June 05, 2024

The Butterfly Dragon: The Two Butterflies - Episode 11 (Updated June 4 2024 6:30 PM EST)

Reader Discretion: This story contains intense and vivid situations and is not intended for younger readers. Reader discretion is strongly advised.

This story is completed, however there is still some editing and some touchups to be done to take the story up to the next level. Overall, I'm very happy with how it turned out, but there are still some places it could be tweaked in order to read better. I might attempt those edits, or I might continue to the next story and project. I hope that you enjoy it.

Brian Joseph Johns

Chapters

To Be - In The Balance Of Six Lines (Finished March 28, 2024 6 PM EST)

Our Fingers Spread (Finished March 28, 2024 6 PM EST)
Our Neighbours Answer (Finished March 28, 2024 6 PM EST)

Education (Renamed from "The Gathering" and finished March 29, 2024 6 PM EST)
Legacy And The Future (Finished March 6, 2024 5:00 PM EST)
New Car - New Challenges (Finished April 8, 2024 3:33 PM EST)
Hot On The Trail (Finished April 18, 2024 6:00 PM EST)
West Meet East Meet Lunch (Finished April 18, 2024 8:00 PM EST)
Deal Of The Two Dragons (Finished April 18, 2024 10:00 PM EST)
The Eclipse (Finished April 19, 2024 7:00 AM EST)
Order And Chaos (Finished May 4, 2024 12:00 PM EST)
Hanshi And The Tiger (Finished June 1, 2024)
Temples And Tutors (Finished June 1, 2024)
Auditorium (Finished June 2, 2024)
Hack And Seek (Finished June 2, 2024)
From Toronto To Denpasar (Finished June 3, 2024)
Senseis And Tigers (Finished June 3, 2024)
Dundas Square (Finished June 4, 2024)
It Ends As It Began (Finished June 4, 2024)
The Wager Of Dragons (Finished June 5, 2024)

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Heylyn Yates is not Filipino with all due respect to members of that community. She's Chinese.

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Brian Joseph Johns

The Three Modern Contemplations Of A Dragon

To Be - In The Balance Of Six Lines

I am the Itsupiki no shin no doragon [one true dragon]. I am the Jidai o koeta senshi [the warrior of ages].

I am the Yoroi [armor].

I am the katana [sharpened spirit].

I am all of my ancestors, their worst and best all at once.

A blade forged entirely of their presence upon Honshu [the largest island that makes up Japan].

I am that which sculpted the people, with reverie and ferocity. I am.

Our Fingers Spread

Our hands upon a map. Lines spread in their pursuit.

Our will was our path. We rose to triumph, yet fell to war.

And somehow, in this cause, we elevated all we opposed.

We made not only ourselves better, but the ranks of our enemies too.

Therefore, we are the makers of true warriors.

It is crime to stray from one's own destiny, and yet fewer they are on our watch.

Our Neighbours Answer

We are amongst many like us. They are our neighbours.

However, their ways are as different as the stars in the sky.

Our first neighbours, they wield the Book Of Changes and the Art Of War, yet their Monks recycle the same circular energy that we use otherwise - in the form of straight lines.

And on the shores of Gojoseon, we arrive with the two ways, and yet we are met by a people who simply add a third wind. They expand and evolve, learning from their enemies yet presenting new chapters to the age old words of what it is to be warriors.

We retreat and yet learn from their perseverance.

However, they become what they were destined to be. Like our neighbours with the Art Of War, they are potent adversaries, beyond our reach. Tell me, who educates who when in pursuit of victory? The pursuer or the pursued?

Education

Three evenings after the events of Episode 10, Warai is in the care of Kori Jonglyu who has come to visit at Heylyn's condominium while the rest of the group train with Jinn Hua, Hanshi, and Hoon Kwang. Alicia, Norler and Gregory meanwhile have continued preparing for the release of Medi-Friend.

Hanshi stood at the northern most point of the dojo, drawing in breath after breath as he stood readying himself for a parlay with one of his most potent foes.

"This is... the necessity of exercise... of application. This is the life of what the way of the Butterfly Dragon is about!" Hanshi announced as he focused his body energy, readying himself for what was to come.

"I agree. This is what the way of the Butterfly Dragon is all about, and yet there is so much more to it than the pursuit of the brutal physicality, isn't there?" Jinn Hua circled him, readying herself for their demonstration.

"The way of a warrior is physical, and therefore we must pursue that mode of training to better ourselves," Hanshi found his stance, facing Jinn Hua, who appeared very casual in her step.

An illusion to all but Hanshi, who recognized her purposeful foot posture as being that of her own regimen, drawn from a mixture of Chen Style Tai Chi and the more esoteric and uncommon footwork of Wing Tsun.

The two circled each other, carefully. Cautiously. Knowing each other fully, yet trying to find that line where the absence of knowledge and intuition reigned supreme.

"I don't see how this is helping us! I mean come on! I could dance around these two a thousand times in the blink of an eye!" Monique challenged their technique verbally, into the ears of her employer Heylyn Yates.

"Technique, Monique. Technique," Aikiko responded to her best friend.

"We're here to learn, Monique," Braden agreed with Aikiko.

"Personally, I prefer it if my own students challenge me. However, they must learn that in doing so that there are challenges beyond what they originally anticipated," Heylyn added as they sat on the mat watching the demonstration in Hoon Kwang's Dojang.

Hanshi suddenly struck at Jinn Hua, who casually side-stepped his blow, catching his arm, twisting it until he gave, onto the mat. However, he did not yield nor did he "tap out".

He tugged and twisted with his own arm, releasing it from her grip, launching himself upward onto his own feet to face her once again.

"I've seen that one many times," Jinn Hua held her calm, as Hanshi circled her once again in pursuit of another opening.

"Is there a purpose to this, or are you two just showing off again?" asked Monique, once again impatiently as they sat around the edges on the mat of the dojo.

Jinn Hua and Hanshi ignored Monique's comment, instead focusing on their demonstration, knowing fully well that it would not be overlooked by most of the students present.

They knew Monique's overconfidence was founded in her unique abilities, for she was the only one of them who could move nearly as quickly as the light emitted from the fixtures in the ceiling.

In the time that it would take any one of them to attack such an opponenent, Monique could literally have changed position to anywhere in the neighbourhood a hundred thousand times within that same span.

To her, everyone was unimaginably slow.

And yet, the wisdom of her teachers somehow found a way to enlighten her further.

Hanshi had never been able to breach Jinn Hua's defenses. Her form in martial arts was developed from decades (even centuries) of practice and direct application. She was alive when Tai Chi was still considered a martial art rather than a meditative practice. She was alive centuries earlier as Shaolin evolved into its modern form, bridging the gap between nature, the spirit and the human body. More so, she was witness to the spread of her favourite method of all, Wing Tsun, and how it had come as close to extinction as its philosophical distant relative in the Tao. She was drawing upon centuries of knowledge and experience, beyond which most people alive could even begin to fathom.

And yet, as if to make a point in response to Monique's limited perspective, Hanshi progressed just enough to achieve his first milestone against her.

It all happened as they peered into one another's eyes, both Jinn Hua and Hanshi, despite the fact that a sacred text exemplified in a lesson in the form of a combat that occurred by its author, Miyamoto Musashi, that one should never focus upon the eyes of their opponent unless they are fully enlightened. To lock eyes was to the spirit as it was to the body to lock arms with one's opponent. Kakutō suru as it was so called.

For the first time, instead of thrusting into Jinn Hua's space with his arms or legs in an attack form, he decided to bring his entire body center to within her circle, an imaginary sphere centered at the opponent's foci of body mass extending out as far as its furthest capable reach via arms or legs in defense.

The epiphany came to him all at once and it was as if time had ceased in that moment. He simply decided to step into her space, though perhaps she had in some way allowed it to occur.

In other similar demonstrations, she would have simply countered by bringing her more agile center of mass closer to his own clumsy center by comparison, and yet, instead she side stepped him, giving him an opening for what came next.

Most of Goju-Ryu was focused around the idea of the hard-soft warrior. To be simultaneously impenetrable without the sacrifice of malleability and flow. The dichotomy of Sanchin (the body's own muscular armour achieved through the focus of tension) versus Tencho (the last stage of kata, and one of the few posing the soft form of the open hand, hence malleability and flow).

Hanshi had married these two forms, while introducing a very strategic employment of a third: the Seppai. To move into the center of one's opponent. Two cannot balance in the same space unless they work together, which went against the very nature of their impromptu kumite and demonstration. Two forces in opposition cannot occupy the same space.

When Jinn Hua suddenly responded to Hanshi's surprising improvisation, it was already too late. With Hanshi's body as the hard, he softly pinned her to the mat and for the first time in such a demonstration, she tapped out gracefully, while at that moment Hanshi knew that he had progressed significantly in kyu.

More importantly, a student such as Monique was there to witness this and right after she'd remarked about the futility of their methods versus her own unique abilities.

Monique, like most of the students there had never witnessed Jinn Hua falling to the adaptive skills of either Hanshi Morgan Hind or Sebomnim Hoon Kwang. Jinn Hua had been the proof of a foundation of skill that was impenetrable, and yet that idea had transformed to become illusion, and the student's understanding of the solidity of ideas was drastically altered. The impossible had happened before their eyes, and their sense of security in their old knowledge was all but lost. They had in that moment entered into a very different and unfamiliar world.

A world in which they were not as assured their place as they were before.

Hanshi assisted Jinn Hua in getting to her feet, which she accepted gracefully from her opponent. Despite the apparent defeat, an amourous smile held its place on her face.

"I am humbled by your skill today, Hanshi," Jinn Hua bowed in the traditional Chinese form of her own.

"That was a truly remarkable open form demonstration. One that I never anticipated I'd overcome so soon," Hanshi bowed to Jinn Hua respectfully as he had to his own Okinawan Senseis decades earlier.

"It seems that even the insurpassable have passages through which one can progress..." Jinn Hua looked over to Monique, speaking directly to her while addressing the group.

"I am very grateful that I was able to be a part of this," Jinn Hua continued, knowing that every one of the students had been utterly changed in their world view.

The solid had become supple and that which was concrete had become compliant. The things that their students counted upon, were no longer guaranteed.

Yet, it was Monique who seemed to have the biggest problem with this challenge to the ground beneath her feet, for everything she had come to trust was suddenly in that moment uprooted.

"That says nothing of how this would transpire in the real world!" she challenged Jinn Hua, as if offended that she'd let Hanshi overtake her.

"The last I checked, this is reality from my perspective," Jinn Hua responded.

"I mean out on the street, where some of us do our best to make a difference!" Monique looked over to Heylyn, and then to Aikiko for support.

Heylyn was still contemplating the importance of what she'd just seen, and therefore missed Monique's plea for support, while Aikiko being the loyal friend that she was to Monique, nodded affirmatively, perhaps even finding difficulty herself in the idea that one of the cornerstones of her beliefs of the way of things had so suddenly been shattered.

And yet support for Monique came from the most unlikely of students.

"Sifu. Hanshi, Monique has a point. How does this come into play in an environment that isn't so protective as the temple, the dojo, or the dojang," Braden asked from his position on the mat.

"A place that despite what we foster in the training of warriors, does not harbour violence as much as we seem to prepare for. These are not the days of the feudal era or the dark ages I remind you," Ms. Huệ Vân added, speaking from a seat at the corner outside of the mat that a lady of her age had been respectfully afforded.

Braden nodded in agreement with Ms. Huệ Vân.

"Thank you Sifu..." Hanshi addressed his guest in the dojo.

"My pleasure," Jinn Hua found a seat on the mat amongst her own students.

"We're warriors in training during a time of peace, and history has demonstrated that in doing so, some of the longest lasting peace has been forged in the preparations for war," Hanshi responded to Monique's and Braden's observations.

"Are you saying that what we're learning might never have application outside of this dojo?" continued Braden.

"Who is it that you're trying to conquer Braden? Everyone out there, or yourself?" asked Hanshi rhetorically.

"Pardon?" asked Braden, being of a less metaphorical mind, not quite getting Hanshi's allusion.

"I mean, you go out there in the streets every day. Get your coffee for work on Monday. Maybe do your banking. Your shopping. You live safely in your home and never experience any threat to those surroundings. Does that mean that we should dismantle the Police force because there's little crime?" asked Hanshi of Braden.

"No more so than we should dismantle the military because there's no war...?" Braden affirmed with Hanshi, reaching for his metaphor.

"Precisely, but we're not conquering the world. We're conquering ourselves," Hanshi looked to each of his students.

"But we're studying the martial arts. Training that was developed with the sole intent to be able to effectively vanquish foes with our hands or weapons. By the very implication of our practice, we are learning to vanquish," Braden continued along the same line of reasoning he suspected Monique was implying.

"Are you saying that Jinn Hua is my foe?" asked Hanshi of Braden.

"No. Not directly, but she was symbolic of being an opponent. A stand-in for what the martial artists of history would have faced. Are you saying that you defeated her, or yourself?" asked Braden, turning his mentor's rhetoric around and wielding it constructively against him.

Hanshi respected his student's ambition, but immediately recognized that Braden was striking out at something in someone else that he equated with the concept of his own self and ego. From that expression, Hanshi immediately knew the values and focus of that particular student and where he was in the structure of what Jinn Hua, Ms. Huệ Vân, Sebomnim Hoon Kwang and he were teaching.

Jinn Hua had not taken Hanshi's epiphany as a defeat, but as an important sign of their progress as mentors, while Braden had immediately equated it with his own two-sided paradigm which was built on top of his ego. A world where his friends and fellow students were merely a projection of himself.

Hence, Hanshi did what any good mentor would do and replied honestly and with the truth.

"I defeated myself and my old notions about what was possible, so much so that those old ideas were no longer an obstruction preventing me from progressing. Something I hope that each of you has learned from, however, I can't learn for you. As Jinn Hua would likely state, that's something that each of you have to do on your own. Don't let your old self get in the way of the new," Hanshi continued.

"How does this play into defeating our new enemies? Those whose realm of warfare seems to be that of the mind, more so than the physical world?" asked Heylyn, suddenly speaking up.

"Not to mention the fact that they can affect people's emotions and moods by the same mumbo jumbo that Bryce and Doctor Briggs always talks about..." Monique found traction once again in questioning their education.

Hanshi looked to Jinn Hua, and then to Ms. Huệ Vân, who returned his glance with some authority.

"That is an ongoing battle that has many fronts. Each of which will likely require a unique solution, like Heylyn's Tin Foil Hat clothing line," Jinn Hua responded.

"That's one front, and assuming that a small percentage of the population buy into this solution, what about the other fronts?" asked Braden challenged his teachers.

"Homeostasis is a quality of the body, and a strong and stable homeostasis is a quality of a healthy body, like healthy Chi. By taking part in these exercises within the temple, the dojo and the dojang, we're solidifying our own defenses, and creating an example for those who are seeking a solution to their own challenges in that regard," Ms. Huệ Vân interjected.

"That's only two fronts. What about the others? What about us transferring these techniques we've studied to the realm of mind? Why are we so focused on the physical when we clearly need something that overcomes the intellectual and mental challenges? These two solutions are clearly not enough," Heylyn added, she too seeing some merit in carefully stirring the foundation.

Jinn Hua smiled as she looked to her students from her place on the mat.

"Ms. Huệ Vân. Hanshi. Sebomnim. It seems that our students are progressing faster than we have the ability to give them a path," Jinn Hua looked to her peers in Ms. Huệ Vân, Hanshi and Sebomnim Hoon Kwang.

"If we're supposed to be this... vanguard against Mentis... Why are we so lost in our direction?" Monique added, finding new footing in her skepticism of her mentors.

The dojo remained silent for a few moments, before Hanshi decided that action was better than conjecture. He continued the night's class with more exercise and physical training, though the questions their students had asked had largely remained unanswered.

For the first time in a long time, the mentors themselves did not know where to go or what to do despite the night's gains in terms of Hanshi's epiphany and realization.

They were guides who were doing their best to keep their students on course in a map that nobody knew the breadth from depth. In that subtle moment, the students were plunged into a world where they realized that even their own mentors did not have all of the answers.

From that moment, they were all, each of them, suddenly afraid of the future.

Legacy And The Future

(Continued directly from Night Boat - Episode 6 - Chapter: Simulcast)

The condominium was luxurious and large, having two floors of its own and for only the wealthiest of residents.

It was as few had seen in their lifetimes, for there were more in the world that had no idea how these fewer lived.

These abodes, equating to fortresses of solitude in the legends of some, were what had been afforded women and men who'd significantly become a source for the world and the people around them. Most such persons residing in such luxury were the foci of vast extensions of prosperity and wealth, giving many the opportunity to ply their skill and trade and earn their keep.

The weight upon those who were the centerpiece to such empires was immense, and hence they were rewarded aptly, for what fool would carry such weight without the reward of a day's peaceful end?

Despite their being the fewer, they were in fact many and to be found all over the world, however not every person who inhabited the towers built for such purposes were as deserving of the comfort of such abodes.

There were those who'd created it by their propensity for prosperity, and there were those who simply preyed upon all, taking what they wanted and when they wanted it.

These people who were the mirror's reflection of plentitude.

"I'm lost as to how all of this plays into your idea of victory. I mean, you come from a culture who practically invented the idea of perfection through better warfare and all that Samurai stuff. Where'd you put all of that history? In your back pocket or something?" Dan addressed those in the marble tiled living area of the condominium, shortly after quenching his thirst with a sip of his drink.

Dan was the former name of the vessel that Jack Warren's mind now inhabited. Dan had been a fifty something year old former sales associate whose life had ended with the structual collapse of one of the arteries in his left leg, thanks to the accumulation of cholesterol and hardening of his arteries. This had in turn counter-balanced the effort of his own heart, in turn leading eventually to cardio-pulminary failure.

At the moment that Dan Gurdy had died, Jack Warren was born into that same body, for Jack's former body had been crushed under the mechanisms of a massive vehicle. As gods might have granted those who'd died prematurely the opportunity of a continued life, so had the demons visited upon those whose malicious purpose was not yet complete.

And so, Jack Warren was now the mind occupant of Dan Gurdy's body, with all of the same independence and ignorance of the former assassin for hire.

Jack had abhorred Dan's body, which its former host had neglected to the point of eventual death, however when Jack had command of this person's vessel, he'd sculpted it to perfection over the course of months.

To any who'd known Dan Gurdy, they'd have not recognized their former associate for his body was now a bundle of packed muscle and monstrosity, shaped to perfection by its new occupant.

One of the six at the bar in the massive condominium looked to the back of Dan's head as he leaned against the counter. That man could see the back of Dan's neck as he grasped the hilt of his concealed Wakizashi, ready at any moment to separate Dan's head from the rest of his body.

"Koro. Why don't you mix Mr. Gurdy another drink?" Mutano spoke calmly and rationally in response to Dan's remark.

Koro, had in fact been an inch away from ending Dan's life at that moment, his grip tightening around the hilt of his Wakizashi.

"Katsu, why don't you coax Koro in the right direction?" continued Mutano.

At the behest of the man seated before the audio visual center of the room, Katsu, one of the three women leaned over and whispered something into the ear of the Japanese man named Koro. He then responded to Mutano's request, and only then.

"What shall I make for him, oh dragon of the flesh? A Bloody Ceasar maybe?" Koro's grip only tightened on the hilt of his blade.

"I'll take a bourbon on the rocks, Koro," Dan addressed the man by name, who cringed upon the utterance of the word he'd so come to despise.

Dan then turned to face the woman.

"Katsu is it? At least I won't be sleeping alone tonight," he spoke directly to her, menacingly so.

The woman in question revealed nothing by way of her expression, though she understood him completely.

"So I take it that our approach to dealing with the Wytches, even after that failed attempt in Alivale is making its way here, to the big city?" asked Dan of Mutano, sliding his empty glass to Koro, who reluctantly caught it, filling it with ice and then pouring a fresh frosting of whiskey within.

Koro then spat at the floor.

"Mr. Gurdy... ahem... Mr. Warren. Like you, we are entirely about action, much the same as the ancestors you so brazingly elevated by your verbal observations. This is a fact we have in common with many, especially those who've been living the idea that what they prepare for is what they do. What they are. That in practicing to be warriors, they become warriors. However, I, much like the legacy of my own ancestors, appreciate the power of action more so than the subtly of practice and contemplation. We are entirely defined not by what we practice or contemplate, but by what we do. The world around us is evidence of this very fact, and so we are going to take what is ours not by waiting or contemplating, like our enemies, but by doing," Mutano did not look over to Dan as he spoke, instead keeping his vision focused on the empty television screen before him.

"Finally! So we're going to West Meet East and kicking their asses?" Dan said, getting into a boxing stance as if he were ready for action himself.

"Not quite. We're going to bring them and ourselves somewhere that we can determine who the real warriors are. Our enemies of contemplation and practice, or us, those who believe that we become what we do," Mutano smiled, though none of his guests could see it from their current angle.

Katsu leaned over to Koro and whispered into his ear.

"I take it that you are going to use us for this prospective venture?" Koro asked Mutano, Dan raising his glass to the man as Katsu watched.

"Katsu and yourself will be the vanguard of this operation, while you will follow the lead of Mr. Gurdy... Jack Warren that is. Our enemies will be brought to the battlefield, and we'll be there to meet them," Mutano addressed Koro.

Katsu leaned over to Koro's ear and spoke quietly enough not to be heard by others.

"And in what form will this take place?" asked Koro of Mutano.

"This world of technology seems very focused on such ideas. Why not take such ideas for ourselves and make them into reality? Let's just call it a Battle Royale between us and our adversaries..." Mutano once again smiled, grabbing the glass of six hundred dollar whiskey beside him and drinking it until none was left.

"Wouldn't that ruin all the headway I've made into earning their trust at West Meet East?" asked Dan, after which he took a quick glimpse at Katsu over the rim of his glass.

"You'll continue to earn their trust as you've been doing already, but you'll not ever attack them so that we'll always have you as an insider. You might even defend them when we do," Mutano assured Dan.

"Who do we have besides me that's skilled enough to take them on?" asked Dan of Mutano.

"Some friends of Koro from ages ago. Men of history who'd jump at the opportunity to regain their honour, status... and heads..." Mutano pondered how it all might play out.

New Car - New Challenges

Heylyn kept her hand firmly upon the shifter, though in all honesty there was no reason for her to do so. Her new car, a Tesla Model S, handled everything for her. Yet, somehow after driving with her employee and friend, Kori Jonglyu, she'd been converted to the idea that a manual shift model might appeal more so to a woman that ran her own fortune five hundred fashion company.

And so, Heylyn purchased a Tesla Model S with software and a stick-shift input system specially modified to suit her needs, though she could optionally return the car to automatic-variable transmission mode, which essentially did not require shifting at all. Handy for when she was nursing her morning Chai Latté.

"So, what did you all think?" asked Heylyn as she upshifted before their entry onto the 401 Eastbound highway ramp.

"I thought Hanshi was especially knowledgeable this session," Aikiko responded to Heylyn's question.

"I felt lost. He was speaking about a lot of stuff I didn't understand... katas and stuff, and so I just kind of did my own thing..." Monique added.

"Well, you did pretty well.. and your technique was good... despite the fact that a student two kyu beneath your level of training ably defeated you three times," Heylyn pointed out to Monique.

"Well... that jam was like having your hands tied behind your back! I mean I couldn't even use my... real talents... you know?" Monique responded, clearly frustrated by her lack of progress in Kumite.

"That's what the tennis is about," Heylyn reminded Monique.

"We haven't played in ages! The only thing we've done recently is spar a little in the calethenics gym!" Monique quickly responded.

"...And how many times have I urged you to knock on Heylyn's door so we could, all three of us... spar? Back in my family dojo, Kumite was a crucial part of our daily regimen," asked Aikiko of her room mate in their shared condominium unit.

"We've been... busy... having a life!" Monique responded, cautiously.

"Speaking of, we're still going to have a serious meeting about that matter you know," Heylyn reminded Monique.

"I honestly don't know what there'd be to discuss. Don't forget that you're addressing a twenty-nine year old woman, and not a fifteen year old girl. You may be my employer, but you're not my mother," Monique challenged Heylyn.

"It wouldn't hurt to discuss the matter..." Aikiko interjected.

"Don't you encourage her! We're adults Aikiko and we don't need to justify our lives...!" Monique began as Heylyn cut her off.

"This isn't a daytime soap opera. This is real life and a real situation with serious implications. If you'd have come with me to South Korea when I adopted Warai, then you'd understand how serious this is..." Heylyn asserted her point of view once again.

"Well who's fault was that? I was waiting for you to ask me to go with you, but you took Kori instead and left Valerie and I to look after the fort, and all during the height of the Chameleon's murder spree! You abandoned us in our moment of need!" Monique challenged her employer and friend.

"I trusted you two to protect the city...!" Heylyn shot back defensively.

"And did we?!!!" Monique responded to Heylyn, unsure if she even remembered what had happened on that very night that Heylyn and Kori had departed.

