The pair continued to patrol the building, with Thomas continually looking for a way to break off from Blair and head out. Partially because he would be caught in a lie if he stayed for much longer. Partially because he didn’t want to have any more serious conversations with her. I could just kill her. She doesn’t suspect I have a Civ, or that I’d want to kill her, AND her back is constantly turned away from me. I need to end this. Except Thomas didn’t have his heat gun. He didn’t plan on killing anyone, although he could always grab a weapon from one of the various security deposits he’d been seeing around the place for security guards. Then, Thomas thought about Blair healing his eyes. She seemed . . . genuine. He thought of how she wanted to protect people—how it was her motivation after someone saved her life. He didn’t want to undo that. Cut another life short.

“The only place left is the main harvesting room. Unless this guy is constantly walking around, which he might be, we would have found him by now. I guess it all depends on what this guy even wants. I’ve never heard of somebody breaking into this place. There isn’t anything to steal except for huge electrical equipment that would be super hard to move and easy to track down.” Blair pondered out loud to Thomas. They were right next to the bathroom Thomas had planned to hide in, and right in front of the door to the main harvesting room. They could hear the whirr of fans and steam through the metal door.

“I’ll head down there first,” Thomas said. If his mark was down there, he wanted to be the first one down there so he could handle it outside of Blair’s gaze. “You wait here. See if he comes around.”

“Are you sure you want to head down there alone? He’s a Civ user, right?” Blair asked, puzzled, as Thomas opened the door.

“Well, I’m just doing recon. I’m a security guard here after all. I’m sure I’ll be fine.” Thomas said as he walked down, shutting the door behind him. Then, Blair heard the sound of a flush coming from the bathroom right next to her. She readied her fighting stance and held her hand on a heat gun on her side as a man with short red hair and a dad-bod opened the door and screamed.

“Don’t move!” Blair shouted.

“Oh my god! Please don’t hurt me. I was just using the washroom! I didn’t see anything, I swear! I have a wife and two kids, and I—” Robert started pleading in a high-pitched accent as he fell to the ground on his knees, holding his hands together.

“Wait, what the fuck? Did you not break in here with a Civ?”

“Of course not. I’m just a security guard here?”

And not a very good one, Blair thought. “All right. Look, man, I’m not going to hurt you. I saw somebody using a Civ and creating some floating orbs, and I came to check it out. I’m on your side. I saw another security guard here who got attacked by him as well.”

“Another security guard? Lady, I’m the only one who works here. At least on these nights.” Robert raised an eyebrow in confusion.

Blair realized what was going on and furrowed her brow in anger. “Wait here.”

The main harvester room was a massive ringed walkway that went around a huge column of steam that clouded the middle of it, flying upwards into a set of massive turbines at the ceiling. Thomas could feel how hot the steam was, just walking around the fenced-in ring around it. His plan was to walk around it, say he didn’t see anything and that the Civ user probably just left, and then leave himself. He pondered his own intelligence as he walked to the other side of the ring opposite the door, and he congratulated himself on the lie. And he wouldn’t tell Helena about Blair either, so he wouldn’t need to do another shitty “No Civ users” job. Then, he heard someone shout his name from the other side of the column of steam.

Blair knew Thomas was in here somewhere. She loaded her heat gun and prepared to fire it through the cloud that obscured everything except the side she was on. She didn’t plan on killing him, but she’d use deadly force if push came to shove. Thomas knew he had been found out, and now it was only a matter of who threw the first punch. Blair’s Civ was scary, but it wasn’t long-range. Thomas had the advantage there and by virtue of the fact that Blair didn’t fully know what Thomas was capable of. He could hear Blair sprinting around the edge of the platform, and then she came fully into view. She had been heating the water in the atmosphere to create jets of steam under her feet and then turning it back into moisture to repeat the process, and was currently sprinting far faster than any normal human by continuously firing out superheated blasts to propel her forward. Thomas could see she had a focus in her eyes. “Okay, Blair. I can explain, really—”

BAM. Blair had gotten close enough to Thomas to send a jet of steam out from her elbow, propelling her fist forward into a speedy uppercut. Thomas felt his neck burn as he flew into the air and onto the platform another ten feet away. “You bastard, I trusted you! I fixed your eyes, for Christ’s sake. Did you do that to yourself?” Blair shouted.

Thomas wiped the blood away from his mouth. “Okay, that’s fair, but I didn’t know what else to do! I wasn’t just going to attack you mid-sente—” BAM again. Blair had sent a steam-powered kick right into Thomas’s face.

“You mean like that?”

“Yes, that would be extremely rude,” Thomas said, feeling his broken teeth fall out of his mouth, and standing up from the ground. “PHANTRANA!” Thomas shouted, throwing a phantom fist right into Blair’s jaw, colliding with her face with a loud crack. Thomas then powered up his foot, sending him flying in Blair’s direction and colliding with her stomach in a flying side kick, before continuing past her. Blair let out a pained yelp as Thomas hit the ground behind her and began running. Blair quickly stabilized herself and fired her heat gun at him through a cloud of steam. Blood was trickling down her face. Before she could take another shot, though, the phantom hand that had been sent into Blair’s jaw had grabbed her heat gun, attempting to wrestle it away before she could take another shot. Then a return bullet from Thomas flew through the massive cloud that was flying upwards into the ceiling and was about to connect with Blair’s eye. Before that happened, however, she threw her own gun away and used her free hands to touch the heat bullet, returning the mix of fire and metal to its previous, cooled-down state.

After grabbing a heat gun from a security area on the nearby wall, Thomas looked out at where he thought Blair was standing, taking another second to adjust his aim according to where he felt his phantom hand was, something he could always sense the position of. Suddenly, despite Thomas wrestling away Blair’s heat gun, a bullet flew back at him through the chamber of his own gun and shattering it, before stopping in the air and falling down as a normal piece of metal.

Damn, she’s good. Returning my own heat bullet to a previous state. Respect. Thomas, without a means of true long-ranged attack, returned to speeding towards the exit, hearing Blair close behind him. Finally, he arrived at the doorway, his only means of escape . . . and found it covered in ice. “What the fuck?” Thomas shouted, stepping back in surprise, and turning to see Blair on his left speeding around the iron ring.