Warning: Target possesses extreme offensive and regenerative capabilities. Proposal: increase combat capability rating and eliminate the target.

Beneath the roiling structure of darkness and bone, beneath countless eyes and drooling mouths splitting apart on a tree borne of shadow, Snow bowed her head.

Understood. Increasing combat capability to 90%.

A rolling bulge on the tree's trunk exploded with a hail of nine barbed tendrils. Caspian deflected one off his armguard, skipped aside one and tore it with Undertow but a third skimmed his shoulder. Snow tumbled out of the way of two, slashed through three more, and sprung backward away from the final pair. She switched from Configuration A to B, and weaving between lashes and strikes that broke concrete, she let fly a volley into the abomination's side. Dark flesh quivered and shifted where her bullets sunk, before tree bark forged from bony plates grew from each impact to protect it.

Tendrils pulled away from Snow, weaved, braided and stitched together to form one a foot and a half across. The first dozen feet pulled taut– bleached white as it hardened into a scythe to slash Snow. She calculated its force, and its path. Direct hit across her neck and shoulder, a magnitude of 6.35 times stronger than she could block. She blinked to the side, used her spear to skewer one of the uncanny, near-human forms born from the Blackened Pool, then heaved herself up to tumble off its wide, froglike head and slash through a tendril before it caught Caspian in the back.

The Grimm he faced, heaving themselves on twisted arms from the Blackened Pool, were unlike anything he'd seen. They weren't Beowolves, Ursa, even the awkwardly-formed Creeps– but the twisted miscreation of a miscreation. On cobalt sparks of Moka's semblance he ran, baiting the smaller Grimm away from Snow with bullets and his own delicious anxiety as the android tore into their creator. He caught five smaller Grimm in midair as he ran– homunculus bodies with a split scorpion tail lifted on bat wings, like imps built from shadow. They were fast, avoided half his shots with a squealing cackle. But after the first couple misses he pulled to the edge of the battlefield, and angled his shots so each miss instead chipped off the Tree's bark.

Caspian felt something strike the back of his ankle– then heat, and barbs that dug into his skin as the tendril threatened to rearrange the bones in his ankle. It sprouted from the back of one of the Tree's creations– almost a Creep, but with misplaced eyes and a six-hinged jaw that opened like a thorned flower. He raised his knee, grit his teeth against tensing barbs and severed the tendril. It lashed twice, in fury and agony, but he blocked both. He allowed the third strike to wrap his upper arm. Again he felt the hot barbs, felt his shoulder pulling from its socket. But the baleful flower bloomed again, and a beam of charged dust pierced it and it faded away. Two more imps got close as the near-Creep held him in place– two swipes of Undertow and they faded away.

He continued along to another mistaken form. Arms as thick as a Beringel's and a wedge-shaped head with a single line of eyes were stuck on an emaciated torso, its ribs jutting out at odd angles. It all shambled forward on a mass of bladed tentacles. One lashed at him, and he rolled aside before trading a shot from Undertow that sunk into its shoulder. Hard-light sprung from his shield and he surged forward, deflecting one swipe with his shield, countering the next and splitting a tendril with Undertow. He leapt to the side of a punch that shattered concrete, and buried Undertow in the opposite shoulder.

When he tried to pull black, its viscous flesh grasped his weapon. Sinews split from its shoulder and arm, weaved around his hand and the hilt it clasped around. Its other hand raised again. Pulled back, and forced the breath from Caspian's chest. He skipped across the concrete, almost caught his footing, stumbled further until a white blur came to his side and caught him inches from a Blackened Pool.

"Are you alright?" Snow asked.

"...I think so."

"Good." She backhanded an imp with her axe, whipped another and helped him to his feet. She transformed Absolute Zero to Configuration A, vanished from his side to cut her way through another hail of tendrils, Caspian looked to the hilt of his blade, still buried in the Grimm's shoulder. Then the red glow in its chest, half-protected by misplaced ribs. He held his shielded arm forward, closed one eye and steadied his arm. His grappling blade burst forth, and the slow-moving monstrosity lurched as it struck true. The red glow of its core burned brighter, brighter, until the orb pulled from its chest. Strings of black flesh still clung to the core. Blue lightning surged around his shoulder as he pulled, and Undertow clattered into the black fog it became.