"...yes. You did. With a little help from our Dragon Man friend, but the Chameleon case is still open..." Heylyn reminded Monique.

"But he hasn't struck again in months. We're not like little girls that need a baby sitter every time you go out, Heylyn. We're adults. We have our own lives, and we don't have to answer to you or anyone!" Monique defied her employer for the first time.

"Monique, when you became the Eclipse, the nature of your responsibilities changed from that moment forward. Our responsibilities go above and beyond those of most people in this world," Heylyn calmed herself for her reply.

"But that doesn't mean that we can't have a life! I've given up the last six years of my life patrolling the skies with you almost every night, watching protectively over other people as they live out their lives. Go to dinner. A movie. Snuggle up in bed at home and make babies. Raise a family, and all we're doing is flying around watching over them like guardian angels. Life is passing us by, and I want a life, Heylyn, and this is the first time since Treadwater Island that I've been able to have one," Monique explained to her friend.

Heylyn was a friend she thought knew her better than anyone else alive. As it turns out, she didn't know Monique as well as she'd hoped, and Monique suddenly felt a deep sense of loneliness and despair. Beytrayal even.

"You've got Warai. You're practically in mother mode from hereon in for the next fourteen years, at least until she starts college. In all of that time, what am I going to build? What's going to be the legacy of my life? I honestly don't know, but I can tell you what it isn't going to be. Fourteen years of patrolling the city skies and watching everyone else feast on the buffet of life, while I get old and become a spinster living in a smelly apartment with twenty cats, eating oatmeal for breakfast and pea soup for dinner every night," Monique looked down at her womb as she finished her sentence.

A gesture which Heylyn caught out of the corner of her eye.

"You're not...?" asked Heylyn, suddenly startled by the possibility.

"No. I'm not, but that doesn't mean that's always going to be the case," Monique replied, running her left hand from just beneath her breasts down her womb and to her belly button along her jump suit.

"Can I say...?" Aikiko attempted to interject once again.

"Let us finish this!" Heylyn and Monique both responded firmly to Aikiko at the exact same time as Heylyn pulled up to a stop light.

The three of them sat silently in the car for a moment, as the awkwardness of the moment finally reached them.

It was Monique who started laughing first. A short moment later, Heylyn followed suit.

"Next time, I'm going to drive and it will be me lecturing the two of you," Aikiko responded calmly, causing both Monique and Heylyn to furtheer burst out in hysterics.

Aikiko joined them in laughter as well until they each of them ran out of breath. Then the silence returned and they realized they'd run out of things to laugh about.

"I'm going to meet Habus next week, and you're going to arrange it," Heylyn said to Monique firmly.

"Fine. If that's the way you want it, but you're not going to sabotage my private life," Monique reminded her.

"Or mine," Aikiko added, backing her roommate up, Eclipse and Dragon against the Butterfly.

"Fair enough," the light turned green and Heylyn pulled the car out into the intersection and down York Street towards the Queen's Quay West.

The rest of the drive home was quiet, with the relaxing clicking of the turn indicator being the only sound that broke the silence.

When Heylyn had parked the car, she once again addressed them as they got out together.

"We have a busy week ahead, so get some rest. Tomorrow, we've got to get our Tin-Foil Hat brand clothing prototypes prepped for the manufacturer, and you remember what's happening on Monday right?" asked Heylyn of the two of them.

"The Eclipse...?" asked Aikiko.

"Oh my gosh! I almost forgot! We have that appearance at Niagara Falls in the afternoon..." Monique sounded startled, suddenly remembering their plans.

"I hope you have a clean set of hero spandex ready for the occasion," Heylyn opened the trunk and they each grabbed their gym bags from within.

"What about me?" asked Aikiko.

"You'll be backing up Valerie, who with Kori and Fiona will be running the show at West Meet East while we're gone," Heylyn gently closed the trunk.

"I never get to have any fun with you two!" Aikiko said in a most humourously frustrated manner.

"There will be plenty of time for costumed fun in the future, if we don't get this Mentis mystery solved," Heylyn reminded them.

Monique and Aikiko's eyes met, and they suddenly recalled Habus and Sterling's connection to it all and somehow they knew that conflict would soon find their romantic relationships with Habus and Sterling.

"I'll call you in the morning. You two can come over and have breakfast with Warai and I before we leave to do the prototype clothing," Heylyn suggested as they walked towards the parking garage foyer and into the waiting elevators from there.

The elevator ascended the tower, and before long they were situated in their respective units. Heylyn greeted Warai and Kori happily as she stepped in the door, while Monique and Aikiko, so worn out turned in to their respective bedrooms.

Their four hour Sunday the next day at West Meet East went quickly, and by the time they'd left, the second batch of prototype clothing was ready and in the company vault in the basement, ready for delivery on Monday to those who'd begin the process of mass producing it.

Ironically, this production would coincide with the epoch event of the century, for it was the day of the eclipse.

Hot On The Trail

Though some would contend that there were other notable areas of the city, such as the food and culture rich Roncesvalles community, which included a wide assortment of Euro-culture from Polish, Baltic, Spanish and French to Porteguese and Italian. There was Danforth East, from Broadview to Coxwell, that hosted some of the best Mediterranean cuisine on the planet. The East Asian Spadina and College to Queen Street community, one of the few places in the city where you could get a traditional six course Chinese meal at 4 AM in the morning, or the Gerrard to Queen East South Asian community, where most every meal included a Naan and Curry seasoning.

There was a lot to experience in the city, however, much like its sister cities throughout the world, the who's who visiting Toronto tended to stick to a few districts. Yorkville as it had been in the city's history, was one of the most successful. It was at a popular café that two men sat, an older man with stylish short cropped spiky hair for his age, with a large coffee (a plain triple-triple with sweetener rather than suger as his wife had suggested), and a much younger Asian man, who had a monstrous Caramel and Mocha Machiato beside his laptop, into which he currently was four fingers deep.

"You in yet?" asked Farnham of the younger man, taking a sip of his coffee and forcing himself to enjoy the artificial sweetner.

"Of course. Its a bank. They're on our side. Its not like I had to hack it or something..." Somboon responded to the older man.

"Just asking. What you do is alot different than what we used to do when I was your age and a young Constable on the force," Farnham responded, keeping his eyes about him and focused on the Cumberland sidewalk itself.

"Are you trying to distract me or something, old man?" asked Somboon, a playful smirk on his face.

"No. You tell me, especially if you want to make Detective one day..." Farnham reminded the younger man.

"I'm a Specialist in Digital Forensics, why in the hell would I ever want to be a Detective? For a cut in pay?" Somboon reponded sarcastically as he typed something on the keyboard with a speed that could be matched by few.

"Great. Not only is my new partner an asshole, but he also makes twice my salary at half my age..." Farnham smirked at the younger man.

"You wish! Try three times your salary and a third of your age old man!" Somboon responded, causing Farnham to laugh out loud.

They'd chosen a part of the patio closest to the exhaust vent for the fan inside of the café, which whirred quite loudly, and enough so to cover their conversation to others on the same patio and passersby on the sidewalk.

"If you put it that way, then you're buying the coffees next time, smart ass!" Farnham replied to Somboon.

As he finished his sentence, he observed one of the men on his surveillance short list leaving the lobby of a nearby building and heading in the direction of 175 Cumberland Street.

"There's our target, and he's headed directly into the deposit zone," Farnham said to Somboon, who looked up momentarily enough to get a good look at the man's face and shape, without looking long enough to cause alarm.

"Got your headset on?" asked Farnham of Somboon.

"Yep. Ready to go, when you get up off of your old time ass," Somboon exclaimed to Farnham.

Farnham did just that, leaving his chair and a cash tip for the woman cleaning the tables.

"Don't take that money, unless you're going to triple it, smart ass," Farnham said as he left.

"Are you sure you're going to be able to keep up with him without your walker?" asked Somboon through his headset.

"Just keep your ass pinned to that seat of yours and your eyes focused on that screen like everyone else in your generation. I'll worry about the real work here," Farnham replied through his headset as he left the café.

Across from the café, on the other side of Cumberland Street, a Japanese man in a stylish suit sat near the window of a restaurant, peering out from within. A cup of coffee with a white tuft of curdled cream swirling within sat in fronnt of him. A MindSpice tablet sat beside it with the headlines he'd been reading earlier still there on the screen in front of him:

MindSpice Selects New CEO - But They're Tight Lipped For The Time Being

Arson In The Toronto Studio District Linked To Insurance Fraud Coverup

Another Bank Robbery Foiled - But The Police And The Butterfly Were Nowhere To Be Seen

The man's attention was not on the headlines, but through the window and on the café across the street as Farnham, in a casual jacket and slacks got up from a table, where Somboon sat with a laptop in front of him, busily typing away.

The Japanese man pulled a phone from the inner pocket of his jacket. He pushed the speed dial for the contact he'd previously selected and held the phone to his ear:

[He just left in pursuit of our man,]

"彼は私たちの男を追って立ち去ったところです、" the man stated in his native tongue.

"Excellent. You may proceed to the next stage Totsuzen No Unmei," Mutano responded to him.

Across from Totsuzen sat an intensely mysterious Japanese woman, with darkly contrasting red makeup and a porcelain complexion. Totsuzen pocketed the phone and then addressed the woman across from him in Japanese. She nodded back to him, acknowledging that their plan was about to unfold.

The waiter in the meantime had arrived, and reached out for the coffee cup to collect it from Totsuzen. His hand quickly shot out from his side and caught the waiter's hand by the wrist, revealing a Totsuzen's tattoo of a black dragon encircling his wrist.

"What...?" the waiter responded in fright, attempting to withdraw his hand, though Totsuzen held on tightly.

The woman then spoke, addressing Totsuzen in a language that few human beings had ever heard first hand, and about which even fewer had lived to tell. It was harsh and full of hard sounds, and phonemes most humans could never hope to pronounce in a thousand years. Totsuzen listened to her carefully as she spoke. When she was done, he simply turned to the waiter, releasing his hand as he addressed him:

"I am not finished yet. Sorry for the confusion," Totsuzen addressed the waiter, who quickly withdrew his hand.

"...I'll just bring you your bill... and a refill?" the waiter asked cautiously.

Neither Totsuzen nor the Japanese woman across from him answered the waiter.

He simply backed away and when he was far enough, he turned and fled for the register and quickly printed their bill.

...

Mutano pressed the END CALL button on the screen of his phone, and then navigated through the interface to find a contact he'd received recently on the orders of Mentis. He then hit the DIAL button and a moment later he was connected to another milestone on the way to achieving their plan.

"Mail Tech Global. Technical Administration. Matt speaking," Matt, a slightly heavy set man in his early thirties answered the call, his workstation computer in front of him.

"Hi Matt, so nice to speak with you. I am calling in regard to our mutual friend, Isene Undu. Perhaps you know this person?" asked Mutano of Matt.

"I certainly do. One of our customers here at Mail Tech Global. They run a small network provider that uses our network infrastructure. How may I assist you?" asked Matt, quickly standing to his full height of five foot nine to peer over the cubicle adjacent to his and ensure that the desk was unoccupied.

He then sat down back at his seat, and began typing a memo to that workstation, requesting the operators presence in the Corporate Office, which happened to be located in the neighbouring building. As he sent the memo, Mutano replied.

"I'm the director of customer service and I need to ensure that one of our mutual customers is receiving timely service on their mail messaging. You see, I received a report on my desk that some of our customers were not receiving messages on time. That such messages and notification were delayed by as much as two hours. Do you think that you could see to fix this problem for us?" asked Mutano of Matt.

"I certainly could. Perhaps you could give me the customer names involved?" asked Matt in a professional and friendly voice.

"Their names are Monique Defleur and Heylyn Yates..." Mutano explained to Matt as he pulled up their email service customer files.

"Would you look at this! You know, I have to thank you for bringing this to my attention. They're both paying for VIP service, and yet somebody had their accounts set to Premium. I'll just make the corrections here and they should be good to go. Two hours did you say? We'll have that fixed in no time," Matt said with a smugly friendly tone just as Elia returned to her desk across from his.

As Matt quickly inserted a function into the mail relay protocol filters for Monique's and Heylyn's email accounts, Elia read the message on her screen, even commenting to Matt who continued to make his modification to their accounts.

"Would you look at that. Corporate wants to speak with me directly!" Elia said proudly, bragging just a little bit.

"Must be important then. I wouldn't keep them waiting..." Matt said as he finished the filter that would alter any references to time or day on every single text or voice mail message routed for Monique Defleur's and Heylyn Yates' email accounts by adding two hours to it.

"Bye for now..." Elia said as she turned to leave, on her way to the Corporate building next door.

"You can give me all the juicy details when you get back..." Matt said in a friendly tone.

"Har har har. Its Corporate, not a peep from me..." Elia responded as she left on her way to the elevator foyer.

When she was gone, Matt addressed Mutano.

"All done. Your customers should have top notch service now," Matt assured Mutano.

"I'm sure they will. I'll be sure to let Isene Undu know about your good service. Have a wonderful day and do be sure you get a chance to enjoy the eclipse..." Mutano said his goodbyes to Matt.

"I sure will..." Matt smiled, not fully knowing or understanding the innuendo that Mutano had implied.

West Meet East Meet Lunch

"Treats are up everyone!" yelled Kori as she returned to the offices of West Meet East, a box of pastries in one hand and a tray of elaborate coffees in the other.

"They'll be in the design room on the closest table! Ahem! That means you too Lisa and Dylan!" Kori once again signalled everyone in the cubicles just beyond the reception desk and the showroom.

Fiona stepped out from her office upon hearing Kori's return and followed behind her on the way to Heylyn's design office.

"How was lunch?" asked Fiona asked Kori.

"It was a late lunch, I mean its like almost 3 PM now and I'm only getting back. But it was good! I had lunch with an old friend from college. She just got a gig around the corner as a Gaff on the set of Street Duty. Said she'll be popping in to visit us from time to time. How was your lunch?" asked Kori as she turned the corner and just barely missed bumping into the material samples table.

"Glad to hear. Lunch was fine. They're serving Chicken and Swiss on a Kaiser as the meat dish, and Tofu and Quinoa Salad for the vegetarians. I had a bit of both and it was pretty darn tasty," Fiona explained to Kori as they arrived at the first design table in Heylyn's design office.

"I guess I'll just have to try it next time... Monique, is Heylyn here?" asked Kori as Monique turned to greet them.

"She certainly is champ! She's in her..." Monique began as Heylyn opened the door to her office, stepping out into the design room.

"Did somebody call a meeting? Mmmmm. Something smells delicious," Heylyn remarked, greeting her employees.

"I decided because its eclipse day, to get a little treat, on behalf of the Human Resources Department..." Kori explained to them.

"A department of one. How thoughtful!" Heylyn responded to Kori, helping her and Fiona get everything laid out on the design table.

"I thought you two had an appointment today?" asked Fiona of Monique and Heylyn.

"We do, but I just received a notification that we won't have to be there until five this evening. So we've got a bit of free time..." Heylyn said, looking briefly to Monique.

"At least we got that order taken care of. When will we be able to go see our Tinfoil Hat line in the stores?" asked Monique.

"About three weeks. We'll go out shopping on the weekend after they release to check it out," Heylyn said as Trey arrived, Aikiko behind him.

"In the middle of a photoshoot. Can't talk. Thanks Kori! Valerie will kill me if I spill this..." Trey quickly grabbed the coffees that Kori had marked for them.

"Not a problem superstar!" Kori responded as Trey left them, on his way first to Valerie's office and then to Studio A.

"Where's Warai?" asked Aikiko as she grabbed her coffee and one of the pastries.

"My parents are picking her up from school again today. We've been doing it that way for the last week and its working out pretty good," Heylyn told them, picking up her cup from the table.

"She must be liking that?" Kori asked Heylyn.

"Oh she loves it, and it puts a little excitement in their lives too, while it gives me a chance to finish the day in a timely manner and the best part is that by the time I pick her up, she's already had an awesome dinner. Grandparents live for that kind of stuff," Heylyn explained to her friends after which she took a sip of her Chai Latté.

"How's Fiona's day been?" asked Monique.

"Its been steady, but I did manage to get a lot of streamlining done and onto Valerie's desk for approval, which is probably why she didn't come to pickup her own coffee today..." Fiona smiled.

"And exactly the reason why I'll have a pile of budget approvals from her by the morning..." Heylyn sighed at the thought of dealing with more administrative work, when all she wanted was to get back to her work on the summer line.

"Budget...? Ooops! I forgot, I've got to get that on Valerie's desk by the end of the day!" Kori grabbed her coffee and a pastry and ran out of the design office on her way back to her desk.

"Thanks for the chit chat, but I've got to go and get back on things in my office..." Fiona smiled, and left with her coffee, leaving Aikiko, Monique and Heylyn.

"So, you two are leaving much later then I assume?" asked Aikiko, as she nibbled on her pastry, covering her mouth with her hand as she spoke.

"I figure we can sneak out at about four thirty. I'm pretty sure that Monique can get the two of us there with time to spare..." Heylyn answered Aikiko's question.

"What? Oh, Niagara Falls? Yeah... that's about a tenth of a second, maybe a bit less," Monique thought it about it carefully, though in all honesty she had no idea of the science or math of flight speed.

She only knew anything of that from what Zheng and Bryce had explained to her during one of the flights on their trip to Asia.

"Look... Aikiko. I'm sorry we're not bringing you, but I promise you that you'll be a part of the fanfare in the near future. I need you here to take care of things, after all we're still in this up to our necks with Mentis and all..." Heylyn explained to Aikiko.

"Its alright. I understand. I'm coming into this fold late in the procession. I appreciate the opportunities you've already afforded me, and I look forward to what the future holds in store," Aikiko smiled and even bowed for them, which they both returned reflexively.

"So why don't we get into costume then before its too late...?" suggested Heylyn.

"I was thinking that we could change down there? I know a quiet little restaurant with a quiet little washroom..." Monique suggested.

"Sounds good. Could you two help me bring some of the summer 2020 outfits up from the archive?" asked Heylyn of her friends and employees.

Monique and Aikiko agreed, and the three of them made their way through the office and to the back of the building where they found the stairs leading into Heylyn's vault.

Deal Of The Two Dragons

In the field under the night sky of a million stars, the moon hovered overhead, a halo glowing around it as it floated over the tree canopy which extended into in the distance. Somewhere beneath the trees and a good distance from their breadth, a vast field of lushious grass and foliage covered the earth beneath it. Flowers of a thousand colours bloomed, and crickets chirped their longing song for all to hear.

On this night, there was only one who could, and that one sat coiled on the grass, its enormous wings folded as it meditated amidst the glory around it. Its scales glistened in the night sky as its head sat stories above the grass and flowers, held there in place by its enormously long neck. It looked off into the distance, perhaps even able to see infinity, for both its eyes and its mind were not of the time and space that currently contained it.

It pondered its trip through time and space thus far, from a point in time roughly twenty billion of our years into the future. A time which physics under its current models could not comprehend, for it was missing information in order to achieve such forecasts, though that did not matter. Especially if humanity could not make it beyond the most severe of obstacles still facing it now and they were numerous, however they all paled in comparison to what humanity was up against, and the vast majority of the nine billion people on the planet had no idea about this challenge whatsoever.

Make it or break it, that's all it essentially came down to, though such a simple concept failed to fully expound the seriousness of this situation. Perhaps if most knew, they'd simply give up and perhaps many already had, and this effect was gaining momentum society wide until upheaval and possibly revolution might once again attempt to quicken our thumos, enough to wake up and overcome this great hurdle, but from the perspective of the current lay of the land, the end seemed imminent and all would be lost.

The universe would reset, and all of humanity, every living thing, every single last living cell. Every atomic and sub-atomic particle would be gone. Destroyed. Folded into itself as time and space collapsed, igniting what would become a new beginning, essentially what our universe was twenty billion years earlier. And in the blink of an eye and in the absence of all consciousness less a few primordial black holes and other proto-celestial objects that could naturally collapse the wave function, eventually the first organism would once again arise on a planet eerily similar to our own and the whole process would start again.

Four and a half billion years later, we would rise again and civilization would once again climb the heights to face the same challenge with an entirely different cast of players and once again, we would either make it or break it, but none of us who had been in any of the previous incarnations of time and space would be there to try. It was either do it there and then, or be done and gone and never again.

The old serpent, an ancient dragon beyond time and space could not count how many times the cycle had taken place before, for this dragon grew backwards in time, from the end of the universe towards the beginning of time and it had to learn of this fate every single time, for though it could remember its own name and wisdom beyond the ages, it could never remember what it had learned from its previous incarnations. Its knowledge intact but its memory entirely gone.

As it contemplated this very fact, the ground around it began to rumble and shake, and the great dragon was roused from its meditation. It quickly uncoiled itself and extended its wings and took to the sky where it witnessed the birth of a celestial object adjacent to the Moon.

The sky opened up and an impossibly enormous object of such dimensions that it spanned the entire sky emerged. A black and orange vortex distorted the sky around it like the edges of a looking glass. The great dragon's eyes narrowed as it realized what was coming.

From behind the vortex, a supermassive black hole emerged another dragon, this one almost as black as the night sky itself, the vortex seemingly having no effect upon it as its serpentine body not unlike that of the first dragon, snaked through the sky and encircled the vortex itself.

At that moment, the space around the first dragon folded and then multiplied a billion times in the course of a second, and it too was enormous as the sky itself, encircling the moon which had equally grown to match the size of the vortex. The two dragons stared at one another from opposite sides of the sky before the newly arrived guest spoke.

"Weltherwithsp, it has been a great deal of time since we last spoke, has it not?" asked the black dragon of Weltherwithsp.

"Witherwyrm, you know as well as do I that the only bearing time plays in our lives is its direction, not its span or breadth," the first dragon responded.

"Well what have you surmised in your contemplation since we last spoke. Have you learned anything new that could avert their fate?" asked Witherwyrm.

"Nothing of the sort, but there is the question of your never ending treachery, Witherwyrm," Weltherwithsp confronted the black dragon who seemed amused by the accusation.

"Treachery? A sharp accusation coming from such a righteous dragon who implored its dark opposite to cause an aircraft of the humans to land early during a flight over a place you refer to as Ho Chi Minh City," Witherwyrm reminded Weltherwithsp of its role in direct interference with human progression.

"And yet it was you who forced the aircraft down if I recall!" Weltherwithsp reminded Witherwrym.

"As part of a deal you made with me. Don't you recall? It was you who came to me for the services of treachery, offering a deal in the form of a debt should I accept. I did, and now here I am to collect..." Witherwyrm's smile grew to become a black rictus of sharp spoke-like teeth.

"You know as well as I that even destiny needs guidance..." Weltherwithsp responded, wary of where the conversation was going.

"Maybe so, but blatant interference in their matters? We agreed that this would never be the case, that either of us would directly be involved in altering any condition of their being or cause and effect towards any of our own ends, don't you recall?" Withwyrm reminded the great dragon.

"We were young and on opposide sides of time from one another. I was a fool to propose such a thing at such an early point in our mutual understanding," Weltherwithsp admitted, its eyes narrowing as it looked upon its own diametrical opposite.

"You actually care for those things? And yet their lives are but the blink of an eye to us. Not one of them has seen the grand picture of this chaotic dance, for if they did, they'd be more than amply prepared for what you and I both know is coming..." Withwyrm reminded Weltherwithsp once again.

"Fetter not about matters you hold as being trifle, dragon of darkness. What is your deal, and how do I relieve myself of this debt?" asked Weltherwithsp of Witherwyrm, now cautiously skeptical of the other dragon.

"The deal is quite simple. As you know, a convergence is about to occur. A convergence that will open a doorway between this universe and an alternate one. One composed entirely of dark matter as the human scientists call it. When that convergence happens, it will give us a unique opportunity to utilize our abilities to their fullest for a wager," Witherwyrm explained to Weltherwithsp, whose brows furrowed after the black dragon had spoken.

"What sort of wager?" asked Weltherwithsp.

"A wager to determine which of our two sides have progressed the most. My side of the eternal coil, in the form of Mutano and his collection of miscreants and denizens. Mentis and his followers, and finally yours, that is: the Butterfly Dragon and her friends..." Witherwyrm laid out the deal to Weltherwithsp.

"And what of everyone else on the planet?" asked Weltherwithsp.

"Oh, not those pesky humans again. Well, them too. All of them. Every single one. A fight to the death," Witherwyrm smiled as he reached the end of his sentence.

"That is out of the question!" Weltherwithsp quickly responded.

"Is it? Is that to say that you believe they'll fail when the time comes to face the dire threat which none have surpassed? Then why not put some trust in them and let us see where they currently stand?" asked Witherwyrm as Weltherwithsp pondered the question.

"It is nothing more than barbarism! Something for your amusement treacherous one! Death and destruction for nothing but itself!" Weltherwithsp responded.

