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DATE:29th of August, the 70th year after the Coronation
LOCATION: Concord Metropolis
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I went to Pamela and crouched over her to see if she was dead.
She was on her side, curled into herself, one hand pressed weakly against the hole in her chest. Blood pooled beneath her—dark, viscous, spreading across the concrete in a slow halo. Her breathing was shallow, rattling in her throat like gravel in a tin can.
Not dead yet. Close, though.
"When are you going to get up?" I asked.
Her eyes opened—barely, just slits—and focused on me with difficulty. Her lips moved, forming words that took too long to reach the air.
"Call... an ambulance," she rasped.
I shook my head. "None would come to such a devastated sector. You saw the neighborhood. Emergency services don't waste resources on places like this."
She tried to say something else, but it came out as a wet cough. Blood flecked her lips.
I tilted my head, studying the wound. The stone hand had punched clean through—front to back, missing her heart by maybe two inches. Lucky. If he'd aimed center-mass, she'd already be gone.
"Why aren't you using your powers to inflate?" I asked, unable to keep the mockery from my tone.
Her eyes flickered with something—shame? Fear? She looked away, staring at nothing.
"Why..." she managed, voice discouraged, barely audible. "Why is that... what you focus on? Not that I... decided to save you?"
I scoffed. "That line of thinking is too pompous for someone like you."
She blinked, confusion mixing with the pain etched across her face.
"You didn't save me," I continued, standing. "You got in the way. There's a difference."
"I—"
I raised my foot and kicked her in the side of her chest.
Not hard. Not yet. Just enough to shift her weight, to make the wound scream.
She screamed—surprisingly vocal, high and sharp, echoing off the warehouse walls.
"Activate your powers," I said flatly.
"I... I can't—"
I kicked her again. Harder this time. My boot connected with her ribs, driving the air from her lungs.
"I can't!" she shrieked, arms coming up defensively.
"Can't?" I asked. "Or won't?"
She didn't answer. Just curled tighter, sobbing now, tears finally breaking free.
The next kick I delivered from above, turning her over and crushing her sternum.
My heel came down with my full weight behind it. I felt something crack beneath the sole—bone giving way, cartilage compressing. Her body convulsed beneath my foot.
She gargled, choking on blood, hands scrabbling weakly at my ankle. "Stop—please—stop—"
I didn't.
Instead, I leaned forward, putting more pressure onto it.
Her eyes bulged. Her mouth opened in a silent scream, no air left to give it voice.
"I didn't need any more burdens on my hands," I said, voice cold and even. "I didn't trade one bitch for another."
She looked up at me as I applied more pressure—her face twisted in agony, but beneath it something else was forming. Not just pain. Not just fear.
Understanding.
Her eyes went wide.
She had gone silent. Not even a struggle. No tears escaped her eyes anymore.
Just... stillness. Realization settling like frost.
I couldn't tell if it was simply a scare, or...
No. I think she finally understood.
She'd been under the impression that there was some kind of friendship between us. That our arrangement, our interactions, the way I'd freed her from her ghost prison—that any of it mattered beyond utility.
That she actually mattered to me.
She'd seen how I reacted all those times—the violence, the cruelty, the casual dismissal of others' suffering—and she'd thought it was performative. A defense mechanism. Something I did to push people away but didn't really mean.
Only now did she realize it wasn't a joke.
Better late than never.
I spit on her face.
The saliva landed across her cheek, sliding down toward her ear. She didn't move to wipe it away. Just stared up at me with those wide, hollow eyes.
I saw her lip tremble. A sparkle in her eyes—wet, bright, catching the warehouse's fluorescent lighting.
It was anger.
Not the hot, explosive kind. The cold kind. The kind that calcified into something permanent. Something that didn't forgive.
Good.
"Now," I said, removing my foot from her chest. "Use your powers. Inflate. Heal. Whatever it is you do. Or bleed out here. I don't care which."
She sucked in a ragged breath, wincing as her broken ribs shifted. Her hands trembled as she pressed them against the wound in her chest.
