'The bodies have been piling up. That's a lot of innocent blood on your hands.'

The words carried the broken form through the automatic doors of the corner store more than his legs did. The store's chime rang a cheerful 'bing-bong', and the clerk - a young woman trapped doing a useless job - looked up to greet him. The words died in her lips as she saw the face of the Adept Slayer.

He didn't need a mirror. The dry instant coffee packets had worked through, and the cold from the little witch-plague's monster had long since worn off before he had gotten out of the primitive world. His eyes hung low. His shield arm was clearly broken. Every motion brought searing pain, every step agony. Probably at the shoulder. His armor was acting as an emergency cast, keeping it in place just as it was holding the knife-wound as closed as it could get. He was covered in laser burns not entirely purged by the Aixgear, laser burns brought on both by his own decision to stand in the way of the Lazy Laser and by Lezard Valeth's meteor throwing him forward into the remnants of the beam. He was more than a mess. He was the walking dead.

The girl's cries of concern and basic human decency didn't fall on deaf ears. It brought a smile to his face - human decency always did when it came from a human, and no Adept would be working a job like this. But he didn't answer her. Instead he moved through the hallways like a man possessed. Every step was the bone-deep pain of days of exhaustion.

'You should finish the job better next time, because you sure made a mess of the last one.'

Merak's voice rang in his ears, and broke his smile into a snarl as he stopped in front of the instant coffee machine. With his good hand he fumbled for a thermos from the shelf. He tucked it under his broken arm and unscrewed it as his snarl became a determined frown.

He had no one to blame but himself. He hadn't known enough about the resurrection witch's powers. He had tried to get her out of the way to get to the radioactive one, but that had created a bigger mess. The Slothful Conjurer was right - each person who died was blood on his hands. His fault. His error.

He wasn't good enough.

The hot coffee spilled into the thermos. He didn't bother to close the lid. He drank it gratefully, letting warm liquid wash over him. Some of the shaking in his hands, some of the splitting in his head, eased. Good. That was good. If he could focus, he could plan.

Another thermos for the road. He stood at the machine, watching the coffee spill down, planning his route. He could find her easily enough - there was no way it wouldn't be on the news, and Sumeragi wouldn't bother to clean up after themselves. But would she die for good this time?

Probably not. He'd studied her Lifewave. He'd dissected the elements of her blood and soul. He was pretty sure he knew how she worked, now.

Copen's eyes sink shut. He was, at the moment, powerless to stop her from coming back. He could only quell the tide of blood at cost to himself. He could only apologize to the dead by preventing more.

Copen turned, the thermos in hand. He grabbed some packaged snack off the rack and stopped in front of the counter. The concerned girl was already reaching for her phone when he shook his head.

"Thank you. But I'm fine. Ring this up, please. I'm in a hurry."

The girl stared at the black card on the counter. She looked back up at him. Copen gave her what he thought was a gentle smile, but he had never been good at that. She recoiled slightly, but slid the card nonetheless. The dead drop accounts were coming in handy for times like this.

Times like this. Times when he was half-dead and still had work to do.

But the hunt wasn't over. The monsters weren't dead. He'd let this one loose personally, and he had to take care of it. Only a coward would run from something like that. Only a coward would...

As he walked out of the store, Copen took a deep breath. He needed sleep. But he couldn't sleep. He needed rest. But he couldn't rest.

So he would hit one of his dead drop caches for ammo. He would input the code, run the biometrics, the voice print. He would disarm the manual trap. He would resupply. He should call Nori, but...

But she would try and stop him, and in this state, she might even be able to.

He took a deep swig of the thermos. The coffee was bitter, thick sludge, unpleasant corner-store coffee without even the decency to be instant-quality, fouled from days of negligence and apathy.

Two things that Copen the Adept Slayer could not ever afford. Because if he didn't care, who else would? The people who thought Adepts were human? The Adepts themselves, happy to play on that illusion? The coffee was a monument to humanity's surrender, and that thought honed his hate from its dull ember back to a roaring flame. Apathy in the face of a world they could not change.

He would show them they could. And then they would take back their world from the monsters.