The false can never grow into truth by growing in power.

-Rabindranath Tagore

The people of Sunnydale weren't entirely blind. They knew that something was going on in their town. But perhaps they were too scared to face it, preferring instead to bury their heads so deeply in the sand that they couldn't hear the screams. Or maybe they had been bought off, paid to look in the other direction. Or, then again, maybe they did know, but found it simply too unbelievable to accept, and so decided instead that they would accept whatever vaguely plausible explanation the media fed them.

In any case, now they knew for sure. They had been told, and they had seen. They had seen the monstrous, inhuman Bringers who brought with them an air of pestilence, of death and decay. And they had seen them die. They knew that the supernatural world was out there, but they also knew that it could be fought. That these things, these creatures, they weren't immortal. If you were strong, you could fight back.

And the demons knew they knew. For more than a century, this had been their town. They had been free to kill and feed with impunity – that is, until the Slayer had arrived, and even then she couldn't catch them all. But now there were many, many more people than just her, and all of them wanted their kind destroyed.

But the humans weren't stupid. They knew that the demons wouldn't be taking this kind of thing lying down. They wouldn't just roll over and let themselves be driven extinct. They would strike now, while they were still strong and the humans weren't.

So, many shops closed early. The Bronze, which was accustomed to finding the occasional dead body drained of blood in the alleyway outside, didn't open for business. Neither did the shadier establishment The Fish Tank, which not only had semi-regular vampire feedings but was also the subject of police raids.

But then, there were the shops that had never been raided. The shops in the coveted position of the Mall, for example. The shops that paid people like Wells to make sure that they didn't get attacked, to make sure they were protected and that their rivals weren't. The kind of shops which remained as untroubled as any shops could be in a town like Sunnydale.

These kind of shops didn't shut early. They still believed in the system that had shielded them for decades. They didn't believe that it could be upended in a matter of days, all because a little blonde decided to make a few speeches. And their customers, people coming out of school or back from work, people who had never once been accosted by something unexplainable while they were there, they didn't go home and lock the doors.

They didn't close early. They didn't go home.

And the sun was setting.

Suddenly, demons were everywhere. It seemed like one second the Mall was a bustling building filled with content shoppers, and the next there were monsters bursting through windows, through doors, even through the floors. There were creatures walking on the walls in much the same way that a human might walk on the ground. There were demons which were generally content to keep to themselves, even some which weren't even interested in humans at all but felt as though they were driven to violence in order to defend themselves.

And people ran, and screamed, and died.

And they fought.

They attacked the demons with whatever was handy. Handbags, potted plants, plates. They were surrounded by shops full of stuff, and they used all of it.

And then there were the police, with their guns that they rarely used and their training that they had half-forgotten, as it had been subsumed by the comfortable lethargy of knowing that no matter what they did they weren't going to make a difference, so they might as well do nothing and be paid handsomely for it. They fought too, as best they could, even though their bullets weren't nearly as effective as they would have liked.

And then, suddenly, there was Buffy. She moved through the chaos as though it was a dance which only she knew the steps to, and with every movement a demon died. They fell before her like wheat before a scythe. She was the Slayer.

But there were a lot of demons, more than she had ever seen in one place, more even than the demon gang. She couldn't fight them all, she couldn't be everywhere at once. She couldn't save everyone. Not if she had to keep going like this and kill every single one of them here and now. Besides, they at any moment they notice that she was there and then they would be on her like a tsunami. Probably the only reason they hadn't done that already was that the demons were taking the opportunity to settle a few scores amongst themselves.

In any battle there are linchpins. If you take them down, then the morale of the opposing force crumbles. They just fall apart. Just as the demon gang had, after Buffy had intimidated them and then killed their leader.

On the human side, there was just her.

It was hard to tell on the demons side, though, because they were such a disparate force. But Buffy identified a few targets that she should take out first.

