Top Guide (In This Town)

Chapter 12

After what must have been nearly ten minutes not being drunk by Tifa, in the chill of the cave, the tea was not very hot.

It was still an attack her host was in no way prepared for, and gave her the opportunity to get onto her feet, out of arm's reach of the man himself or his flanking Copies, turn, and sprint away across the cavern floor.

Vincent—who hadn't needed to stand, had already been in the direction she was running, and was objectively faster than she could hope for in this body—could probably have been halfway across the cave by now, but he fell in at her shoulder instead. Covering her. She didn't even need to look to know he had his weapon in hand.

The way they'd come in wasn't actually useful to her, since she didn't have wings, but it was possible the cliff face was rough enough to climb—and anyway, heading for it had made her point, if not exactly served her goals.

But Genesis had a point to make as well, obviously, because his copies that hadn't been serving as waiters had filed together and were blocking the mouth to that tunnel, three and four deep.

Almost certainly, these copies were weaker than the original, but Tifa had seen him fighting Sephiroth and knew that wasn't necessarily saying much. Even if they were a fraction of his strength, as she was now—as Vincent was now, even—it would be purest foolhardiness to wade into the center of the swarm. It probably wouldn't even have been smart in the future, but she'd probably have done it, mad as she was now.

The ones toward the middle of the pack were the ones in gear that matched their master's, with a little less deadness behind the eyes, though what expression there was suggested nothing but nightmares. She strongly suspected these of being the most dangerous ones. They were also the most in her way.

"Tifa," said Genesis, who had gotten her name from Zack Fair just as she had gotten his from Sephiroth. She kept going. The name had issued from back among the cushions. He wasn't giving chase.

She was more than halfway to the blocked exit. Vincent was right there guarding her back.

"Tifa," called the monster-SOLDIER, having overcome the tea. "Don't make a worse fool of yourself!"

Just before they came to grips with the horde Tifa swung left, put on a burst of speed, and blew past the one clone nonchalantly blocking the mysterious shadowed tunnel that had been drawing off a thin stream of smoke from the brazier all this time. Did he think she was stupid.

"Tifa!" Genesis shouted somewhere behind her, but Vincent was right at her heels and they were running pell-mell down dim and unfamiliar tunnels, and she had no more time for him.

The tunnels were studded with materia crystals—further apart than in the great cavern, but enough to see your feet striking the ground better than half the time. If she tripped, so be it. Genesis had been hospitable enough to heal her completely, she could handle skinned knees.

She hoped they didn't meet a dragon. For winged creatures, they spent most of their time underground, and she was not up for handling a dragon right now.

Though if they did have to fight one hopefully she could score a bangle. Not having proper gear was driving her nuts.

A masked Copy loomed up out of the gloom, crescent shortsword in each hand. Either it had gotten around ahead of them through superior knowledge of the tunnel system, or it had been placed here beforehand as a second-string guard, but either way it sunk into a menacing ready stance as it saw them, weapons raised.

Neither Tifa nor Vincent broke stride, and the monster-without-a-mind-of-its-own didn't adjust to this reality fast enough to leave more than a thin line of blood up Tifa's bicep, as she crashed elbow-first into its chest. Vincent's gun went off under its chin and it occurred to Tifa that here was an extra reason for her to miss Cloud—sharp edges killed just as efficiently as guns, but much more quietly. They could use a swordsman right about now.

They ran on.

Whenever there was a choice, they took the path leading down. Of course it didn't always continue leading down, but in the event they did find an outlet, lower was better. They'd started out a long way up the mountain.

Tifa tripped twice—the second time, Vincent got his clawed hand around her bicep before she could fall, and she swallowed her reflexive hiss at the pinch, turned it into a whispered thanks, because he didn't need any more reasons for uncertainty.

After what felt like an eternity of running through dim tunnels listening for enemy movement and looking for signs of an exit, and trying to make sure they weren't going in circles, the tunnel abruptly broadened out again.

They'd reached a small cavern, a tenth the size of Genesis' eyrie, this one clearly worn by water. The space was split by a great, jagged rock formation, taking up most of the center and leaving a path large enough for two to go abreast on each side.

Bright light, from huge collections of crystal oozing through cracks in the stone, splashed across a few surfaces, left most of the space in twilight, and cast particularly dark patches of shadow where it was blocked. A great place for an ambush—on either side.

