It was not yet afternoon when the students pulled into the driveway of Lanara's home, situated outside of the radiation-soaked area that had once been Los Angeles. It had been subject to nuclear weapons via the rogue host Daigo Yashukure, whose non-lethal arrest and later escape led to the creation of Urasaria Academy students' legal immunity, and general obligation to murder.
Mia had asked if they could go sight-seeing through it afterwards; hosts are immune to radiation.
Aimee knocked at the front door to Lanara's home, and the two-headed student Dmitri answered. "Finally here."
"Finally here." he said, leading them down the hall and inside. It was a small house, and a woman was in the kitchen cooking. A man was sitting at the table.
"Where's Lanara?" said Makoto.
"Sleeping, probably. She doesn't leave her room much." said Dmitri.
"I'll go get her." nodded the man and went further down the hall.
The woman introduced herself as Lanara's mother and continued cooking. "I'm so glad you were finally able to get here. Sit tight and I'll make you some lunch before you go."
"Works for me." said Aimee. The students sat down at the dining room table. "Did you ever have any electric tendrils show up here?"
"Nope, nothing like that." said Dmitri. "But that reminds me - don't be too violent around Lanara. My dear esteemed other head vomited something on a host in front of her, and she responded in kind onto my shirt."
"Matoi probably would've said she needed to toughen up." said Aimee.
"Maybe it's a good thing she isn't here." said Makoto.
"She's either going to be student-president in a few years or she'll have killed every rogue host on the planet by that point."
"You better still be leading in the rankings for next year." muttered Mia, stroking her butch's arm.
"Uh, Aimee got all of her shit done last year, she's like 200 kills ahead of anyone else at this point." said Makoto. "Must be nice."
"Yeah, for all the shit Nuiko gave you for it." said Marisa. "I mean, I get being bitter, but didn't you offer the bitch vice-presidency?"
Aimee sighed. "I offered her a spot in my squadron, one, and then she goes and says I offered her a consolation prize - I mean, fuck, I try with her, but there's a reason her only friend is Jeanne."
"Uh, are they still friends?"
Aimee frowned; she had not seen them together around campus lately. She had known of issues Jeanne was having with her protege Kirihara, yet eventually Jeanne had stopped speaking of any problems; thus Aimee assumed she no longer had any. "Can't imagine the comas she's been going into wouldn't affect that."
"The ones her Revenant puts her into?" said Mia. "She still hasn't had that diagnosed?"
"Who's she going to get to diagnose it?" said Makoto. "Hirogane does surgeries, not diagnoses."
"Knowing Jeanne, she'd have it diagnosed if she could send it off to an energy healer." said Marisa. "She's all woo-woo. Super metaphysical."
"Because there's nothing metaphysical about a swarm of scarabs creating ice and fire and lightning and metal." muttered Mia. "Or inheriting someone else's skill in melee."
"You can burn a host to death and prove that shit's real, though. Crystals don't do shit." said Makoto.
Lanara's mother served them lunch ten minutes later, at which point a teenage girl, a minor by her appearance, came out of the hallway with her father and introduced herself as Lanara. Had they not already been introduced as Lanara's parents, Mia would have assumed they were not related: Lanara did not look much like them.
"Are you the Urasaria students?" said Lanara.
"That's us." nodded Aimee. "Are you hungry? We're just eating before we go to get your Revenant removed. It doesn't require you to fast, so."
"Um, I guess."
Lanara ate little, and Aimee updated their government contact with their location before they left with her. Dmitri and Atori stayed behind to protect her parents if needed. Aimee and Mia sat in the front of their vehicle, Marisa and Makoto and Lanara behind.
Aimee spoke as she pulled out of the driveway. "So, just to let you know what we'll do - it shouldn't take us more than an hour to get to the facility. We'll keep you safe, get your Revenant removed, send it off to storage for someone else, if they want it. Sorry that you've been having to go through all of this."
"Can you tell us what your ability is?" said Mia. "I'm just... curious."
Lanara nodded. "I can manipulate the frequency of liquid, sort of. It's hard to explain, um... Like, I can send out a shockwave of sound from a glass of water. Stuff like that. I could knock someone out with it."
"And you're certain you don't want Urasaria?"
"I'm sure she's given it a lot of thought after seeing up close what we do." said Aimee. "It's alright."
Lanara did not speak for a while. Yet there was an odd resentment Mia held of Lanara that she could not recognize the origin of, but for that her rejection of Urasaria almost seemed to stab at Mia's great acceptance and desire of it. She increasingly over the years identified herself further with her academy, though not for any delusional reason; Urasaria was her profession, but also where her closest friendships and relationship had been formed; she could not hear an insult towards it without feeling some strange root within her flesh curl up as well.