The Tree of Death's massive half-skull twisted in place to watch Snow's approach, drooling tar. Two clusters of six tendrils weaved and rippled together, bearing down on Snow as two scythes. She watched them. Calculated the distance between compared to her own body, and ducked between. The ground exploded as they buried two feet deep in concrete, but she held steady– drove her spear into one, pulled back, and slashed into the other four times with her blade. Her attention snapped to a ripple in gooey flesh and she tore her head to the side, avoiding a spike that exploded from inside with a tenth of a second to spare.

She saw the tentacle beginning to pull back, and grasped the spine that nearly impaled her. She rose up with it, transforming Absolute Zero into Configuration B. Her finger half-pulled, and her Internal Targeting Reticle pulled into focus around the three-hinged jaw that dribbled tar. It opened. She fired. 85% of her shots landed, and the tendril she rode up tensed and tried to fling her off. She cartwheeled in the air, in a fraction of a second analyzed 289 possible targets, and cracked her whip at the most efficient option. It caught, and she swung herself onto another branch. Her path up was at an incline of 74.2 degrees. It was spongy and constantly shifting. But she sprinted up still, lashing her blade back and forth before her bootfalls.

A line of eyes bubbled up beneath the inky surface, following Snow up the stalk. Then a mouth tore open where her foot would fall, and its teeth clamped on her leg below the knee. Vicegrip jaws decreased her EMRF integrity by 13% and they tightened, taking another 1.2% per second. She slid Configuration A parallel to her leg, through an inch and a half gap between nine inch teeth. Her thumb slid on its hilt and light sparked from within, the broad head of Configuration C shattering bone and freeing her from its grasp. She buried her axehead into bark to slow herself down before kicking off. And as Caspian raised Undertow at a fetal form hovering in a halo of bone, Snow cleaved it down the middle and landed among its remains.

Caspian's armguard half-hid a thumbs up. "Thanks!"

Snow nodded, but looked up to two more jaws tearing open between tendrils. "I'm going to have to increase combat capability to 100%," she advised. "Please stand clear. If I overheat, rebooting me is your top priority."

"Got it."

Snow stopped for a second. Lowered her head and closed her eyes.

Increase Combat Capability Rating to 100%.

Understood. Increasing.

Her eyes flashed blue, and she vanished from where she stood.

A torso sloughed toward the ground like a thousand gallons of molasses, and six arms burst from bubbling flesh. Snow calculated a path between them, flipped through the air to follow it and lashed with her hard-light ribbon. Six arms severed, and faded away. She planted her feet, cracked her whip and buried its tip in the darkness. The whip pulled taught. She followed it, and halfway through transformed into Configuration C to cleave it in two. She tumbled, ground to a stop on an axe that tore cement, and backflipped off it to land on inverted branches.

She climbed again– faster this time, weaving more slashes between steps, dodging more tendrils, teeth and claws that tried desperately to tear her off. Two tendrils, 45.8 degrees right, 31.2 degrees to the left. Both split by Configuration A. The flesh ahead of her bubbled, exploded in bony thorns. Snow leapt aside, twirled in the air until she found another branch and tore a seven foot gash in its bark on landing.

An eight-fingered hand Snow severed landed with a splat, but didn't fade. Instead it skittered toward Caspian, dragging a wrist and half a forearm behind it. It pulsed, swelled, and retracted to become a bulbous body, and bony fingernails stretched and contorted into the legs of a spider. Caspian strummed Undertow's trigger, bullets pierced it, leaving behind splatters of tar until it fell a few feet past the end of his barrel. He looked up to prepare for more, and saw within a few seconds Snow had nearly reached the Tree of Death's roots. She landed on a branch that pulled back to swat her away, took a split-second to lock onto her target, and shot toward it.

