The right side of Cloud's face burned. He could still smell the charred flesh, feel the flame cutting into his muscle and bone. The worst part had been forcing himself to keep his gaze on the mirror. There had been no room for mistakes, and it had been the only way he could keep himself from becoming infected.

Outside the hospital, the night was cool, but he felt as though he were burning alive. The rational part of his mind told him he had a fever, that the infection from the horrible burn was spreading and the antibiotics weren't working. Cloud wanted to lift his hand and press the call button, but it seemed like so much effort, and his hand seemed so far away.

The door to his room silently swung open, casting light from the hallway into his dark room. He blearily fixed his gaze on the figure silhouetted in it – a woman in a nurse's uniform. His head swam. Why was she here? He hadn't been able to press the button.

She approached the bed with a fluid grace that somehow unnerved him. Where had he seen that gait before? It seemed so familiar…

"How are you feeling?" she asked him.

Cloud licked his cracked lips and muttered, "Terrible. Fever… must be a hundred. My face…"

"Well, it would make sense for you to have a very high fever, considering you haven't been on any antibiotics for the past eight hours," the nurse observed cheerily.

Warning bells went off in his head, but in his muddled state Cloud couldn't say why. "What? But… why not? The IV…"

"I let myself in after your friends left," the nurse went on, "and switched out your antibiotics with a bag of saline. Funny how they look exactly the same, huh?"

"Who…?"

The woman leaned close to Cloud, wearing a smile on features he did not recognize. Slowly her face shifted, changed; her skin darkened, her hair became blonde, and her eyes turned a deep purple.

Adrenalin shot through Cloud's body and he started to leap off the bed, but Raphael's hand snaked out, grabbed him by the throat, and slammed him back down against the mattress. "It's funny where you can go when you can change your appearance at will," she said matter-of-factly. "The woman whose identity I've borrowed was a bad choice, though. I had to break nearly all her bones to get her to fit into that little waste chute."

Cloud's vision swam. He couldn't breathe for the iron fingers tightening around his throat, could barely speak. "You… bitch," he managed to get out.

"Poor Cloud," Raphael sighed. "I will miss your emotions, but you ran away and I just can't permit that to happen a second time."

"Must be tough," he said, barely able to form the words, she was throttling him so hard. "Killing a sick man in his bed."

The smile on Raphael's face grew, but it was no longer innocent; it became a feral grin, all her teeth on display, and her eyes shone with glee. "But you have me all wrong, Cloud," she said. "I'm not going to kill you." With her free hand, she reached into the large pocket on the hip of the nurse's uniform she wore. Even before she withdrew the syringe completely, the utter blackness visible through the glass casing told Cloud exactly what she was planning to do. "I'm going to set you free."

Knowing he was going to black out in less than ten seconds if she kept strangling him, Cloud struck out in a desperate attack, whirling his legs around in a pair of scissoring kicks that thudded into the side of Raphael's head. She didn't even notice. In one surgically precise motion, she moved her hand from Cloud's throat to his arm, jabbed the syringe full of Lost blood into a vein, and injected him with all of it.

Cloud felt it ripping through his blood like an all-consuming fire. His vision went dark and he could no longer feel anything except his body twitching and writhing. He could still hear, however; he could hear Raphael telling him how he would feel so much better when he woke up, how everything would be different and they would be together for as long as they wanted.

Then he lost consciousness.

"Do you know the history of the WEAPONs, Cloud?"

Cloud paused, confused by the question. He and Tifa had been walking through the desert together in silence for what felt like forever, and now she asked him this seemingly out of the blue. "No, I don't," he said. "Do you?"

Tifa nodded. "A very long time ago, the Calamity came to this Planet. The Planet sensed that it was in terrible danger and spontaneously created the WEAPONs to protect it. However, the Cetra managed to seal JENOVA away, removing the threat for the time being, meaning the WEAPONs had no reason to exist. Rather than destroy what it had created, the Planet decided to preserve them in crystallized Mako at the roof of the world for when the next crisis threatened."

"Huh," Cloud said. "That's interesting. What brought the WEAPONs to mind, Tifa?"

She looked at him long and hard, her wine-colored eyes seeming to measure him. "We destroyed them, Cloud."