She turned to Vincent, didn't even need to wait for him to turn to face her in return. They were syncing up nicely, excellent. Smacked her own chest gently and pointed left, then jabbed his arm and pointed right. He nodded understanding, and ghosted away around the right-hand passage.

Tifa hunched low and hugged the curve of the central rock formation as she worked her way left, until the faded black-leather curve of a shoulder came into sight. Sure enough, Genesis had set up a trap here. Fortunately, his pawns seemed to be only slightly brighter than non-materia rocks without his direct supervision, because as far as she could tell the owner of the shoulder was just standing mechanically in place, not scanning its periphery at all. Tifa fell back out of line of sight again.

She squinted up at the slope of the central upthrust of boulder a moment, then dug her fingers into a crack and started to climb. Edged her way along, above head height, until she was directly over the waiting Copy.

This was one of the more expressive ones, admittedly, in a long leathery coat, wielding some sort of electricity baton similar to Reno's. As she dropped like a bolt from above it dodged, at the last possible moment, just as she hit, so that part of the down-driving force of her heels was lost and the copy didn't crumple under her, and instead in the next instant lashed out with a sheet of fire.

It wasn't nearly as delicate a use of magic as she'd seen from the original, unsurprisingly, but it was Fire. Tifa felt a grin breaking over her teeth as she recovered and her feet found secure places on stone. Well.

She ducked forward, inside the copy's reach; once more it seemed taken off-guard, and she rammed a fist into the underside of its jaw. That threw its balance back, which Tifa used to sweep out its feet, and then followed it down with an arm-bar to the throat.

It was a foot taller than her and the muscle felt dense, never mind the Jenova factor; she shouldn't risk a wrestling match even if its fellows weren't likely to come upon them soon, and she couldn't count on this creature having a safely normal response to choking, even if its eyes were wide in animal alarm right now.

Her left hand she took from reinforcing the arm-bar to grab a fistful of auburn hair, which she used to drag its head up into the curve of her shoulder, and then with the strength of her whole upper body, slam it down into the stone.

The blankness in its gaze was joined by dizziness. She slammed it again, and a third time, and then as soon as it went limp tore its coat back to reveal—yes! On the left bicep, a Gold Armlet (she would bet gil Genesis had taken it from a local dragon) with three full slots. Two green Magic materia, and one the pink-purple of Independent.

The Armlet would be good to have, but would take too long to remove; she'd have to wrestle the full sleeve off before she could slide it over the wrist. She went for the nearest green orb first. One of these two was Fire. How kind of Genesis to honor her request.

Footsteps closed in as she popped the second Magic free—seven Copies on their way at least… She left the Independent; she had what was important.

The faint impact sounds of Vincent fighting hand-to-hand not far away were replaced by a single resonating gunshot, and he met her at the outlet point of the cavern, which had been hidden behind the tall rock, at a soundless full run. They fell into step without discussion. Even if the Copies didn't share a hive mind and Genesis couldn't see through their eyes, the noise would still have given them away.

They killed two more Copies in close, brutal skirmishes before they broke out into a slightly wider tunnel thronging with at least a dozen of the things. Vincent shot the nearest one, and both of them dashed with everything they had for the slightly upward-slanting narrow shaft that opened on the far side of the wide tunnel.

The one that ended in the yellow-white glow of the sun.

Tifa focused on reaching that flash of daylight, not the Copies hot on their heels. Not that being outside this cave system would altogether help them, since it would in fact make them easier to surround, but at least it would open the possibility of getting away. It would get them off Genesis' home ground, and back onto hers.

This was her mountain, she'd been brought up on it. No one else should have the home ground advantage here.

They broke into the daylight and had to pull up, because (Tifa was less than shocked) they had run out onto a cliff, and the sudden brightness left Tifa at least blinking back tears in the face of the sudden reappearance of one o'clock in the afternoon.

A vault of stone fell away above; the lip they'd run out onto protruded a little way beyond this shelter, before falling away in the opposite direction. They'd trapped themselves in a cup dipped into the mountainside, with nowhere left to run. This tunnel opened closer to the ground than the last one, but still much too high to survive the fall by anything but inhumanity or miracles. And the Genesis horde wasn't going to give them the leisure to see if the rock face was scalable.

Tifa rounded on the tunnel. At least she could avoid offering them her back.

At least until any came at her from the air.