"Then the only alternative is that you will surrender one of yours, their life in exchange for freedom from your debt to me, so called dragon," Witherwyrm countered.

"The children and the elderly will not take part in this and we will make provisions to ensure this. If my side can overcome yours, we will reset the world back to its state before the eclipse and our wager. That is the only deal I'll make..." Weltherwithsp returned a counteroffer.

"You are ever so surprising sometimes. You'd not risk one to save all, but you'd risk all to save your few?" Witherwyrm's logic seemed sound, but it was anything but.

"You yourself suggested that I don't trust them to overcome what's in store if I pass on your wager. I believe that humanity has a great chance, and I'm willing to wager it. What fool dragon who's lived the future already would turn down a bet they already know the outcome of?" Weltherwithsp smiled deviously.

"Ahhhh but the convergence and our interference will create a completely new universe, branching out from the one you know and very obviously feel protective over. The original universe will remain in stasis until the outcome of our wager in the newly spawned universe has been decided. If your friends win... then we merely allow time to continue its slow advance to their eventual death. If they lose however... then both universes will be lost, and the great reset will occur once again. You and I will be reborn from the opposite ends of time and wait billions of years before they arrive once again. How suits you that wager?" asked Witherwyrm.

"And I will be freed from my debt, will I?" asked Weltherwithsp.

"Of course you will. A deal broken between two dragons as us would undo all of reality. I will honour the terms of this wager as I'm certain will you," Witherwyrm agreed.

"Neither of us will interfere by hook or crook in this wager then, correct?" Weltherwithsp asked.

"As certainly as our scales will never tarnish," Witherwyrm seemed fit for the wager.

"Then we have a deal," Weltherwithsp agreed and the two dragons sealed their deal by entwining amongst one another in a spiral, and folding their arms together, holding them in place for what seemed an eternity, and then each releasing a breath of their dragon spirit, which floated glowing in front of them, flowing in a circle.

One a beacon of light, the other a herald of darkness.

An instant later, and they were floating in space on the other side of the Sun, just as the eclipse began.

The two dragons encircled the sun, flying around it as fast as needed for what was required to spawn a branching universe from this point in time.

The Eclipse

As the two dragons encircled the Sun, the Moon moved between it and the Earth as crowds had gathered the world over to watch the mysterious event at its peak.

The shadow of the Moon moved across the face of the Earth, until it reached a convergence point, very close to complete alignment. At that point, the field generated by the two dragons flight around the Sun, and the magnetic field of the Earth and Moon coincided with the world's consciousness, unifying it for one brief instant, enough to collapse reality into another distinct universe. One whose time zero began at the moment of convergence, an exact copy of the universe from which it was spawned.

The wave-like particles encompassing the original universe, began to oscillate out of phase with the new universe and hence where the two overlapped, the original one became invisible and intangible, while the new universe remained. Yet, throughout the entirety of the world, not one conscious being felt it as it occurred. One moment simply passed into the next as if nothing had happened at all, except the magnificent spectacle of the eclipse itself.

...

Heylyn, Monique and Aikiko had been in the basement of West Meet East, where they went through the locked steel cabinets, retrieving various designs from their 2020 summer collection.

"I think this is the last one... I remember this one. Strutting on the catwalk upstairs..." Monique recalled that evening and the party they had afterwards.

Heylyn began to laugh when she recalled the situation to which Monique was referring.

"What? What's so funny?" Aikiko asked, smiling and looking to each of them in anticipation of an explanation.

"Monique was on the stage for her strut, wearing that very dress. She was backstage at that point, and apparently two of the models had setup a prank to play on Monique. They were in line behind her, and had prepared a sign to which they affixed tape and stuck to her back without her noticing it..." Heylyn smiled, trying to contain herself.

"What happened then?" asked Aikiko, on the brink of the giggles herself.

"They stuck the sign to her and she started her pace out onto the stage and by the time she was out there, I noticed the sign on her back but by that time it was too late. I remember gasping thinking that someone's going to kick Monique and the show turning into a flop from that point..." Heylyn explained to Aikiko, Monique smiling as she heard the story from another perspective.

"So what happened then?" asked Aikiko impatiently.

"Well... Why don't you continue Monique?" Heylyn asked her friend.

"...alright. So I was on stage, walking along and one of the girls who passed me walking towards backstage, turned as planted a kiss on my cheek..." Monique burst out laughing and blushing at the same time.

Aikiko began to laugh too, though she didn't quite get what was so funny about it. Perhaps something she'd missed she thought to herself as Monique and Heylyn laughed.

"So I continued along the stage, the audience by this point were also laughing, but not in a cruel way. It was more in a fun way. So I pass another girl and she does the same thing. Giving me peck right on the same cheek..." Monique explained as she burst out laughing once again.

Aikiko and Heylyn by this point were both laughing as well.

"I continue along the stage and the audience is now fully out of breath from laughter, and I've got like three or four patches of lipstick on my cheek from the kisses the other models had given me..." Monique laughed some more.

"So why didn't they kick you, isn't that what those jokes usually are about?" asked Aikiko.

"Well... that's exactly what it was supposed to say on the sign on my back. But unbeknownst to the pranksters, Kori had found the sign, and saw that the words Kick Me were written boldly across it in black and white..." Monique laughed some more.

"So Kori finds a marker and changes it to Kiss Me, without either of the pranksters noticing the changes..." Heylyn explains to Aikiko, who just bursts out in uncontrollable laughter.

They all three of them laughed for a minute or two before Heylyn finally stopped and started speaking again.

"As it turns out, the show was a hit. It was a sensation. Maybe that's why I'm digging up these outfits. I'm trying to recapture that energy and style from that show..." Heylyn pondered out loud for a moment, before the three of them gathered up the outfits and began up the stairs.

"Lets get these situated in the design area in one of the wardrobes and that should do for us today. Aikiko, you can look out for the place, getting ready for that day that you'll be doing more of that kind of thing... Managing and what not?" Heylyn laid their plans out.

"Thank you for the opportunity..." Aikiko said gratefully.

"Get in line... You're behind me, remember?" Monique insisted.

Aikiko wasted no time and gave Monique a quick kiss on the cheek, causing Heylyn and Monique to both return to their former laughter.

"Next time, I'll make sure its going to say Kick Me!" Aikiko joked with them both.

At that moment, they heard what sounded like gunfire coming from the front, just outside of West Meet East.

Braden burst through the sewing room doors and out into the open office area, passing Heylyn, Monique and Aikiko along the way.

"Everybody get down!" he yelled as he ran by and out to the reception area.

"Monique!" Heylyn ordered her friend.

Monique looked to Heylyn, nodding once and then she disappeared at nearly the speed of light. In a period of on one millionth of a second, Monique had managed to fly to her backpack, remove her clothing, get changed into her Eclipse costume, seal the bag again, fly out of the design room and past Heylyn and Aikiko and then past Braden, who by that point as just arriving in the reception area.

She phased herself, becoming a streak of light so she could pass through the glass front doors of the building without shattering them. On the other side of the doors, she immediately spotted a man wielding a large automatic rifle. He'd begun firing at a specific target down the road from him when Monique flew over and returned to her solid form again, quickly disarming him, and dismantling the weapon and leaving it in pieces on the street before him.

"You shouldn't play with guns!" Monique said to the man from behind her mask.

"Look lady! My beef isn't with you! Outta my way!" the man said to Monique, pushing her aside as he ran forward towards his same target.

She quickly flew behind him and tripped him, by inserting her leg between his while he ran. He fell forward onto the street, catching himself on his hands carefully to brace his fall.

Monique then took a look around her, and saw that everyone, absolutely everybody on the street was fighting one another. They weren't simply standing like pugilists, throwing timed punches at one another in turn. They were viciously trying to tear each other to shreds, using any form of weapons they could find within grasp.

Monique immediately took to flight, and one at a time for the entire city, she separated the people fighting one by one, placing them each at a distance so as not to encourage their continued violence. The reason they'd not been ripped to pieces by her incredible speed had something to do with the field her body generated as a result of the SY-349 formula she'd used six years earlier.

When she was close enough to be incontact with them, their bodies were also affected by the same field, which bonded their molecular structure in place, as their reference frame became one with hers. Bryce would have explained it in terms of General Relativity more so than Quantum Physics, for her reference frame was defined by her entire body mass rather than distinct particles at the Quantum scale. Actually, her entire body was behaving much like a Quantum particle by that point. Both a particle and a wave in terms of probability. Hence, the people she rescued from each other, didn't simply fly off into pieces when she grabbed hold of them.

When she arrived back out front of West Meet East, several seconds had passed and the streets were mostly empty thanks to her quick work. She fell to the street, out of breath as Braden, Heylyn and Aikiko came running out onto the street.

"What happened?" asked Heylyn, still in her day suit.

"...they were all... fighting... so I moved separated them..." Monique said as she caught her breath.

"Who?" asked Aikiko.

"...everyone... I think..." Monique replied modestly.

"You mean out here?" confirmed Heylyn.

"No... the entire city..." Monique explained to Heylyn, Braden and Aikiko as she got to her feet.

"Heylyn! You should have a look at this!" Jennifer opened the front door of West Meet East, leaning outside and yelling over to them.

"Get to the roof. I'll meet you up there..." Heylyn urged her friend.

Monique immediately took off into the air, seeming to disappear into the distance, though she'd actually turned around and landed on the roof of West Meet East, waiting outside of the skylight in Heylyn's design room.

Heylyn and Braden ran back to the building, as sirens blared all around the city.

On the widescreen television in reception area, a news brief played:

"...Eclipse pandemonium hits the world as violence breaks out in cities everywhere..." the announcer spoke, aerial shots of violence around the world played on the screen, obviously taken from drones and helicopters.

"...Seems to be some kind of... madness... something that's affecting everyone..." the sound of the announcer struggling with someone could be heard through the speakers on the television.

As they watched, a perpetual wall of fire trucks sped by, their sirens blaring in the late afternoon darkness of the eclipse.

"How did it hit early? You said the eclipse wasn't until after five?" asked Aikiko of Heylyn.

"They must have been wrong...?" Heylyn looked puzzled momentarily but then pushed the confusion aside.

"Jennifer, lock the doors and turn out the reception area lights. Get everyone into the auditorium and lock the doors. Have the caterers bring some of the leftovers to keep you tight until we can find out what's going on," Heylyn ordered Jennifer as she and Braden returned to the design office to get changed.

Jennifer's voice came on over the intercom system speakers:

"Everyone! Heylyn just advised me that we have an emergency and that we all need to get into the auditorium and lock the doors. The caterers are to bring extra food and drinks for everyone, enough to keep us for the evening until we know what's going on. Get there right away please and thank you," Jennifer announced to the rest of the West Meet East employees.

By that time Heylyn and Braden had arrived at the design room.

"Why did you follow me?" asked Heylyn of Braden.

"I'm going to get changed..." Braden reminded her.

"No your not. You're going to stay here and and protect these people. You're the only one who can," Heylyn ordered Braden.

"What about Aikiko!" Braden looked to Aikiko beside him.

"She's coming with Monique and I," Heylyn assured Braden.

"What about me?!!!" Braden shot back.

"Grow some wings! When you do, you can come with us! Its more important for you to keep these people safe! Ahem....?" Heylyn said to Braden impatiently as she waited for him to leave so she could change.

"Alright. Fine. I'll protect them, but you keep me in the loop. You can't just keep on running off like this. You know I'm capable..." Braden resisted as he opened the door.

"That's why you're here with Valerie to protect them! I can't think of two more capable people for the job. But try to keep your abilities hidden, though protecting them comes first," Heylyn advised him.

"Fair enough," he nodded in approval, finally understanding why she'd made that choice.

When the door was closed, Heylyn quickly stripped while Aikiko stood on the other side of the design room, concentrating. A black cloud suddenly enveloped her, consuming her entirely before disappearing. A moment later, another cloud opened up in the same space and Dragon Butterfly stepped out.

"What's taking you!" Aikiko demanded of Heylyn.

"Putting this thing on isn't easy you know..." Heylyn said as she hopped on one leg, trying to get her other leg into her armoured spandex.

As she hopped, she quickly lost balance, falling forward onto the floor, still struggling to get her leg into the suit.

"Amateur!" Aikiko joked with Heylyn.

"Easy for you to say. Dragon Butterfly practically wears nothing but tattoos..." Heylyn responded, remaining on the floor as she pulled her tights on around her body.

"...And with dignity and honour," Aikiko responded.

Before another ten seconds she was up on her feet and in her boots.

She pressed a button on the wall and then flew up to the skylight, which had opened to expose the room to the air outside by that time. A renovation she'd recently had installed for the sake of convenience.

A dark cloud enveloped Aikiko and she disappeared within and reappeared on the roof of West Meet East beside Monique.

"What took you two so long?!!!" Monique asked impatiently.

"Not a word!" Heylyn turned to Aikiko, zipping her lips shut.

"The eclipse had some kind of effect upon the population... everyone's fighting... everywhere... around the world..." Heylyn explained to Monique.

"The world? I'm still outta breath from doing just one city, and its the entire world?!!!" Monique panicked.

"Remember what I said after we saved the bank?" asked Heylyn of Monique.

"I think so... refresh my memory," Monique pressed her.

"One a time. We save them one at a time and we do our best, because we can't do better than that, and if we can't save everyone, we'll at least save some. So don't stress about it. We've got to find a way that isn't about our abilities that we can use to stop everyone from fighting," Heylyn explained to both Monique and Aikiko.

"Listen to the sirens... are they fighting too?" asked Aikiko of Heylyn.

"No... it sounds like they've got their wits about them... so if its that way here... we can assume that its that way everywhere. Police, medics and fire fighters are probably up to their teeth in this by now, helping to stop the fighting. That's a start," Heylyn reasoned as she thought carefully about the stituation.

"Where's the dragon from the field when we need it?!!! Preening its whiskers?" Aikiko asked Heylyn skeptically.

"Monique, begin doing exactly what you were doing to save this city, but expand the area that you're doing it, taking breaks every few minutes. If you did a city of four million in a few seconds, that's a good start. That means we can have all of Canada done in about half an hour with your breaks. From there you'll expand into the United States and Mexico, helping them..." Heylyn ordered Monique.

"What about you two? Are you just going to...?" Monique began.

"I'll do the same thing, but much slower, using my cloud to put some distance between the people. I suggest you do the same with your wings, Butterfly," Aikiko offered, giving Heylyn a suggestion of her own.

"That's a great plan, lets start there and use our phone headsets to keep in contact, assuming there's still phone service..." Heylyn said as they prepared their headsets and readied themselves for the task at hand.

"Good luck!" Monique waved before she disappeared, flying off towards the outskirts of the city.

A dark cloud enveloped Aikiko and she too was gone a moment later, but by that time the Butterfly Dragon had taken off into the air, flying as fast as she could to assist in the surrounding area.

Order And Chaos

Somboon sat at his laptop, spying the bank's interior through the cameras to which he'd gained access. He'd even managed to map each of the cameras to a different keystroke, so he could easily switch to a different view as required.

"How am I looking here?" asked Farnham through Somboon's headset.

"I can't see you yet! How can I tell you how you look? Maybe a fashion model might be your next line of work!" Somboon responded sarcastically.

"Not what I meant. Have you got a twenty on our suspect?" Farnham asked again.

"He just entered the bank!" Somboon reported as he watched a tall and heavy set man wielding a briefcase approach the line-up for the next bank clerk.

"I'm around the corner. I'm just about to hit the front doors. Keep an eye on him, and I'll move in close before he gets a clerk," Farnham stated as he rounded the corner and continued towards the front doors of the bank.

"I've got a closeup on him and a camera locked to follow mode... I've got you on camera one coming into the bank," Somboon reported to Farnham.

"Perfect. Now remember, we have to wait until he's completed the transaction before we can snag him," Farnham said, lowering his voice so as not to draw any attention.

"You'd better fade old man, or they'll be suspicious," Somboon suggested.

"Copy that. Watch my six," Farnham responded quietly.

Farnham got into line behind the suspect, very much playing the part of a gambling man there to deposit his winnings. He even pulled his wallet and began thumbing through a mixed wad of fives, tens and twenties. After pocketing his wallet, he began shuffling with impatience, checking his watch as they waited in line.

"I've got to hand it to you old man. Your performance is incredible," Somboon said encouragingly, knowing what was at stake.

"Can I help the next client?" one of the bank clerks, an attractive woman in her mid thirties addressed the line.

The suspect proceeded to the clerk as Farnham kept careful watch on his suspect, even stepping forward enough so as to get a glimpse of what was in the case as he opened it. Somboon in the meantime had zoomed the camera to its limit, focusing on the suspect's briefcase which he placed upon the counter before opening it.

"I've got a twenty on the case and its contents. Its not cash as we predicted. It looks like bonds," Somboon stated, not expecting a response from his partner.

Farnham heard Somboon, and confirmed what his partner had stated. Meanwhile, the suspect began indicating his transaction, speaking discretely but not enough so for Farnham's keen ears.

"I'd like to make a deposit. I've five accounts, four of which will each receive forty thousand dollars, while the fifth will receive fifty thousand dollars. It is to be made in American issued bearer bonds," the suspect requested of the clerk, who seemed slightly amiss.

"You must have been keeping these for some time? They ceased issuing them in 1982 from what I recall," the clerk stated.

"I guess so. I suppose you could say that they're old money," the suspect responded in quip.

"Sir, can I help you?" another one of the available clerks addressed Farnham, who looked over to the far end of the counter.

He then quickly made his way over to the clerk so as not to break his cover.

"I'd like to make a deposit? I've got a hundred and twenty dollars here in cash. My winnings at the horse races," Farnham placed a third of the contents of his wallet on the counter, smiling proudly.

In the meantime, the manager of the bank arrived at the clerk with which the suspect was dealing.

"Hello Sir. We're just checking on how best to serve you... It looks like you've got a pretty solid track record with us, not to mention your status as a VIP customer," the manager metaphorically polished the suspect's shoes which was a stand-in statement for kissing one's ass.

"That manager certainly knows how to grovel," Somboon said to Farnham as the clerk finished up with Farnham's request.

"Thank you sir. We'll just need your signature and you're good to go," the clerk explained to Farnham as the manager co-opted two other clerks to assist in processing the bearer bonds.

"Sir, these are so old that our scanners can't collate them, so we'll have to do them by hand. It should take us about twenty minutes, though you're free to go," the manager stated.

"Very good then. Thank you. I'll just be on my way," the suspect stated to the manager, closing his briefcase and turning to leave the bank.

As the suspect started towards the door, Farnham, now finished with his transaction began pursuing the suspect.

"Alright Somboon. Call in the support. Wait until he's in the clear, away from civilians before we take him," Farnham urged his partner as he pursued the suspect.

"I'm dialling the radio room now..." Somboon responded, feeling an intense mania telling him that he should immediately move.

Somboon pushed off, away from the table, tipping backwards in his chair and rolling over his shoulders as the six hundred year old Katana stopped before hitting the chair.

Somboon looked on in horror as a well dressed Japanese man turned to face him, wielding the same Katana for another strike.

"What's going on Darna?" asked Farnham of Somboon, using his codename.

"I'm being attacked by a Samurai!" Somboon responded excitedly, backing away from his assailant.

"Samurai? I'm no Samurai. I used to hunt them for fun long before the existence of gun powder," the assailant stated to Somboon, a smile stretching across his face.

"Correction, I'm being attacked by a Ninja!" Somboon backed up further, until his legs reached the patio fence.

"Wrong again. Ninjas too fell to my blade," the assailant added, stepping slowly towards his prey.

Somboon quickly jumped the fence and began running.

"Correction! I'm being chased by a crazy guy with a sword!" Somboon stated to Farnham, who suddenly had problems of his own.

...

Around Farnham, pandemonium began to break out as bystanders and pedestrians began viciously fighting one another as far as his eyes could see.

"Support Team Echolon, this is Alpha! Hold at your position and keep six! Do not engage the tango! Have Gamma follow, maintaining visual only until we figure out what's going on here. Copy?" Farnham gave the order for his support unit to stand down.

"Holding at deployment on your orders, copy. Thankfully there's no civvies close enough to engage us, but they seem to have lost their collective minds..." Team Echolon leader reported to Farnham.

"Some kind of gas attack maybe? BZ gas?" suggested Farnham.

"Possibly, but none of us (including you) have been affected, so I'd rule that one out Alpha," Echolon replied.

"Gamma here, following tango at a safe distance. I'll let you know when he arrives at his destination, over," one of the unmarked cars pursued their target who proceeded on foot in the direction of a contained parking lot.

There was momentarily a bright flash. A blur of light, which illuminated all of the streets where the civilians were engaged in violence with one another. In the blink of an eye, most of the civilians were all gone, a few left standing by themselves, where they tended to their newly acquired wounds.

"Did you catch that? They're gone!" Echolon reported in to Farnham, who stood in the center of an intersection trying to figure out where everyone went.

"We train for a lot of stuff, but nothing like this..." Farnham responded, returning his attention to their target and the Gamma unmarked mobile unit following him.

"Our tango doesn't seem too phased by the situation. Either this guy's a walking potatoe salad or he's the coolest target under pressure I've ever seen," Gamma reported in.

"Stay out of sight, but maintain visual with him or in worst case, with me. Darna, are you still on the run?" Farnham gave orders to the mobile unit, and then checked up on Somboon.

"He's right behind me. I'm sprinting as fast as I can, and he's like in a casual jog, keeping up like its nothing," Somboon reported to Farnham.

"Echolon, engage Darna's wolf. Bring him in uninjured, but use whatever force is required to get him off of Darna's tail," Farnham ordered his support team.

"Got a lock on Darna. Moving to engage the wolf on his six," Echolon responded, their team moving into the alleys between the buildings on Cumberland Street to clear Darna's tail.

In the meantime, Farnham continued after their target.

...

The waiter sat down at Katsu's table, a listless look upon his face as Katsu sat across from him.

She leaned across the table and whispered something into the waiter's ear, and he pulled out his cellular phone and dialed a number.

A moment later, a man answered the phone on the other end.

"What's the situation?" asked Mutano of the waiter, without knowing that it was a waiter with whom he was speaking.

"Koro is pursuing their technologist. Keeping the pressure on them to reveal themselves, while making a sizeable opening for our bond man to make his escape," the waiter reported to Mutano.

"Any signs of the Butterfly?" asked Mutano.

Katsu took the empty seat beside the waiter, whispering something into his ear.

"No Butterfly yet, but it seems that her sidekick might have been involved in clearing the streets of violence," the waiter informed Mutano.

"Excellent. The streets are cleared and the only ones left on the battlefield are the warriors," Mutano seemed pleased by the turn of events.

Katsu once again whispered into the waiter's ear.

"I will begin the next phase of our plan while Koro keeps the pressure on the Police team," the waiter reported to Mutano.

"I expected nothing less from one so old and wise as yourself. Let us see how our friends deal with a challenge of the Yokai variety, shall we?" asked Mutano of the waiter.

"Yes, lets," the waiter responded, hanging up the phone as he broke out into a cold and calculated maniacal laughter.

He continued to do so, even as his coworkers looked over to him, puzzled by his sudden change in behaviour.

He then stopped all at once, as if he was thrown into the chair in which he was sitting from a distance. He looked around, puzzled as to how he ended up in the seat. When he looked to Katsu to ask her, he found that she was no longer there.

She had simply disappeared.

...

Outside and in an alley between buildings on Cumberland Street, Koro continued his pursuit of Somboon on foot, his Katana back in its Saya as he paced himself against the much younger mortal.

Koro could have easily taken Somboon back at the table. First with his initial strike, or any other attack he'd mounted thereafter against the Digital Forensics Specialist. Koro was savouring the hunt, and wanted this to last for some time, rather than to have it all end in one fell swoop.

This is how he'd done it all throughout Japanese history, whether his prey be strong or weak, he preferred to savour his pursuit of them, as if somehow the cruelty involved was energizing. Invigorating. To watch as his pursuit slowly wrenched every last bit of hope from his victims, a point which would signal its arrival when they finally ceased running. They simply accepted their fate, and it was at this point that he'd let them in on not who was pursuing them, but rather: what.

At that moment he'd relieve them of their head, by swiftly separating it from their body with the adeptness of his skill with his Katana. Looking into their eyes in their final moments, at which point the veil was lifted and they could truly see his immortal form.

Hanshi And The Tiger

[Heroes - David Bowie]

Within the Dojang, a group of sixteen students of varying levels and degrees were into their warm-up exercises for their day class. Their Sebomnim, as he was so titled (roughly meaning teacher) stood at the front of the class, wearing his favourite tank and a pair of loose style black martial arts pants. On either side of him were the teaching assistants, following his lead as he guided the class through the warm-up session. From the crest centered over his heart on his tank top shirt, a Tiger peered out at the class, poigniantly, not unlike the Sebomnim himself, whose name was "Tiger" Hoon Kwang.

