69. Nice Shot (Patreon)

"So, uh, considering how you froze up like someone put ice in your ass, should I be worried about that being more than anti-human propaganda?" Helen asks, breaking the awkward silence that follows the elder's story. I flinch, releasing the iron grip of my claws that had been digging into Helen's scales.

"Yes," Sela answers before I can. "The broad strokes are correct, even if the blame is misdirected. Humanity was as much the victims as anyone."

"I… yeah," I confirm. "That's more or less the impression I'm getting, too."

"Huh," Helen says, still staring out at the rushing waterfall in front of us. The idea of the Goddess being able to change magic at will, not to mention the fact that she's potentially planning on doing it again if I cause an apocalypse, is certainly a lot to take in.

"This doesn't really change anything, does it?" Valerie asks. "It's good to know. It gives us a bit more information on the kind of apocalypse we're looking to prevent. It doesn't really tell us how to prevent it, but it's a start."

"I got the impression that the Goddess might change magic as a response to the apocalypse, but that wouldn't be the apocalypse itself," I say hesitantly. "But yeah. You're right. This changes nothing."

"Indeed," Sela agrees, staring down at its illusory human hand, flexing it into a fist. "Let us go. You fragile chemical sacks need to procure sleeping quarters."

"I guess we do," Helen smirks, standing up. Together, we head back to town in relative silence, gathering more silent stares from the dentron surrounding us as we trawl the bottom floor of the multi-layered city for a place to sleep.

"...You said you could deactivate this disguise at any time," Sela suddenly buzzes out of the blue.

"Yep," Valerie nods. "You want me to?"

"Just like that?" it presses. "In the middle of the city? We will be accosted."

"I'm not forcing you to look like something you don't want to be," Valerie scowls. "I wouldn't do that. If it's that distressing, I'll pop the illusion and we can run out of here."

"...No," Sela says. "I hate this, but I am used to hate. I will be fine until a private room is found."

Hmm. Well, okay. I feel kind of bad for encouraging the poor bot to do it, now. I hope that didn't influence its decision at all. It's kind of hard to know, given Sela's stubbornness and the Crafted's whole thing.

Either way, it's over soon. There's only really one place to stay in town, given how remote the place is, but we're still offered a room with two beds and a lock on the door and that's good enough for me. We get a lot of weird looks from the proprietor of the little tavern-and-inn, which I guess makes sense considering how our group appears to be two mutants and one normal human, all of whom are wearing clothes from Earth rather than the tree. Not to mention the albino dentron and whatever the fuck I am! We're like half a dozen different kinds of what the fuck, and it's kind of great.

The moment we head into the room and shut the door, Valerie deactivates Sela's illusion and Sela lets out an enormous burst of steam as a sigh of relief. I apologetically give it a thorough Refresh to clean it up, and we settle in to sleep.

"Dreamer's Spellbook: Vivian's Ambush Ward," the Goddess speaks with Valerie's breath, and as she tears out a burning page of her spellbook a subtle comfort settles over the room, ready to wake us if anyone tries to enter while we sleep.

"Ooh, that's a handy one," Helen hums. "How many spells do you have in there, Valerie?"

"Currently? Thirty-four," she answers. "Well, thirty-three now. I'm going to try to make sure that number is steadily increasing, but it still takes me nearly an hour to prepare a single spell. More, if it's a powerful one. I have a lot of the basic, universally useful ones repeated a few times, but I think the real strength of my magic is being able to stockpile specific counters to esoteric situations and just pull them out as needed. As far as I know there's no upper limit to the number of spells I can make, so…"

"Won't you struggle to actually find the right drawing if you have that many, though?" I ask.

"...Maybe," Valerie admits. "But if I make an efficient enough sorting system… hmm… what if I had a spell that could instantly find any spell? No, that would double the cast time, which would somewhat defeat the point…"

She sits down on the floor and opens up her sketchpad, rapidly scribbling ideas onto a blank sheet of paper. I chuckle and scuttle on over to her, waiting for her to wave me permission before snuggling up against her leg and watching her scribble and doodle.