"Tifa," came Genesis' voice up the tunnel, a superior smile drenching both syllables. "This is the only way out. You don't have any other options but to talk reasonably with me."

It was probably true that there were no entrances accessible from ground level, or Tifa would have visited these caves before. Someone would have found them by now, anyway, if they could be stumbled across without flying, and she'd have heard. She knew all the old smuggling routes.

"We saw how well that went," she said.

"It went very well for you," Genesis argued. He was drawing closer. "Because I refrained from attacking in the midst of a friendly discussion."

"Kidnapping," Tifa corrected him. "As soon as I decided we can't be friends, this became a kidnapping."

Those had been the terms he set, after all. Maybe he'd meant to create plausible deniability by leaving that threat implicit, but that was a Shinra game Tifa was long past being willing to play.

"…infinite in mystery is the gift of the Goddess." The voice had stopped coming closer. She'd seen him stand against Sephiroth not an hour ago; Sephiroth might not yet be the Nightmare and he might not have been trying his hardest, but no one who'd just taken on that should be hesitant to approach her and Vincent at their current level of strength.

Unless he didn't really think Sephiroth would hurt him.

That seemed like a popular opinion to have, at Shinra. Fair trusted him, until Nibelheim. The President definitely hadn't expected to be skewered by him.

She didn't have time to think about Sephiroth right now.

"What is it you don't want to tell me?" Genesis asked from inside the tunnel. The helmed head of a trooper-style Copy sorted itself out of the shadows. Was he speaking through it? No. Watching, possibly. Tifa hardened her glare, just in case. "What secret is so vital it drives you to reject my hospitality?"

"It's not about keeping secrets," Tifa answered. Because he didn't even know the right questions to ask, to get at the things she really didn't want to tell him; hadn't gotten to the point of pressuring her on subjects she would prefer to avoid.

Though she expected they would have reached that point, if she'd let them keep going the way they had been. Because even if he really was against Sephiroth, and not playing games, he wasn't a person she could trust at her back, let alone with her secrets.

"No?" The Copy tipped its head, slowly, a little further than humans normally would. Its mouth didn't move. The voice coming up the tunnel was calm and liquid, with just a faint hitch betraying some sort of pain or emotion buried inside it.

"You know it's not. I don't work with murderers."

She understood the need for half-random violence, sometimes, against a monolith like Shinra, and that there would be collateral damage and no matter how you tried you couldn't ensure that none of it would be innocent. The world forced harsh decisions on everyone. But aiming for collateral damage first and foremost, turning on your own people, and worst of all perhaps doing both those when you had your own army, and unlike Tifa's old terrorist group stood a reasonable chance of accomplishing something by confronting Shinra forces directly…that was another thing altogether.

"I thought you might have a good reason," she said, when Genesis didn't answer right away. "But you didn't. Let us go."

Nothing.

"Please let us go."

"…I think not." Something in the way he said that made Tifa think he'd paired it with a dramatic pose, but if so there was no one to appreciate it but himselves, because he still hadn't come into view.

"Why not?"

"Because I still have questions for you."

"I already told you more than I have Sephiroth." Mostly because she feared him less, but she didn't think it would help anything to add that.

"…infinite in mystery is the gift of the Goddess."

He sounded like he was trying to sound gently mournful, but enjoyed the opportunity for drama a little too much to nail it. "Thanks?" Tifa hazarded.

This conversation was clearly leading nowhere. "I don't actually want to be your enemy," she said, because she didn't, she didn't need extra enemies and she couldn't kill every murderous asshole in the world even if she were twice as powerful as she'd ever been. She had responsibilities, and also her own life to live. "I appreciate the lift and the healing, since you scuttled my negotiations earlier, but if you keep getting in our way I can't afford to go easy on you."

The silence following this only-sort-of-a-bluff seemed to be the incredulous kind. Vincent was raising his eyebrows at her. Tifa ignored them both; if they wanted her to acknowledge their opinions they would have to vocalize them.

She pulled her two captured materia out of her bra, weighing one in each hand, trying to feel the spark of fire in one of them. Yes. The left. She tucked the unidentified Magic back under the seam of her left breast, and focused on the orb in her hand. Yes. Natural materia. Elemental. It felt right.

"Stand back," she warned Vincent, and then channeled her energy into materia for the first time in this timeline.