"...another ten with the other leg and then we'll move to stretching, starting with our thighs, groin and hamstrings..." Tiger counted down from ten as the students limbered up their legs.

Off of the matts and towards the hardwood floor, the edge of the training area was found at the borders of the room. Nineteen pairs of shoes and sandals lined the border, which opened into a long hall stretching to the north. After a short distance from the opening in the training studio, on the east side was the entryway to the change rooms. One for women and one for men, all complete with lockers, a massage/triage bed, and even a trio of showers for each side.

Further north up the hall was another door, this one on the west wall. A glass window in the door revealed another training studio which appeared much the same as Tiger's Dojang. The training area was half lined with matts, the other half being hardwood floor. Both sides were bordered by a small walkway surrounding the training area, which too was populated by pairs of shoes and sandals belonging to the students there within.

At the front of a similarly sized class, Hanshi led a group of nine students through a warm-up, which had started at the same time as Tiger's, though each from its own training area, for one was the Dojang (of Korean origins) and the other was the Dojo (of Japanese origins). Effectively, they translated roughly to Temple or School in English.

"Alright. Some loose relaxed stretching. After a hard warm-up like that, we don't want tension. We want fluidity of motion. Our movement is fluid, yet deliberate. It is of the soft essence, while our force of impact is of the hard. Like Sanchin, which we introduced you to last week," Hanshi himself stretched his hamstrings carefully, setting the example for the class.

He neither pushed himself beyond his flexibility, nor allowed any part of his stretch to be absent of flexion.

"You mean like body armour, Hanshi?" asked Emmett, a Bank Shift Supervisor from the same community in which Tiger's and Hanshi's classes were situated.

"Listen up. Emmett just explained what Sanchin is. Its natural body armour, made up from the energy of Ki, and muscular tension," Hanshi continued his stretch on the other leg.

"I thought you said we don't want tension?" responded Clara, a Bank Cashier from the very same bank as Emmett.

"Not in our movement. Tension in most techniques involving motion is the end point that we want to achieve. We want our armour ready to protect us between moments of the execution of motion. We want the natural armour of impact as well. There are places where we'll use tension, and there are places where we'll use fluidity. Paying close attention to this will reduce injuries while training, and protect us by have a feel of where to rely on tension and fluidity," Hanshi explained to the class.

"Emmett, I though I told you to go easy on stretches?" Hanshi paused as he saw Emmett attempting to over extend himself.

Right away, Hanshi recognized that Emmett was pushing himself too far, and given that he'd sustained a slight tear in his abdominal musculature the previous week (acute herniation of the right external oblique), Hanshi was concerned that he might further his injury.

"Emmett, I want you to sit it out, off the Dojo floor for ten minutes. That means at three fifteen you're back in, when you'll be much more careful, right?" Hanshi confirmed the discipline with his student.

Emmett immediately got to his feet (carefully) and bowed, backing away from Hanshi while remaining facing him but not looking at him, until he was off the training floor. He then sat on one of the benches that lined the wall, using the break to check his injury.

"That doesn't make sense, Hanshi," Avery, a younger and very fit student in his early twenties remarked to Hanshi.

"Speak up Avery. What is it that you're trying to say? Don't hold back," Hanshi asked his student after the entire class had gotten to their feet.

"I mean... we spend all this time training, for situations where there's a good chance that we're going to get hurt. Why isn't getting hurt a part of our training? I mean that's like stress testing, isn't it?" asked Avery, obviously bringing some of his studies at the Toronto Metropolitan University Program for Structural Engineering with him into the Dojo.

"Avery. Right here. Front punch, right hand. Aim for my face," Hanshi instructed Avery, who smiled at his fellow students as he took up his stance before Hanshi.

Avery took up his stance, starting first from a point of tension, his left hand guarding his midsection, while his right was locked and loaded under his shoulder. He then shifted from tension to fluidity, moving his right fist quickly as he withdrew his left. His right fist snapped as it arrived to within two inches of Hanshi's face. However by that time, Hanshi was already standing outside of Avery's right arm, grasping his elbow with one hand and his wrist with the other. Hanshi twisted ever so slightly, and a ribbon of intense pain shot up Avery's arm to his nerve center.

He immediately winced and Hanshi immmediately released the tension.

So, now lets suppose that you're injured. You arrive at the Dojo to continue training, with your same injury. Try moving your arm.

Avery tried to move and twist his arm free of Hanshi's hold, only causing himself more pain in the process. Avery winced again, this time audibly, tapping his Gi in panic with his free left hand.

"Because of your injury, you're not able to train. So what's more important, being ready for injury by training when we're injured, or allowing ourselves to heal from injury before resuming training?" Hanshi asked the students.

"Heal first..." most of the students agreed.

"We never train beyond the threshold of injury. Never aim for something that you don't want to hit. Aim for our goal, which is to avoid injury. Either ourselves or even in circumstances, our opponents," Hanshi released Avery's arm and bowed to him respectfully, which Avery returned gratefully.

"But then why do we train at all? I mean if we're never going to use it?" asked Paul, another one of the students.

"Why do the Police train for hostage rescue situations? For armed takedowns? For dealing with unruly assailants?" Hanshi answered with a question.

Nobody in the Dojo responded.

"To be ready in case they do happen," Hanshi provided their answer.

"My exact argument about injury and stress testing," Avery added.

"We don't aim for them. We train to be ready for when they do happen. Alright. Pair up. We're going to spend the next fifteen minutes working with our partners on Sanchin Kata. One will practice the Kata, the other will check for vulnerabilities. I'll be circling too, and occasionally will try to find your weak points. From there, we're going to learn breathing methods that allow us to transition from tension to fluidity. Mr. Emmett, you're back on the Dojo floor and with Clara," Hanshi invited the student he'd just disciplined back into the lesson.

Tutors And Temples

[The Shape Of My Heart - Sting]

"This soil is too dry!" Ms. Huệ Vân fidgeted with her trowel in the garden surrounding the exterior of the Temple.

"Perhaps it is you that are as much?" Jinn Hua responded, tending to her own portion of the temple garden.

"Humour? No! You completely missed my point!" Ms. Huệ Vân responded.

Ms. Huệ Vân demonstrated as she spilled half a bucket of her water over the cracks between the temple and the soil. The water seeped into the ground, finding the shortest path absent of algorithm and naturally so, soaking not into the powder, but into the granular sponge essence of what made up the garden itself. As someone whom had a lived passion for as much.

"There is no object sublime, as much so as there is time..." Jinn Hua found the poetic words Ms. Huệ Vân was eliciting.

"You see! I am truly impressed by your poetry, but I do believe that your words have been as much coined... by another!" Ms. Huệ Vân smiled as a flower found the strength to extend itself upright.

"I'm quoting Immanuel Kant... Sometimes it pays to humble oneself by recollection of the works of others," Jinn Hua replied to Ms. Huệ Vân.

"I truly love what you've done with this garden of late. I'd have never believed that the Temple Of The Butterfly Dragon could once again flourish in the west if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. It is a sign of the turning of the tides," Ms. Huệ Vân immediately demonstrated that she'd heard and fathomed Jinn Hua's words.

"We will see how the tides fare. I mean that I think that water has its own ways. Be careful not to lay down the terms of its defiance of your pronouncement," Jinn Hua responded.

"You've come a long way Jinn Hua. I am finding it ever more difficult to snag you," Ms. Huệ Vân responded, standing to smile at her long time friend before she spoke again.

"Fret nought. It is a fair thing," Ms. Huệ Vân spoke her words confidently.

At that moment, both women stood still and silent as something the world over changed.

"You felt it too?" Ms. Huệ Vân asked her one time student.

"I did. It is far bigger than us alone..." Jinn Hua responded.

"The two must be engaged in some damned measure of their sense of eternal worth...! I curse the day that serpents and ego found one another..." Ms. Huệ Vân quickly elicidated.

"It was bound to happen, for the two are eternal opposites... but they've once again overstepped their bounds... A war?" Jinn Hua sensed calamity around the world.

"No. To them, all of time and eternity is simply a game. We are caught in the middle," Ms. Huệ Vân focused her thoughts, trying to determine the extent of perturbance into the realm of humanity by the two dragons.

...

Heylyn found herself in the midst of a battlefield. One composed of modern armaments. Of women and men with tanks and guns. Their numbers spreading and diverging upon the supply lines of their enemies, none aware that their current state of ire was neither their own nor of their doing.

Upon her arrival from the skies above a border clash between North And South Korea, she descended into the midst of the combatants.

As her wings folded around to encompass her body protectively, her skin quickly transformed and became lined with harder than diamond scales. The gunfire directed at her bounced off of her form harmlessly, while her wings caught every single richochet and rebound, preventing them from injuring those who'd fired upon her.

"I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to confiscate that, and you're going to have to stand in the corner for the rest of class..." she said defiantly, grabbing the barrel of one of her assailant's firearms and using it as a blunt weapon to dispatch an entire fire line, leaving them with a few bruises and bumps and more importantly, without their firearms.

"Stay down and don't get up!" she directed those who she'd just forced from the battlefield, then directing her attention to those members of the opposing force.

It would do no good to disarm one side, while allowing the armaments of the other. She quickly flew across the battlefield, directly engaging the front lines of the opposing force.

One by one she disarmed them, forcing them down and into cover, leaving none with more than a bruise or at worst, a battlescar which most would have likely bragged about with their friends in later years. On both sides, she preserved their dignity, while denying them of their propensity to hurt one another.

One of the field commanders then called in a modern generation of Sergeant York AAA cannons, while the opposite force answered with its own line of Shilkas, all directed at Heylyn as she returned to the skies.

The 40mm rounds from M247 impacted her wings first, bursting with explosive power, sending schrapnel in all directions. None of it penetrated her dragon skin and instead bounced harmlessly out into the air from where it fell as her wings contorted and folded to block any of the schrapnel from hitting anyone on the battlefield beneath her.

She at once turned first to face the line of M247 Sergeant York advanced AAA system, and then the modern equivalent in the form of the Shilkas.

When she turned to face them, completely unharmed by their fire, they immediately ceased all firing on both sides, though not everyone was convinced so much of her status as their saviour from each other.

On either side, there were those who sought to become heroes of their own, by taking down the Butterfly.

One such member of the Anti-Air Detachment, leveled a stinger missile at Heylyn, hoping that the heat generated by the artillery deflections would be enough for him to establish a lock on her. The weapon began humming profusely, confirming his suspicions, despite it having been procured more than thirty years previous. A bright flash emerged from the barrel of the Stinger, and a trail of smoke followed its meandering path all the way to Heylyn who made no attempt to move on its approach.

She watched it as it flew at her, following a meandering path and she at once recalled something her Sifu had taught her.

"All butterflies follow a meandering path, but that alone doesn't make them unpredictable, for they all share one thing in common..." Jinn Hua had told her nearly two decades earlier.

"Their destination?" asked a much younger Heylyn of her Sifu.

"You have learned well, butterfly..." Jinn Hua responded to her student.

There was a large plume of smoke as the Stinger missile arrived at the Butterfly Dragon's location in the air. They all waited as the smoke dissipated, anticipating having taken down the angel with butterfly's wings.

The smoke cleared, and there was a familiar form still there hovering in the same place she had been when the Stinger missile had arrived.

In her left hand, she held the Stinger missile, examining it as if it were a toy.

"I think its a dud. But in all truth, I hear viagara is one solution," Heylyn quickly dismantled the missile with her hands, dropping its pieces beneath her in a place where she was sure it would pose no threat to anyone.

On both sides, all of the lines of troops began laughing over her quip. Not at her, but with her. Even the soldier who'd fired upon her, and they suddenly realized that they weren't acting upon their own motivations. They didn't really want to kill each other.

They were playing roles in an invisible game, at the hands of puppeteers, in a situation they could never hope to understand involving the eternal forces of the universe. So instead, they accepted their awareness and more importantly, their lives, which had just been given to them by an angel with butterfly's wings.

[Angel - Aerosmith]

Long after Ai Yuanlin Ying, otherwise known as Heylyn Yates and most certainly the world over as the Butterfly Dragon had left their airspace, the soldiers rejoiced with the one true gift they'd started out with that had cost them nothing at all. One that was given them by their parents and born of lust, and sometimes by true love.

Their lives.

...

Back at the Temple of the Butterfly Dragon, Ms. Huệ Vân found herself struggling to stay afoot.

Jinn Hua came quickly to her aid, and Ms. Huệ Vân staid to her feet despite the obvious calamity in the air.

"She caught it..." Ms. Huệ Vân responded as Jinn Hua caught her, keeping her from falling.

"I know. Every meandering butterfly has one thing in common, and that's their destination," Jinn Hua recalled the lesson she'd taught Heylyn nearly two decades earlier.

Words Are Entirely From Lips To Eclipse

[Elevation - U2]

Monique was in a unique situation, for she was the only being in the entire world who could be at any location the world over, in less than one seventh of a second. Even faster than the individual electrons could travel via the pressure of voltage through a copper line, their limit being closer to the velocity at which neurons communicated information in the human brain (at fifty meters per second when Culomb's law and Cantor's information versus noise on a channel was factored. Limited by many factors related not only to classical, but the quantum nature of physics as well.

The information and energy that powered modern society was actually very simple in terms of the physics that drove it. Like marbles lined against one another, in a hose, the waves of pressure rippled back and forth from one end of the hose to the other, but none so fast as Monique's unique capability, for she was truly the Eclipse. An energetic woman whom embodied all of the properties of light, and the absence thereof. The only limit she'd ever know, was the limit of capacity. The c in e=mc² in terms of Einstein's equation.

On this particular night on the far side of the world from her own Toronto home, which was a condiminium unit which her employer, Heylyn had helped her to acrue the assets she'd need for such a purchase, she'd come to grips with her own limits, and exceeding her own self imposed trepidations.

Though she didn't think of it at first, it was quite amazing how someone without limits in terms of their rate of travel could find so much to fear in the world and Monique often spent many anxious moments on either end of that scale.

However, on this day, when she was needed by the world more than ever, Heylyn was confident that she would truly shine.

It wasn't the immense pressure that Heylyn had knowingly placed upon Monique that worried her, but rather how she'd discarded one of the most powerful of resources at their disposal: Aikiko, the Dragon Butterfly.

She'd even discarded Braden, who had already demonstrated his immense skills and aptitude, as he investigated the secret of the notorious Chameleon Killer all by himself, even surpassing the progress they'd make into the investigation.

Monique had often been Heylyn's right hand, however, she had arrived at a moment in time when she questioned her own mentor's better judgement.

How could she have simply discarded the most effective assistance in a time when they needed all the help they could get in dismantling this clearly global crisis of epic proportions. A paandemic of hate and war, that had somehow infiltrated humanity at every level, and whose symptoms were playing themselves out on every place inhabited by those affected in the world.

Monique (in her form as Eclipse), landed in the midst of the streets of Washington, D.C. in the United States of America. She'd effectively cleared the conflict in her own home country of Canada, and as Heylyn had requested of her, she'd been expanding her area of interdiction and was now deep into Canada's nearest neighbour.

In all irony, a debate of candidates for the U.S. Presidency was already underway on the lawn of the White House, with a podium for each candidates. However, when this crisis of war had started, it had catastrophic effects upon their debate.

For one, the press all began fighting, viciously ripping and clawing at one another, each divided by their company affiliation. When the Secret Service had become involved, the entirety of the press turned their attention towards them, now ignoring each other and directing all of their ire at those charged with protecting the President Of The United States, and other candidates.

Meanwhile, the candidates themselves had in mid-debate, began a physical bout with one another. The two older men quickly tired after throwing a few punches at one another, before the bigger of the two attempted to tackle the other.

The smaller one, thanks to his time in the military, had caught the other candidate, trying to flip him over onto his right hip and lower back, keeping his center of gravity well poised. However, time had not been as kind to his limbs and joints as he'd hoped, and instead the two of them fell sideways onto the floor of the stage, rolling around as each struggled to get on top of the other, wielding the advantage.

Monique had landed in the center of the press area on the lawn, as they laid assault to the Secret Service detachment, who were quickly overwhelmed by the press' numbers.

Monique was tempted to stop and get it all on video, but wisely chose rather to act, given her unique abilities.

[Come Out And Play - The Offspring]

"Nobody would ever believe me that I saw this..." she said as she disappeared, flying at a velocity approaching the speed of light, and one by one, she separated them from each other.

In the first three seconds, and without efficient path finding algorithms to help her manage the logistics of such an immense challenge, she covered over thirty eight thousand kilometers, which helped her to alleviate the violence in three quarters of Washington, before she landed once again on the White House itself, considering her options.

"There's no easy way..." she said, slightly out of breath from this first span of her effort.

She disappeared once again into the sky and from there, she continued for a full forty-five minutes, clearing most of the rest of the United States of their conflict as Heylyn continued her efforts in Europe.

"They'd better have the tequila ready for me in Mexico and South America... cuz I'm going to need it..." Monique landed in south Texas to catch her breath and consume some calories in the form of a few energy bars she'd managed to pickup (buy, taking the bars and leaving more than enough of her money on the counter to pay for her sudden purchase) during her travels.

Ironically, one would think that someone like Monique would need to consume tons of food in literal carbohydrates, however her sustenance requirements were much closer to what Bryce and Zheng had on a quite Thursday afternoon during their time at MindSpice working on MAZ's Quantum computing powered mind, had calculated with the assistance of MindSpice hardware.

Bryce had predicted that her body didn't need to consume massive quantities of food, but he couldn't figure out how this was, though he knew the sum energy of most carbs in terms of their atomic structure. Zheng, who'd benefited from Bryce's knowledge then wrote a quick program to calculate the most efficient conversion of carbs to actual Joules of energy, and found that she only in fact needed to consume the same amount as anyone else.

One of her abilities was that when she digested food, she digested it atomically. She could literally power herself for a year, simply by chewing on her own fingernail.

Monique continued her efforts, working her way into Mexico in ignorant bliss of the fact that Zheng and Bryce had actually worked it out. As it would occur, her energy bars, two of them in total, would haved powered her efforts for two years.

She however just put the extra energy into doing it all faster, perhaps even beyond the ultimate speed limit in the universe, but that's another story.

As she crossed the border of Texas into Mexico, the United States as had Canada, found peace once again. Mostly that is, because in another part of Toronto, a war of another kind was being fought between ancients whose memories spanned far more than a single generation.

Detectives And Forensics

[Twice As Hard - The Black Crowes]

Somboon ran, hanging onto his laptop as he slammed into a wall, behind an electrical box, against which he hid momentarily, ripping the backpack from his shoulders and throwing the laptop within.

He then quickly shouldered the backpack as he sat upon his ass on the concrete, and then wired checked his headset again.

"You still there, Old Man?!!!" Somboon exclaimed into his headset as he checked his six for any signs of the atana wielding maniac would had been behind him only moments earlier.

"Watch it...! Wait... I'll take that as a compliment from you... Are you safe partner?" Detective Farnham, replied as he pursued his target on the sidewalk.

"Uhhhh! No! I'm being chased by a sword maniac! Remember?!!!" Somboon responded, peering around the electrical box to see if he could see any sign of Koro, though he knew not his pursuer's name nor purpose.

"Something just happened... its like everyone who'd been fighting suddenly disappeared... and our tango? He just keeps walking like he's unphased by it all..." Detective Farnham explained to Somboon.

"What do you want from me?!!! Moral support? A cheering section?!!! I have a very angry man trying to relocate my head!" Somboon responded, panicked as he checked his six and then twenty.

"Our backup is dealing with another situation and I'm alone out here. If I could be with you partner, I would. I'm hoping you kept up with your PT schedule...?" asked Detective Farnham.

"PT? You mean like Partner Tardiness?" Somboon responded, panicked.

"No...! I mean Physical Training! The minimum reqs we all have to maintain as cops..." Detective Farnham responded as he made his way around to a rental vehicle parked nearby.

"Uhhh, no! I'm in the FTDNP program, Old Man!" Somboon responded, checking the tracking software on his mobile phone.

"Really? Impressive... You mean Forensics Training Deployment for the National Police?" asked Detective Farnham.

"No you idiot! I mean Free To Do Nothing but Play...! Of course I'm in the Deployment program! That's my tasking Old Man!" Somboon panicked when upon looking back in the direction from which he'd come, he spied Koro, walking calmly in his direction.

"Ohhh shoot! He's here! He's back! He's like T-1000 from that old man movie!" Somboon added, upon spying Koro and his ever so casual approach.

"Listen to me carefully Somboon. We can't lose the tango. Get to Saint Laurent Flagship Store... I'm just outside in close cover. Use Bellair Street... I'm out front! Hurry! I'll cover you partner, whether he has swords or pointy sticks or anything... If he's T-1000, I'm your Arnie!" Detective Farnham spun to face east, leveling his trusty hand-modified Glock 18 to cover for Somboon's approach.

"Arnie who?!!! You mean the golfer? Arnold Palmer? Are you mocking me? I love computer golf...!" Somboon panicked as he broke cover, running as fast as he could in the direction of Bellair Street.

"No partner! Sorry buddy that's a trigger... my fault...! I don't know you that well... I promise buddy... I ain't spying on you or anything... I'm talking about my Arnie! Arnold Schwarzenegger! You know, from like T-1000 movie... Terminator 2... and Kindergarten Constable... uhhh Kindergarten Cop!" Detective Farnham responded, trying to keep his focus as his tango's began driving away to the west along Bloor.

"Ok... I know that guy... not personally... but he was good... I think that sword guy has a bead on me..." Somboon continued running, cursing the day he decided that he didn't need the physical training requirements for his FTDNP certification program.

"That's alright, I know some tricks. Keep running..." Detective Farnham holstered his Glock, getting up from his cover and running in the direction of Bellair Street.

As Somboon came running around the corner of Bellair and Bloor, Farnham came running from his cover, passing Somboon whom he gestured to keep going. As Koro rounded the corner, Farnham clotheslined the Katana specialist with his open arm, using a move he'd learned in Aikiko to quickly dispatch the man.

Farnham turned once again and began pursuing Somboon.

"Get into that rental! Hotwire it and lets get out of here!" Farnham screamed at Somboon, who was momentarily disoriented.

"That one?!!!" Somboon nodded when he realized what Farnham was talking about, but by that time Koro was already upon his feet, and had pulled forth his Katana from its Saya, interposing between Farnham and Somboon as the younger partner ran for the rental car and attempted to hotwire the vehicle.

"Let's see what you got?" Farnham shifted around Koro, using the footing he'd learned from Aiki-jutsu.

"A student of O'Sensei Ueshiba I see? Most impressive," Koro then bowed ever so slightly to Farnham before continuing.

"You should know however, that I defeated his Grandfather, six generations removed from my own current line, in open combat and with nothing more than a poorly crafted Bokkuto. In my line of the Yokai, I am of a family reknowned for death, even upon the face of the Samurai... they wear fear upon seeing face, or hearing my name," Koro circled Farnham, savouring the moment he'd found a true warrior.

"You? I know your type. You have a big gun, a big knife, a big sword, and you think you're in charge, but in all truth, you're just a big Arse!" Farnham circled in the direction of Koro's off-hand.

The side to which Koro would have to make the most effort and distance to swing against Farnham, who was currently unarmed in terms of any bladed weapon. In Japanese, it was known in terms of being referred to as Hottosaido, the hot side of the conflict, the vulnerablility and hence one to be guarded.

However, Farnham was playing from a few different books of strategy, some of which would have been ignored by an egocentric Yokai such as Koro. An apparently timeless entity who reveled in his skill of evisceration, while a man like Farnham, reveled in his sense of direction and justice. Being a beacon without ever being a zealot. Being flawed without ever being flawless. The true circle of harmony about which O'Sensei was referring.

Somboon by that point in time was already in the front seat of the rental Tesla, and had his laptop out readying it for the hacking attempt of his life.

"Oh dear Lord Elon! Please forgive me for what I am about to do!" Somboon prayed to the god of corporate electronics and his Big Bang generation.

Koro swung the blade diagonally, trying to minimize Hottosaido, by balancing it laterally rather than vertically alone.

"This guy's good partner...!" Farnham barely dodged Koro's swordsmanship, rolling sideways using all of the skill he had in terms of Uekemi.

Barely upon his feet again, before the blade was inches before his nose.

"Not only do you fall like Uesheba, you also recover like Ueshiba... Too predictable..." Koro enjoyed the test of his own ego, the measure of his true connection to ancestry.

"If I'm still alive here, then I must be benefitting from lover, family and friend alike..." Farnham pulled himself back from Koro's blade, even momentarily catching it between his palms and throwing it away from his face before rolling backwards to gain the advantage of distance.

"Try Chinese! Try Bruce... Bruce Lee I mean! Try Shaolin too... they are like nature! Try Miguel De Cervantes! Try Lord Byron poetry! They all really like circles a lot! All like O'Sensei Ueshiba! No straight lines! I know, I watch a lot of really cool movies and read really cool books too! They fight in circles! Yokai fight in straight lines! Move in circles... like a woman's body! Like curves!" Somboon exclaimed as he struggled to hack the rental Tesla, a vehicle he'd idolized his entire life.