Eventually they came upon the long road which led to the Revenant removal facility, though they were not yet there. It was flanked by the desert, infrequently used and with few signs around, but for a few roads that might have led back to civilization.
There was a mountain of a white man waiting on the side of the road, and Aimee saw the cyst on his neck. Mei had healed his amputation. Rider's tendrils went taut, and time itself slowed twice, thrice, decimated until one second of Aimee's time equaled a tenth of everyone else's.
She stepped out of the car and rushed at him with a speed that to normal eyes would approach six hundred miles per hour, all others caught in slowness of a disturbed pond, until at unabated speed he snapped his head back towards her. "I wondered who it was I felt stalking in the bush."
Rider's tendrils went taut; time folded over itself once more. A twentieth of a second for every second of Aimee's. "Either you've got a hell of a reaction time or you're immune to chronodilation."
"Rider: Blue tendrils bursting from the small wrists of a small muscular frame. Acceleration and deceleration of time. A rudimentary Revenant."
"There's six hundred hosts that would disagree with you if they could."
"Six or sixty or six hundred or six thousand. It doesn't matter. You're all the same host to me. Do you think that because you have a badge and the state behind you that you're special? Don't make me laugh."
As time resumed, the vehicle continued forward; Aimee made a small wave to Mia in the rearview mirror and it continued on with a new driver.
She saw the glint of a sniper's scope over some arid cliff a mile away, and Eternity laughed as her fingers pinched and crushed a bullet intended for her. "Guessing he doesn't have much now that Ten-Mile is dead." she said. "How many hosts from Ningsing are left? Or did you think we wouldn't figure that out?"
"Why the fuck would I care? Yujin, Lao, Wenxuen, Mei, Zhong, Fenhia, a few others. A group of idiots who caused their own problems and died for it. I never expected any of them to succeed and they were delusional for thinking they could."
"Fenhia was a student-president at Ningsing once, no? He's a long way from home."
"Back when China thought his stupid straw hats could transport anyone more than a few miles. They thought that they'd be sending that fuck to Africa, drop a few straw hats, set up portals all around the planet. He's related to some party official, probably why he was chosen as student-president to begin with. Doesn't matter the country - everywhere is about who you blow. Scandals, sick shit, affairs - all that shit that would've made anyone else's life hell got swallowed up by his prestige. I laughed when I found out that little fuck got assigned with me. He's in a position that he never developed the stomach to endure or the nose to staunch the bleedings that come from climbing out of it. I dared the pussy to defect once, but he's too loyal. Made me wonder if it's worse to have a memory that you want or one that you don't."
"What about you? Doubt you were born there. The hell made you join Ningsing instead of Urasaria?"
"Two students dead in Cromwell, two years ago."
"Never even heard of that."
"It was a first-year student. His friend... or whatever she was... wasn't supposed to have shown up. Damn, if he had actually fucking been where they told me he would be..."
"The hell does that mean?"
"What the fuck difference does telling you all of it make? What happened happened. But somebody from China approached me and threatened to kill me if I didn't defect. Those communist motherfuckers solved the case quicker than we did."
"So, now what? You think if you kill me then they'll give you a fucking promotion back home?"
"I never needed a promise of wealth and I wouldn't believe one if it were offered." His neck craned back, as if tugged, and he slammed his palm upon his cyst. "T-These infections... stubborn cunt. She's disciplined, I'll give her that, b-but I'd enjoy making her feel what the fuck it's like to have your inhibition gone, your thoughts pulled around by someone who won't even come down here herself. Eternity!"
He was thirty feet away from her, and the sands around Aimee began to swirl as if pulled, and she backed away as a hellish onslaught of tornados began in an instant; something pulled the sand into a storm up and around her, veiled so thickly that she could no longer see her foe; a dart from Mei shot into the vortex and towards her, but Rider activated into a zone of slowed time around herself - she knew that neither she nor Eternity could access the full extent of their Revenants' strength currently.
Tentatively as the dart flew at her, she parried it with her knife into the dirt; time paused completely as Eternity burst out from the sandstorm around her and at her, yet withdraw in an instant upon realizing the dart had not landed; again the tornadoes veiled him and began all around, continuing to swirl as if beneath her was a gravitational well.
There was a deep pile of techniques that she had not needed to reach into for years, yet had continued to review monthly if she ever encountered a host like this. She recalled how she had entered it upon her Urasaria registration:
[Rider: Creation of accelerated & decelerated zones of time.]
She had rose rapidly in her second-year once it had begun being able to affect herself and others; thus she had felt that her presidency was due to luck rather than skill.
As the sands continued around her, she knew she would be struck eventually if she stayed here; she saw within the hellish storm a mixture of bullets that Vortex had peppered into it, and so she could not rush out directly; she muttered: "Now it's a fair fight."
