shape, position or weight to handle it. Despite the troubles Envy had with handling the machine, it managed to hurl the machine at the window, and this time the window cracked noticeably, though it still did not break.
Envy had had it with the window. It slammed the emergency door opening button and quickly shapeshifted into a monstrous amalgam of a shark-like creature with a very sharp and hard head and a rabbit and charged right at the window. It managed to get enough momentum behind its leap so that the window finally broke. Of course, it was immediately shot at by the soldiers in the loading area. Luckily for it, most of the shots missed as it shapeshifted back into human form as it fell. When it landed, it dropped partially on a truck's roof, breaking some of the rack structures, and then slid down the truck's side so that it was flanked by two trucks. It heard the door still opening and since it was so close to its goal now, it decided to just rush through.
Envy darted toward the doors. It was immediately shot again, but it moved quickly and shapeshifted and regenerated erratically, which also helped it avoid some shots. The doors started closing again when Envy was very close to it, but by then it was too late. Envy managed to get outside into the snow. Once there, it noticed that the weather was very cold – the temperature in the mountains was consistently below -40°C in winter if the sun was not shining. In addition, there seemed to be at least a small snowstorm going on. It immediately shapeshifted into a furry horse and ran off as fast as it could.
Just then Envy heard a weapon launching something, and the sound was very worrisome. It turned its head to see that something relatively big was coming right at it at high speed. It could alter its movement a little and tried to jump out of the way, but it was still caught in the large explosion from the bazooka's missile.
The force of the explosion obliterated its body.