"Gotcha Partner! I like curves too!" Farnham responded, knowing exactly what Somboon was talking about.

All the while, Farnham had struggled to remain clear of Koro's blade.

When Farnham had rolled out of bladestrike distance from Koro's attack, he noticed that his escape was always linear. A straight line approach, much like Koro's attacks. He was always playing into Koro's plan, until he realized this nature of circularity.

It encompassed everything.

The motion of his legs walking. The nature of his breathing. Every motion his body was capable of, had a circular component and a straight line. However, the circular component was the most stealth and sacred. As if nature had masked every destination, rather than revealing the end point of a line. Even O'Sensei himself had elicited this himself in every demonstration. And yet Koro was stretching his Yokai ego by pursuing the hunt of his prey... Farnham by chasing him in straight lines.

Even great Generals and Admirals, such as Wolfe, Montcalme, Macarthur and Yamamoto, had at some point used the nature of circularity as part of their own battle strategy, with immense effectiveness and precision.

For the first time in his life, Farnham found a moment of clarify in Somboon's words. When and where his life depended upon it. Drawing upon the lesson of circularity, and it was at that moment, that the motion of Koro's blade became apparent to him, even before Koro had moved.

When the blade had come down, nearly separating his neck from his body, he used circularity to dodge the attack, finding that he had gained energy from the circular concept to initiate a counter attack.

Koro's blade swung once again in the direction of Farnham's neck, only for Farnham's hands to clap around the flat of the blade, twist (circularly), hence forcing Koro to twist with the blade, lest it break under the opposing circular pressure.

By the time Koro had caught on to what was happening, Farnham was already in the passenger door of the Tesla vehicle and as if by some intervention by the God of Tesla vehicles, the rental car started and the Somboon suddenly found himself in control of the car of his dreams.

"You like that hot shot!" Somboon quickly threw his laptop at Farnham's lap, though Somboon was addressing his response to Koro.

Koro ran after the vehicle, furiously swinging his Katana against the car's exterior, drawing nothing but sparks and flakes of steel.

"You like those moves old man?" Somboon asked Farnham, chasing his own ego as Koro had been moments earlier.

"The best moves I saw tonight involved circularity, and the Black Crows..." Farnham smiled, satisfied that Somboon's own advice was well in advance of his own wisdom.

"The Black Crows? What is that old man?!!!" Somboon responded, completely lost as to the Detective's allusion.

"Another place, another time, another band. A damned good one at that," Farnham responded, more than content to have escaped that situation without so much as a slice or scratch.

Regardless, his partner, and someone else was looking after them each.

Whether they were moving in straight lines or circles...

Auditorium

[Skin Deep - The Stranglers]

Braden paced back and forth, following the length of the catwalk from the floor beside it, walking somewhat differently than a model might have done so in rehearsal for a fashion show, though his motivations for doing so were very different.

As he did, Kori Jonglyu threw her gaze in his direction frequently, as if he'd stepped into one of her various fantasies about him. He however, never seemed to notice for he was always preoccupied with other matters and this only served to entice Kori that much more.

As for the rest of the staff of West Meet East International, they'd settled into their new workspace as best as they could. Some of them had retrieved their queue from their workstations and had resumed their work despite the limitations, using a combination of their tablet computers and their phones to conduct their daily regimen.

Trey had brought his favourite 35mm DSLR with him and had managed to co-opt Aikiko (who had returned to her "normal" form) and Susan (another model that Heylyn often contracted) into an impromptu photoshoot, using various locations in the auditorium.

Valerie and Fiona were busy working with Lisa and Dylan on a plan to upgrade the various systems on the network, as the computers on the West Meet East network were by this time approaching their end of support life cycle.

This left many of the remaining support staff, whose work depended upon their equipment to do little else but wait. Trey had also enlisted the help of Fay and Sienna in his micro-shoot to do up Susan and Aikiko in various artistic ways, leaving Ebtissam and her crew of seamstresses to do nothing but sit and wait.

Ebtissam looked to Braden, empathizing his state of mind as he paced the length of the floor along the catwalk. She in turn looked over to her staff, who'd pulled a table from the auditorium storage and set it up. A group of them had set about sorting Heylyn's material inventory samples just to keep themselves busy. Ebtissam in the meantime stressed a bit about how this situation was unfolding, worried both for her own family in her Toronto home, and for the employees left in this vigil inside of the offices of West Meet East.

She'd known that something was peculiar about West Meet East. It had been like no other place she'd worked in her life. It was almost its own clique. A group of people who'd likely never fit in anywhere else but under the roof of Heylyn's company.

They were not so much outcasts as they were of their own ilk. A group of people motivated by that thing for which many people were still searching. Even longing perhaps. Something that could not be put into words (nor honoured by them). Something that had not to be told, but rather lived.

After her first day of employ at West Meet East, Ebtissam had found many things puzzling. For one, her direct supervisor at the time, the one who'd previously held her current position would often cover for their mutual employer. This had been many years earlier, just shy of half a decade ago.

At that time, Heylyn would often in the middle of the day, up and leave on a moment's notice to her employees, often citing that something of urgency had come up in her day. She'd then leave the building, sometimes by means which no employee had seen. As if she had a secret exit.

Several days later, the work crew would show up to repair the skylight in Heylyn's design room. This happened many times over the course of years, and yet not one employee had ever broached Heylyn on the subject.

Then, as chance would have it, Ebtissam's supervisor and the manager of the entire sewing department had reached the epoch of age upon which she'd decided to retire. Emily, an elderly woman born of the French-British marriage of her parents fifty-five years earlier, which in itself had yielded a spirited and sometimes tumultuous environment, had taken it upon herself (with some pressure from her husband) to travel the world. Heylyn, in Emily's decision had lost one of the cornerstones of West Meet East, and had taken Emily's departure with difficulty. Regardless, Heylyn's graceful nature won out and she welcomed the change Emily's decision would bring, throwing a day long party for her departing employee.

Many of the reps of suppliers showed up to the party, to wish Emily a happy (early) retirement, and the auditorium for the day was filled with music and drink, while it remained as any day for the rest of the office staff at West Meet East. Heylyn had implored Emily not to work that day, though Heylyn insisted that she'd still be paid. This was in addition to the gracious package Heylyn had given Emily to help her and her husband realize their lifelong dream. The only condition Heylyn held them to was that they spend their first week touring Toronto as tourists, enjoying the many venues the city had to offer, and then additionally, that they visit GuangZhou in China, where Heylyn had arranged for their welcome. They'd agreed and the party began that day at noon, Heylyn still not having a suitable replacement for Emily.

It was an astute Ebtissam who approached Heylyn that day, during their afternoon break, where Emily's retirement cake was presented amidst the clinking of wine glasses. By that time, Monique was already three sheets to the wind, and just as bubly as usual. This was long before Valerie was an employee at West Meet East, still in therapy in the aftermath of Treadwater Island and the fall of Alomera Zek, and her own former romantic partner, Grier Torman.

Ebtissam upon confronting Heylyn, who was speaking with several of their suppliers at the time, was given Heylyn's attention. Ebtissam, being astute and somewhat empathic however, could see something hidden behind her eyes. A deception of some form. Whether what remained hidden behind Heylyn's eyes was of virtuous or vitriolic nature remained to be seen.

"Heylyn, do you have a moment?" asked Ebtissam.

"It's good to see you again Hiroyuki. Enjoy the buffet here, and you might want to go and thank Emily too. She's a big reason why all of this, under the roof of West Meet East is possible. Make sure you thank her," Heylyn insisted to her cosmetic products supplier from Kawaī kao Cosmetics.

"Thank you for the hospitality, Ying-chan," Hiroyuki bowed his head to Heylyn, leading the other two reps over to have a word with Emily.

"I'm sorry Ebtissam, how are you today? Is everything alright?" Heylyn asked Ebtissam, a wine glass with barely two fingers held by its stem in her hand.

"I know that this is not the time or place to discuss such matter, but..." Ebtissam began and to her surprise, Heylyn immediately responded.

"Then it must be important. Why don't we talk in my office?" asked Heylyn.

Ebtissam was immediately thrown off by Heylyn's sudden confrontation of the situation. She found herself in unfamiliar territory from what she'd expected of Heylyn, for most people when confronted with details of their scarcity from their responsibilities would find themselves scarce of words. Heylyn instead had immediately countered Ebtissam, confronting her head on, hence catching Ebtissam off guard.

"I wasn't trying to..." Ebtissam suddenly began to fear for her job, realizing that Heylyn might have detected her intent.

Somehow, there was much more behind the eyes of this mysterious woman who ran a flourishing company in the Queen Street fashion district of Toronto.

"Thank you. I'd be glad to address this," Ebtissam held on to her dignity despite her sudden fear.

"Kelly, could you make sure that the servers keep everyone's glasses full and the buffet full?" Heylyn addressed the senior caterer, an articulate and civil man in his mid forties.

"Its all been looked after. You just go and do what you've gotta do keeping this roof over our heads and we'll keep everyone fed," Kelly responded with a smile.

Heylyn responded with a smile and then led Ebtissam out of the auditorium and through the offices back to her design room (which was currently in disarray), and finally into her office.

"Take a seat, please," Heylyn offered Ebtissam, who'd suddenly accumulated a lump in her throat in anticipation of the expiration of her employ.

Ebtissam suddenly realized that Heylyn wasn't a sheep. No. That was just a camouflage to protect her true nature.

She was something beyond.

Regardless, Ebtissam in this game of work related political chess decided to be seated.

"So, what would you like speak about?" asked Heylyn from her seat at the head of the company that employed them all.

"...Ummm... this is a little difficult to broach, but I've been noticing that you've had any urgent matters during the course of my employ here... and I was worried that perhaps you might have family circumstances of the nature of which you'd prefer not to discuss with your employees..." Ebtissam began.

"I fail to see how your observation of my personal life or my family play into any aspect of your right to impose your ideas upon my life?" Heylyn responded suddenly, though not with malice or deceit.

Just confidence.

Ebtissam once again was caught off guard, though her motives had escalated from pure work politics to actual human values. At once, she realized that she was with a woman of values like her own. Who was she to dismantle her works, great or small? Worthy or as much not? Who was she to decide the fate of the one whose money fuelled her life? If as much was the case, and her confidence was truly misplaced, then her truest and most moral action would have been to leave, rather than confront. To attempt to change or impose her values onto her place of employ.

Heylyn watched Ebtissam carefully and intentively, and for a moment, she felt as if there were more than two eyes upon her.

Ebtissam drew a breath, and cautiously responded.

As the air passed her vocal chords, she found true sincerity within herself and her reply.

"...I was just concerned for you... a bit suspicious of you, but also concerned. I just wanted to let you know that..." Ebtissam paused, trying to find the courage of the confrontation she'd originally planned.

It was all but gone. Absent of purpose and value to her and her values.

When she realized that Heylyn too had family, friends, people for whom she cared beyond the measure of her own life, she called into question her own values. It was at that moment, that something in her changed and she realized that she wasn't alone. She'd found another family in her own workplace that was much like her own.

"Go on..." Heylyn waited from commanding side of her desk, watching Ebtissam carefully.

"I just wanted to let you know that if there's something... anything in your life that is proving diffult for you to manage this company and your home... that I'm here and dedicated to helping you. All that you need to do is ask of me, and I will do what I can to assist..." Ebtissam responded modestly.

Humbly.

Heylyn's expression eased somewhat, though very imperceptibly but not impassibly so to one as astute as Ebtissam.

Heylyn returned Ebtissam's gaze, and in the end it was Ebtissam who turned away.

Heylyn in the interest of affirming her employee's courage, also looked away at almost the same time, knowing fully well that Ebtissam had dual interests when she'd entered the office, but that those interests had changed when she'd considered circumstances that went well beyond her own life.

Heylyn reasoned, that Ebtissam was not a selfish person. She empathized that Heylyn might have family issues, rather than what she'd originally intended and that was to challenge Heylyn on the grounds of ulterior motives that contradicted the imperative of West Meet East.

Heylyn looked up from her seat, and to Ebtissam, who struggled to maintain her confidence and dignity.

Ironically, in doing so, Heylyn saw every weakness Ebtissam ever had throughout her life in one gaze.

"You know, that since Emily is leaving that there's an opening for the position of Supervisor of the Sewing Department, don't you?" Heylyn's response came amidst the uncomfortable silence.

"I do," Ebtissam responded, maintaining her retreat from Heylyn's awareness.

"I was honestly interested if you thought that there might be someone else who is deserving of this position. From your department I mean. Maybe someonw with whom you work?" asked Heylyn, cradling a pen between her fingers dextrously.

"Heylyn, I work with a group of very capable sewing machine operators, each very skilled in what they do. I could never single out any off them as being lesser or greater than their neighbour. We're all very skilled equals, and they're all as deserving of the positition as anyone, perhaps even moreso given their experience," Ebtissam responded.

Heylyn then balanced the pen in her fingers with ease upon its ballpoint end from the tip of her index finger. Ebtissam watched in complete amazement as Heylyn kept the pen perfectly upright from the ballpoint tip. She then let it drop into her other hand.

"You're right Ebtissam. You're exactly right, and that's why I want you to be the new Supervisor..." Heylyn responded to Ebtissam.

"...I'm sorry, could you say that again...?" Ebtissam was caught off guard.

"I said that I want you to be the new Supervisor. The Manager of the Sewing Department, unless you'd prefer otherwise?" confirmed Heylyn, looking momentarily to her screen where she pulled up a file where she'd detailed what she was offering.

"Forgive me, you caught me off guard... I wasn't expecting this..." Ebtissam continued.

"There will be a lot of responsibility, including answering directly to me on any issues related to your department. Basically, you'd be doing everything Emily did, which was quite a lot. Its a big change and a fair bit to take on your plate at once. Are you interested?" asked Heylyn.

"I take it that I'll be compensated for that extra responsibility?" asked Ebtissam.

"Most certainly. You'll start at an additional twenty thousand per year over your current salary, which puts you on par with all of my entry level Management staff. You'll be expected to take part in the monthly meetings between myself, Fay, Lisa, Monique and Trey, not to mention that you'll be overseeing your former peers. Think you can handle it?" asked Heylyn.

"I think... I know I can. I'll take it... thank you!" Ebtissam responded.

"Great! Congratulations! Oh and also, I'll expect you to keep what happens here between us. Especially if and when I suddenly have to make a quick departure for one of my emergencies?" Heylyn confronted Ebtissam this time, though not intimidatingly but rather with humour.

At that moment, Ebtissam knew that Heylyn had been onto her from the beginning.

Rather than create conflict by further prying into the matter, she instead chose to trust that Heylyn's sudden departures were her own personal matters and not the business of anyone at the company.

Ebtissam's mind returned from her memories and she, somewhat differently than was Kori, continued to watch Braden pace.

She looked to one of the large screen televisons in the auditorium, where a news helicopter overflew the streets of Toronto, which for the late afternoon, seemed eerily empty for even a Tuesday.

"The riots in Toronto appear to be over... No... wait, there's a small crowd gathered there in Dundas Square who seem to be facing off against another crowd..." the helicopter slowed and the camera panned to take in a conflict that had recently started between two groups of people just outside of the Eaton's Centre.

"Reports are coming in that the riots have dropped to a minimum and that Police and Tactical Operations crews are working to contain the remainder," the videographer reported.

"In other parts of the world, the riots are slowly being contained, while there have been ceasefires called on several battle fronts in the midst of sightings of the mysterious Butterfly and the Eclipse girl we've been seeing in Toronto," the videographer continued.

"It seems that the worst of it is coming to an end. Maybe its safe for us to go back to...???" at that moment they heard a horrendous crashing sound from the front of the building followed by the breaking of glass.Valerie looked to Braden, who looked to her and then Aikiko.

"Oh my gosh! I think I left the kettle plugged in!" Aikiko suddenly remarked, stepping away from Trey's side as he took photos of Susan.

"Braden, could you check up on what that was please?" asked Valerie of him.

"I was just going to do that. I'll be right back..." he said, slipping out of the service doors of the auditorium with Aikiko. The moment the doors had closed, Aikiko disappeared into a vapourous cloud of darkness. She then reappeared as the Dragon Butterfly.

"Cover me!" Braden told her as he advanced towards the front of the building in the direction of the ruckus they'd heard.

"No! You cover me!" Dragon Butterfly responded, stepping in front of him and boldly leading the way through the offices.

"For all its worth, I know better than to argue with you, have it your way but don't say I didn't warn you," Braden responded, keeping his wits about him.

They progressed through the offices, nearing the front foyer when they paused upon hearing voices coming from the front offices.

"Sounds like they're in Heylyn's design room?" Dragon Butterfly remarked.

"Shhhh! Listen to they're saying..." Braden ducked behind the water cooler, pulling Aikiko to take cover beside him.

They listened for the voices, which resumed, completely unaware of their presence:

"...Its locked..." one of the voices said.

"Well unlock it!" another one responded.

"Can't, without the password. We'll wait for the tech team to arrive..." the first voice said.

"How long do you think we'll have before the Butterfly or the Eclipse girl return to the city?" asked the second voice.

"Who knows... The Voices Of Mentis said they'll be occupied for some time with this situation..." the first voice responded.

Outside, Aikiko and Braden heard another car come skidding to a stop. They kept their vigil behind the water cooler and watched as a team of three men, two of them quite large ran into the building, seeming to know their way around and exactly where they'd find their peers.

"What would they want with Heylyn's computer?" asked Aikiko.

"You've got me. I don't know, her bank account numbers?" Braden responded.

"They're with Mentis! If they wanted money, they could get it in less taxing ways. We've got to stop them before they get into the system!" Aikiko insisted.

"I'll take the big ones, you take the other ones..." Braden suggested, but by that time she was already gone, having disappeared into the black void.

Hack And Seek

[Ghosts 'n Stuff - Deadmau5]

"What took you so long?" asked Dermick, the larger of the first two who'd crashed their pickup truck through the front entrance of West Meet East to gain entry.

"I had to pickup these two security nitwits..." Halbrook responded as he retreived a pentesting kit from his toolbox and threw it on the desk beside Heylyn's keyboard and monitor.

"Watch it, nerd!" Kurr, the larger of the two largest men responded.

"That's Mister Nerd to you," Halbrook came back as he plugged in a USB line between the pentesting dongle and Heylyn's computer.

He then used his phone to navigate the software frontend of the dongle's pentesting features. A moment later a console window opened on the screen of Heylyn's computer (despite it not being logged in), and a stream of numbers and letters began to fill the screen as the pentesting dongle began hashing numbers based upon a header entry on one of Heylyn's local hard disks.

The header contained a unique identifier which had a known structure. The only missing factor there was about this identifier was its exact contents. What hexadecimal number(s) were contained within. Once the pentesting software had found the correct hash, it could breach the first line of security and gain direct access to the file system. From there, hacking the password cache would be trivial for Halbrook.

"How long is this going to take?" asked Weber, the second of the first two men who'd arrived on the scene.

"As long as twenty minutes, but more likely, about three," Halbrook responded as he sat back in Heylyn's chair comfortably.

"Why don't you two goons go out there in the design room and stand guard like you're paid to do?" asked Dermick of the two larger men.

"We're not working for you. We're working for the voices. If you get this done, that's one step closer to their having this city as well," Tarsi responded defensively.

Nobody else responded, for they all knew that the Voice of Mentis were already watching them carefully. In all truth, ever since they'd been co-opted into the Millions Of Minds of Mentis, they'd not known a moment of privacy since. They'd become part of a biomagnetic collective. They'd given up their own individuality in favour of the power and protection of the group and they'd done so willing, unlike so many others who'd been forced in against their will.

The only sure sign of one having lost their individuality and perhaps even their own freewill, was dictated directly by their expressed opposition to Mentis, and there were few if any who did that. Most just accepted this new way of life despite its immense cost to their sense of being and contradictory aspect to their own natural behaviour. One by one their lives were whittled away until they'd become nothing more than simplified parts of a collective organism. There was no cooperation in this fact, for cooperation required freewill. The propensity to operate with others, using one's own unique skillset and experiences towards a common goal.

With Mentis, there was no optional. You either did it, or you didn't. If you didn't, and were required to do so, then you'd undergo several months of conditioning as they called it, until you were compliant. It was as Doctor Stephen Briggs and Professor Bryce Maxwell had analyzed it: a biomagnetic collective utilizing operant conditioning to train its population into complete submission.

Sure, there were pockets of resistance within the Voices of Mentis itself. Those who thought they'd be able to immerse themselves within Mentis' collective, while retaining their original ambitions. They'd create a secretive language that they assumed none would be able to detect, and use that language to return to their former freedom in plain sight of Mentis' collective. However, these pockets rarely lasted more than a few weeks before being entirely discovered and quickly scrubbed from the collective. Those involved were seperated from each other and relocated to places where they were isolated, to undergo conditioning until they were completely compliant.

Many of those who'd undergone that process would suffer horrible and often irreversable psychological damage. Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome was at an all time high. In fact, there were so many for whom this was a fact of life, that those who were absent of such harm were the remarkable exception. The Millions of Minds of Mentis did not regard such trauma as being real, even regarding it as a temporary setback in the process of reconditioning. Mentis used PTSD as a tool in operant conditioning, knowing it to be a very effective motivator against even the sturdiest of minds.

One at first would be tempted to compare Mentis to something from fiction. Perhaps like the Borg, an alien collective from a popular television science fiction show, but that comparison was highly inaccurate. The Borg of fiction would entirely become machine-like, lacking any local autonomous mind of their own and requiring a constant connection to a hive mind. Mentis on the other hand, maintained autonomy of every individual, though they were all connected through a biomagnetic network with each other. Collectively, their sum consciousness created a superconsciousness. One in which each of them were like a neuron in the human brain, albeit a much more sophisticated neuron. A neuron of the brain of Mentis.

None who'd been reconditioned into the collective had then become mindless machines. Instead, they were simply human beings whose ambitions and aspirations had been entirely crushed. The only emotion they truly felt was a horrific sense of hopelessness. A distant ache in their soul that cried out in the worst of times, which they'd each been conditioned to ignore. To fear. For if they listened to that cry, they'd end up in a repetitive cycle of conditioning. Over and over again, until every last bit of hope and struggle in them was gone. Until they could simply watch human suffering, and feel no compulsion to put a stop to it. That of others or even their own. Complete and utter detachment. Even from one's own basest sense of being.

Mentis' Millions of Minds was generally divided into two groups. Those who'd embraced it, and those who were conditioned against their will to become a part of it. Often, those who'd embraced it were of the most cruel and narcissistic personas, and their becoming part of the collective had only amplified these qualities a thousandfold. They seemed to thrive on suffering. On causing it, or observing it as it happened by other causes. The weaker and more sick their victims, the harsher they'd be. Like wolves culling the sick and weak from the deer population, though wolves lacked a sense of cruelty. Their concern was based upon conservation of energy. With those who'd embraced Mentis' Millions of Minds, their concern was based upon the causing of suffering in others as a form of power over them. Not as individuals, but as a supermind. A mind made up of many minds, who collectively worked together to achieve the exact same goals, essentially becoming a distinct personality itself. An emergent persona that arose as a distinct individual resulting from a collective of minds.

Sure, you could leave one place to escape their access to you, if you were being pursed by Mentis' Millions of Minds, but as soon as you arrived somewhere else, another member in that locale would continue the exact same thing, as if they were simply the same person as the one from which you ran fled. As if that persona existed in millions of people, and not simply just one person. The only common ground that Mentis' Millions of Minds held in common with the Borg of fiction, is that once they had their sights set on you, resistance truly was futile.

Those who resisted were often labeled as selfish. Self serving types. As not being "team players". There were various marketing ploys devised by the Millions of Minds of Mentis to exploit these concerns in humanity and to weaponize them so that those who operated against Mentis' collective, were very quickly vilified. They were often isolated, and then conditioned until their integration.

In all truth, as Doctor Briggs was beginning to understand, the superconsciousness itself, the persona that had arisen from the collective as a uniquely identifiable personality resulting from collective participation of the group, in fact itself was a giant narcissist. It could be analyzed with the same tools that had been present in Psychology since Jung and Freud. Since modern Psychology took its first steps. It wasn't a case of analyzing the people in the collective itself, as many were far from being anything remotely close to selfish before they'd been conditioned. As a part of the superconsciousness however, collectively these people contributed to becoming a different organism. A collective organism. Much like our own brains are made up of tens of billions of individual cells. From that collective emerges our own consciousness and from that, our personality. Forever part of a balancing act that is fought between our tendencies towards self preservation, and our tendencies to equate our own suffering with that of others, hence giving us a sense of empathy. With Mentis' Millions of Minds, there was no empathy at all. It was all suffering until the conditioning was done. From there, it was a sense of self hopelessness and cruelty to others who were not part of the collective.