The next thing I know, I'm waking up in bed back on Earth, comfy and strangely happy. I stretch my many limbs, new muscles under my armpits twitching as my body prepares to grow a new set of arms. I push myself to my feet with the limbs on my back, languishing in the feeling of my claws digging into the carpet. I close my eyes and yawn as widely as I'm able, briefly disconcerted by an unexpected sensation that takes my groggy brain a while to identify.

I closed my eyes, but I can still see. In fact, I can see in a full three hundred and sixty degrees around myself, and I don't just mean with my spatial sense. My eyes have finished growing in, poking out around the crown of my head like little black marbles. I even have some front-facing ones, rendering my main eyes somewhat redundant and the act of closing them quite useless; my new eyes have no eyelids themselves, after all.

I glance around my room, consciously keeping track of what my normal eyes are focusing on as I get used to the extra sensations. It's not hard, since I'm already very accustomed to full-circle vision, but combining it with more mobile, humanoid eyes is a bit odd. Anything I'm looking at with my human eyes is a lot clearer, like I'm somehow looking at reality via a higher-definition TV. Now that I'm focusing on it, it's kind of hard to ignore how details just snap into my awareness based on how my eyes move around. I've never really noticed the lack of fidelity in my treeside body before, but I guess I've always had my spatial sense to provide details for me. Plus, it's not like my vision with my spider-eyes is bad, it's just… not quite as good. Weird, but I'll get used to it.

Yawning again, I head to the bathroom to look at my changes more closely. My skin is even more gray than before, and the weird translucent stuff I'm growing in place of hair is very slightly longer, but other than that it's just the eyes that changed. Understandable, I guess. I haven't been using my self-transformation spell to accelerate my changes at all, but I'm kind of tempted to.

…Eh, maybe later. It's kind of funny; it wasn't long ago at all that I was terrified of these changes, desperately hiding them and constantly worried about what would come next. And to some extent, they still feel like something to get embarrassed about. To be self-conscious over. It makes people uncomfortable to see me, after all, and I don't at all like making people uncomfortable. But I can't really do anything about that discomfort, and being ashamed of it is a lot less fun than reveling in it instead.

I get clean, get dressed, eat breakfast, and head out to the bus stop, waving good morning to the people spying on me in the government van down the street. It's weird and lonely waiting for the bus and taking the drive to school without Valerie, her absence pressing on me for the whole trip, but I know I'll get to see her when I go to bed and, if anything, I'll get to spend a lot more time with her than before!

My chemistry teacher gives me a concerned look when I walk into class and sit down, which makes me worry that I've traumatized him a little, but it's nothing compared to the looks Ida gets when she saunters into class, fangs grinning and tail swishing. I feel my face flushing just looking at her, the memory of what we did together burning hotly in my mind.

"Sup, Hannah Banana?" Ida greets me, stepping past the other gaping faces silently begging to talk to her and plopping down in the seat next to mine.

"Oh, y-you know," I shrug, doing my best to push aside the more inappropriate thoughts and memories bubbling up in my mind. "I'm still managing. Things went better than expected with that pyromancer kid and his mom. But I think people might be starting a cult about me?"

"I mean, yes," Ida smirks. "You're an extradimensional monster with a direct-call line to the divine."

"Yeah, yeah, I know," I pout. "I was just hoping that the people who are most inclined to worship me might also be inclined to listen to me."

"You go to church, Hannah," Ida snorts, poking me with the tip of her tail. "You know that's not how it works."

I sigh, nodding glumly as the chemistry teacher awkwardly tries to start class while staring helplessly in our direction. We get through class without too much in the way of issues, though when class ends everyone naturally starts swarming Ida and asking her what the heck is going on. I shake my head in exasperation as she starts talking about having a crown of horns because she's secretly a princess of the underworld, carefully noting everyone that seems to believe her as targets for further teasing. I head to gym class next, changing into my workout clothes and lining up next to Autumn entirely out of habit, not really thinking about how awkward that might be until Jet raises an eyebrow at me, her tail flinching away and hiding behind the leg opposite to me.