The first were the strange demons that she hadn't seen before, that walked on the walls and plucked humans from the ground and then tore them apart. The police targeted them, but they were fast and never stayed in the same place long enough for their rusty marksmanship to come into effect. There were only two of them, making them amongst the rarest of the demons there, but in terms of body count they were way up there – and they could just walk over any impromptu barricades humans might make.

The second was a big reptilian demon. This one wasn't fast, but seemed unfazed by bullets, or walls, or indeed anything that got in its way. It just casually crushed anything that was within reach.

The third was a female vampire who moved like she was at least a century old. Buffy briefly wondered why she hadn't come across her before, until she saw the way she fought. In her human guise, she pretended to be a human and ran screaming with the rest of them – until she came into a sizeable knot of humans, which she promptly slaughtered. She was too careful to ever be seen doing it, and she stayed away from any demons that might mistake her for a human. Someone like her was too careful to ever come to a Slayer's attention. Until tonight, at least.

But first things first.

Buffy ran towards the nearest of the wall-climbing demons. She jumped in the air, pushed off the shoulder of a nearby human to leap even higher and grabbed the demons leg. They both fell to the ground with a thump, and the demon already had its hands around her neck and was squeezing. It was strong. She broke its wrists and stabbed it with her stake, before turning and throwing its corpse at its comrade. That fell too, and was promptly riddled with bullets thanks to a particularly observant policewoman.

The demons had noticed that she was there now, but she didn't care. She was the Slayer, and this was her town. No one was going to wreck it. She was going to keep it safe.

The female vampire died before she even knew Buffy was nearby, and then she was in front of the reptile demon. Far from being afraid to see the Slayer right up close, it just smiled, showing too many razor sharp teeth for an ordinary mouth. "I hear you've been looking for me, Slayer."

Buffy tilted her head to one side. "No, not really. I've been kind of busy." And then she killed it.

Buffy decided that she had had enough.

"Stop." Her voice wasn't loud. Over the sound of screams and guns and breaking things, she shouldn't have been heard. Even someone right next to her should have had difficulty hearing what she was saying.

But they did hear her. Everyone heard her. And they obeyed. If someone had asked them why, they would have been hard pressed to answer. But the answer itself was simple.

It was the same reason that a person would freeze when they're in danger. They searched desperately for a way out, a way to safety – or failing that, they stood still in the vain hope that they wouldn't be noticed. The voice, the voice that was so quiet that it sounded as though it had been whispered directly in their ears but also seemed like it would have carried through a thunderstorm, appealed directly to some primitive part of their brains. The part of the brain that governed fear.

"You've lost. You know that. Look around. How many of you are dead? How many of you have died from human hands – unskilled, untrained human hands? We have won. We are still here. You tried to sweep us away, crush us before we were strong. And you failed. We won. We are still here, and you will never, ever scare us away." Buffy paused, more for impact than anything else. "So run. Take your dead and run. Because the humans are here, and we will triumph. We will drive you away – so take the chance and run. Run, and tell your kind that we are coming. Because we are. We-"

"Run. Run and hide. Run, because the real monsters are coming. The human race." The effect of this new voice was jarring. After Buffy's voice, which seemed to almost bypass the ears and speak directly to the mind, this new voice, which blared over the Mall's speaker system was like a harsh alarm clock awakening them from a dream.

Everyone turned to see Wells, dressed in an immaculate suit. He obviously hadn't fought, hadn't been anywhere near the fighting. But he was there for the aftermath. Of course.

And the demons did leave, because they had lost. Their dead littered the floor, and the humans, well, there were a lot more of them than there were of the demons. And they were armed, and led, and looked they would slaughter them without a second thought, not out of a survival instinct but out of a deep-seated hatred of things that are other.

Buffy looked back at the humans, only to see that they were all looking at her. There weren't looking at Wells, weren't interested in him in the slightest. They were all looking at her, waiting for her to speak.

Buffy looked deep inside herself, trying to find the right words.

I hear you've been looking for me, Slayer.

Oh.