And then—slowly, painfully—her body began to change.
I could hear her inflate even through the foot. It was like her cells were drawing in the air.
The sound was obscene—organic, wet, like lungs expanding beyond their natural limit. But it wasn't just air filling empty space. It was something else. Something denser.
Yet that wasn't some kind of false bloat.
It was real flesh.
Fat-like flesh covered her cells and expanded outward in waves, rippling across her body like water disturbed by a stone. Her arms thickened. Her legs swelled. Her torso ballooned beneath my foot, lifting it inch by inch until I had to compensate for the shifting ground.
She grew in size, and I raised my foot to the side, stepping off before I lost my balance entirely.
The fat even covered her wound entirely.
The gaping hole in her chest—the one that should've killed her—sealed itself as the tissue spread. It didn't heal cleanly, didn't knit back together. It just... filled. Like pouring cement into a crack. The fat both filled the wound inside and covered it outside, creating a smooth, unbroken surface where there'd been torn muscle and shattered bone moments before.
The clothes on her body ripped on all sides, flashing me with a horrid sight.
The shorts and t-shirt exploded—shoulders, sides, hem—shredding like tissue paper. The fabric couldn't contain the expansion. What remained hung in tatters, barely covering anything, exposing rolls of pale flesh that jiggled with each movement.
Pamela's ugly mug from when she was just a puppet came back.
Gone was the slender woman with the grief-stricken eyes. In her place stood the corpulent nightmare I'd first met—wide frame, thick limbs, face bloated until her features almost disappeared into the mass. But this time, the expression was different.
Back with the same anger.
Her eyes burned. Her mouth twisted into a snarl. Every ounce of hurt, humiliation, and rage I'd inflicted on her was written across that face in brutal clarity.
She jumped at me.
Fast. Too fast for someone her size.
I kicked her in the head in a spinning motion as she was raising, putting my full weight into the strike. My boot connected with her temple—
Nothing.
Her face took the hit like a cushion. Like kicking memory foam. The impact absorbed into the fat, dispersing harmlessly, and she barely even flinched.
She kept coming.
I stepped back before she could grab my leg, pivoting on my heel. Then I dashed toward the blade lying near Crater's blood pool, snatching it up in one smooth motion.
I spun, slashing horizontally at her midsection as she charged.
Still nothing.
The blade bit into the fat—maybe half an inch—then stopped. Stuck. The flesh closed around it like quicksand, holding it in place. I yanked it free, but the wound was already sealing.
She lunged again. I sidestepped, narrowly avoiding her grasping hands. She was slower than me—barely—but not by much. And every time I landed a hit, it did nothing. She was a walking fortress of blubber and fury.
I could dodge her attempts at a grapple, but this wasn't going anywhere.
And I was also injured, so my time was running low.
My ribs throbbed with every breath. My wrist—possibly fractured from the Albion agent's strike—sent jolts of pain up my arm every time I gripped the sword. Blood loss, exhaustion, ventium damage still healing—it was all catching up.
I needed to end this. Fast.
"You know," I said, circling her, keeping my distance, "You're like that story from Helvetia… the Beauty and the Beast?"
I flashed a mocking grin.
She responded with only a screech—guttural, inhuman, vibrating with pure hatred.
Then, as I dodged her hand and slipped on a patch of blood, I used her leg as a trampoline to create distance.
My boot pressed against her thigh—soft, yielding—and I pushed off, launching myself backward in a spin. I landed several meters away, blade raised defensively.
"Actually," I added, still smiling, "that's not really right. You're more like the ugly bastard and the bitch."
She stopped.
Her hands clenched into fists, nails digging into her palms. Her entire body trembled—not from exertion, from rage barely contained.
I used the time to grab the gun I'd dropped earlier, checking the chamber. Still loaded. A few rounds left.
I raised it and started shooting into her eyes.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
I was almost amused.