Some, like Dermick, Halbrook and the rest of the men who'd arrived to take a very specific series of files that Mentis had known existed on Heylyn's computer, it was humour that got them through the worst of their sense of feeling so helplessly lost. That, and cruelty to others with the backing of the most prolific power there was on the face of the planet. Because it was cerebral, almost ideological, it could move freely between any borders the entire world over and there was little that could be done to stop it, no matter where it emerged. If Mentis' Millions of Minds was the sickness, then humour was a short lived painkiller. A painkiller nonetheless that these thugs had learned to live by, perhaps in a bid to reach out for what they'd lost. Arguably, what they'd gained was the power and backing of the world's most notorious and powerful collective. At the expense of their souls.

Halbrook leaned back in Heylyn's chair, suddenly noticing one of the nine security screens Heylyn had installed in the upper corner near the ceiling of her office.

"Look at this... there's still people in here..." Halbrook remarked as he spied one of the screens, which panned and scanned the auditorium.

Dermick and Kurr had pulled up chairs in front of Heylyn's desk, their feet up on her desk as they leaned back and relaxed.

"Let 'em stay there. No sense stirring up the hive if you know what I mean?" Dermick responded with a decided knack for wisdom.

He however failed to see the irony in his own statement. Halbrook smirked, for the tragedy Dermick's statement had not escaped him.

Kurr and Tarsi were at the far end of the design room, near the door. Frick and Frack, Heylyn's two design mannequins stood silently behind them, perhaps even observing them quietly as they shuffled from foot to foot nervously in anticipation of an encounter with the Butterfly or the Eclipse.

"I heard she's got armoured skin or something. If we see her, go for the eyes..." Kurr suggested to his peer.

"There's no way a little woman like that could take us down. Not the two of us. I've got like twelve years of grappling training under my belt. I'm going to use my weight and crush her..." Tarsi responded.

"I heard from someone in prison, a guy who's trained and an expert in like four different martial arts, that it took her like three minutes to take him down. Now, you have to figure he was exagerrating because nobody who'd been taken down by someone half their size would brag about it. So he probably doubled, even tripled the time it took her to do him in, just to save face you know. I'm thinking guns are the way to go, and when I'm out of ammo, I'll move in and use my weight..." Kurr responded.

"Just don't shoot me when I'm pile driving her..." Tarsi joked, a thick hoarse laughter coming from his lips.

"I won't shoot you, but how could I miss your fat ass...?" Kurr began laughing at the liberty he'd taken against his peer for a cheap laugh.

They momentarily felt a terrifyingly frigid wind from behind them, and the air became still again.

"They must have the air conditioning on..." Kurr said in response to the chills that rippled through his body.

"You felt that too? Man I though I was just going bonkers..." Tarsi added.

"Perhaps then you can tell me if you feel this?" asked Aikiko from behind them.

Kurr turned first, his 9mm handgun leveled straight at Dragon Butterfly. Tarsi followed suit but by that point it was already too late.

Dragon Butterfly's left hand quickly moved, in fact a blurr to their sight. In one swift movement, the force of her hand had relieved Kurr of his 9mm parabellum, despite his monstrous grip on the weapon. She pried it in precisely the weakest point of his grip, and in conjunction with the pain nerves of his wrist. Any resistance on his part was quickly met with immense and shattering pain. However, her movement had been so swift, that it even exceeded the rate at which nerves conduct pain signals to and from the brain. She tossed the gun, now broken into several pieces and discarded it before Kurr even knew that his wrist had been broken in two places.

By the time Tarsi had turned to face Dragon Butterfly, who expected to see a giant pair of golden Butterfly wings, she'd swiftly delivered a kick to his groin.

"That's for implying that you were going to pile drive a butterfly!" Dragon Butterfly responded to his earlier quip.

By the time the pain had reached Kurr's wrist, gravity had already taken hold of Tarsi's three hundred pound frame and brought it crashing down to the floor. He writhed and gasped, holding onto his groin in severe pain.

Dragon Butterfly then looked to Kurr, who backed away in fear, now completely unarmed and unable to defend himself given his broken wrist.

"When strength fails, strategy prevails," Dragon Butterfly said to Kurr, and at that moment he realized that what they were dealing with were not lacking in the authority of wisdom, intelligence or skill.

"Thanks for waiting for me. Ok. Enough dissing the men please? I like my manhood. A lot. So let's get these other ones before they get to Heyly's files..." Braden ran in through the front doors of the design room as Kurr backed away.

"You. Could you like sit down and just wait here? Maybe help your buddy here, once the Pink Panther returns his family jewels? It would be a lot less painful than the alternative. Believe me, you two got the better end of the deal. She's the love side. I'm the hate side," Braden said to Kurr.

"Sure, alright," Kurr nodded, his wrist quickly swelling as he carefully sat himself on the floor beside Tarsi.

At that point, Braden hadn't noticed that Dermick and Weber had stepped out of Heylyn's office, each brandishing a 9mm submachine gun.

They immediately opened fire, and just before one of the rounds burrowed into Braden's abdomen, Dragon Butterfly quickly tackled him and pulled him to the floor, leaving her lower body beneath the skirt exposed to Kurr and Tarsi.

Tarsi by that time had mostly recovered, but was still very sore. They both looked in Aikiko's direction, but Dragon Butterfly's gaze caught them.

"I think what she's trying to say is to peep at your own risk. She's my girlfriend, and I don't take too kindly to brutes like you eyeing her!" Braden said to them, doing the best he could to sound mean and beligerent.

"I'll give you a D for effort. D for Dragon Man..." Aikiko said to him gratefully.

The magazines of Dermick's and Weber's submachine guns had run dry and they were now reloading. They'd certainly not miss their targets the second time around, even risking hitting Kurr and Weber to take down their enemies.

"I guess that's my cue...?" Braden responded to Aikiko, jumping up onto his feet.

Before either of the two men could get their submachine guns loaded, he was upon them. He'd disarmed Weber first, planning to use the submachine gun as a blunt weapon to take down Dermick, but by that time Dermick had already reloaded and was applying pressure upon the trigger.

Braden quickly pushed Weber against the wall, narrowly missing being shot by the spray of rounds erupting from the silencer's mouth. Rounds plunged into the drywall of Heylyn's design office as Braden delivered a blow with his elbow to Weber's nose. Weber slid down the wall as Braden moved to disarm Dermick.

The two fought over the submachine gun, another two sprays of sporadic fire erupted from the weapon before it was once again empty, punching holes like Swiss cheese in the ceiling.

Dermick backed off, away from Braden, standing at his guard, in a stance unfamiliar to Braden.

"I've never seen that style before... Is that something you made or..." Braden remarked, weighing his options between the various styles of Gong Fu he'd studied.

"Why don't you come find out pretty boy?" Dermick responded.

"I'm flattered and its only our first date..." Braden responded.

...

At that time, Dragon Butterfly was back and up and on her feet.

"Be good, or else..." Dragon Butterfly said to Kurr and Tarsi.

"I'm just going to sit here..." Kurr replied in manner lacking aggression or hostility.

"..." Tarsi gasped, nodding affirmatively, still in some discomfort.

Dragon Butterfly disappeared into the realm of Witherwyrm, the dark dragon who powered half of her abilities. In the blackness, she moved instantaneously through space without actually moving at all. She emerged from a fissure into Heylyn's office.

As the pentesting software converged on the final solution to the hash of the parameters of the encryption algorithm protecting Heylyn's hardware, Dragon Butterfly pulled the USB cable from the front of Heylyn's computer, immediately ceasing the whole process.

Halbrook sat there nervously silent for a moment, eyeing Dragon Butterfly and taking in her body of tattoos before he spoke.

"Please. Just not in the face?" Halbrook responded upon seeing the tattooed woman before him.

"Who told you about this place? Tell me, or my jealous boyfriend out there will take it out on your precious face," Dragon Butterfly asked him coldly.

"You're not going to win this... Aikiko? Right?" Halbrook responded, though something had changed in him significantly.

However, Dragon Butterfly, not having known him in the first place was completely unaware that she was speaking directly with their nemesis.

"That name sounds familiar, but it is not mine. Who told you about this place?!!!" Dragon Butterfly bluffed as she pressed Halbrook again.

"How did you get here so quickly? How did you even know we'd be here? Are you friends with the Butterfly? With the Eclipse girl? This entire mess just keeps on getting more interesting!" Mentis' entire collective responded through Halbrook.

...

Dermick and Braden circled each other just outside of Heylyn's office door, sizing each other up for an opening. Dermick's finely crafted body was visible beneath his summer clothing, telling Braden that this was not your run of the mill thug. This was someone who'd invested considerable time fine-tuning themselves and their bodily health, to become a formidable fighting machine.

"So you didn't answer my question..." Braden broached the topic again.

"What, about my fighting style? Its home made. Its been in my family for a few generations. Kind of a mish-mash between boxing, wrestling and good old dirty tricks," Dermick kept his stance, weighing Braden's style as much so as Braden was weighing his.

"What about you? I can see a bit of Kung Fu in there, but that's not all there is..." Dermick asked Braden.

"Actually I call it Gong Fu, but that's only the smallest aspect of it. There's a few different styles, mostly from South Eastern China. Most I learned from my family, and the rest from my travels," Braden said confidently.

Dermick quickly threw a jab to test Braden's defenses. To measure how he'd respond.

Braden used no hand techniques to block, but instead used footwork and flexibility, even integrating what he'd learned recently from Hanshi, Hoon Kwang and Jinn Hua. What he didn't reveal was that he'd been luring Dermick into throwing such a punch, just to see how and where Dermick would measure his capabilities.

Braden realized that Dermick had little if any footwork related to offense. Instead, it was all about upper body work. Mostly punches, meaning that his lower body was a walking target. All of Dermick's defenses were based up into the upper body and protecting the core. Mostly from punches. Braden's best strategy would be to stay away from his arm's reach, while trying to connect with his lower body.

Just one well placed kick could disable his knee, which would then allow him to move in for the proverbial take-down. However, Dermick was also employing a similar strategy to bring Braden down as well.

In most cases, Dermick would have simply just attacked, especially without his foe's awareness. From the side with a hook or directly with a jab to the forehead, in attempt to quickly take down his foe before his foe was even aware that Dermick was an enemy. The dirty trick aspect of his methods very much at play in his system of martial combat, as for to him, there were no rules. No honour. There was either win or lose.

It was as simple as that for it was all a show before the one they had all deified. Mentis. A collective of their combined minds that had become its own persona. Both a supermind and a superego. The great and secret show before their secret god, which ultimately amounted to being nothing more than their combined selves. The thing they feared most was actually them and the darkest reaches of their own psyche. In turn that combined mind had become something that none of them could stop, and that was when they'd first admitted defeat of their own freewill. Surrendering it all to the cruel monster they'd created.

For Dermick, his fight with Braden was merely part of a show, and through his own eyes, a million or more people were all watching with anticipation. Waiting, knowing that they would prevail.

They circled each other a few more times before Dermick finally became impatient and threw his first punch at Braden. As Braden had predicted, it was a hook, arced wide and coming in from the side, just beyond his radar. He deftly leaned back and dodged the punch with ease, tempted to counter but something in his intuiting told him not to do so. Perhaps his family speaking to him from beyond the grave? Perhaps one of his many Sifus, Sebomnims and Senseis. However, he simply sidestepped the wide arced attack, and kept his focus.

"A bit slow, but very stealthy," he remarked.

"Just warming up, punk," Dermick responded, throwing another straight jab.

Braden once again barely dodged it, side stepping it without compromising his balance.

"Wow. That one had some speed to it. A real fastball. You ever go to an amusement park and get it clocked?" asked Braden, who'd felt the force of wind behind the jab without it actually making contact with his face.

Before Braden had a chance to respond, Dermick replied with another jab, this time an off handed left that came from nowhere. It connected solidly with his forehead, stunning him and throwing him off balance.

Dermick immediately followed up with a right hook, but Braden it turns out had been playing him the whole time. He easily ducked the right hook, leaving the entirety of Dermick's right hand side exposed to Braden's response.

Braden chose not to respond with hard force, like a punch, but instead by using Dermick's own momentum against him as Hanshi had taught him earlier the previous week. The same lesson when he'd bested Jinn Hua, and ascended to another degree, or level of Kyu.

Dermick's right hook had been an example of over-spent energy and momentum. It illustrated the fact perfectly as Dermick had opened himself up completely to Braden when he'd missed. Braden simply used the exposure to deliver a quick low impact attack to his kidney, winding the man, and then sending Dermick's full body to the floor, spinning in the direction as the punch with which he'd tried to best Braden.

"Please do me a favour and stay there... I'm running out of patience and I'm not even a Doctor...!" Braden responded humourously, immediately turning his attention to Halbrook, who'd been subdued by Dragon Butterfly.

"So are you done with the hacker?" asked Braden of Dragon Butterfly as Dermick got to his feet behind him and prepared to deliver a blow to Braden's neck in hopes of breaking his vertebrae.

Aikiko immediately saw the threat and in a time span far less than a moment, she disappeared and reappeared behind Dermick, catching his fist in mid-flight before it impacted Braden's neck.

Dermick spun, attempting to hit her in the face with his other hand, but she was too fast for him, catching his hand in her's.

She then redirected the force of his punch, forcing him to hit himself in the face several times with the guidance of her hand. After the third punch, he fell to the floor unconscious.

"What the heck was that?!!!" asked Braden, turning to face her as she now stood behind him.

"Instant karma I'd say. Just protecting my boyfriend," Dragon Butterfly responded, winking at Braden with a smug smile on her face.

Braden saw Kurr on the floor behind her, smirking at them.

"You got a problem with that or something?!!!" challenged Braden of Kurr.

"Me? No. I was just nursing my broken wrist. Did you guys call the ambulance yet?" asked Kurr, his wrist now swelled to twice the size of a tennis ball.

"If we did, I don't think they'd come. I think they're a little busy right now..." Dragon Butterfly responded.

"Would it be too much trouble to ask you for a Tylenol or two?" asked Kurr.

Tarsi mumbled something incoherent.

"And one for my friend here?" Kurr continued.

Braden walked over to a cabinet where he knew that Heylyn kept several first aid kits and her pain killers, finding an opened bottle of acetominophen.

"You guys aren't allergic to this are you?" asked Braden, suspecting they might be attempting to take another route out of the responsibility for their recent crimes.

"Not at all, but we're allergic to pain though..." Kurr said, tears already streaming down the side of his face given his swollen wrist.

Braden tossed them the entire bottle.

"Two at a time and only every six hours..." he stated.

"..." Tarsi mumbled a barely incoherent thank you, to which Dragon Butterfly frowned.

"Don't expect any sympathy from me!" Dragon Butterfly responded to Tarsi, who silently nodded affirmatively.

Roundabout

[Roundabout - Yes]

"Who taught you to drive like that?" asked Farnham as he sat in the passenger seat of the rental car.

"Nobody! I just got my license old man..." Somboon responded, doing a quick shoulder check as he changed lanes on Yonge Street on an essentially empty road.

"You can't tell me you didn't take a course or something..." Farnham checked his piece, ensuring it was loaded and ready for use.

"No. Not at all. My driving is all Need For Speed and Gran Turismo old man!" Somboon had the look of a man on the edge of a razor.

"What the hell is a Gran Turismo?" asked Farnham, holstering his 9mm beneath his left armpit.

"What rock did you crawl out from beneath? What have you been doing all these years? Watching television soap operas or something?" Somboon responded, trying his best to catch up with their suspect.

"What? You mean you never watched Game Of Thrones or Walking Dead? In my generation it was Dallas and Twin Peaks. Video games are what you did when you had five minutes and pocket change to play Ms. Pac Man or Asteroids at an arcade. Those were the days... When I think of all the leads I got in the arcades..." Farnham responded, checking their six only to find that their pursuers had indeed found a car.

There was a moment of silence as Somboon struggled to make a series of sudden turns to keep their suspect in his sights.

"Put your damned seatbelt on!" Farnham ordered Somboon.

Somboon looked down at his lap and realized in horror that he'd neglected the most basic and imperative of safety measures when operating a vehicle.

"Hold the wheel old man!" Somboon responded, and Farnham obliged as Somboon buckled up.

"Got it?" asked Farnham of his partner.

"I got it! Really... uhhhh... thank you. I mean that old man. Thanks," Somboon responded, now buckled up safely he felt confident to take on the challenge of keeping up with their suspect and eluding their pursuers.

"No sweat partner. That's what good teams are made of. A different opinion? A different perspective and one that might save you," Farnham replied, keeping his eye on their suspect vehicle while checking the mirrors to keep their pursuers in sight.

At that moment, Farnham's phone began ringing.

He quickly checked his pocket and pulled forth the phone, checking the number.

"Who is it old man?!!! Did you forget your prune juice or something?" asked Somboon, right back to his usual self.

"Its my wife, Lori. Keep us on target. I can't turn this call down," Farnham put the phone to his ear and answered.

"Hi honey, how are you?" he spoke calmly to his wife.

"I'm good. I'm just a little a concerned given the recent news... the riots... nothing you're involved with I hope..." Lori asked him as she focused on her design work at home.

"Me? Nooo... not at all. I'm having a run of the mill day. Somboon, my new partner and I have been assigned to traffic duty, albeit at somewhat of higher speed than usual but it seems to be working fine thus far. How about you? How's how's your day going?" asked Farnham of his wife.

"A bit stressful... but my latest design work is really coming together. I think this new client of mine is going to lead places that might help us to achieve our goals of a vacation in the Bahamas by next summer..." Lori responded to Farnham, whose smile stretched from ear to ear.

"That's wonderful news honey! There's nothing on my mind more than seeing you in a bikini on those beaches..." Farnham smiled.

"Or strolling together through that subterranean aquarium. You know, the one we've seen on all those marketing videos for that resort..." Lori drew her paintbrush along the length of the digital page.

"That's a bit of a money, honey. I'm not saying that we can't do it, I'm just saying that it might be better spent closer to home?" asked Farnham of his wife.

"Edward. We're at the doorstep of our retirement. We're both so fortunate to still have the health and youth we have. If we don't do this now, we might never do it, and I don't think that we'd want to live with that... We can build our life closer to home where and when we're there. During our actual retirement. Why don't we aim at the things we want, rather than the ones we're putting off...?" Lori said to him somewhat rhetorically.

Farnham thought about what Lori was saying and understood her all at once. Recalling what he'd found the most attractive about her in the first place. That element of excitement and risk she sometimes toyed with, despite her naivety, she somehow had courage well beyond her years. A sense of adventure and romance that few could have understood from the very same perspective.

"You're right honey. Again..." Farnham replied, though nought reluctantly or as if he was giving in to the weight of a debt, but rather, with the sincerity of a dedicated husband who considered every one of her words carefully.

"We'll talk later Edward... I've gotta go. Big kisses... see you soon," Lori replied, hanging up, confident that her husband was safe and sound.

"I think the guy with the Katana is trying to overtake us old man!" Somboon responded after it was clear that Farnham had finished his conversation with his wife.

"Never a dull moment. Not even after a conversation like that," Farnham shook his head before turning to eye the situation with their pursuers.

"Have you still got a bead on our felon?" asked Farnham.

"I think! They turned south onto Bay Street up ahead...Hang on!" Somboon turned the wheel, taking a hard left onto Bay Street from Bloor Street which was mostly empty as they'd sped westward.

"They haven't seen us yet, why are they speeding?" asked Farnham.

"You've got me. I only work here," Somboon replied, checking his mirror as they sped south along Bay Street.

They flew threw the intersection at Wellesley Street. First their suspect, a few seconds later, Somboon and Farnham, and then finally, Koro.

"I've never seen these streets so empty. Good for driving fast!" Somboon said as they flew past College Street and the very same day courts where Myung-Ae worked as a stenographer.

"This ain't a video game, Somboon! Keep your eye on the ball!" Farnham reminded his partner.

"Are you kidding me? That's all that life is. One big video game, and we're all the npcs..." Somboon responded, trying to sound philosophical.

"Then who's the player?" asked Farnham, somewhat amused as his attention jumped back and forth between the vehicle they were pursuing and the vehicle by which they were being pursued.

"Me!" Somboon pulled the rental car through the intersection at Yonge Street and Dundas Street, up and over the curb on the south east corner and into Dundas Square, where they skidded to a stop just behind the vehicle they were pursuing.

Farnham was out first, his firearm in hand as he approached the suspect vehicle.

"Hands in the air! Out get out in the open, where I can see you! No sudden moves! Do it!" Farnham yelled as Somboon covered their six against Koro's approach.

The suspect slowly and cautiously got out of the vehicle, his hands in the air as he stood facing Farnham.

"What's the charge? What'd I do?" asked their suspect.

"You know what you did! Turn and face the other direction, keeping your hands in the air..." Farnham ordered him.

"He's here..." Somboon informed Farnham about Koro's arrival.

Koro's car pulled up smugly behind theirs, almost bumper to bumper. Koro then opened the door and got out, keeping his sunglasses perched on his face.

There was a quaint smile on his face as his hand rested on the Saya of his Katana.

"Stay where you are!" Somboon ordered Koro, who responded without any sign of fear.

"No," he replied, walking slowly toward Somboon.

"I mean it! I'll shoot!" Somboon backed away from Koro as he approached.

"Be my guest. It wouldn't be the first time, and it won't be the last," Koro responded, his hand now firmly gripping the Katana's pommel.

As Koro was about to draw, a fleet of vehicles arrived, encircling them all, trapping them in the center.

From each of the vehicles, men similarly dressed to their suspect stepped out, each brandishing their own firearms.

"Looks like the cavalry finally showed up," Farnham said confidently, turning to Koro momentarily and then back to his suspect.

"I though you guys were never going to show..." Farnham holstered his handgun and reached for his cuffs, preparing to inform the suspect about the long list of charges that the investigation had levied against him.

"One of the men that had arrived, came and escorted the suspect to another vehicle while an older man from the same group wearing a conservative business suit and jacket stepped forward to address Farnham.

"Sorry veteran, but we're not here for you. We're here for him. This is the end of the line..." the man addressed Farnham and Somboon.

"I still haven't acquired my prey..." Koro responded to the same man as another three vehicles arrived and parked just outside of the most recent circle.

Out of the first stepped Katsu. Her shapely body concealed by a professional women's business suit and skirt. She too much like Koro wore sunglasses. She approached Koro, stepping between three of the men encircling them without concern or fear.

From the other two vehicles, first stepped Jack Warren/Dan Gurdy, and finally Tanto, both of whom were equally well dressed in their own designer suits.

"Somboon, I think we just happened into the midst of a business fashion show..." Farnham responded sarcastically, in a bid to distract their captors.

He reached for his holster again, but was quickly stopped.

"Hold it there Ed. You don't want to do that. Time is precious and yours and your partner's is ever so short. Don't risk making it any shorter," the man once again addressed Farnham.

"Well this is something I'd have never expected from you, Richard," Farnham addressed the man he'd come to know as an intelligence source over the last few years.

A man who seemed to possess much knowledge relating to a string of cases connected to the ground breaker case of Ronald Forseth. The case that had opened up departmental awareness of Mentis to the Police Service, and several other branches of Municipal Government, who up until that point had been in the dark despite the fact that the Federal Police and several globally based intelligence agencies had been investigating the case for nearly fifteen years by that point.

"Ed, we tried to reach you early on. I wanted to bring you into this. On board with us. You see, we're the future and we already have most of the world. Its too late old friend. This war's already over and you're on the losing side. I'm everywhere now. I'm everyone now. You're just a lonely old man, approaching his retirement fighting a war you'll never win. Unfortunately though, the time for you to switch sides is long gone and we can't afford any late comers who'd just secretly work to undermine ouur progress," Richard looked to Farnham, and then to Koro, Katsu and Tanto.

At that moment, Jack Warren/Dan Gurdy walked over to Richard and took up a place beside the man.

Neither Katsu, nor Tanto, nor Koro seemed moved by this latest of events. They instead stood fast, Koro still gripping the pommel of his Katana firmly.

"Tanto, I hate to tell you this but I've made my choice. You see, your old ways and ties to a dying dynasty just isn't the kind of thing that turns my crank. I've been with Mentis all along, and assigned to keep an eye on you. I don't think your loyalties are Mentis. I think you're playing us all," Jack asserted to Tanto, who seemed unfazed by Jack's words.

"Those are bold words spoken from the body of a dead man whose life you now animate thanks to my dynasty, and you choose to betray me?!!!" Tanto spent a great deal of energy concealing his hatred of the man for such a betrayal.

"I'm not Jack anymore, Tanto. I'm Mentis. We are all Mentis. We're just one giant person the entire globe over," Jack, who'd died and was reborn into the body of Dan Gurdy, disappeared from being.

His consciousness now merged into the Billions of Minds Of Mentis, like so many others before him.

"Sorry to break up your lover's quarrel here, but what about us?" asked Farnham of him and his partner.