"Oh!" I jolt, eyeing the tail with an ache in my chest. "Uh, sorry, should I go somewhere else?"

"It's fine," Jet shrugs. "Some of it has been rough, but overall things have been going a lot better since the breakup. Part of it is because you handled it well. I appreciate that."

"Uh, that's a bit of a strange thing to thank someone for, but I'm glad I could help, I guess," I say awkwardly, scratching the back of my head. "Alma doesn't really look like she's happy to see me, though."

"It's more complicated than that," Jet sighs, frowning down at her tail and shaking her leg to dislodge it. "Alma's emotional palette can be rather extreme, is all."

"...I guess it is," I agree hesitantly, a few thoughts churning up in my mind as I look for a way to change the subject. "Oh, that reminds me. Back when you first helped me out, you told me I owed you. There was something about wanting my help to magically, uh, supplement your income, right?"

Jet chuckles, and we start our run at the gym teacher's command, quickly pulling ahead of everyone else in the class.

"Well, I consider that debt already paid, considering the magic you've given me," Jet says. "It makes that sort of thing pretty easy."

Oh! Uh. Has Jet… already been getting back to stealing things? Well, I hope she's safe about it.

"Right. Um. Well, in regards to that, I was wondering if you could give me some advice. I ended up having to send Valerie to another dimension—"

"Oh you just 'ended up' doing that, did you?" Jet mutters.

"N-no, this was consensual and on purpose!" I protest. "Her parents found out that… y'know, that she's Valerie, and they took it super poorly and she had to get away. They have her phone, though, and she wants it back. I was thinking of… y'know. Just going and taking it."

"Oh," Jet says, frowning in thought. "Huh. Well sure, I kind of wanted to steal from Valerie's house anyway. I'll grab it while I do that, make it look like part of the burglary."

"Wait, really?" I blink. "Well… thanks! That's a big help, she'd really appreciate having it back."

"It lines up with something I wanted to do anyway," Jet shrugs.

"Just be careful, alright?" I press. "They're really bad people. I doubt they'll just go 'oh well' and leave you alone when they find stuff missing."

"Noted, but I'll be fine."

"Alright, well, thank you," I nod. "I guess I owe you even more now. If you ever need help with anything, just let me know."

"Yeah, I've been thinking about how to best get you to repay me," Jet hums. "I wouldn't hate spending some time learning your cleaning spell."

I blink, a bit taken aback. The Goddess was just talking to me about how she doesn't like learned spells very much. …Is that why learned spells are weaker? Oh pork rinds, it is, isn't it? Learned spells are weaker and less versatile than natural spells because the Goddess thinks it's boring to share them too much.

"...I think that might be dangerous," I hedge. "I'm not going to say no, but I am going to say that even my disaster-prone butt thinks it's a bad idea."

"Well damn," Jet frowns. "I was afraid of that being the case, but confirmation is good. I dunno, I'll keep thinking about it, then."

"Yeah, uh, no expiration date on that I.O.U., I guess," I chuckle nervously.

"That is how I would hope it works, yes," Jet sighs.

"Uh, right."

The rest of gym class is somewhat awkward, but not hostile. Not… what I would expect from someone who forced me to break up with her other self on accusations of abuse. I'm not sure how to feel about that. On one hand, it's nice, because I still like Alma and Jet and I'd still want to be their friend, if I can. But on the other hand, I was apparently hurting them on accident, just by being around and being me. So I probably shouldn't hang out with them anymore, right?

I mean, I guess I can just leave that up to them to decide. That's probably the smart way to handle this.

I spend lunch in the lunchroom for once, mostly just to tell Valerie's friends (most of whom don't even know her name is Valerie) that she'll be in a different dimension for a while. One of them very excitedly asks me if I can tell him how people are turning into monsters. I do not tell him.