When the brilliant burst of Fira didn't tap her flat, she knew her magic reserves were something else she'd brought with her from the future, like her memories and her Limit.

Okay, then. This materia didn't feel mastered but it had at least second level spells, which meant she could deal a lot of damage over a long time, with the kind of reserves that had once let her cast multiple rounds of Ultima between Ethers.

She filled the upper end of the tunnel with Fire, and every time a Copy showed its helmeted head brought down another Fira, and Vincent tapped. After three failed to make it to her or Vincent alive, they stopped coming. His forces weren't infinite, it seemed.

Vincent's supply of ammunition wasn't infinite either, and neither was Tifa's casting strength, and they no longer had any element of surprise. Even with a choke point to defend, even if Genesis was much stupider than he seemed and didn't have units circling behind them to split their focus, this couldn't last forever, and it wasn't getting them out.

"Vincent," she said, "how close are you to your Limit?"

He stole a look down at her, and she might have been the only person alive who could have read the dread in his expression as he said flatly, "Close."

"Okay. As soon as you feel yourself reach it, disengage. I'll cover you. Make for the edge. Limit Break there, focusing on getting down."

Gallian Beast was stupid, and like all Vincent's monsters goal-oriented. If he activated his Limit in combat it would fight until it went down, overwhelmed by Genesis' numbers. If he activated it running away, it would run away like there was no other activity in the world to do, until its enemies were vanished or dead.

Concern etched itself between Vincent's eyebrows, very faintly. "What will you do?"

"I'll be holding on."

Vincent's head turned a few degrees, though his eyes stayed on her. That was his startle reaction. "You," he said, and alarm and uncertainty and an irrational amount of guilt were all there in his voice. It always had been more expressive than his face.

"I know what I'm doing," Tifa said. "I trust you. Just trust me a little longer, and we'll be fine."

So Tifa pretended to have run out of magic. This was easy; she'd already cast more than a girl her age should have been able to manage. It just took stepping down to Fires staggered further and further apart, and then a half-summoned plume of cool yellow flame, and then nothing.

She shoved the Fire materia back into her bra. She could use it from there if she needed to, now that she had a feel for it, even if it would take extra concentration, and she was going to need both hands.

Vincent moving forward to block the tunnel with his body wasn't a much harder sell. He just had to put his gun away, as though it was no longer any use. His punches were devastating, though less than deadly, especially with the prosthetic-sheathed hand, and it was obvious he was getting used to his new body—faster than he had the first time, Tifa thought, since it hadn't even been a full day. The speed of his movements was picking up.

Every so often he whipped his gun from its holster to deliver a one-hit kill, furthering the impression that he was almost out of ammo. Switching tactics before he was entirely out was probably more believable from an ex-Turk, anyway.

Tifa stood a step back, darting in beside him or under his arms to deal damage when she saw an opening, but always falling immediately back behind her human shield. After all, if she passed out before Vincent got his Limit what would they do? Other than hope the materia that wasn't Fire was Restore, she guess, but realistically he wouldn't have time to experiment.

It was just like one party member equipping Cover, she told herself, regardless of the fact that she always hated anybody besides herself or Cait Sith equipping that, and that usually that wasn't something done on the basis of her asking them to trust her. (Also, it was usually bad tactics to equip Cover in a two-man party.)

Then Vincent's shooting hand wavered, and instead of firing again or delivering another punch he turned and fled, taking a scimitar-cut to the back of the shoulder as he went, past Tifa, away from the enemy, and she held her position with bare knuckles seeking out weak places on armored clones for just a few seconds longer and then fell back a few steps, dropped a Fira on the tunnel mouth, and bolted.

Caught up with Vincent at the rim of the cliff just as the hunch of his shoulders burst out of his cloak and hulked up into the crouching Gallian Beast. Flung herself against his back and tangled her fingers in his mane just in time, before he leapt out into thin air, roaring, as fire burst around them in every direction.

That hadn't been her.

She looked over her shoulder to see the real Genesis reaching the cliff's edge, looking mildly scorched by her goodbye present, a look of fury on his face and in the curve of his black wing, as he sent another quartet of fireballs after them.

They hit the ground, a great collision that almost knocked Tifa loose, and all but one of the fireballs earthed themselves harmlessly. The remaining one struck Gallian Beast on the head, catching Tifa only in the splashback, and she was briefly afraid the Limit would refocus on the enemy that had attacked it and try to climb the cliff again to confront him. But apparently Vincent's focus had been strong enough, because it merely howled in outrage and started to run.