Even her pupils had that fat-like coating. The bullets struck the surface—eyes that should've burst, retinas that should've torn—and deflected. Not harmlessly, but close enough. Like shooting at a blob of gelatin. The rounds embedded themselves shallow, then squeezed back out as the tissue compressed and expanded.
She didn't even blink.
She arched her legs as if she was going to jump.
Oh, shit.
I tried to breathe in to activate my ability—
But she dashed with a speed above my reaction, pinning me to the ground.
The wind was knocked from my lungs instantly. My back hit concrete—again—and this time her full weight came down on top of me. Crushing. Suffocating. Like being buried under a landslide of flesh.
I tried to squirm away, to push her off, but it was like fighting quicksand. My hands sank into her sides, finding no purchase, no leverage.
She raised me by the collar, lifting my upper body off the ground—
And slammed me back down into the disheveled floor of the devastated warehouse.
My skull cracked against concrete. Stars exploded behind my eyes. Pain lanced through my spine.
She did it again. And again.
Then she started strangling me with both hands.
Her fingers wrapped around my throat—thick, immovable, tightening like a vice. My airway collapsed. I clawed at her wrists, nails scraping uselessly against the fat, drawing no blood, causing no pain.
I wasn't scared.
Strange. I should've been. Staring up at her rage-twisted face, feeling my vision darken at the edges, oxygen deprivation setting in—this was death approaching. Clear. Inevitable.
But I wasn't afraid.
I felt strange to find myself in this position. I guess heroes are just built different. Actually, after all this time, just how many of them did I manage to take down without an ambush? One? Two perhaps?
I was Helpless. Pinned. At someone else's mercy for once.
It was... almost nostalgic.
How many times had I been here before? Different hands around my throat. Different faces staring down with hatred. Different reasons, same outcome.
I'd always gotten out before. Through luck, through cruelty, through sheer stubbornness.
Would I this time?
My hands stopped clawing. They went limp at my sides.
I stared up at her, vision tunneling, and waited to see what would happen next.
I wasn't feeling anything particular. I gave her a bored look.
Just flat. Empty. Staring up at her contorted face like I was watching paint dry. No fear. No anger. Not even annoyance anymore. Just... nothing.
She didn't seem to like it as she upped the pressure.
Her fingers dug deeper, crushing my windpipe completely. The world started to blur at the edges—colors bleeding together, sounds becoming distant and muffled. My heart hammered against my ribs, desperate, futile.
I felt myself slipping away, but I didn't move a muscle.
Let her be. She "won."
If this was how it ended—strangled by a fat ghost wearing stolen flesh in a blood-soaked warehouse—so be it. I'd had worse deaths. Probably.
But she stopped.
The pressure eased. Not completely—her hands were still there, still wrapped around my throat—but the killing intent wavered.
Did I not give her enough satisfaction for a kill?
Or... it was actually the opposite.
I looked into her eyes and I saw hesitation.
There it was. That flicker of doubt. The moment where rage met reality and flinched.
She wanted to kill me. She wanted it desperately. Every ounce of humiliation I'd piled on her demanded it.
But she couldn't.
Yeah, thinking about it, it was funny.
This ghost suffered so much, yet couldn't muster the anger to try to kill her murderer, Zilliam. She'd left her alone and instead cried in a garden for twenty years, clinging to a puppet husband whose name she couldn't even remember.
How could such a creature end "my" life?
What did I even do to her compared to Zilliam? Beat her a little? Kicked her ribs in? Spit on her face?
What a joke.
The absurdity of it hit me all at once, and I used whatever air I had left to start screeching.
Laughing. Any sound that I could make in that position.
It came out strangled, broken—half-choked giggles that rattled in my compressed throat. But it was genuine. If I was going to die, I may as well go down laughing.
If I died here, then I was strong enough to corrupt even a girl who didn't want to hurt her murderer. Isn't that a badge of honor?
Alice became like that through her own dementia—her paranoia, her isolation, her fragile mind shattering under pressure. But this? This was my doing. I was the architect.