She heaved Absolute Zero at maximum force output. The Tree's bark shattered, the flesh beneath shredded halfway through the trunk. Black sinews reached for each other inside the wound, burning away before they could stitch it closed. The colossal mass of the Tree tensed and retracted in apparent agony, its roots pulling on the glass dome and spreading the deep fractures within it. Snow began to fall. 62.9 feet– enough to neutralize her EMRF and cause extensive damage. Her internal positioning system guided her upright, and she flung her whip into what remained of the monstrosity's bark. She swung toward it, buried Configuration A to the hilt. Tar surged from the wound she left in her wake, and as her boots struck ground she tumbled to avoid it.

Caspian noticed a flicker of light along the cracks, a flicker of movement. He felt a drop on his forehead as if it had started to rain, but he was far beneath cover and the shattered moon hung bright in twilight. He looked closer at that glimmer of movement. Water trickled from cracks in the glass, coursed down the Tree's roots and coalesced into a stream that splattered the pavement with each of the Grimm's jerking movements.

He recalled the last time he fought the form-shifting abomination, how dust was their only hope to harm it. Snow's hard-light blade left wounds that were slow to heal. But the evacuees would arrive any minute. If The Ambassador did too, a pair of corpses would greet the procession. As a Holographic ad for running shoes flashed across the face of a nearby building an idea flickered in his mind– a hail mary, maybe. But it just might work.

The growing puddle splashed beneath pounding footsteps, and he dropped an armed serpent with three beams of dust on his way to the advertisement. He assessed its frame for a second, found the tiny steel box that supplied its power, then jabbed and twisted with Undertow. Midas's grin and the shoe he held blinked out, and Caspian didn't listen to the automated voice that warned him police had been alerted. He caught his finger on a sharp corner, swore and flicked his hand in pain but dug in again, until he plucked his quarry from inside: a neatly cut yellow crystal that made the air around it crackle. An inch long, maybe a third wide, but big enough to fell the colossal demon Snow still contended with.

He'd only ever used hard-light dust in Undertow. But from his crash course in dust circuitry he knew that so long as the crystal fit in place, and all the circuits were meticulously aligned, the flavor of power source mattered little. He pressed in the glowing pad just behind Undertow's trigger, snapped out the hard-light crystal, and slotted in lightning. He clicked the pad back in, and the soft yellow glow down Undertow's barrel and rhythmic hum were promising.

He half-pulled Undertow's trigger. Aimed for the monstrosity's approximation of a head. Narrowed his eyes, corrected his aim for its roots. "Snow, back up!" he shouted. She finished twirling her spear to shield against an onslaught of tendrils, cartwheeled back from a scourge of Blackened liquid, and ran to his side.

Caspian let the bolt fly. It flicked and lashed viciously in a tenth of a second, arcing into the undulating structure of flesh and bone, coursing around it twice before exploding in a flash of light and burst of noise Caspian felt in his chest. A mosquito-buzz scream rumbled his eardrums. The sound of something immense falling– shaking and shattering the pavement. Once Caspian's vision returned the Tree of Death had fallen, and shriveled to half its size.

Absolute Zero flashed to life in Configuration E, and Snow approached again.

Warning: Internal temperature at 80% of emergency shutoff threshold. Proposal: Lower combat capability rating, and limit strenuous activity.

Just a little more.

The flesh facing Snow bulged and split, the newly formed jaw belched sludge. But no Grimm were born from the black hemorrhage, and it began dissolving in grey steam. Tendrils retracted into the slug-like body, squelched and shifted into the shadows of human arms and legs. Another belch, and the abomination lurched forward piteously.

Snow's internal targeting reticle assessed 159 possible targets, and honed in on its right eye. Two hairline fractures webbed from the dark pit– an imperfection suggesting it was approaching its regenerative limit. The tip of her spear and ten inches beyond it impaled the mask. Split off a chunk of it that began to dissolve, and drew another surge of dark sludge. Her eyes flicked to a tentacle coming down at her. To her spear, returning on its hard-light tether. She ran the calculations. Caught her weapon, transformed it, and cleaved the tendril in two with a negligible margin for error. She skipped forward, transformed Absolute Zero into a sword to engage in a full assault. Each strike came from a varied angle, and in the wake of each, 9% less volume regenerated per second.

A bone spear caught the android off guard and stabbed her in the stomach. She tumbled back, EMRF integrity decreased by 12%. But she rolled back to her feet in time to dodge the next spear it launched. It was persistent, with five more attempts. But at 100% combat capability, deflecting each as it came was trivial. And each time she stepped closer, until once again she was within range for Configuration A.