School remains strange and surreal, though Ida's transformation finally takes a lot of the attention off of me. I'm already a little drained when I get home, but of course I have to immediately change into my uniform, get into my dad's car, and let him drive me to work. The store is still extra-popular because of me, which some of my coworkers like but most of them hate. My boss loves it, though, and that's what matters most. I can't say I hate it, either, since it helps me get into a groove and pass the time without giving me a chance to think about the many, many things I very much don't want to think about.

With my hat secure and my non-slip shoe coverings on, I'm told that I'll be working up front again today, probably since most of the people coming in are half just here to see me. I've long since lost my anonymity; the whole world knows I'm Hannah Hiiragi now, and it's even possible to find a close approximation of my work schedule online. Having me work register one is exactly what people want to see when they walk in the front door, coming here to get excited and unnerved by my weird, toothy smile.

"Hi, welcome! What can I help you with today?" I greet the next of many customers in line, a mom with what looks like her twelve-year-old son.

"Ah, I'll take a small mac and cheese with meatballs, and… a pesto cavatappi?" she says, staring at me with obvious worry while her son vibrates with excitement.

"Do you fight other monsters!?" the kid blurts.

"Sometimes, but don't worry," I smile at him, not feeling the least bit offended to hear that I'm apparently fighting 'other' monsters. "You're safe from them. Do you want chicken on that pesto, ma'am?"

And so it goes. People ask all sorts of things and I answer as honestly as I can, trying to move through the line as efficiently as possible without being impolite. It's a normal day. My new normal, at least, my mind having already found a new routine to comfortably settle into like a cat in a perfectly-sized box. It's comfy, relaxing, and easy.

…Until I notice a guy walking in with a shotgun under his coat.

I very carefully do not freeze or panic, continuing to focus on the person still ordering in front of me. The only thing I really know about weapons is what I've picked up from Valerie rambling about Halo 5 in middle school, but the gun is at least shaped like a shotgun, and the bullets inside it are loaded with around eight metal balls instead of, uh, bullets. And I think that's how shotguns work?

Anyway, shotgun guy would be suspicious-looking even if I didn't have a spatial sense that just flat out told me he's armed; the big coat he's hiding the weapon in should by all rights be boiling a human alive in this weather. He's got a hat hiding most of his head, hunched over away from the cameras, though his eyes keep glancing at me whenever he thinks I'm not watching, his heart racing in fear and anticipation.

I hold back a sigh. I guess it was only a matter of time until someone came to shoot the monster.

He's waiting in line like any other customer rather than just rushing me with the gun, which is good. There's a small chance that means he's not actually going to shoot me, or he's talking himself out of it, but either way it gives me more time to deal with the situation. I casually flick the silent alarm underneath the register with a hip-limb as I continue to talk with the person whose order I'm taking, and when they finally leave I motion the girl on the register next to me over. She seems confused and annoyed that I'm pulling her away from the register when we have like ten people in line, but I have to get her out of the potential line of fire.

"Grab the boss and everyone in the kitchen and lock yourselves in the walk-in fridge," I tell her, my smile professional and my voice low enough to hopefully not be heard by anyone else over the din of the busy restaurant. "Don't make a scene, and don't open up for anyone but me or the police."

Her eyes widen, and I push her lightly towards the back with a hip-limb.

"Now," I hiss, my attention on the nervous gunman. He has no reason to think we're talking about him, but he has no real reason to not think it either, and he looks pretty paranoid. She nods and heads into the kitchen to grab the rest of my co-workers there, and I turn back to the front and start taking more orders.

He's definitely going to get suspicious when my coworkers don't come back, but his plan seems to be to get close and shoot me point-blank, maybe after talking to me a little. Seems like a dumb plan to me, but I'm not complaining.

I suppose I should probably be scared, but I don't really feel it.

I'll be fine, after all. I'm confident I can lean my head into the fourth dimension faster than he can pull the gun out of his coat and fire it, and as long as my brain isn't damaged I'll probably survive. And that's assuming he can even hit me at all before I rip him to shreds; if he actually tries to shoot me from that close, I can easily kill him before he even raises the gun. If he wants to wait for the other humans to get out of the way before shooting, that's all the better for me.