To think that the girl I took her most precious person from forgave me, and this loser I kicked and punched a little decided to take my life.
What was more amusing than that?
She let go of my throat and started punching me.
Her fists rained down—face, chest, shoulders. Each impact cushioned by the fat coating her knuckles, but still heavy enough to hurt. My head snapped side to side. Blood filled my mouth.
It didn't stop me from laughing.
If anything, it made it worse. The sound bubbled up uncontrollably, spilling out between blows, echoing off the warehouse walls.
"How—how can you even be called human?!" she screamed, gargled and distorted.
She had a hard time talking with all that fat surrounding her lips, cheeks, and tongue. It was like she was the strangled one, not me. The words came out thick and wet, barely intelligible.
I spat blood to the side, still grinning. "Who exactly are you talking to? Not yourself?"
"What?" She froze mid-punch, confusion cutting through the rage.
"Are you even human?" I asked, tilting my head despite the pain. "Seeing ghosts or whatever you claim is a sign that your soul doesn't cling to life. It wants to move on. Simply being a ghost doesn't give you divine eyes that shamans or clerics have..."
I paused, letting the words sink in.
"You are an actual dead soul inhabiting a living body."
Her fist hovered in the air, trembling.
"And what are you then?" she demanded, voice breaking.
"Obviously a living soul if I don't see spirits."
"You're a ghoul!" she shrieked, slamming both fists down on my chest. "An abomination against the living! How dare you!"
"How dare I?"
I laughed again—darker this time, colder.
"I ask you, Pamela, who is more human? A dead soul inhabiting a living body, or a living soul inhabiting a dead body?"
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"Obviously..." she started, then stopped.
"Obviously what?" I pressed, watching her struggle. "Go ahead. Answer."
The question slowed her thoughts. Trapped her.
To even answer it would mean to accept that she was still dead. That the body she was wearing—even if it was hers decades ago—was just a costume. That she was the intruder. The parasite. It almost lived more without her, so how could it ever be hers again?
That between the two of us, I was closer to human than she'd ever be again.
"Exactly," I said, smiling through bloodied teeth. "That's what I thought."
She growled—low, animalistic—and grabbed my throat again, strangling me with renewed fury.
But the hesitation was still there.
I could see it in her eyes.
She'd already lost.
"Do it. I won't stop you. I'm actually curious to see who will be more tortured between us in the aftermath." It's time to see if ghosts really hunt her.
I didn't even struggle. It wasn't like this was going to do anything.
Her grip was weakening already. I could feel it—the pressure fluctuating, her fingers trembling against my throat. She wanted me dead, but wanting and doing were different animals entirely.
But she couldn't do it.
With tears streaming down her face, with a face that not even a mother would love, Pamela let go of my throat and fell to my side, sobbing.
The sound was pathetic. Raw, broken wails that echoed through the warehouse, mixing with the distant drip of blood pooling somewhere in the darkness. Her massive frame shook with each sob, rolls of flesh jiggling obscenely.
I clicked my tongue, almost disappointed.
I rolled onto my side, coughing, rubbing my throat where bruises were already forming. The skin felt tender, swollen. I'd be hoarse for days.
I was already bored.
This intervention was a bust anyway. Crater was gone. The Albion agent had teleported him out before I could extract anything useful. Emily's location was still a mystery. And now I was stuck in a warehouse full of corpses with a crying ghost-woman who couldn't even commit to murder.
Surely Deus had some kind of device to operate on Crater. Extract information. Track him. Something.
I couldn't deal with a teleporter alone. Not without preparation. Not without resources.
I pulled out my phone and called Mike.
The line rang twice before he picked up.
"Carter," his gravelly voice came through. "What's wrong?"
"Need extraction," I said, voice rough. "And probably medical consultation. Can you get here?"
A pause. "Where's here?"
I rattled off the address Pamela had given me earlier. The industrial sector coordinates.
"Give me five minutes."
The call ended.