"I could stand hear and congratulate you for what you've done. I could stand here and laud you for standing your ground and fighting. But the truth is, it's not enough. Not nearly enough. Because fighting the demons is only half the battle." Buffy turned and looked at Wells – the man who had had his bank robbed by a demon, a demon that he had told her to hunt down. A demon that she had just killed, a demon that could only have known that she was coming after it if someone had told it – and only Wells had known. "There is more to fight than just the things that go bump in the night."

"I think she's talking about me." Wells said, voice filled with dark amusement. In other circumstances, his tone, so carefully tailored to discredit Buffy might have accomplished his goal. But not now, not with him in his perfect suit, not when everyone else was weary and injured and Buffy was just like them. Not when she had a voice that seemed to speak directly to a part of their brain that wasn't interested in rhetoric or cunning arguments but just wanted to fight or flee. "She has this mistaken idea that I'm somehow responsible for the things that happen in this town."

Words. That was what it boiled down to, in the end. That is what wins battles. Wells couldn't have just killed her with no witnesses. No. He had to cut her down here and now with everyone watching. He had to discredit her and everything she had done.

And that wasn't right. That wasn't right at all.

"You are like a cancer in this town." Buffy said simply. "Everything that happens, every death, it all leads back to you."

"Mr Franklin!" Wells' voice boomed over the speakers. "Who was it who gave you an extension on your mortgage payments when your business went under? And Mrs Beckett, who was it who gave you an interest free loan when you lost your job? Does that really sound like the kind of thing someone would do if they were a 'cancer'?"

Before Buffy had a chance to respond, to talk about how of course Wells would act charitably if it kept people in Sunnydale to feed to the demons when they got restless, Wells spoke again. "This crusade that Ms Summers has started you on is all very commendable, in its way. But the lady herself? Not quite so much. She has these delusional ideas that she is going to save this town and – well, you only have to look around to see what this kind of salvation leads to. But she is so set on this course that, when I tried to reason with her this morning, she threatened me!" So saying, Wells held aloft a voice recorder, and Buffy realised why he had really come to speak to her in the studio. She wouldn't have been surprised if this entire assault was entirely thanks to him, just so that they could all be here for this.

And then Wells pressed play, and there was nothing but hissing static. He frowned, and shook it slightly. And then a voice came, and it wasn't the voice that Wells had wanted. It was a dark, twisted thing, masked by the static.

I have seen what the things in the dark can do. Would you like to see?

It didn't sound like an offer, or a threat. It sounded like a promise.

And then the static cleared, and a voice spoke. A voice instantly recognisable as Wells'. Your friends? I can crush them before they even know what's going on. Sure, you can turn loose your rabble, but you can rest assured that nothing I do will ever be traced back to me. Your friends are just as dead. Your sister is just as dead.

Buffy leant forward. "Yes, Mr Wells. That sounds exactly like the kind of thing that a human cancer would say."

And the crowd surged, ready to crush this man who would tear down their saviour, when Buffy said "No. There are policemen here. There will be justice for what he has done. We can't be like him, we can't just end him here in the night. He has to pay for what he has done, yes, but not like this. This has to be done properly. We have to restore order."

And Wells smiled, thinking that he was rich and powerful, the kind of man who had connections and wouldn't stay in prison long. With his contacts he could be broken out leaving no one the wiser.

Buffy looked back at him, the poor man who didn't even know that he was ruined. He was finished. His usefulness was over. Everyone here knew what he was, and that made him more than worthless – to the kind of people that he associated with, that made him a liability. He'd sit in his cell, thinking that he'd be free at any moment… right up until the moment that someone came, and he'd be filled with despair as he realised that they weren't going to save him. And then he'd be found in the morning, having hung himself, or perhaps having died of a fatal heart attack.

And then the people he worked with would move in on this town, keen to keep the status quo, to keep themselves in power, and there would be more chaos and death and destruction, and she would be right in the middle of it, she would be-

Wells was led out of sight, and Buffy blinked and looked away.