I take a deep breath, rewinding my thoughts a little. I shouldn't kill him. I definitely shouldn't eat him. My situation is precarious enough without adding murder-cannibalism to the list of reasons why people hate me. Why did I even consider it? For all the times I've panicked over having to fight, for all the times I've torn myself apart in fear of having to hurt and kill people, why do I feel so calm now?

Part of it is the fact that there are other people to protect, I suppose. This guy is endangering more than just me. I could just be finally desensitized, though. I completely broke down after killing the pirates, but with the cultists I had no such issue. Seeing Hagoro impale Ida was more than enough to get over any regrets I had about the necessity of it.

I hate killing. I do. It's horrible, it's final, it's up there on the list of the worst things you can physically do to someone. So I won't kill this guy. I don't have to.

Ultimately, I'm calm because he simply isn't a threat to me.

His patience, unfortunately, runs out when there's still three innocent people between him and me. It's only been a few minutes, and I don't know how much more time the police will need to show up after I tripped the silent alarm, but I guess I'm out of time. He has clearly noticed that the orders are piling up without a kitchen staff to make them, and his paranoia is drawing him to the correct conclusion. He shifts the arm hidden in his coat, wrapping his hand around the handle of the gun.

"Sir!" I bark at him suddenly, startling half the restaurant. "Don't do that. It won't end well for you."

He stares at me. I stare back, my mind rushing to figure out a follow-up. He's still far enough away from me that he could probably pull the trigger before I reach him. Do I just rush him? …No, I need to focus on the innocents, making sure that if he does shoot, it doesn't hurt anyone other than me.

"I mean it," I continue, my body tense and ready to move at a moment's notice. If only this damn counter wasn't between us; vaulting over it is going to be so much slower than just rushing him. I dig my claws deep into my shoes, completely ruining the soles as I prepare to move. "There are a lot of innocent people here, sir."

The people around us are starting to get scared, and I really wish they'd get scared a lot fucking faster because I need them to get out of the way. Shotgun guy's hand clenches harder around the weapon's handle, his face looking angrier rather than the hesitance I'd hoped reminding him of possible unwanted casualties would instill.

"You mean the idiots paying you money to get fooled by your lies?" he growls.

Hey, they're not paying me, they're paying the people I work for. Also, I might not be a great person, but I'm no liar. Still, he hasn't pulled the gun out yet. He wants to talk. For some reason. I can work with that.

"You don't need to worry about any of them caring about me," I tell him. "They're just here for food and a show."

How can I stop him? Shotguns have like, a spread, right? He could hit all sorts of people. Wait, I know! Bullets need to explode, right? I can Refresh the oxygen away from the gun! Pulling it out of someone's lungs might be too fucked up for me, but pulling it away from a weapon that's endangering multiple innocent people? Hell yeah, that sounds like the way the world should be to me. I silently sort the air to make a flame impossible while he continues talking to me.

"And what are you showing them, monster?" he demands, finally revealing the gun and leveling it in my direction. I am very tempted to rush at him right this second, but only now that the gun is visible do people start freaking out and trying to get away from him.

"Nobody move!" he shouts, putting an end to that. Goddess damnit. What, does he want them all to watch? I narrow my eyes at him, unable to keep the calm, professional tone in my voice any longer. There are still two people that might get hit if he fires.

"I'm showing them myself," I answer. "That's all. If you're faulting humans for being curious, you may as well fault the wind for blowing west."

"Well," he says, his finger moving onto the trigger as he aims his weapon. "I have something I want to show them too."

We're just over ten feet apart. The two people between us have scooted off to the side, but they're stuck in the head-high divider aisle where people get funneled in to look at the menu on the wall and order, which is probably only in the realm of five feet wide. While he has a straight shot to me, I have no idea what the shotgun is actually going to hit. Y'know, assuming it even fires. I'm pretty confident that my Refresh has cleared his gun of oxygen gas, but I don't actually have a way to see if that's true or not, I just have to keep silently funneling my attention into maintaining the spell. It would be best, I think, if we never have to find out if my trick works.