Genesis dropped another set of fireballs

He didn't give chase, though. Only sent a couple of Copies to dog them, presumably so he could catch up at his leisure. They'd cost him over a dozen bodies, though, and Tifa wasn't sure what the overhead was for replacing them but it was obvious he relied much more heavily on being an army in his own person than Sephiroth appeared ever to have considered. She guessed he'd decided they were more trouble to contain than they were worth, at least for now.

She took Fira potshots at both scouts whenever she caught sight of them, until one dropped out of the sky, smoking, and the other stopped appearing. She didn't know whether it had gone back to Genesis to report or was just being more circumspect about its tailing, but either way there was nothing she could do about it.

She buried her face in the shaggy mane that never existed long enough to be anything but clean, and breathed.

Vincent ran for a long time. Tifa hung on grimly, fiercely—not only did she risk injury and (if she was unlucky enough) unconsciousness if she hit the ground at this speed, she'd be damned if she left herself exposed alone to the Copies after all this trouble, and she'd be twice damned if she left Vincent to wake up alone from his first voluntary Limit Break since Hojo had done this to him.

They hadn't been terribly supportive, the first first-time, her and Cloud. They hadn't known him yet, hadn't realized how new this body really was to him, hadn't known what the starker silence and almost invisible tremor in his gun-hand had meant, and had been much too annoyed about the Gallian Beast's repeated counterproductive setting-a-dragon-on-fire to figure any of it out.

She'd do better this time. It was a small regret, on the scale that measured her life, but she'd resolved to seize every opportunity this restart offered with both hands, hadn't she?

Which, for this bit, meant very literally holding onto a very annoyed monster like grim death, until her knuckles ached like she'd beat up several trees and a robot barehanded, and her inner thighs trembled like she'd been riding an incredibly poorly-tamed chocobo bareback across a few hundred miles of rough ground.

It hadn't been a few hundred miles, more like sixty or seventy, but you didn't have to cling to the back of a chocobo vertically, either.

She was getting a crick in her neck from keeping an eye on the sky. She hadn't seen a Genesis since she'd taken down that scout. The original hadn't seemed too badly injured. It occurred to her the Copies might have a…distance limitation from him. Maybe? The Sephiroth copies hadn't, in spite of their compulsive desire to draw closer, but these very transparently did not work quite the same way.

Trying to picture Sephiroth commanding some of his constantly rocking, mumbling black-shrouded gene-splice clones to set their broken minds to catering a tea party beggared imagination.

And not just because the breadth of Sephiroth's social skills in her experience consisted of silence, interrogation, and deranged monologue, but because of what she'd seen of the copies themselves. He obviously could use them to do complex tasks—one had apparently coherently asked Dio for information once, after all, leaving no impression on the entrepreneur's rubbery mind but the hand tattoo—but Tifa had always assumed this was accomplished more via direct possession than…whatever Genesis was doing.

One of the things that tended to happen at AVALANCHE reunion parties, once everyone was thoroughly drunk, was debating which of the Sephiroths they'd encountered might have been possessed Copies, rather than possessed fragments of the original Jenova body. And whether Jenova itself had ever spoken to them at all, or if the conversation had all been from Sephiroth. The balance of opinion was that the tentacle fight on Rufus' boat, the first time they left Junon, had been Jenova in everything but appearance, but not everyone agreed.

Everyone who bothered to get in on the debates had different ideas about how Sephiroth's ghostly consciousness worked, especially since the Remnant incident. It had always been a mostly-academic exercise with a tiny thread of this might matter someday behind it, but she'd never expected it to matter like this.

Cloud almost never joined in, but when he did have an opinion everyone listened, for obvious reasons. Tifa had worried after the first few times the subject came up (between Barret and Reeve, with Yuffie providing color commentary) that the subject would be too fraught for him to bear, but he said he liked the discussion, really. That it made the whole monstrous mess seem more normal, and reminded him he hadn't gone through it alone.

And that was all she wanted to be able to give him, so she'd stopped trying to shield him from their friends' insensitivity.

But now it came down to it, she still knew nothing decisive about how any of Jenova's Reunion abilities worked, beyond the fact that they had definitely let Sephiroth into Cloud's head.