"I'd like to keep my head if its alright!" Somboon added as another one of the men came to each of them and relieved them of their firearms.

"This is it Ed. This is the point in the war where the Two Dragons have laid out a destiny for humanity. Its forward or backward... and you failed to make a choice..." Richard drew a handgun from a holster beneath his armpit.

The other twenty one of his men did the same, some of them brandishing pistols while two thirds of them held 9mm submachine guns that had been paid for by Richard's own firm.

"So we die this day?" Tanto asked the collective that now inhabited the body of Dan Gurdy.

The same body that had previously been occupied by Jack Warren.

"Tanto, you were already dead when you set foot upon this Dundas Square here on this day. Sorry, but even your trusted Dragon, Witherwyrm has joined our cause. You're now a part of an extinct dynasty of ancient Japan and you'll perish beside the last of the worldly Yokai with whom you've chosen to allay yourself. Immortality might be immunity to time, but it isn't immunity to complete destruction..." Mentis spoke through the body of Dan Gurdy, Jack Warren now a part of the sum knowledge of Mentis.

Katsu at that moment decided to whisper something into Koro's left ear. He stood and listened to her carefully, and then turned one hundred and eighty degrees to face the opposite direction, his hand still on the pommel of his three hundred year old Katana.

"Before we begin this slaughter, allow me to confirm once more that you've chosen to betray our dynasty, and with it taken our Dragon?" Tanto addressed Mentis in the guise of Richard.

"Your Dragon is mortal. You just don't know it. It is belief that fuels the power of any deified being the cosmos over, and without the consciousness of belief, there are no deities of any kind. I, as Mentis, am now the sum of humanity in the form of a God! Through the power of unified belief, I am an equal of the Two Dragons, for their existence depends entirely upon the existence of consciousness. Without it, they simply cease to be, hence the stranglehold of fear they've both used to keep humanity beholden to their plan..." Richard spoke, but Mentis' will and voice emerged.

"The Dragon Witherwyrm has anticipated this, for it is the one who cannot know the future. Only the past has been revealed to it. It is merely acting in the interest of self preservation while the other, is acting with complete knowledge and memory of what is to come, without ever knowing the past. And so their war of the ages, and this test of humanity has come to this: the progression of humanity to become something much greater than individuality. To become one collective organism the planet over. I am no longer Richard. I and every one of my compatriots here are Mentis. That is all there is. We are merely vessels for the Mind of Mentis," Richard spoke, though even that man was now diluted into a superconsciousness that spanned the planet.

"So what you're saying is that we can either be selfish as ourselves, or we can be globally selfish as Mentis? I think I'll keep myself, thank you very much. At least I can truly love my wife in a way that Mentis never could!" Farnham responded, a scathing smirk upon his defiant face.

"I'm with my partner! Not that I could ever love his wife like he does... I mean I could love my future wife like none of you ever could!" Somboon added, taking up his partner's flank protectively.

There was a moment of silence, and then it was Katsu who began walking ever so purposefully and yet seductively toward Farnham and Somboon. She stopped beside them, standing protectively with them.

Koro and Tanto in the meantime, each took up a protective position around them, facing off against the circle of twenty-one men that opposed them.

"It seems that in our betrayal, we've become the allies of the more honourable of the two sides. We'll stand and defend them, until the last of you are gone," Tanto declared, drawing two blades, one for each hand and readying them for battle.

Koro then drew his Katana, and held it in the ready stance, his back to his former enemies, protecting them.

From the depths of the universe, both Witherwyrm and Weltherwithsp watched as this battle began.

Return To Night Style

[Blondie - One Way Or Another]

Alicia unlocked the shipping door at Tynan And Associates, peering out into the back parking lot for any signs of trouble around her car.

She spied the front windshield and saw a paper note tucked under one of the blades of her windshield wipers.

"Another parking ticket? I pay for that space!" she said aloud, as one of the receivers addressed her.

"Everything alright Alicia?" Garner asked her.

Alicia shook her head, perhaps a slight tinge of guilt out of her own sense of self concern, especially given the world situation on this day.

"In the scheme of things Garner, yes. Everything's just fine, but if it were just any other day, then I'd have a gripe," Alicia responded.

"Well you might be happy to know that we received the new catalyst samples you requested a few months ago?" Garner informed her, he himself an intern biologist.

"That's good news! Thanks Garner, but that still doesn't quite sooth the sting of a parking ticket..." Alicia replied.

"My parents always used to say, that if there's something bothering you, better to face it directly rather than to allow it to take up space in your mind, especially when its not paying rent there!" Garner replied to Alicia.

"Good point. I'll take that advice to heart and go check my car..." Alicia said as she stepped out of the receiving door and towards her Toyota Rav4 parked in the far end of the back lot.

Despite the global riots which were currently all over the news, she was able to make it out to her car safely and without requiring the intervention of her alter-ego Night Style.

When she reached her car, she quickly grabbed the parking ticket and examined it carefully, somewhat angered by the fact that after all she'd done for society that someone would have the nerve to ticket her for a parking space she paid for legally every month.

However, when she examined the ticket, she found that it wasn't a ticket at all. Instead, it was in fact a note and one from a very familiar friend of hers:

Heya there blondie! Eclipse here! We miss you, but we're going to need you soon! Meet us downtown today, just before dinner... if you remember?

Alicia blushed as she realized that her friend Monique had in fact left her a note, and that likely, it was closely related to these global riots.

Monique's reference to dinner time was a coded message. One referring to a specific time of day, back when the three of them were investigating Treadwater Island. It was how they'd refer to six o'clock in the evening. Dinner time. It was a coded reference they'd use that only they knew.

Downtown was another. It was taken from a reference to the song of the same name: Downtown. Downtown was the code word they gave Dundas Square as their meeting place for when they were doing patrols after the events of Treadwater Island and still cleaning up the remnants of Torman's and Zek's organized crime network.

Alicia pulled her keys from her pocket and opened the trunk of her Rav4, checking the contents where she found a very familiar suit. The tights and trench coat that made up her Night Style costume. Her mask on top of the folded pile of clothing.

She then returned to the receiving door and called out for Garner.

"Look, tell Alex to look after the lab samples. I'm done for the day. I've got a priority engagement..." Alicia yelled to the receiver.

"Don't worry girl. I got you covered," Garner responded.

"Oh, and thanks for the advice. As it turns out, you were right," Alicia closed the door and returned to her car, where she quickly donned her Night Style outfit in the backseat.

"There's got to be a better way to do this..." she grumbled as she struggled to get the tighter portions of her costume firmly to her form. After she was done, she got into the driver's seat and started the car.

With her mask laying in the passenger seat, she drove out of the parking lot and headed towards Dundas Square from Kennedy and Ellesmere Avenue, curious as to what Norler and Gregory were up to.

From Toronto To Denpasar And Back Again

[The Beaches - Gold]

Heylyn descended from the sky, exhausted having covered nearly half of the globe in a span of hours. When her feet found purchase of the top of the Bajra Sandhi Monument, she immediately leaned against the peak, bracing herself in such a way so she could rest and recover some of her spent energy.

"Somewhere I've always wented to visit, and yet I never thought I'd end up seeing it under circumstances like these..." she remarked, catching her breath as the warm south Pacific air embraced her body.

Her golden wings phased and disappeared into her back, leaving her scaly red costume as the only sign that the one true Butterfly Dragon of GuangZhou had descended upon Indonesia.

She was grateful to see that around the streets of the great city, that most if not all of the conflict had ceased. That Monique's and her own gargantuan effort had truly made a difference in the world upon such a chaotic moment of the world's history.

She closed her eyes and fell into a deep meditative sleep, drawing upon energy and Chi she'd expended during her effort to curb the outbreak of global conflict.

As she drifted asleep, her body was invigorated by the scent of warm Pacific air, she felt the presence of another close to her.

"Heya boss!" Monique exclaimed in her usual sparky and chipper voice, still somehow full of enthusiasm.

"How'd you find me?" Heylyn responded, still resting with her eyes closed.

"Well I gotta tell you, it wasn't easy. I had to like circle the Earth about fifteen times until I realized that you were talking about Bali last week, and how you wanted to visit. So I kind of figured you'd be here of all places and low and behold, here you are. Now move over so I can catch a few winks too!" Monique exclaimed to Heylyn.

"How'd it go in the Middle East?" asked Heylyn.

"Its still a bit messy, but I managed to stop about ninety percent of the conflict that resulted from this eclipse phenomenon," Monique replied, still relaxing.

"How's Tel Aviv?" asked Heylyn.

"It was actually pretty good. Not to much fighting there. Not to mention that there was some nice scenery there too, though to tell you the truth, it was Petra that really amazed me. I've never seen it before. It was absolutely beautiful..." Monique remarked.

"I'll have to check it out some time when we're better rested..." Heylyn responded, still catching up on her energy.

"How'd things fare in Macedon and Turkey?" asked Monique.

"Well, it was a bit messy there too, but they've been working together thanks to UN Peacekeepers for a long time. So most of their conflict was held behind a hand of cards and bottles of imported whiskey wielded by their Generals. None of the troops fought thankfully. Only a few old Military gruffs from either side who like strategy and Poker. Old timers you know?" Heylyn said to Monique as they both took in the warm air.

"We can only do so much..." Monique responded.

"Thankfully they turned to a deck of cards before they loaded their guns if you know what I mean. Did you message Alicia?" asked Heylyn of Monique.

"Yep. Exactly as you said, but I added in some of my own flair too..." Monique smiled behind closed eyes.

"We can only hope that we somehow made a difference. Stopped the worst of what could have happened. I just can't see how Weltherwithsp would allow something like this," Heylyn paused as she considered other matters.

"Well maybe we prevented the worst of it? Maybe we prevailed in the face of what could have been?" asked Monique.

"Maybe... By the way, something's changed... in my wings. My body. I feel... different..." Heylyn remarked.

"How? For the worse?" asked Monique, now very concerned for her friend.

"No... for the better. For one, I could have never made it this far in under twenty hours, and yet I was able to fly here in under ten minutes..." Heylyn explained to Monique.

"SY-349 maybe?" asked Monique.

"That's what I'm going to ask Alicia when we get back..." Heylyn replied, now beginning to feel recharged and alive once again.

"Well stand in line, because I was able to move faster than I've ever moved before. It was so fast that everything seemed to be going backwards and forwards at the same time... like looking through one of Trey's wide angle lenses? I was moving so fast I could see as well behind me as I could in front of me..." Monique explained to Heylyn, looking over to her friend.

"It seems we've got some mysteries on our hands. Lets get back to downtown (Heylyn referred to their meeting place in code) and hope that Alicia got your message," Heylyn opened her eyes, standing firmly above the center of Denpasar as her golden wings emerged from her back.

She stood at the top of the Bajra Sandhi Monument, from where she flew skyward.

"See you there..." Monique replied.

In the time it had taken Monique to finish the sentence, she was already in downtown Toronto on the other side of the world.

Heylyn in the guise of Butterfly Dragon took off into the air above Denpasar, quickly accelerating into the night time sky until she was moving fast enough so that she arrived in downtown Toronto in the early evening only five minutes later.

The Sun stared back at both Heylyn and Monique as they landed in Dundas Square amidst another conflict that was on the precipice of eruption. That was when Heylyn recognized a familiar face atop a roof just south of the square.

A circle of twenty-one men stood surrounding a group of five people. Two of them, a young Indonesian man and a man in his mid fifties stood protectively behind vehicles. The other three seemed foolishly read to risk their lives against the fire of automatic weapons.

Those of the less protective stance, a Japanese woman and two Japanese men stood ready for combat. One wielding an ancient Katana, whose blade had many times before quenched the thirst of its owner's propensity for battle. Opposite the Yokai in a manform named Koro, stood Tanto, a lifelong dragon of a secretive order from the red light district of Osaka, Japan. A man who Heylyn recognized as the one who'd attempted to kidnap Warai, and the man who'd bested Braden in battle once already.

He wielded two blades, one in each hand and Heylyn immediately recognized them as the famed named blades of the Tokugawa era. Two blades forged, each a sibling to one another that had been a part of Japan's history since the emergence of the Feudal era. They were rumoured to have been produced in the forges of the Yokai. A demonic tribe that predated human history.

The two blades each had a name, much the same as the symbol Yin and Yang, and yet those names were one of the greatest secrets of the Yokai, for those who wielded such names in their memory, could lead the Yokai as their Emperor.

There was only one who could exceed this implored leadership, and she too was amongst them and her name was Katsu, short for Katsura.

The Empress of the Yokai.

Heylyn wasn't certain that the woman was human or demon, for even to her keen eyes, Katsura could fool the senses of the Two Dragons themselves.

"And so it begins..." Butterfly Dragon said as she landed beside Eclipse, now knowing that Mentis was completely unaware of the forces with which the collective had stirred into wakefulness.

For even though so many of humanity had readily folded to the power of Mentis, there were many more who'd never yield to such an emergent collective consciousness at the cost of their own individuality or the merit of cooperation. The choice of freewill as to work together, as individuals, rather than as beings conditioned of fear.

Honour and respect had long been the staples of structure in Southeastern Asia, and there was no lack of honour in submitting to a mentor. To a teacher. To one who could through discipline and knowledge further another's life progress and understanding in any number of ways. A trust born thousands of years earlier and carried from generation to generation since. Those of the truest virtue would never take advantage of a student, and yet it was the ultimate test of ego to depart from one's own sense of self determination to trust a mentor's guidance. Not foolishly so, but after careful evaluation. After all, who would give up that which they valued more than life itself? Self determination.

Every great mentor had at one point in their life, given up the same to their own teacher, and so it was that they understood the resistance of ego to such a lure.

Mentis however was almost entirely of ego, for it had become one composed of ego sourced from its membership. A collective consciousness, and the embodiment of ego.

Mentis was no longer dancing with the subdued minds of humanity. Those who'd been stripped of their Thumos. The driving spark of the soul and their very essence.

Mentis had declared war on the most ancient of powers the world had ever known and those for whom the concept of mind, body and soul had been invented to describe, for they were the first ones to have ever gone to battle to protect those ideas.

Mentis, in all irony, was at war with the very essence of existence and what it meant to be alive.

On this very day, the Yokai abandoned Mentis, as did their allies, and the Dragon Witherwyrm had become Mentis' only ally.

Katsura and Tanto were now defying one of the two great forces of the entire universe, their allegiance had been forced by way of this change in diplomacy and now they were working with Jinn Hua and the Order Of The Butterfly Dragon.

...

Alicia parked her car in an alley just beyond Dundas Square, in fact the same alley where nine months earlier, Valerie, Monique and Braden had cornered the Chameleon killer while Heylyn and Kori had been in South Korea to retrieve Warai.

Alicia had no knowledge of this coincidence. She instead parked her car and grabbed her mask from the passenger seat, quickly putting in place over her eyes.

She then closed and locked her car and leapt up twelve feet to the nearest fire escape. She clung to the ladder and scaled the wall with a precision and expertise few would have believed without seeing it.

Another moment later and she was on the roof surveying the situation in Dundas Square.

She spied a circle of twenty-one men, each of whom were armed with machine guns (a brand of firearm she recognized and had contended with many times before).

As she ducked behind the lip of the roof, she spied Monique first, descending from the sky and landing just outside of the circle of armed men.

"Well, at least Monique's not late," Alicia remarked as she watched from the distance, atop a roof south of Dundas Square.

"Who are they?" Alicia spied Katsura from the distance, seeing Koro and Tanto bracketing her protectively.

"They're the ancient remnants of a demonic tribe from Japan, known as Yokai..." Heylyn descended behind her best friend, startling her into action.

Alicia immediately rolled backwards flipping up and onto her feet, delivering a punch at Heylyn which the Butterfly Dragon caught easily with one hand, holding Alicia's hand firm and then releasing her grip.

Alicia's look of intense caution quickly changed to one of joy and gratitude when she recognized the face of her best friend. It was Butterfly Dragon, without her mask, and Heylyn Yates' face looked back, as familiar as their days in school together.

"Just like the old days. Its good to see you," Alicia returned Heylyn's smile.

"Been a long time since Night Style has been out and about. Are you ready to make a difference?" asked Heylyn of her best friend.

"That depends. Who are the bad guys? Sounds a little confusing at this point," Alicia replied.

"Oh believe me, it just gets more complicated from here. From what I gather, the Yokai have been betrayed. I'm assuming that the twenty-one guys you see encircling them are from Mentis' own tactical operations group..." Heylyn reasoned with Alicia.

"They kind of stink of those guys that tried to take the Japanese Imperial Palace back during our time in the Western Delegation..." Alicia looked to them, recalling her encounter with a similar group who'd attempted to assault the Imperial Palace in the Chiyoda prefecture of Tokyo back during their time with the Western Delegation (in the book: The Butterfly Dragon II: What Different Eyes See).

"So who are we with?" asked Alicia of Heylyn.

"The Charter... The Human Rights Act. Maybe a few reluctant ancient demons too... and one hell of a pissed off dragon..." Heylyn replied, retrieving her mask from her belt and putting it on her face.

"Now those are the kind of odds I like. Let's do this..." Alicia stood poised on the ledge of the building.

"Sure you don't need a lift?" asked Heylyn as she prepared herself to plunge into what would undoubtedly be chaotic madness.

"I'm aiming for the advertising billboard, and then from there I'm leaping into the fray..." Alicia suddenly backed up thirty feet, and then began sprinting full tilt for the lip of the building launching herself a good eighty feet into the air where she caught the edge of the billboard, maintaining her momentum as she flew spinning through the air and landed directly in the center of the action.

"Now that's the Alicia I know..." Heylyn responded, taking off into the air.

She flew into the chaos, Monique and Alicia already in the thick of battle.

Senseis and Tigers

[Shout - Tears For Fears]

During the stress testing of the students' knowledge of Sanchin in class, there arose a horrible ruckus in the front reception area of the same building the Dojang and Dojo occupied.

"Alright, just maintain your practice and work on the breath. Use it to for the purposes of tension and fluidity and I'll be right back after I see what the heck that was..." Hanshi told his students, directing his Senpai to oversee the exercise as he'd been doing earlier.

Hanshi bowed before leaving through the door, almost literally bumping into Hoon Kwang on the way to the front of the building and the reception area.

"...whoa... you mean that wasn't you?" asked Hanshi of Hoon Kwang, the infamous Tiger of Tae Kwon Do.

"I was going to ask you the same thing big guy..." Tiger responded, tapping the shoulder of his peer.

"If it wasn't you or me, then what the heck was it?" asked Hanshi, continuing down the hall towards the reception area.

As they progressed, the sound of screaming emerged. That of a familiar voice. That of their receptionist. Hanshi's own niece, Lana. A girl in her mid twenties, struggling to pay her tuition and to keep her compass on track to insure that she met her career goals. A woman by herself pursuing her dream of being a graduate of the school of medicine.

Hanshi broke out into a sprint to the front of the building, Tiger just behind him and catching up to the bigger man quickly.

When Hanshi arrived, he spied a group of ten men, each of them armed with baseball bats. Some wooden, others aluminum. To his horror, these men had begun pounding the furniture into a pulp of wood chips, screws and metal clips. Lana had retreated to the back wall behind the now pulverized reception desk as the bat wielding attackers expunged whatever ill had driven them to such rage.

As one of them was about to bring the bat down upon Lana's skull, Hanshi jumped in front, redirecting the swing to impact the wall beside her, narrowly missing her.

By that point, Tiger had leapt literally through the air, catching another one of the men by arm, flinging him to the floor, disarming him his bat, which he then broke in two against a steel column, throwing the discarded pieces out through the broken window of the front door.

"Who's next!" he screamed, purposely drawing their attention towards him and away from Lana and Hanshi, who was trying to evacuate his niece to a safer place.

The remaining eight men all turned their attention to Tiger.

"I didn't mean all of you at once!" Tiger responded to his current dilemma as Hanshi rushed his niece into the hall, directing her towards the class in progress.

"Run! Get some help from the class. Ask for the Senpai," Hanshi directed Lana, who wasted no time, running down the hall to the door to the Dojo, quickly throwing it open.

By that time, Hanshi had joined Tiger who was quickly and deftly dealing with all eight assailants, though quickly losing ground to them given their overwhelming numbers.

Tiger caught the first bat, an aluminum slugger, redirecting its force, and spinning with it while the assailant held onto it, in a struggle to maintain control. He didn't by that time realize that both his arms were twisted over one another and Tiger forced him back into and through the drywall, where his assailant was stopped by the studs, without injury fortunately.

Both Tiger and Hanshi knew that they were dealing with amateurs. People who'd never wielded a weapon in their lives. They were more like rabid animals, acting out of instinct and reaction. People who'd been triggered by someone or something into random acts of violence, and in this knowledge, both Hanshi and Tiger were ultimately responsible for them. For as real warriors, they wielded superior knowledge. Enough so to protect both themselves, and their adversaries from real harm. They both knew that in their actions, they would have to protect these people attacking them as much so as they'd protect each other.

And in that moment, they both suddenly realized what they had been trying to explain to their students.

Why it was that people trained for warfare, and yet aspired towards peace.

The responsibilities of being a warrior implied the ultimate importance of peace. In knowing how to harm someone effectively, in a means to incapacitate, the responsibility to protect and preserve life lay steadfast above all other priorities.

It was the very reason that Police trained. That Tactical Operations Units did so as well. The Military. Special Forces. Every warrior the world had ever produced wasn't about the taking of life, but rather its responsible preservation and protection.

The very essence of being a true warrior was defined by these qualities of honour.

As Hanshi and Tiger struggled against the superior numbers of the force against them, they realized what it was they'd been trying to explain to their class. The purpose of why people practice hurting other people.

It wasn't about harm. It was all about protecting. Preservation.

What had started as a means to the execution of warfare as an armed and skilled combatant, had changed, much like as stated in the I Ching, in the works of Miyamoto Musashi and the works of Jun, a Korean philosopher who'd fully explored the concept of Thumos in his book of the same name.

So it was that Hanshi and Tiger against overwhelming odds, took on a larger force who enraged, were now trying to kill them, while Hanshi and Tiger were trying to save them. It was the students of warfare and death that had become the saviours of life.

Tiger barely dodged the incoming swing of a wooden bat, side stepping it as quickly as he could, attempting to disarm his foe. Before he could, another one swung at his head, and he was forced to block it with the wooden bat of the other. The impact was short of perfect, hitting the fingers of the one originally wielding the bat, breaking two of them under the force.

The one wielding that bat cried out in pain, releasing the bat as Tiger attempted to disarm the second assailant.

"I'm losing this battle!" Tiger screamed to Hanshi as he backed into the corner of the reception area.

"No lethal force! Just do your best for honour's sake!" Hanshi responded, as he delivered one of his assailants to the floor without hurting the poor fool, who obviously did not fully appreciate the extra effort Hanshi had made on his behalf.

As they overwhelmed the Sensei and the Sebomnim, the students themselves poured into the reception area under the guidance of Hanshi's chosen Senpai.

Quickly, the students overwhelmed the assailants and yet, without hurting any one of them.

Instead, they used grappling techniques. Waza taught them by the various visiting Senseis, Sebomnims and Sifus. Visiting instructors to their Dojo and Dojang. Aiki-Jujitsu and Aikido. Brazilian Jujitsu. Judo. Wing Chun. Gong Fu. Muay Thai. Kendo. Iaido. Their lessons and demonstrations suddenly found purchase of the students' memory, and they quickly applied the knowledge without injuring themselves of their assailants.

And in their overwhelming show of force, nobody, not a single person was harmed or maimed and yet every assailant was incapacitated.

Hanshi accepted a hand up from Tiger, who lifted the heavier man onto his feet.

"You should probably stay away from the beer, Hanshi," Tiger responded to the extra weight.

"My Sensei drank beer and sake. So will I dammit," Hanshi responded.

Emmett looked to Hanshi and Hoon Kwang, sizing them up.

"So, how'd we do?" asked Emmett, much like Hanshi wiping his forehead clear of sweat.

"Good..." Hanshi accepted a towel from one of the other students, wiping his own face clean of sweat.

"Just good? That was the best workout I've had in my life..." asked Clara, whose own Gi was clinging tightly to her body with sweat.

"You aren't just honoured students. You've progressed to become something more... Much, much more," Tiger addressed them.

"Tiger is right. You've all graduated in a sense of being. You're all now true warriors, for you understand exactly why it is that we train..." Hanshi wiped his forehead again with the same towel.

"The same reason that Police train. The Military. Fire Fighters. Medical Services. Everyone in a protective line of work..." Tiger added.

"And why is that, Sensei? Sebomnim?" asked Clara.

"To protect. To protect ourselves and each other, and to protect others whose intentions betray their own safety and the safety of others..." Hanshi replied.

"And the safety of Tigers..." Hoon Kwang smiled, winking at the students, drawing a hearty laughter from Hanshi and the rest of their class.

Dundas Square

"Who's she?!!!" asked one of Mentis' men, turning to face the newly woman.