I pocketed the phone and leaned back against a crate, ignoring the blood soaking through my clothes. My ribs throbbed. My wrist was definitely fractured. And my throat felt like I'd swallowed broken glass.
But I was alive.
For now.
He teleported in front of me after a short time.
The air shimmered, reality bending briefly, and then Mike was there—not in military equipment, but civilian clothes. Dark jacket, jeans, boots. But his posture was tense, ready. Hand hovering near his concealed sidearm.
He scanned the warehouse in seconds—the bodies, the blood, the concrete pillars jutting from the floor. Then his eyes landed on Pamela.
"Who's the woman on the ground?" he asked, voice carefully neutral.
I started laughing—couldn't help it. The absurdity of the question after everything.
"Another one of the corpses clinging to me," I said, gesturing dismissively at her sobbing form.
I didn't even bother to hide my tone. The mockery. The contempt. So much that I sensed disgust even from Mike.
His expression shifted—just slightly, a tightening around his eyes, a downward turn of his mouth.
I certainly would be disgusted if I saw that naked abomination lying there, all rolls and tears and self-pity.
But I had the impression that it wasn't what he was thinking of.
His disgust wasn't aimed at her appearance. It was aimed at me.
Whatever. Not my problem.
"I met a remnant of Sayahara's little Time Bureau," I said, pushing off the crate and standing despite the pain. "Gray hair, could turn his body into stone, could also move in my stopped time. Ring any bells?"
Mike's jaw tightened. "Minerva."
"Exactly. A relative apparently. And he was probably working for Deus. Teleported out with another hero—Crater, earth manipulator. Crater took Emily, or at least they know where she is. Either in hacker's possession or the Combine's."
"Stop," Mike said, raising a hand. "Stop there."
I frowned. "What?"
"First, explain your state." He pointed at me—at the burns still healing on my arms, the scars crisscrossing my exposed skin, the blood soaking my shirt. "What the hell happened to you?"
I glanced down at myself. Right. I looked like I'd been through a meat grinder.
"Ventium explosion," I said simply. "When I was fighting the Necromancer."
Mike blinked. "The Necromancer?"
I scoffed. "Long story."
"Zaun—"
"Later," I cut him off, turning toward Pamela. "We have more immediate problems."
I walked over to where she lay, still curled on her side, tears still streaming silently.
"Will you start bleeding again after you deflate?" I asked, unconcerned with our earlier incident.
She didn't look at me. Just stared at the floor, voice hollow. "I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"I don't want to use this power," she whispered. "I've always avoided it."
I felt my jaw clench. "I care about strength, not pathetic 'avoidance.' If you're not going to use your potential to help me, then our relationship is done."
She raised her fist upward—trembling, weak—then gave up and lowered it back to the ground.
Still lying there, she said quietly, "I don't care anymore."
"Then kill yourself," I said flatly, "and spare me the cries."
Silence.
Mike shifted behind me, boots scraping against concrete. I could feel his eyes boring into the back of my skull.
"Mike," I said, turning away from Pamela. "Teleport both of us out of here."
"Hold on," he said, voice tight. "Who is Pamela? Actually explain."
I sighed, rubbing the bridge of my nose. "She's a loser. Had her spirit ripped out of her body by the Dean of the Hero Academy twenty years ago. The one I took out, remember? Left to wander as a ghost while her body moved on its own."
Mike's expression darkened.
"I recently freed her," I continued, "so that she would help me find my contractor."
"Contractor?" Mike asked, brow furrowing.
I met his eyes. "My soul is owned by someone. I want to break the contract."
Mike was stunned.
He just stared at me for a long moment, processing. His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"Your soul is..." He trailed off, shaking his head. "Heavenly Savior, Carter."
"I suppose a lot happened since we last met," I said dryly.
That was an understatement.
"We should leave her," I said, nodding toward Pamela's sobbing form.
Mike shook his head. "That's not right."
I laughed—sharp, bitter. "How rich, coming from you. You called out my 'change of heart' months ago, remember? Now you're suddenly the moral compass?"