"Well, we had to," Cloud replied. "You know that as well as I do. When the Planet released the WEAPONs in response to Meteor, Sephiroth had a barrier up that kept them from being able to detect him. So they started attacking anything else they saw as a threat, which included pretty much every Mako-using town on the face of the world. We couldn't let innocent people die."

"That's true," Tifa acknowledged. "We did what we had to at the time, and there's nothing wrong with that." She stopped walking as they reached the crest of a dune, motioning for Cloud to sit down with her. He obeyed, carefully settling on the hot sand. A small voice inside his mind said that something was wrong here, that Tifa was dead and should not be talking to him, but the rest of him felt as though he belonged here. This was where he needed to be right now, he was sure of it. "Do you remember what Vincent told you about Geostigma?"

"He said our bodies have a current in them like the Lifestream. It's what fights off alien matter that gets into the body, and Geostigma was that current hurting us by overreacting to JENOVA."

"That current isn't infinite, but if it's depleted it slowly regenerates over time," Tifa said. "Just like the Lifestream. When your body fights off disease, you're weakened by its passage but eventually you get better, forming new and better ways to fight illness. That's what the Planet was doing with the WEAPONs. They were the Planet's immune system."

"We destroyed the Planet's immune system?" Cloud asked, feeling somewhat horrified. It had been necessary, yes, but that didn't mean it was a perfect solution.

"Yes," Tifa replied. "So the Planet analyzed why the WEAPONs had failed, why JENOVA had been able to hurt it so much and cause such horrible destruction. It realized that JENOVA's insidious nature, the fact that it was so small, made it possible for the Calamity to do things the WEAPONs could not. JENOVA had intelligence, the ability to make decisions, could use subtlety just as well as brute force. The WEAPONs were no smarter than the cells inside your body that are designed to fight off disease, Cloud. All they could do was detect a threat and try to eliminate it. They couldn't discriminate."

"How do you know all this?" Cloud asked. "Where are we? What's –"

Tifa smiled at him, a sad and patient expression. She put a finger to his lips, and his questions faded. He knew this could not be real, but at the same time he could feel her calloused skin, he recognized that smile of hers that she would so often give him when he was being difficult or obtuse.

"This is not a lie," she said to him.

Instinctively, at the core of his being, Cloud knew it was true. This was not real, but it was still true; it was not some fantasy pushed into his mind by a malevolent outside force. "I believe you," he whispered.

She nodded. "Your body learns every time it fights a new disease, Cloud, and the Planet works the same way. When it saw that the old WEAPONs didn't work, it decided to make some new ones."

"What? How?"

"It wanted WEAPONs that had the power to defend it but could think for themselves, could use reason and make decisions. It wanted WEAPONs that would feel every death they caused, WEAPONs that wouldn't go berserk but would know when to act and when to wait. Most importantly, it couldn't muster the strength to make these WEAPONs themselves, only empower them to act in its name. So it found three receptacles it could use, and it gathered them together in one place, just like it had gathered all the other WEAPONs together at the North Crater."

"So if we find and release these new WEAPONs, they'll help us against the Immaculate Swords?" Cloud asked. There seemed to finally be a light at the end of the tunnel. Defeating Ruby and Emerald and Ultimate had been terribly difficult; if they had the power of those creatures on their side, paired with the capacity for decision-making and the ability to see who the real threat was, they might actually stand a chance.

Tifa shook her head. "Two of them are bound to wait, asleep, until the Calamity returns or something of similar power threatens the Planet. It may not return at all, or it may be a thousand years, or it may be tomorrow; but if JENOVA or its ilk do come back, they will be ready."

"We can still get the third one to help," Cloud exclaimed. "Where is it, Tifa? We only have a little while before the Immaculate Swords show up. If we –"

He was interrupted when Tifa moved close to him, pressing her lips against his for a brief moment before withdrawing. "You're so dense sometimes, Cloud," she said, her smile growing. "Don't you see?"

"See what?"

Tifa sighed. "Ask Vincent how he found you. You'll understand." She stood up, dusted herself off. "I'll see you soon, Cloud."

"You're leaving? Where…" Suddenly the world lurched around him. The sky inverted, the sand beneath him turned to glass, and he couldn't breathe. Tifa seemed to shrink, disappearing into the distance without moving. Cloud reached for her in vain, panic gripping him. "Don't go again," he gasped even as the air turned to green, glowing water that rushed into his lungs. "Don't…"

And then he woke up.