A red, black and white angel who'd descended from the evening sky.

"That's the Eclipse girl! Take her down!" yelled their team commander, and all at once Dundas Square erupted into a circle of gunfire as Mentis' men moved to take down their opposition.

Alicia landed in their midst as the first rounds flew. Her senses urging her to dodge and move, narrowly escaping the trajectory of the opening volley of gunfire.

Eclipse in the meantime had transformed herself into a shaft of pure light, and was now on the opposite side of their Dundas Square battlefield, grappling with the first gunman as they fought over purchase of his MP5 submachinegun.

The rounds erupted into the air as she struggled to wrest the weapon away from him. He held fast and managed to level the barrel at her head, but by the time he fired, she'd once again phased herself into polarized light and the rounds passed harmlessly through her.

When the assailant's magazine was emptied half a second later, she materialized once again grabbing hold of the man's arm, flying him to a height of sixty feet in the air and then releasing him. He fell to the pavement, broken by the fall and unable to resume his assault on the women.

Butterfly Dragon by that point had dropped into the center beside Alicia, as Koro charged one of Mentis' men, seeking a decapitation.

"I've got it!" Butterfly Dragon told Alicia, who then rolled just barely averting a spray of gunfire directed at either of them.

Butterfly Dragon's wings deflected the remainder of gunfire into the air vertically above them and harmlessly out of the way.

Alicia in the meantime caught the man who'd fired that volley as he attempted to reload. She quickly swept the man's own arm up into his face, and from a distance, he appeared to be repeatedly punching himself, thanks to Alicia's quick puppetry of his arm.

In the meantime, Butterfly Dragon's armour caught Koro's blade mid-swing just before it found the neck of its target.

"This is a different fight Yokai!" she exclaimed to the centuries old demon.

"And whose side are you Butterfly?!!!" Koro responded, turning to face her, ready to vanquish her as need be.

"Humanity's! You can't fight it this way, demon. You're going to have to make a choice. Remain a killer and be killed, or preserve and protect, and find redemption for your kind!" Butterfly Dragon insisted to a demon who'd lived nine times the life she'd already experienced thus far.

His blood seemed to boil upon hearing her words, and he responded with the brutal force of an attack beyond fathoming.

His Katana crashed down on her body armour, scales chipping away as he furiously tried to break through to her skin.

As he made progress backing her up, and chipping away at her only protection, her skin suddenly changed, and her body became covered in dragon scales from head to toe.

"Alright Yokai! So we do this the hard way!" Butterfly Dragon pushed back, catching his Katana in her hand, ready to break it at its weakest point. The pin that fastened it to its own grip.

At that moment, Katsura arrived by Koro's side, her lips moving close to Koro's ear. She whispered something within, and his expression became one of puzzlement, and then grief. He looked at Butterfly Dragon with remorse and pity, now understanding the woman before him. Katsura's words continued and Koro suddenly turned to face Mentis' men once again. However, this time, he didn't wield his Katana, for he'd sheathed it. He wielded his Saya. The vessel that contained his Katana, the blunt bamboo hardwood that was itself a formidable weapon lacking a sharpened edge.

It was a blunt weapon of mercy.

He then charged at Mentis' men, employing it to full effect upon them, without drawing so much as a drop of blood.

Butterfly Dragon looked to Katsura, suddenly realizing that the word demon was simply a label. Full of stigma and predisposition, though in this case it was clearly unfounded, for in a few moments these Yokai had shown more humanity than Mentis' own protectorate.

Katsura looked back at Butterfly Dragon, a mutual respect had surfaced between them.

As Mentis' men closed in on Somboon and Farnham, Katsura and Butterfly Dragon moved protectively to their defense as Alicia and Monique quickly evened up the odds.

...

[Soundgarden - Bleed Together]

By that time, Tanto and Jack Warren found pause enough to face one another. A conflict that had been brewing between them since day one.

"To think I hired you as an assassin... and yet you've been nothing but a failure, especially so in your betrayal of me, and the Yokai!" Tanto confronted Jack, Tanto's blades held firmly as he faced the assassin.

"As Jack Warren, I've killed many people for saying much less than your words, and even as I am no longer of that soul, I will relish removing you from the world..." the man who had once been Jack Warren responded.

"How noble your words considering that they're from a filthy indignant man of few scruples and even less honour!" Tanton challenged Jack, both his blades thirsting for the man's lifeforce.

"Those are steeped words coming from a murderer of virgins..." Jack responded, referring to the dragon nature of Tanto and his dynasty.

"Then as two cold blooded killers, we shall fall..." Tanto charged at Jack, who in turn did the same, firing his 9mm handgun several times into the Dragon Tanto's body.

...

As the fighting erupted and the bullets flew, Farnham and Somboon dove for cover behind their vehicle.

"Keep your head down and your feet behind the tires!" Farnham yelled to Somboon on the other end of the car.

At that moment the unconscious body of one of Mentis' men came flying over the hood and landing with a thud on the pavement beside Somboon.

"This isn't looking so good old man!" Somboon said excitedly, a look of terror on his face.

"Don't knock it. Its a step up from facing off against that guy with the sword!" Farnham replied, somehow managing to find improvement in their situation.

Somboon's face contorted into a grim frown, but upon thinking about Farnham's statement, he suddenly began to laugh.

"Yes, our situation has improved, but its still got a long way to go..." Somboon managed to find a smile amidst the turmoil around them.

A round from one of the submachineguns riccocheted off the hood of their car, sending hot sparks flying.

Farnham ducked even lower behind the car's front wheel, suddenly joining Somboon in laughter.

"Yep, its got a ways to go..." Farnham responded as he looked to the cloudless sky.

He squinted to ensure what he was seeing was really there, for across the sky, arriving from the north were a series of contrails, perhaps a few hundred in all. They were arriving from the shortest path between Eurasia and North America: over the North Pole.

"Somboon..." Farnham said to his partner.

"What? Did something else go wrong?" asked Somboon, panicking at whatever he imagined had got Farnham's attention.

"Its been an honour working with you," Farnham nodded to his partner as Somboon looked skyward and saw as several of the trails began descending towards the ground.

It Ends As It Began

[Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Two Tribes]

Somewhere within Mount Cheyenne, SAC NORAD, a flurry of activity centered around the DISTANT EARLY WARNING SYSTEM had led to an argument deep within the command structure overseeing the deployment of more than half of the world's nuclear arsenal.

Two of those in charge of interpreting this data had began a furious conflict, their interpretation of the data, which indicated an incoming attack sourced from several former Eastern Bloc countries, would mean the annihiliation of North American society in its entirety.

The two men fumed at each other, until finally one of them drew their service pistol, shooting the other square between the eyes, but not before the other had gotten a shot off, hitting the assailant's shoulder.

It was however, too late, for the man who'd won had ordered a completel retaliation with all of the tacticcal and strategic forces deployed by the west throughout the world. Land, Sea and Air.

Mentis' Billions Of Minds had in fact infiltrated NORAD and the former WARSAW PACT. In essence, Mentis was running both sides.

As the Butterfly Dragon, Night Style and Eclipse fought the forces of Mentis, nearly having subdued them all in Dundas Square, the missiles flew over the North Pole, those from North America onward towards their targets, and those from Europe and Asia towards North America, their trails drawing lines across the sky whose presence meant nothing but doom.

The contrail of one particularly large warhead fell onto Pearson International Airport, detonating just below the precursor limit, sending an immense unstable shockave across Mississauga soil, levelling all buildings great and small for nearly ten kilometers in diameter.

"Noooo! This can't be happening! I thought we stopped it!" Alicia screamed as the sky was pocked with these trails of the ultimate doom of humanity.

"Eclipse! Stop them!" Butterfly Dragon ordered her friend and peer, but by that point it was already too late.

Both Butterfly Dragon and Eclipse took to the sky, attempting to intercept the missiles one by one.

Monique poigniantly flew up into the stratosphere in an instant, destroying several of the missiles one by one as fast as she could move, but somehow, no matter how many she destroyed, another twenty would take their place.

She'd covered half the globe in an instant, perhaps taking down more ICBMs than even the strategic defense initiative, and combined satellite defenses of SAC NORAD. Yet still, the vast majority of cities the world over had already been leveled and were no burning as a result of nuclear devastation.

However, when she turned back to her own home city of Toronto, she saw the last solitary trail erupt into a web of other smaller trails and she at once realized that it was a MIRV. A multiple impact reentry vehicle. One rocket, many warheads. Three of them heading directly for Toronto.

She sped off as fast as she could tearing strips of the atmosphere from the ionosphere with her speed before she arrived at the first reentry vehicle.

She clasped it as tight as she could, flying upward and throwing it out into space before she moved on to the second. But by that time, like all the other missiles she'd already missed, it was too late.

The first twenty megaton payload impacted Toronto Island Airport, sending fragments of superheated heated glass and concrete in the direction of Dundas Square, let alone pulverizing absolutely every bit of organic matter between the point of impact and fifty kilometers.

Alicia and Butterfly Dragon looked to one another as their fate found them and they watched the city they'd risked their lives to protect consumed. It was the last thing they saw.

And with that, it was all gone. All of it.

Monique, still in light form, cried with all the life in her, screaming until eventually the heat of the nuclear blast consumed even her and the collection of photons that made up the volume of her body.

And she expired with her friends despite their effort to save humanity.

The Day After

Alicia stretched out, the morning sunlight caressing her skin as she awoke for another day.

Norler lay beside her, snoring uneasily on his side as Alicia's hands found his side.

Her eyes opened, and she at once found herself in a girlishly mischievous mood.

With her hand clasped down on his torso, she began squeezing rhythmically in an attempt to tickle him.

She watched his face with amusement, as a smile slowly jumped onto his face, even long before he'd awakened.

He pushed her a couple of times, mumbling something incoherent under his breath, though she wasn't so easily put off.

She continued until finally he awoke, laughing and gasping for air. A look of utter mischief crossed his face and given the fact that he'd spent the better part of years learning Alicia's most ticklish parts, she was suddenly forced to face the fact that she'd been defeated by a better tickler.

Norler played her like an instrument of pleasure, until she was begging and pleading with him to stop.

That was when their lips met in a wet and passionate kiss, and their morning began (and ended) with intense love making.

...

"Did you dream last night?" asked Norler of his wife to be.

Alicia paused, her lips and cheeks still red and flushed from their earlier passion.

"I think so..." Alicia responded, now leaning up against the headboard, checking the clock.

"About what?" asked Norler, running his index finger gently up her leg.

"I'm not sure... It was kind like a sunrise... Really bright..." Alicia responded, lifting her legs over the edge of the bed and standing to make her way to the shower.

"If you want seconds... come get it..." Alicia invited Norler from inside of the shower.

A grin strethced across Norler's face.

"Time's tickin', I'm serious!" Alicia leaned out of the shower inviting her man to join her.

Norler quickly discarded his housecoat and jumped into the shower with Alicia. His hands quicly found the faucet, throwing it to the cold side as he laughed. They both jumped around dodging cold water in the shower until Alicia adjusted it, and then warmed them both up with the caress of her body.

...

"Breakfast's on!" Monique announced to Aikiko, who lay comfortably in her bed by herself.

"Murder should be made legal against happy people in the morning!" Aikiko responded, still very much short of her sleep.

Monique remained silent, unsure of whether she should laugh or not, which of course spurred a smile onto Aikiko's face.

"I win!" Aikiko smiled, laughing at her roomate out loud, enough so that Monique easily heard her.

"You're way too tricky!" Monique scooped two plates full of eggs and sausage for each of them.

"I'm not the one who had the big photoshoot today..." Aikiko replied to Monique.

"Funny you should mention. I think I had a dream about it. I could see someone that looked like Trey, and then there was like a big flash..." Monique reminisced.

"He's a stickler for those amped up high powered LED flashes... He near blinded me on my last shoot..." Aikiko wrapped herself in her silk housecoat and made her way to the kitchen.

Aikiko arrived behind Monique, checking the table where she'd served breakfast.

Aikiko picked up a sausage and placed it in Monique's lips.

"Pretty darn good! Cooked by an expert waitress you know..." Monique smiled, finally grabbing a seat behind her plate.

"Cooked by the light of a thousand suns..." Aikiko took a seat across from Monique, never realizing the coincidence of what she'd stated.

...

"Rise and shine!" Heylyn announced from the kitchen as she finished cooking the last of breakfast.

Heylyn didn't hear the usual response of her favourite breakfast buddy, and so she went to check up on her best morning friend, as she'd often referred to Warai.

Heylyn arrived at Warai's door, knocking twice with her knuckles. A moment later, a short grumpy woman of no more than six years emerged, wrapping her arms around Heylyn.

"I'm scared...!" Warai sniffled, keeping her embrace of Heylyn firm.

"Honey, there's nothing to be scared of, really..." Heylyn rubbed Warai's hair comfortingly.

"I had a dream... a bad dream..." Warai's bottom lip protruded as she pouted.

"You know what I heard, Warai?" asked Heylyn of her little friend.

Warai stood still for a moment, refusing to accept anything that might oppose her fear.

And then she swayed a bit.

"What?" she asked Heylyn.

"That if you have a bad dream, that means you're going to have a good day...!" Heylyn smiled at her adopted daughter.

"And what if I have a good dream?" asked Warai, quickly catching on.

"Well, then you're just going to have to keep on dreaming for the whole day..." Heylyn urged her.

"So bad dreams, good day?" confirmed Warai.

"Absolutely," Heylyn agreed.

"And good dreams...?" asked Warai.

"Then just keep dreaming, sweatheart. Good dreams," Heylyn kneeled down to Warai's level, planting a kiss firmly upon her cheek.

...

Two men sat at a café along Cumberland Street, a crowded one-way road in the northern most part of Toronto's downtown and part of the star studded district of Yorkville. Alongside Queen Street and the Distillery, it was the favourite playground of both domestic and foreign stars and celebrities. The two men seated at the café were professionally unknown to most citizens, and that is exactly how they preferred it, given the nature of their employ.

"Alright, let's run through this one more time. When our suspect leaves his condo, I follow him..." Farnham began.

"Then I obtain access to the camera in the front door of the bank, and the camera above the tellers... I know, I've already got that part!" Somboon said impatiently, Farnham however kept speaking.

"Its important that you get his face on camera and a clear shot of the bonds... We're building a case here, not home movies..." Farnham reminded Somboon.

"Alright! Alright already! Look! There he is..." Somboon replied, lowering his voice as he saw their suspect across the street, leaving the lobby of his condo.

Farnham got to his feet, and began pursuing the suspect without once ever laying eyes upon him as the man walked casually to the bank, a hefty briefcase in his hand.

The suspect got into line as Farnham filled out a deposit slip, carefully counting out his money and organizing it according to its cash denominations.

"Did you get him on camera entering the bank?" asked Farnham of Somboon.

"Done already, old man. I'm ten steps ahead of you!" Somboon responded impatiently once again.

"That's why you get the big bucks... He just reached the teller and he's opening the briefcase..." Farnham signed his deposit slip, fighting the sense of regret he suddenly had.

In his hands, he held the last possible hope of owning his dream fishing boat. One for which he'd been saving money for years. And now, here he was signing all that money away, putting it to a much different use.

"So much for my fishing trip with the guys..." Farnham said aloud, though more intending his words only for his own ears.

"Ahhh.... its a waste of time old man. Why go fishing when you can buy fish in the supermarket?!" Somboon responded.

"I wasn't talking to you..." Farnham carefully pocketed the wad of cash and the deposit slip, then getting into line.

"Then who were you talking to?" asked Somboon.

"Me. You wouldn't understand..." Farnham took a quick peek at their suspect and then to the teller with whom he was dealing.

"You get a closeup yet?" asked Farnham, quietly shuffling in line impatiently.

"I sure did! A good one of his face, and the bonds all in the same shot! It was a real Kodak moment!" Somboon joked.

"Alright, I've got to do something here first, and then we'll go for the gold. Keep your eye on the ball," Farnham said as a teller gestured to him.

"How many I help you today?" asked the teller.

"I'd like to kiss my dream goodbye, and deposit this money into this account..." Farnham slid the deposit slip to the teller, followed by a sizeable stack of cash.

"Will that be all for you today?" asked the teller.

"Not exactly, but lets do this first," Farnham accepted a slip from the teller, which he then signed in front of them to approve the deposit.

...

Koro sat in the restaurant across the street from Somboon, watching the younger man carefully. Across from him sat Katsu, she too watching Somboon carefully.

The sombre mood and silence in the retaurant was interrupted by the sound of a ringing phone inside of Koro's jacket. He retrieved the phone from the inside pocket and answered.

"And now for the real question. Do we stop them, or do we turn over Mentis' money man?" asked Tanto on the other end of the line.

Koro listened, but did not speak. He instead handed the phone to Katsu, who then addressed Tanto herself.

"These men. They're pitiful. Frail. I can see nothing but weakness in them, and yet they are of the highest calibre. A sense of duty and honour absent in their nemesis, Mentis. In their frailty, they somehow overcome," Katsu spoke to Tanto in higher language.

"Are they then our allies, or our enemies? Do you find that our initial choice of allegiance was flawed?" asked Tanto, seeking answers from a woman who'd been alive since before the formation of the Earth.

"It would seem that we share much in common in terms of our flaws with these who oppose Mentis. Let us break this costly allegiance and seek new allies on this ever changing battlefield," Katsu suggested.

"Then it is done. We will speak later and more of this dilemma in the audience of Jinn Hua," Tanto hung up.

Katsu handed Koro the phone and he pocketed it, already aware of their decision.

...

Outside of the bank, the car that had pulled up to pickup the suspect suddenly drove off, disappearing into traffic, abandoning the suspect at the bank.

"Thank you sir for your business. It will take three days for these to clear, if you have any questions you're free to call me directly any time during our business hours," the bank manager addressed the suspect, who in all honesty and irony, suspected nothing.

At that moment, Farnham slid a note across the counter to the teller, informing her that he was an undercover Police officer, and that he was about to arrest the customer two windows down to his right.

He smiled at her, and then spoke:

"That went perfectly!" he said, and upon hearing those words, Somboon gave the go ahead signal for their backup.

"Sir! Put both your hands in the air and no sudden moves! I'm Detective Farnham with the Toronto Police Service and you are under arrest for Money Laundering, Racketeering and Extortion!" Detective Farnham began explaining the suspects rights, but by that time the supect had already began to sprint for the front door of the bank trying to make it to the getaway car he knew would be waiting for him outside.

Farnham followed, running as fast as his feet would carry him. As he threw the door open, he spotted his backup, who'd already surrounded the suspect as he searched for his getaway car.

It was at that point that he realized that he'd been abandoned. Left with all of the evidence working against him.

Reluctantly, he put his hands across the back of his head, as Detective Farnham assisted his backup in finishing the arrest.

"Good work Somboon! We got him," Farnham congratulated his partner after he'd stepped away from the suspect, who was being forced into the back of a squad car.

"Like a FIFA championship game. Good plan, good play. We did it partner!" Somboon responded.

"That we did. It certainly could have gone a lot worse. Look, I'll meet you in about ten minutes. I've gotta speak to someone first," Farnham said to his partner.

"See you soon, glory hog," Somboon replied, drawing laughter from Farnham.

A few minutes later, Lori answered the phone.

"How's your day going?" she asked Farnham.

"Good. How about yours?" he asked his wife.

"Just finishing that digital painting for the restaurant promo," Lori replied, still very much concentrating on her work but clearly happy to hear Farnham's voice.

"You remember that fishing boat I had my eye on?" he asked her.

"The one you told me was your dream boat... and then I said that I thought I was your dreamboat," Lori continued, drawing a smile from him.

"Yeah, that same dreamboat..." Farnham responded.

"What about it?" she asked him.

"Well, I've been saving for it all these years, but I didn't tell you. I just had it garnished from my wages and secretly deposited into an account for six years. I'm sorry honey, I should have told you this..." Farnham admitted.

"I see. So now what? Did you buy it?" she asked him, sounding slightly more amused than upset.

"Not really. I took the money and transferred it all to our vacation account, and with that deposit it looks like we'll have enough for that Bermuda vacation you're been dreaming about..." Farnham informed her.

"You'd better get home in time for a romantic dinner tonight, beause we're spending the whole night together, and I'm going to wear your favourite negligé," Lori said to him seductively.

"I wouldn't have it any other way dreamboat," she could see Farnham's devious smile on the other end of the phone.

The Wager Of Dragons

A gargantuan celestial object of absolultely unfathomable proportions spanned the sky. It bent and twisted all light towards its epicenter. Everything near it was lensed and distorted. Curved beyond comprehension for nothing could escape its grasp.

Not even light.

But not the light or darkness of a dragon. A true dragon.

The Two True Dragons held firm their vigil after having watched the outcome of their wager, both remaining silent in its aftermath.

"They prevailed..." Weltherwithsp declared.

"They failed!" Withwyrm responded.

"It was Mentis who failed humanity! Leading them into tragedy beyond measure!" Weltherwithsp defended his observation of their wager.

"Are you kidding me? You're choosing purposely for humanity, trying to spread their failure about the globe!" Witherwyrm responded, relinquishing victory.

"What is it with you? You'd see the spread of filth before the sharing of triumph?!!!" Weltherwithsp clarified.

"How is global nuclear war a triumph?" Witherwyrm dipped into the black hole, defying all laws of physics to devour a piece of infinitely dense matter for its own appetite.

"A fate led by Mentis into the tragedy of humanity! So say those of the Sanctum... When Aerth doth fall, and none heed call, then so do we all!" Weltherwithsp replied.

"You are not mortal, brother. You like I are well beyond their finite time here. We are infinite. Immortal beyond the measure of time/space. We predated them, and we shall be around well beyond the extinction of their universe..." Witherwyrm added.

"We are not the only immortals. And there are others who are witness to your corruption, should you choose to stay this path," Weltherwithsp replied, finding light enough to make up for Witherwyrm's darkness.

Compromise was not a part of their vocabulary, and their debate ended in a draw.

The Yokai, and their numerous brothers and sisters the world over sought union with the most unlikely of allies, for they'd seen Mentis' ultimate destiny, and their memory of that nightmare was fresh within their ancient minds.

This allegiance would take them for an audience before Jinn Hua.

To be continued in The Butterfly Dragon: The Two Butterflies - Episode 12

Credits and attribution:

Artwork: Amy Wong, Wendy Pusey, Ghastly, Birdman, Brian Joseph Johns, Daz3D, Unreal Engine...
Tools: Daz3D, Corel Painter, Adobe Photoshop, Lightwave 3D, Blender, Stable Diffusion (Easy Diffusion distribution), InstantID, Sadtalker, Google Colaboratory, Microsoft Copilot (Windows 11), Hitfilm, Borderline Obsession...
InstantID by: Wang, Qixun and Bai, Xu and Wang, Haofan and Qin, Zekui and Chen, Anthony. Research Paper Title: InstantID - Zero-shot Identity-Preserving Generation in Seconds.
Sadtalker by: Zhang, Wenxuan and Cun, Xiaodong and Wang, Xuan and Zhang, Yong and Shen, Xi and Guo, Yu and Shan, Ying and Wang, Fei.
Research Paper Title: SadTalker: Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animation.
Gratitude: Our Mentors, Senseis, Sifus, Sebomnims, lifetime inspirations, family, friends, the Nomads (ask Stanton about that one), the Music, the Movies, the Theatre, the Arts, ASMR, (both YouTube and Bilibili and the many other creators on those platforms), the Gaming and Developer communities and of course, the audience.
Martial Arts (in the words of real experts and at least one comedian): https://brucelee.com (home of the real Dragon and an entire family of inspirations), http://iwco.online International Wing Chun Organization (International presence of a very scalable intensity martial art, protected and developed by Shaolin Nun Ng Mui) and the alma mater of Jinn Hua's own specialized variation thereof, https://iogkf.com International Okinawan Goju-Ryu Karatedo Federation (even Hanshi had his teachers), https://itftkd.sport International Taekwondo Federation (Here there be Taegers), https://tangsoodoworld.com Tang Soo Do World (the path of Grandmaster Chuck Norris), https://www.aikido-international.org International Aikido Federation (how else would Navy Chef Steven Seagal liberate a Nimitz Class Aircraft Carrier from a team of hijackers?), https://www.stqitoronto.com Shaolin Temple Quanfa Institute (The City Of Toronto's own Shaolin Temple), https://www.enterthedojoshow.com Master Ken's Ameri-Te-Do presence (If we can't laugh at ourselves, then we can at least laugh the loudest at others, and other Zen).
Special thanks to Aitrepreneur, Hugging Face and the YouTube educational content producers, including those catering to the AI content production pipeline and of course AlphaSignal.
Something to give you perspective: The very first teacher had no formal education, didn't graduate and was self taught, but only because they had no other choice. We do.

This content is entirely produced in Toronto, Ontario, Canada at 200 Sherbourne Street Suite 701 under the Shhhh! Digital Media banner.

Brian Joseph Johns

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