Gallian Beast and its ridealong blundered their way south down through the foothills of the Nibel range without any further visible pursuit, and all the way out onto the plains east of Nibelheim before they encountered some extremely foolhardy Nibel wolves who thought the Gallian Beast looked like either a challenger for their territory, or a good square meal. Vincent had to kill each of them several times as their packmates kept reviving the fallen, but finally the fight ended and instead of going back to running, his whole body sagged.

Tifa leapt free in time to avoid potentially squashing Vincent, as he melted back into himself, and staggered, and fell to one knee. Yuffie was tiny and shameless enough to get away with that sort of thing; she wasn't.

"Vincent," she said over his ragged breathing, and he jerked to look over his shoulder like he hadn't realized she was there. His memory of the transformation would be very fragmentary at this point, and Gallian Beast had been pretty thoroughly ignoring her (as Vincent's monsters generally did their allies), so it was possible he actually hadn't.

She gave him her biggest smile, and moved around so he could look at her without having to twist. "I knew you could do it."

His breath came out in a gust. He was fingering the place on his left bicep where a Copy's blade had left a particularly nasty gash. Not only had the wound vanished once his Limit activated, his cloak and coat were whole again as well, as usual. That didn't seem like something Hojo would have done. Tifa wondered how Dr. Crescent had managed it. "We…got away?"

Tifa checked the sky again. Still clear. "We got away."

Vincent sagged over the knee not braced against the ground supporting his weight. "That…was…."

"My fault," said Tifa, because she'd made a whole string of reckless, emotional decisions and Vincent had had to pay for them. "Sorry."

He raised his head enough to give her a very flat look. "I was hardly forced to join you."

No, but possibly bullied a little. Still, she could give him the dignity of his choices. "Well, thanks then. Great job. I'll try to lead us into fewer desperate last stands in the future."

"I won't hold my breath," said Vincent, and Tifa laughed, louder than she probably should have, startled by the familiarity of Vincent's grouchy sense of humor and buoyed by the way his breath was coming normally again, the way he was no longer hunching forward as if around a death-wound.

"Yeah," she said. "As long as we keep getting out, I guess."

"As long as," Vincent agreed drily, and got up.

Tifa patted the nearest elbow, and surveyed the sky again. The distant outline of a hunting Zuu, but nothing humanoid.

"Well," she said. "I guess it's time to start work on Plan…" Plan B she guessed had been catching the troopers falling off the bridge, and it had technically resolved successfully, or maybe Plan B had been confronting Sephiroth outside the reactor, which made leaving with Genesis the improvised Plan C. "D," she decided.

Looked around at the open sward. Once, long before she was born, you'd be able to spot signs of at least one farm from almost anywhere on the plain, especially this near a town like Nibelheim, which used to get all the overland trade through the pass. But these days Nibel agriculture had mostly moved to the south and west, where it was cheaper and easier to get the crop onto the water, to transport in bulk to the world's cities, mostly to Midgar via Shinra's vast shipping fleet.

It was mostly big corporate farms worked by hired labor, too. (And the employment contracts, Tifa had heard, weren't kind.) The modern economy couldn't support independent farmers very well—or at least, it didn't want to, so it didn't. Monster attacks had been going up in the northern part of the plain since the Reactor went in, too, though of course no one could ever prove anything, and that made living spread-out more dangerous.

Tifa remembered when freeholding farmers were making a comeback, ten years from now. When so many of the people who'd lived through the long weeks of Meteor's burning presence in the sky and the succeeding collapse of the intercontinental economy had begun to value sustainability and self-sufficiency over convenience, and the few stubborn holdouts of each area's traditional farming communities had suddenly been treated as bastions of wisdom.

But now there was no sign of human life to be seen, except the broken huddled remnant of what had once been a small house, or perhaps a barn, the splintered leaning timbers bleached grey. A few times a year, one drover or another came through grazing their cows or chocobos, willing to risk the depredations of monsters for free pasturage.

Tifa liked wilderness well enough, but this wasn't wilderness exactly. This had been the hinterland of her community, once.

Shinra had begun destroying Nibelheim long before Sephiroth came back to it with fire.

"Step one," she said, turning her face toward her town, even though it was invisible from here, too far away and low behind the spur of the hill. She laced her fingers behind her and arched her spine until it popped. "Reassess the risks."