Cloud's face no longer hurt; his fever had vanished. Confused, he gingerly probed his right cheek, expecting to feel raw and charred flesh, but instead he found only rough scar tissue. It was still late at night, so he stumbled into the bathroom, flipped on a light, and stared at himself in the mirror.

His horrible burn was gone. There was a long, wicked scar curving from beneath his eye down the side of his jaw, but it looked like it had been healed for some time now. Cloud stood there for a moment, utterly confused.

The memory of Raphael throttling him and jabbing a syringe full of Lost blood into his arm abruptly rushed out of the recesses of his bewildered mind. He spun around, looking for any sign of her, but the room was empty save for him. He stared at his arm but could find no traces of any needle. Had it been a dream? Then how could he explain the deep, unassailable feeling that his meeting with Tifa had been true, and why was his burn completely healed?

Cloud moved back toward his bed, thinking to hit the call button and summon a nurse. As he took a step forward he felt his toe hit something lying on the floor. The sound of glass skipping over the linoleum surface was very loud. He crouched, retrieved a syringe from the ground. It was almost entirely empty save for a few drops of Lost blood that had not been injected with the rest.

Without hesitating another moment, Cloud slammed down the call button before rushing back into the bathroom. He stared at himself in the mirror, summoning up kànderén to see if he had been uplifted. The training seemed to be working perfectly, but he could detect no trace of the disease in him.

A nurse appeared at the door to his room. "You called, Mr. Strife?" she asked. He whirled, stared at her intently with kànderén. She wasn't Raphael in disguise or infected at all, that much was certain. Taken aback by the intense scrutiny of his gaze, the woman shrank back a step. "Are you all right?"

"No," Cloud said. "The Third Angel snuck into my room disguised as one of the nurses who worked here and injected me with this syringe full of Lost blood. Sound an alarm, call the police, do something to try to catch her before she causes even more damage."

At the mention of Lost blood, the nurse shrank back even further, her eyes wide with fear. "You're –"

"I'm not infected," Cloud cut her off. "I'm an Inquisitor of the Protectorate and can tell I'm not."

"But if she –"

"I don't understand it either, but if you don't tell people she's inside the city there's no telling what she could do. Hurry!"

Rather than argue the point with him, the nurse turned on her heel and hurried off down the hallway. For his part, Cloud walked over to the closet. Inside were his clothes, his Fire Materia, the First Tsurugi's harness, and the two shortswords he hadn't lost in his fight with Raphael.

He felt better than he had in days, and it was time to get some answers.

Alarms howled out in the predawn hours. All of Wutai was on alert, the police and the army on the lookout for suspicious persons violating curfew. The report the nurse had given had mentioned something about an Angel attacking Cloud Strife.

That had been more than enough of an excuse to alert his friends, Rufus, and the Turks. All of them were currently rushing to the hospital. Denzel, Marlene, Reeve, Red XIII, Rufus, Reno, Rude, Tseng, and Elena were all crammed into Rufus's private car, a vehicle that was supposed to comfortably seat only six people. Vincent ran on all fours alongside the vehicle, steely muscles rippling beneath his grey-blue fur.

"How long until we get there?" Marlene asked. She sat on Reno's lap in the front passenger seat of the car, much to the Turk's dismay. "Cloud probably needs our help."

"This car wasn't built to accommodate nine people," Rufus replied testily. Red XIII made a growling sound in the back of his throat, and Rufus amended, "Well, eight people and a… Red XIII. I'm going as fast as I can without burning her out."

"Burn her out if you have to!" Reeve snapped from where he was wedged between Rude and Tseng. "Cloud's in trouble!"

"Oh, no," Elena said. "Cloud's not in trouble right now." Everyone looked at her, confused, and she gave them a toothy smile. Her features shifted and reformed themselves into those of a dark-skinned, purple-eyed young woman with identically blonde hair. She smiled, showing straight, white teeth. "All of you are."

Tseng swore. "Where's Elena?"

"Unconscious in her room, of course," Raphael replied. "You mako-enhanced specimens should make interesting study and I don't want to waste any of you. The rest of you, though…"

Whatever she was about to say was drowned out as Rufus slammed his fist down on the car's horn. Raphael, startled, reached out to rip Rufus's hands off of the wheel.