I stare down the barrel of the gun and sigh, stretching some of my extra limbs in preparation for the upcoming disaster.

"Do you think I'm afraid of you, sir?" I ask him.

Leaning forward, I put my hands on the counter, preparing to vault as I watch the sweat bead on his forehead.

"Who do you think is really going to be worse off after you pull that trigger?" I press. "What do you think I am, exactly?"

"Demon," he hisses.

I grit my teeth, the Goddess settling happily on my shoulders as she kicks her feet in excitement.

"You've been playing far too many video games," I tell him, suppressing a shudder as She caresses my hips, "if you think real demons are the sort of thing you can handle with a gun."

My instincts feel it before his finger ever moves. It's something in the dilation of his eyes, the tenseness of his muscles, the halt in his breathing. I'm moving towards him before he ever fires, but he does successfully fire, my oxygen trick having accomplished nothing at all. Time seems to slow down as my spatial sense tracks the shot, terrified some of the pellets are going to spread out and hurt the people nearby, but that's not what happens at all.

As I leap towards the shooter, the shot that was aimed towards my upper torso instead lands directly in my gut, all eight balls hitting in a tight group and blasting clean through my intestines and out the other side, a few of them ricocheting slightly off my spine as they exit. A splattered mess of gore explodes out of my back and paints the register with blood.

But I keep moving forward. I stumble when I hit the ground, but I've already prepared a Refresh to keep my blood in my body, casting it alongside my nameless self-transformation spell to begin patching up the wounds. I don't know if it'll be enough to save me without speaking a spell out loud, but I don't have time to worry about myself yet. Spacial Rends shriek to life on every last one of my limbs, and I reach the man before he can get off a second shot.

I cut his gun to pieces, severing one arm and most of his fingers in the process. I am very, very tempted to do more, but instead I merely grab his face and force his head into the ground, pinning him down with my many limbs. I can't hear, or see, or smell; my head is safe in the vacuum of the fourth dimension, so only my spatial sense feeds me information on my surroundings, but if anything I find it a helpful way to remove distractions from the many spells I now need to micromanage to keep the both of us alive.

I'm such a dumbass. Why did I injure him this badly!? I wasn't even thinking about it, I just struck, and I'm lucky I didn't do worse. But now I have to keep his blood in his body along with my own, which would be difficult enough even if I wasn't using my self-transformation spell on top of it all.

Months ago, when I first learned to do this, the Goddess taunting me and teaching me and laughing as I bled from the cuts She gave me, I definitely wouldn't have been able to do this. It was a struggle to deal with myself at all, and though I had a lot more wounds they were comparatively superficial. Dealing with an exploded torso and another man's severed limb and digits might have been impossible with an incantation, let alone without one.

But I can't speak the spell aloud. I can't. Because if I give magic to an idiot like this, I'll definitely have to kill him.

Fortunately, I'm not the same terrified Hannah I was back then. I've handled a lot of deadly situations, and I've had a lot of divine revelations. The Goddess showed me, for a brief moment, how She sees a human body back when I healed J-mug's mom. I've done impossible feats with Refresh, I've had impossible power channeled through me, and I can do this. I can see every severed vein and artery, simultaneously. I can focus on every last wound, individually, and keep track of my surroundings all the while. I can give myself over to the magic raging inside my soul, the heartfelt gift from my Goddess, and channel it without her help. I will not call for Her aid. I do not need it. I'm better than that.

I'm not some weak human, anymore.

The Goddess purrs like a lion on my shoulders, watching without interfering. Her presence is terrifying, but Her self-imposed rules remain ironclad, and She gives out no souls without being called. The restaurant's patrons finally flee from the headless, bloody monster zombie straddling her shooter, and the police eventually arrive a minute or two later. It would seem they were slightly delayed by their decision to deploy a SWAT team, a decision I cannot entirely blame them for.

I do not, however, appreciate being aimed at by yet more guns.

