As before, I tumbled through darkness. No forcefield, no flight. Only a general arc of travel with me as a dark shape against a night sky. Sweat drenched me just from the ambient heat, and that sweat stung my eyes as my head rotated and the droplets traveled across my face.

I let myself fall, powers dark, the wind alternately freezing and skin-searingly hot as it whipped at my face, at my costume and my hair.

As I fell down, fire spiked up, aimed right for me. I flew, and purple flame below me and around me billowed out, swelled, and lanced toward me, depending on its shape, chasing that flight.

As I made my aerial maneuvers around flares that worked like explosions constrained within invisible cylinders, the heat in the air sucked all moisture from my mouth and eyes. Had I been running, the heat would have knocked the wind out of me, saw me crumpling to my knees.

My flight didn’t draw on any well of physical capacity like that. Where anyone else might have been drained, I was… I was drained of something closer to my humanity. I was my power in action, my focus, my battle-sense.

I was more a Glory Girl than the Warrior Monk right now, and that was okay. If the focus of a dangerous, barbaric teenage me was going to keep me in the game in a moment like this, I would tap that focus with no regrets.

Maybe wrong to think that, within a few seconds of recognizing how I was letting more human, fair parts of me fall away.

His senses were improving, going by his ability to track me in the gloom. More eruptions were coming.

Frustration welled in my chest. I was fighting like Glory Girl and that kept me fighting, but she was someone who charged in, and that wasn’t a possibility in the now. The purple fire burned away powers, and Lung’s heat burned away… my reserves. I couldn’t fight in a battlefield this hot for that long, and the others didn’t seem to have many more opportunities, either.

When I’d played basketball, ‘giving 110%’ was the refrain, over and over again. With my mom, it had been to ‘give my all’. Even Amy—

Fuck. With the name, there were a hundred mental pictures, a hundred scenes and feelings, crashing in. Focus gone, the image in my mind’s eye so intense that my efforts to push it away only dragged it in closer.