Vincent crashed into the side of the car like a cruise missile. The vehicle was thrown right off its wheels and went tumbling, flipping over several times before skidding to a halt, right side up. Inside, the Turks grabbed Marlene and Reeve, the more fragile passengers, shielding them with their own bodies. Marlene felt Reno slam into the door and heard the window shatter. For his part, when the car came to a halt, Reno looked completely uninjured and unfazed. The mako treatments had obviously done more than make the Turks stop aging.

Raphael was recovering from the unexpected crash when Vincent ripped the door off of her side of the car. He plunged his talons deep into her chest and lifted her out of the vehicle before flinging her into the road like she weighed nothing. She hit hard, the impact making cracks in the asphalt.

"You have a lot of rage in there," she laughed, getting to her feet. Vincent's eyes narrowed as her wounds healed up at an unnatural pace. "Share it with me, Vincent. You seem to have become much less capable of bottling your emotions up inside since going through this change. I like the new you."

"Well, I don't like you," Vincent snarled. "It's time for you to die, Third Angel or no. I'll annihilate you just like I destroyed Uriel and Alexandra!"

Raphael raised an eyebrow. "You will, hm? Selaphiel observed that fight, Vincent. He was acting as our scout, seeing as how he can make himself invisible to prying eyes. According to his report, you didn't destroy Alexandra at all. Galian did."

"That's what I said!"

"No, you said you destroyed Alexandra. Having a bit of an identity crisis, Vincent? Don't bother denying it, I can feel it all from right here."

"I –" Vincent stopped, confusion evident even on his twisted features. He roared and clutched at his head, white flames springing up all along the length of his body.

Raphael made a clucking noise, slowly advancing toward him. "It seems like you're not weathering this new form of yours very well, Vincent." She raised her right arm, shaping her forearm into a writhing mass of JENOVA-disease liquid that ended in a very sharp point. "Here. Let me make things clearer for you."

A dozen bullets ripped into her body. Tseng clutched a pistol in either hand, and Rufus held his sawed-off shotgun almost casually, its twin barrels still smoking. Rude and Reno both held stun prods, the tips of which glowed with energy waiting to be discharged. Next to them, Red XIII crouched low, teeth bared and hackles raised, and Denzel stood in a fighting stance, ready to try to contain Raphael for as long as he could.

"You think you puny bugs can hurt me?" Raphael laughed. "The only one here who might have a chance is Vincent, and he seems a little busy right now." She looked at the ex-Turk, who was on his knees gripping his head so hard it seemed a miracle he didn't hurt himself. "And the only other person who could ever even touch me is currently getting used to being uplifted. I wonder which fallen Angel he'll replace. Maybe he'll even bump me down a notch."

"Cloud," Marlene whispered. "No."

Raphael sneered at her. "Oh, yes, Marlene Wallace. Cloud Strife is no more. Whatever's left of him once the disease gets through uplifting him will be ours. I used a special strain that Michael developed personally. It'll destroy his mind and still keep him sane. He'll be our own special puppet."

"You bitch," Marlene hissed.

"Call me whatever you want, it won't change the facts. He's gone."

"For a dead guy, I'm feeling strangely fine," Cloud said.

Raphael went completely stiff. She slowly turned her head to look at Cloud, who stood several yards away from her, shortswords drawn. He wore his normal clothing and a determined expression.

"Not possible," she breathed. "I injected you with enough Lost blood to infect a hundred people!"

"I don't understand it either," Cloud replied, "but I'm here, and I'm not infected." He looked at Red XIII. "Right?"

"He is not," Red XIII confirmed. "My kànderén confirms it."

"Then HOW?" Raphael screamed. "HOW IS IT POSSIBLE? Nobody is immune to the disease, NOBODY! You become a Lost, or you become uplifted! There are no in-betweens, no exceptions! NONE!"

"None except me." Cloud began to advance on Raphael, shortswords ready. "You've got two options, Raphael. Fight or run. You might live longer if you take the second one."

She stared at him for a long moment before throwing back her head and giving a horrible, keening cry, a sound of pure hate and anger that echoed for miles and made all of them stumble back, clutching at their ears. In the next instant she was gone, dissolved into a fine black mist that flew away through the air.

Vincent gave a sharp gasp, lurching to his feet. "She… my mind… I couldn't keep her out. I…" He rubbed at his eyes, despair clouding his features. "I don't know if I can fight her. I don't even know how much longer I can stay sane." He looked down at Cloud, who had sheathed his shortswords and now stood only a few feet away. "Is it true? Did she inject you with Lost blood?"