Her next slash cracked the bone mask down the middle– the second shattered it. And she continued her assault, slashing two dozen times in two seconds. Beneath the ruined black surface, an orange glow pulsed. Near-imperceptible at first, but glowed brighter with each slash until she saw the nine inch sphere almost bare. She pulled away from a lazy protest, a swing of the newly-forged arm that cracked concrete. Transforming her weapon to Configuration E, she impaled the Grimm's gleaming heart.

It all went still as she did– gurgling and squelching in place of a scream. Snow pulled, and is if she wrenched the heart from caramel, black sinews attached to it, protesting, trying to suck its core back in. She slammed her speartip into the ground, and the viscous liquid glowing within ruptured across the pavement.

The Grimm sloughed across it, formless ooze within barely contained by rubber skin. And it leaked from the wounds Snow left– slowly, at first. Then within a matter of seconds it was a Blackened Pool that began to fade away.

"Nice, Snow!" Caspian cheered. "I'll be honest, I wasn't fully convinced it was possible to kill that thing."

But increasing distortion muffled Caspian's words. The world went grayscale. Pixelated. Faded.

Snow fell to her knees, then onto her side.

"Snow?" Caspian called out. But the android didn't hear his words.

INTERNAL TEMPERATURE EXCEEDS ACCEPTABLE VALUE. POWERING DOWN.


Lazula paced the length of the windowless airship cabin, hand on her hip, thumb stroking Impetus's crossguard. She felt like she was back in Condor's airship, abducted for tea with the devil himself. The floor of the cabin had shifted at the top of its ascent, as if they turned before leaving Atlas. Due South, by her guess. Toward Vytal. Away from her friends, away from the Grimm, probably away from Port Cyrreine.

At the front of the cabin, a grey slate. She tested the handle. Locked, to no surprise. She slammed her fist into the door. Three times at first, and after seconds of silence, six more. She stepped away a few paces, hands on her head and letting out a breath of frustration. And she stepped to the door, wrung Impetus's hilt, and plunged it into the door handle. There was a tearing, bending, and clashing of steel, and she twisted her blade in the lock mechanism. Bits of it fell to the floor as she planted her boot on the wall and pulled her blade free. She whipped the door open, and its slam into the end of the track shook the cabin.

To the left, the pilot faced ahead. His arms shook with the strain of his grip on the controls. His android copilot stood from the seat on the right to block her path.
"The cockpit is reserved for flight staff only. For the safety of everyone on board, please–"

Her blade through its sternum interrupted the android. Its core erupted in a flash of light that cast burnt blood and oil across the windshield. It went limp. Silent.

"Where are you taking me?" Lazula questioned. She dropped the destroyed android from her blade. It dropped into the pilot's lap for a second before it crumpled to the floor. "And why?"

"I-I'm sorry! It's nothing against you, or– I just–" he shook his head. "There's an airship carrier off the coast of Vytal. I was told to take you there. I wasn't given a reason." He mustered the courage to look up to her, but a crimson-soaked blade at his neck stopped him. "Griswold Baine personally offered me five million lien. I-I'm trying to send my daughter through college, and–"

"Have you thought about this for a second?" Lazula snapped. "You heard the announcement. If you don't drop me in Port Cyrreine, your daughter, your wife, or your husband, everyone you love is going to be archived. There won't be a college to send her to!" She looked out the windshield, into the rolling black expanse below. "Ten million if you land in Port Cyrreine. Make it twenty. And you'll be alive to watch her graduate. Not a bad deal, if you ask me."

She noticed tears at the corner of his eyes. Thought for a second she'd been too harsh. But with the world on the line, she renewed her grip.

"...If he realizes I'm headed for Port Cyrreine, he'll shoot me down." He shook his head. "Once we make it to the aircraft carrier, we'll take another airship. One that isn't tracked. And I'll land you at the docks, about a mile away. Does that work?"

"A Barricuda-Class, or we won't get there on time." She sat in the copilot's seat, wiping the android's blood from Impetus. "And don't try to pull anything, okay? I bet I could survive an airship crash. I wouldn't expect you to."