A group of them enter the restaurant and shout orders at me, not that I can understand them with my ears in the fourth dimension. I can take a pretty good guess as to what they want, however. Others circle the building, another one aiming at me through the damn outer window-wall. I do not want to spook them, though I'm ready to just shift my entire body into the fourth dimension and rip them all apart from perfect safety if I have to. I should have done that to this asshole, I just didn't want all my clothes to fall off.

Slowly, carefully, I lift my arms above my neck while my head phases back into normal space, keeping the squirming man beneath me locked down with my other limbs.

"—behind your head! Step away from the man!"

"Dude, you can literally see my pelvic bones," I grumble at him, though I do at least put my hands behind my head. "I don't know if I can walk. Also, I'm—"

"I said STEP AWAY!"

"And I said I can't! I'm busy keeping this guy's blood inside his body!"

"Lie down!" he barks instead, and I groan, scooting to the side and lowering myself onto my belly. Which fucking hurts, because my belly is a completely tattered mess of pulped blood and skin that's slowly, barely regenerating.

The moment I get off the guy who shot me, though, he scrabbles for what's left of his gun, despite the fact that I cut it to pieces and he doesn't even have any fucking fingers to shoot it with. I guess he wasn't all that lucid before losing a bunch of body mass and blood, though. They scream at him, and he doesn't listen. So one of the SWAT guys pulls out a taser and shoots him with it.

I groan, continuing to lie down with my limbs folded behind my back as I try to keep his blood moving. For a moment, his heart stops, but thankfully it restarts after only a second or two. I find myself struggling to care very much.

I realize I wouldn't mind if this guy dies, as long as I'm not the one who kills him.

Oh, well. I can worry about not being a good enough person to love my enemies later (and I'm sure I will do exactly that the moment I'm left alone with my thoughts). For now, I just don't want to get in a fight with a SWAT team while I'm focusing on keeping what little is left of my guts inside my body. I'm ready to phase out of this dimension at a moment's notice, though. Just in case.

They shoot me with a taser too for some fucking reason, but it doesn't do anything to me so I just ignore it, leveling an irritated glare at the guy who tried. Despite his helmet, I see his terrified expression with my spatial sense, and it helps me forget the pain in my gut.

Miraculously for everyone, however, I am not subjected to additional police brutality, either because I am a good little girl who complies with orders even while bleeding out, or because they're too damn scared of me to risk it. The store security camera probably captured them tasing me for no damn reason, so I look forward to my mom's firm ripping them open in court a few months from now, assuming I don't fuck up and the courts are still around and functioning.

It is, overall, a thoroughly unpleasant experience. But eventually, the SWAT team finds my coworkers safe and sound, interviews witnesses that didn't run far enough away, and watches the shooter's wounds suddenly start gushing blood again after the EMTs wheel him away—which I directly warned them would happen, after declining treatment myself—and I am eventually allowed to sit up and focus on regeneration, my guts slowly but surely stitching themselves back together as I finally take in the carnage with my own eyes.

I wonder when my blood turned black instead of red. My spatial sense can't tell me what colors things are. I guess it explains my skintone, now.

"Everybody is safe, right?" I ask the SWAT guy that was screaming at me earlier. "Nobody else got hurt?"

I'm pretty sure that's true without asking him, but I want to be sure.

"...That's correct," he confirms stiffly. "The employees are fine. The walls to the freezer stopped the buckshot."

Wait, the fridge stopped the… there's already two walls between where I got shot and the walk-in where I told my coworkers to go! I just told them to go there because it locks on the inside, not because I thought they'd need extra armor to block stray bullets! Or I guess stray buckshot? I don't know the difference. Still, what the fuck? Some of the pellets ripped through not only my body, but through the register and then through the wall behind! What the heck was I hit with?

"Is that normal for shotguns?" I ask.

"It can be," he shrugs.

"Goddess," I breathe. "Well, I'm glad it was me and not anybody else."

"Mmm," he hums noncommittally. "Well, whenever you're okay to move, we'll need to take you back to the station."

I sigh.

"Then I guess I'll need to call my lawyer," I mutter.

I can't believe I've been arrested twice in the past two days. Mom is gonna kill me.