"She did. She also switched out my antibiotics with saline so I'd be feverish and weak when she did it."

"How did you survive?" Rufus demanded, obviously confused for one of the few times in his life.

Cloud shook his head. "I have no idea. I dreamed I was walking in the desert with Tifa, talking, except it wasn't a dream – it was true, even though it wasn't real. Then I woke up, feeling great, and my burn was gone. All that was left was this scar." He turned to Vincent. "Tifa told me to ask you how you found me, Vincent."

"What? Why?"

"Please," Cloud said. "It's important."

"I found you in stasis," Vincent replied.

"I know that much, but where was I? Was I alone? I need details, Vincent."

Vincent took a deep breath. "I found you in a giant underground cavern beneath Deepground. Your pod had been taken there along with two others from Project R's base, and was facing a giant, red Materia that floated off the ground. The other people with you were Genesis Rhapsodos and Weiss the Immaculate, both of whom were in stasis when I arrived. Genesis let himself out and explained that the Materia was the Gift of the Goddess, whatever that means, and that he and Weiss had to stay there and sleep until the Planet was in immense danger."

Cloud stared at him, struggling to keep his expression neutral. "You're sure."

"Positive," Vincent growled.

"What is it, Cloud?" Marlene asked. "What's wrong?"

"Now it makes sense." Cloud ran a hand down his face, realization flooding him. "In my dream, Tifa kept talking about the WEAPONs, how they were the Planet's immune system. She said the old ones that we destroyed were flawed, so the Planet decided to make new ones, WEAPONs that could think for themselves and operate on a smaller scale than the old ones. The thing was that it didn't have the power to just make them out of nothing, so it took three – what did she say – receptacles, that's it, and gathered them together. She said two needed to wait until JENOVA returned, if ever, but the other one…"

"So you," Rufus said, "are a WEAPON."

Cloud met his cold gaze. "Yes. I am."

"What does that even mean, though?" Reeve demanded. "You're still Cloud, we can all see that. If you're a WEAPON, where's your overwhelming power?"

"I don't know, Reeve. I just know that this must be how I survived Raphael injecting me with all that Lost blood. The Planet couldn't let one of its WEAPONs get corrupted by the enemy, so it intervened and saved me. That also explains why my wounds all healed up."

There was a beeping sound from Rufus's wrist. He held his watch up to his ear, listened, said something short into it. "Well, if you really are a WEAPON, Cloud, you'd better figure out how to harness that power. Spotters aboard the Deus Ex Machina just sighted the entire Lost army incoming. I don't know how they got across the ocean, but at the rate they're going, they'll be here in just under an hour."

Nobody said anything at first. Finally, Reno laughed. "At least we already woke everybody up with the alarm for that crazy bitch," he drawled. "Saves us a little time."

Immediately everyone snapped out of their shock. Rufus started issuing rapid-fire orders to the Tseng, who directed Reno and Rude to carry some of them out before hurrying off to complete the rest himself. Marlene and Denzel exchanged a glance, then both started off toward the city wall, intent on organizing the defenses there.

"You have an hour to figure out how to use whatever advantages being a WEAPON gives you," Rufus said to Cloud, getting back into his somewhat-ruined car. "After that, get to the wall. We'll need all the help we can get." Without waiting for a reply, he gunned the engine and sped off in the direction of the city's command center.

Cloud, Vincent, Reeve, and Red XIII stood in the road, not sure where to go from here. "Vincent," Cloud said slowly. "Do you think maybe this WEAPON is a part of me, like Galian and Chaos and your other demons used to be a part of you? Is there some way I can transform into it?"

Vincent shook his head. "If it worked like that, you would be aware of it," he said. "Trust me. It would be impossible for you to have missed its presence this entire time. You yourself must be a WEAPON. It's the only explanation."

"I've never heard of anything like this," Red XIII observed. "Grandfather never spoke of people becoming WEAPONs, nor do any of Cosmo Canyon's histories. I'm afraid I am completely out of my depth."

"Reeve?" Cloud asked.

The ex-President of the WRO stroked his goatee pensively. "You say Tifa came to you in a dream, or vision, and told you this?"

"Yes."

Reeve nodded. "Come with me," he said. "I have an idea."