"...Yes, ma'am."


The inner deck of the Kestrel-Class Speedliner felt empty under white light. Dozens of rows of seats in the middle of it sat vacant. And along windows that showed the deep purple sky, only one booth was occupied by the unwilling, unprepared saviors of mankind. Apart from the roar of engines deep below deck they sat in uneasy silence as if leaving their collective anxiety unspoken would stop it from taking form.

Lilly paced beside the booth. Looked out to the ripples reflecting moonlight and indigo, then to the huntsmen before them. "...I know we're all a bit stressed out right now. Myself included," she said. "Let's just… pull back, and take stock of our situation."

They remained silent, but welcomed her words.

"As of right now, we're headed back to Port Cyrreine. CCTS is down, but once we're there the local transmission should work properly and we'll be able to speak to the Headmaster regarding our next steps."

Facing away in the bordering booth, Ichigo raised his hand. "And I'm trying to reboot a local connection here, so we can figure out where everyone is."

Lilly nodded. "Thank you. Caspian and Snow were supposed to rendezvous with us at the docks, but they didn't show." She sighed. "Neither did Lazula. Worst case scenario, they've been… compromised. And Snow won't be able to reverse The Apoptosis Project. Frankly, I don't know what options we would have left in that situation."

Noxis knocked his head on the back of his seat. "We'd be shit out of luck."

Laurel scoffed. "Probably." The cabin fell silent for seconds after. Gallows humor, but the rope was tightening.

Rowan pursed his lips. "Snow seems important, so she makes sense. Why would they go after Lazula? Or Caspian?"

"Condor specifically structured his plans to avoid Lazula whenever possible," Noxis noted. "Until he wanted to meet her, at least. It wouldn't surprise me if Frontline is doing the same." He shrugged. "Caspian probably just got caught up in it all."

Moka's head slumped against the window. "Wrong place, wrong time," she muttered, and her sigh clouded the glass.

Lilly watched the sigh evaporate, bit her lip, but she balled a fist. "We have to remind ourselves who we had to leave behind. Lazula. Caspian, and Snow. They're all incredible. Whatever's gone wrong, they'll be okay. We have to trust in that."

"And in me!" Ichigo chimed in. "I think we're back online."


"Snow?" And Caspian was at her side, propping her head up and checking for injuries. Nothing on the surface, but she was hot to the touch. He lowered an ear toward her chest, heard the whir of her core far louder than usual. He looked up, and though the main threat had passed, a pair of tentacled Sabyrs approached, and an imp passed overhead.

He opened his Holoband. Though CCTS had gone down, the internet still worked. He typed in half a search, shot down an imp then completed it.

[What to do when your android overheats?]

"Unfortunately, there is no way to reboot your android once overheated, aside from Frontline Biomedical's forced reboot stations. On the bright side, unless exposed to extreme heat or prolonged exertion, the chance of an android overheating is low."

"Of course," Caspian muttered, and he dropped another imp. He knelt down, and took a minute or so to hoist Snow onto his back. He bent her arms around his neck and they stayed in position– he decided it reminded him of an artist posing their mannequin, instead of rigor mortis. After bending her knees into position next to his side he paused with a thought, opened his Holoband again, and clicked the Quickstagram icon. The CCTS was down, but if the internet worked, the messaging system should still be intact.

But he cursed under his breath, because that too had failed.

He glanced around, for a reboot station, for evacuees that would have difficult questions about the out-of-uniform android overheating on his back, for the Ambassador. He found none. But at the docks, a quarter mile away and a couple hundred feet down, Frontline Biomedical's logo adorned the bridge of a Speedliner ferry.

Caspian made his way down, slinked his way past Grimm tearing through the streets, dropping the unlucky few to notice him with bullets of dust. The ship that sat next to an abandoned warehouse was quiet– eerily so. And all the windows aboard were blacked out. He didn't like anything about his situation. He'd be creeped out even if Frontline wasn't just revealed to be plotting the effective end of humanity.

Caspian sighed. Bumped Snow further up on his back. And as he made his way up the gangplank, Midas peered out from the warehouse door. Black eyes flicked to each side, and he followed the huntsman in.