Hunter saw a shift in expression, brief, sad.

The kind of thing she wanted to ask about, to question, challenge, or pick apart.

Except asking put distance and time between where she was now and getting help.

“Please help me,” she whispered.

“If I can,” Amy Dallon told her. Her tattooed hand stroked Hunter’s. “What’s the first thing that you’re going to do?”

Hunter let out a half-laugh, incredulous. She hadn’t even let herself believe hope was in reach. “Dance. Hug my friend. Cry.”

⊙

She laughed, her back arching backward with the motion, one hand to the hole in the side of her head. Her emotions ran wild, like fire to accelerant, no body to contain them. There was no functional difference between this form she wore and the pillars and threads of blackness that webbed this landscape, tearing it up.

She danced. Stepping on threads, running along a pillar, spinning in the air to avoid a spear of carefully arranged molecules, slapping it aside as spear became whip—became blade as she slapped it. It cut deep into the back of her hand.

The giantess could see her before she acted. Could see every incoming blow before it could strike home. The thing that had been Hunter dove in close, trying to grab. She touched only air, and was touched in turn, a grazing contact from the giantess, who was now wreathed in a fractally arranged lace of fine molecules. Still backed up by an army of people who had been brought into her influence. The contact distorted the thing that had been Hunter, tugged at parts of her that controlled the threads and pillars.

This too, she resisted, fought with her entire being.

The woman could see attacks coming, but that didn’t necessarily mean she could do something about it. Threads erupted all around them, creating an arena. The thing that had been Hunter closed in, dancing, moving acrobatically, using the threads. Lace barriers rose between her and her target, and she slipped past them, despite the fact she was taller than most buildings.

She got her hands on the naked giantess, wrapped her in a hug, and squeezed. Her own threads tore through the carbon molecule chains, disarming her target, protecting them as she crushed meat and bone.

The giantess, helpless to do much of anything, exerted more influence, more control.

And the part of Hunter that was deep within the Titan erupted in a sudden laugh, fighting off the control that tried to subvert her very being. Manic, reckless, defiant, free.

You can’t, the glimmer of Hunter deeper still within that manic Hunter thought. I won’t let you pull at me or push me. I won’t let you make me do things.

Other giants were pressing in now. The Knight, the Mother. The Knight cut through threads. The Mother brought forth life between them, en masse.

Titan, manic ‘Mincemaid’, and teenage girl acted in concert.