She stepped on wires and conjured up more, climbing higher and higher, to match the giantess that now flew. Her psyche was a funhouse mirror of a funhouse mirror self. A her that had been distorted and broken and put back together again before this new body started plucking and snatching up scant memories. Picking from dance lessons and schoolyard games to figure out how it should move and hold itself together.

She danced up wires and pillars and ascended skyward, faster than the giantess could rise.

She stared down her opponent with senses that weren’t eyes, and saw facets of the woman in places so buried they weren’t in this world with its statues sticking out of buildings, its people in fancy clothes.

She saw memories and events. A palace. Luxurious clothes, handmade for her. Servants. Good food. The woman had power, in so many ways. She could ask for things to be done without worrying about how.

The inverse of what lay behind that funhouse-in-a-funhouse psyche, deep within the thing that had been Hunter.

Cords became elastic, and the thing that had been Hunter let herself tip forward, then snap toward the giantess, a rubber band fired from a hand. She was deflected, struck by thrown buildings, and those buildings crumbled with the impact more than she did.

She hit the ground with two hands and two feet, crushing concrete and stone. With the impact, more wires and pillars stabbed upward, finding their purchase wherever they could, before snapping taut. A cage around her. One of them wounded the giantess. Another hit a shield she’d gathered around herself.

The thing that had been Hunter laughed, high and loud enough to be heard across the whole city she was in, a hollow, echoing sound.

The giantess had once had it all, when she’d been an age where a girl named Hunter had had nothing. All the luck in reality, power stolen from a family closer than blood, and she’d ended up here, naked, distorted and bleeding, weaker than the thing that had been Hunter.

The giantess had done something with the concrete she’d turned into a shield. Concrete broke, but something within was compressed, reformed on a molecular level. It was now nearly black, lace-fine, like geometric drawings that got more complex as one drew closer to the center, but it hadn’t broken with the impact. Even the parts further from the center.

The giantess’s power was reaching out further. Finding people who hadn’t run away fast enough. Cape and civilian, pulled together into a force. Weapons were being arranged, cannons and rockets.