Rider's tendrils went taut and a bubble of accelerated time formed around her, overlaid by a second bubble of slowed time; she clapped and clapped until the immense speed of her hands built up a pressure, dammed at the edges of accelerated & slowed time, until the zones dissipated and sent out a shockwave that blasted clear through the sands and she rushed back out to the road, clear of sight ahead, turning only to hear Eternity say: "-fucking shit, what the fuck was that-"
Another dart from Mei shot at her and Aimee went to parry it with her knife; yet time stopped and all projectiles froze, Vortex's bullets still landing within the sandstorm that Eternity now strode out of; she recognized now how uncoordinated these hosts truly were. She could move in this paused world and sliced through the dart, glancing down to see Rider's tendrils; formed of millions upon millions upon millions of microscopic clocks; continue to accelerate; creating the time necessary for her to be able to move in a world temporarily stripped of it.
"All this so your little girlfriend can get her fucking Revenant removed." he muttered as they came 20ft within each other.
A zone of accelerated time formed under Aimee's feet as Rider's tendrils burrowed behind her legs, slowing underground, and when she stomped down and time resumed the pressure shot a fissure through the road and a jet of pressure upward that sliced clear through half of his left arm; he staggered as he rushed at her, and as she raised her knife, she felt a gravitational force pull and yank it out from her hand and into the sands aside; she swept left in time to dodge his forward punch, unarmed but catching her feet underneath herself quickly.
He lunged at her and she dodged, landing a blow to the back of his skull that staggered him; he swept his massive arm back and knocked her away & to the ground, and if she didn't keep rolling then his stomp would've broken her arm. Stumbling to her feet again, she caught a punch to her elbow that nearly bent it how it shouldn't; a second one almost landed, but Rider's tendrils extended and shot into his eyes, gouging; he staggered long enough for her to double overhand bash him in the head and send him reeling, his closed eyes losing sight of her for a second as she jumped on his back; Rider's tendrils ripped and tore at his eyes from behind, drilling into whatever she felt and trying to avoid his murderous grip; she grabbed the cyst upon his neck, and when he finally bucked her off, she took the cyst with her as she hit the road rolling & scraped & rolled for dozens of feet up the road, a dart missing overhead of her, Mei's voice barely audible within the cyst; she crushed it, got to her feet, and saw Eternity rushing at her again, his eyes bleeding but enough sight to fight.
She heard behind herself a car approaching, and by the time she glanced back, it was flying towards her as if gravitationally pulled; Rider's tendrils extended and decayed it as the civilian driver flew past her; Eternity was in melee range now, and as he lurched to tackle her, the next scene was instant.
Rider's tendrils accelerated pieces of her Urasaria badge into decay and sharpened it to a fine point; she gripped and pulled and stabbed clear through his chest, his momentum pressing him further upon the sudden blade as a bloody gasp gurgled in his throat; she slashed through his chest and Mei's dart hit her for a moment; her Revenant fizzled for a second, but Eternity was in too much pain to capitalize as they both stumbled away, Aimee ripping the stubborn projectile out and Rider returning.
"F-Fuck that cheating cunt." he grunted. "M-Motherfucker doesn't view this shit with any honor or respect. She's j-just a fucking professional killer."
Aimee tried to stagger further back, but the asphalt of the road kept her in its pull; she was glued in place, and before she could react, her improvised knife was similarly pulled away into the sands like the last, burying it deeply enough that even a decay & search could not reveal it quickly.
Eternity circled her warily, Rider's tendrils slithering over her vest; she could not think of another improvised weapon to make; by virtue of their differing weights he could outpower her. Sensing this, he rushed at her and a gust of sand swept across her eyes to blind her; but her accelerated feet shifted to combust the road and a geyser of flame shot down the road and towards him, the scent of his burning skin telling her that her mark hit as she decayed the sand from her eyes and saw Eternity lit aflame and staggering.
Another dart shot into his neck and the cyst within it infected him once more, a shout of Mandarin from Mei entering his consciousness as pain seemed to melt from him; he could no longer buck away her commands, and he rushed at Aimee, still aflame and his chest wound dripping; Aimee grabbed his fist and her hand nearly shattered for the effort, but an accelerated bit of air pressure shot into his chest wound and caused an embolism that weakened him for an instant; she heard the slice of a dart through air and pulled his arm into the projectile; his Revenant wilted for a moment; and in that instant that she was the singular maiden of time, Rider's tendrils went taut and a single punch at full strength exploded him into a shower of gore & guts & entrails.
That was all.
As his mangled pieces blasted out in every direction, she felt irked by his calling Rider a rudimentary Revenant. She waited until 5.99999 seconds had passed to finish saying the name of Rider's Symbiosis ability: "Time Spiral." Time itself rewound six seconds, exempting Aimee, as she awaited the dart, parried it into him, drove her fist into his skull and he blasted into mangled pieces once again with finality.
That was truly all.