"I did say that," Mike admitted, jaw tight. "But this is different."
"How so?" I asked, genuinely curious which flavor of hypocrisy I was getting today.
He gestured at Pamela, struggling for words. "You used to be pragmatic, not heartless—"
Then he stopped. Realized what he'd said. His hand came up to cover his face, rubbing his eyes like he could scrub away the contradiction.
"Fuck," he muttered. "You're right. This is in character, isn't it?"
I grinned, feeling vindicated. "And she's a hero, too. Part of that subspecies you hate so much."
He didn't immediately rise to the bait. His eyes drifted back to Pamela—still on the floor, still deflated, staring at nothing.
"That's not exactly accurate," he said quietly. "She's more of a victim considering how her power works and how she suffered. Twenty years as a ghost? That's not—"
"Don't be a numbskull," I cut him off. "This makes no sense."
He blinked, taken aback.
"The potential to do evil that you hate so much is still within her," I continued, stepping closer. I pulled down my collar, exposing the bruises darkening around my throat—purple and black, finger-shaped marks already swelling. "See this? She could kill even someone like me if she wanted to. That fat coating makes her near-invulnerable. Bullets bounce off. Blades can't cut deep enough. And she's strong enough to pin me down and choke me out."
Mike stared at the bruises, then at Pamela, then back at me.
"Let's talk outside," he said, voice low and serious.
I scoffed but followed him.
We stepped through the gap in the warehouse wall, boots crunching over broken glass and debris. The night air was cooler out here, carrying the smell of ash and burnt concrete. The distant sounds of the city—traffic, sirens—felt impossibly far away.
Mike stopped a few meters from the entrance, hands in his pockets, staring at the ground.
"In the month we've been apart," he started slowly, "I realized something."
I waited.
"We can't simply beat heroes," he continued, looking up at me. "Technology and human potential have their limits. We've seen it. Every time we go up against someone with powers, we're outmatched unless we have perfect conditions, perfect planning, perfect luck."
I crossed my arms. "And?"
"And if Pamela is strong enough to subdue even someone like you..." He paused, letting the implication hang. "Then we shouldn't let her go. We should use her to kill the other heroes."
For a moment, I just stared at him.
Then I smiled—wide, genuine.
I stepped forward and patted him on the back, hard enough to make him shift his weight. "I like your line of thinking, Mike."
He met my eyes, expression unreadable.
"Phew," I added, chuckling. "For a second there, I was scared you'd grown a conscience."
He didn't laugh. Just nodded slowly. "We need every advantage we can get."
He was right.
Pamela was near-invulnerable in her powered-up form. Bullets didn't work. Blades didn't work. She could tank hits that would kill a normal person ten times over. And her strength—when she committed to it—was monstrous.
I needed that kind of muscle.
In fact, his idea was even better than merely using her as a shield. Yeah, sometimes he is even more hateful than me.
We returned back to the woman, and I told Mike to teleport and get her some clothes. "His or someone else's, it didn't matter."
Mike nodded and vanished—reality folding around him, leaving only displaced air.
I crouched near Pamela's head.
Strange. It was as big as both my legs crossed. Her features were almost buried in the swollen flesh, eyes barely visible through the puffiness.
"So," I said casually, "do you want to die or not?"
"Fuck off," she muttered, not looking at me.
I ignored her and continued. "If you want to leave, then I'll help you control your powers."
That got her attention. Her eyes—what I could see of them—shifted toward me, suspicious.
"What even is there to control?" she asked, voice thick and distorted.
"What you see as the 'normal skin' of your deflated form isn't real flesh either," I said. "Both your forms are related to your powers. You're never actually turning them off."
She frowned—or tried to. Hard to tell with all that fat. "How are you so certain?"
"I've seen many types of skin up close," I said, studying her face clinically. "Your flesh—the deflated version—is close to a shapeshifter I knew. There's a quality to it. Too perfect. Too uniform."
I gestured at her current bloated state. "And if you were really just turning off your powers, then you couldn't have looked so good underneath all this fat. No forty-year-old has zero gray hair, no stretched-out skin, no discolored spots from stress or aging."
Her breathing slowed. She was listening now.
"The math teacher whose body you're wearing was known as a ball of stress," I continued. "Yet your deflated form doesn't suffer from any of those signs. No wrinkles. No liver spots. Nothing."
I paused, letting it sink in.
"Fat people don't age any better than slim ones. But your body has a clean slate. That's not natural biology. That's power."
She stared at me, processing.
The air shimmered, and Mike reappeared—arms full of clothing. Loose sweatpants, an oversized hoodie, probably scavenged from his own wardrobe.
They were still too small for her inflated form.
But I saw hope flicker in her eyes.
"What do you think I could even do with training?" she asked, voice barely above a whisper.
I smiled—not cruel this time, almost genuine. "Lessen your transformation, at the very least. You could probably get only slightly bigger instead of turning into this abomination, and still have most of the benefits."
She flinched at the word "abomination," but didn't argue.
"The secret to your endurance comes from the surface of your skin, not the protection of depth," I explained. "That fat coating absorbs impact, disperses force. But you don't need three hundred pounds of it to achieve the effect. You just need the right density. The right distribution."
I stood, brushing dust off my knees. "Not even I use my powers to the maximum because the side effects outweigh the benefits. Control isn't about strength. It's about efficiency."
She looked down at herself—at the massive, grotesque form she'd become—then back at me.
"Deflate," I said simply.
"I don't know if I can," she whispered, fear creeping back into her voice. "I might die. The wound—"
"I repeat myself," I cut her off, voice hardening. "If you don't want to take life by the teeth, then you don't have a life at all."
Her face tensed.
The tears had stopped. Now there was just... calculation. Fear warring with desperation. The question hanging between us: which would she choose?
Death by inaction, or risk by transformation?
I waited, watching her decide.
She deflated.
The process was slower this time—deliberate, controlled. The fat receded gradually, flesh compressing back toward something resembling human proportions. Her limbs thinned. Her torso shrank. Her face emerged from the bloat, features sharpening back into recognizability.
Within moments, she was back to the slender form I'd seen earlier—pale skin, dark circles under her eyes, borrowed dress now hanging in tatters.
I looked at her chest, where the wound should've been.
The hole was gone.
She noticed my stare and immediately covered herself with her arms, face flushing red with embarrassment.
Mike looked away reflexively, turning his back to give her privacy.
"Let me see the wound," I said, stepping closer.
"I—"
"Now."
She hesitated, then slowly lowered her arms, eyes fixed somewhere past my shoulder. Vulnerable. Exposed.
While the place where the stone hand had pierced had filled in completely, it left a visible discoloration. A ten-centimeter-wide circle under her left breast—lighter than the surrounding skin, almost translucent. The texture looked different too. Smoother. Too smooth.
She shook under my touch as I pressed my fingers against it, testing.
Gooish. Softer than the surrounding tissue. Probably fat.
I frowned, thinking.
But did this mean her whole body was fat underneath? Or was filling the wound just an automatic, temporary response to keep her alive?
Would her flesh underneath heal by itself? Like regeneration, but slower? Cellular replacement over time?
Heroes with self-healing were very rare. If this was genuine regeneration and not just fat plugging holes, then she was more valuable than I'd thought.
I certainly didn't want to meet John again for medical consultation.
I pulled my hand back and straightened, reaching for the clothes Mike had brought.
"Get dressed," I said, tossing her the sweatpants and hoodie. "Quickly. We've already spent too much time here."
She caught them awkwardly, still shaking, and nodded.
"Turn around," she whispered.
I raised an eyebrow but complied, turning to face Mike instead. He was scanning the warehouse perimeter, hand still hovering near his concealed weapon.
Behind me, I heard fabric rustling—the sound of her pulling on the clothes, wincing occasionally. Probably still hurting from the broken ribs I'd given her.
Good. Pain meant she was alive.
And alive meant useful.
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