Blood dribbled down Fate's chin and dripped from cuts and scrapes here and there on his body, but he was practically unharmed compared to Griffith.
The bear was covered from head to toe in jagged, thin cuts; deep, narrow ones; and he even had two toes and an ear missing. Many of the faces on Griffith's back were bloody messes and others had vanished in strange, fiery explosions as the bear miraculously healed itself.
Having learned quickly in the fight that the faces were the source of the bear's continued revivals, he had started aiming for those, putting the tortured souls inside to rest as his Manifest Miao Dao broke the Divine Energy-fueled shackles restraining them. Then it was simply a matter of killing the bear until it had no more usable lives.
Fate was feeling very grateful for the days when Autumn had forced him to train his body, a practice she hadn't dropped even after the Advanced weren't around to force her; fighting a bear for half an hour was nothing compared to sprinting at full speed for five or six hours at a time.
Now the bear, knowing it had but one life left, was stuck under Fate's blade as the two stared at each other. Cait walked up next to him, the scrunched look on her face telling him that she was still fighting to tame Griffith's energy even now. Fate didn't take his eyes off the bear when he asked her a question.
"Can you influence this thing's desires so he stops trying to kill us?"
"I'm afraid not. His mind is surprisingly strong. Coupling that with the fact he's farther into the Personification Level than I am and I can only barely control his Divine Energy."
"So, we kill it."
"That's our only option."
Fate pulled back his sword, aiming to thrust it between the bear's eyes when the thing pounced, smacking away his Miao Dao with a paw and barreling into him with his full thirteen-thousand-pound weight. Fate fell on his back, feeling his ribs crack and his organs get smushed.
He snapped his head to the side, dodging a paw swipe, then another before Griffith wised up and held him still with a paw. The bear roared, spittle flying in Fate's face as Griffith brought his free paw up for a vicious strike.
Fate smiled. "Forgetting something?"
He slipped through the ground just as the bear brought its paw down. The earth exploded into a rain of dirt as the bear hit nothing but grass. That was when Cait acted, strengthening her Divine Intent to twice its normal strength with her desire domain as she clamped down on the bear's head, squeezing tighter and tighter until Griffith's eyes bulged out of his sockets.
The bear tried to fight back with its telekinesis, but Cait's Desire Domain removed the parasitic quality to it and rendered it normal, leaving the creature with only its normal twelve-thousand-pound strength, almost half of Cait's enhanced strength.
Right then, Fate popped out of the ground next to the bear, chopping his sword at the bear's neck. It sliced clean off, the sudden lack of telekinetic resistance fighting against Cait allowing her to squash the head into a shower of blood and bone.
Fate stowed his sword in its ring and poked the bear with his foot. Getting no response, he leaned over with his hands on his knees and waited for his pounding heart to calm down.
"I think I'm getting too old for this," he said between breaths. "My heart's racing like crazy."
"You're only twenty-three, get over it," Cait said, reigning in her own breathing.
"I'm closer to fifty, actually. Time Dilation, remember?"
"You're still not even a hundredth of the way to middle-aged for an Embodiment," she admonished. "It's probably just the dread of this thing getting back up again."
"Probably."
They waited for almost thirty minutes to see if the bear would get back up. Finding that it wouldn't, Fate sighed contentedly and straightened.
"It only took him a few seconds the last dozen times. We should be good."
"I say we burn it, just in case."
"Sounds like a good idea. Got a match?"
"No, but I have a little laser pistol I keep tucked in my boot." She pulled out a small silver gun that could fit in the palm of one's hand. "Not that helpful for killing anything other than rats, but I've found it's helpful for utility purposes. I used it to burn handcuffs apart at one point."
"Wouldn't that burn your wrists, on account of metal conducting heat?" Fate asked her as she knelt next to the corpse, applying low, constant heat until it caught fire.
She stood and dusted herself off. "It did. Hurt like a bitch, but it beat whatever those crazy cultists were gonna do to me. Now, we should head to the ship and bring that stupid palace down."
Fate nodded, and they went down the hill, the bonfire of Griffith's body left behind them. They made it to the ship around dusk, the tenacious flesh of Griffith's corpse still visibly burning on the faraway hill. Fate smacked the button, glancing at Cait as he waited for the ramp to extend. She was looking out across the fields, staring at nothing.
"You all right?" he asked.
She blinked rapidly, shaking her head. "Yeah. Just… remembering some stuff."
"Like what?"
"Like those faces on the back of the bear. I could feel what they wanted. They were angry, wanting nothing more than to lash out at the world and the bear that held them captive, but with no way to do it. I can't help but feel that they were a lot like me, before you and your friends saved me."
Fate pat her shoulder as he stepped around her, going up the ramp. "We'll make them pay for that; don't you worry. Those fuckers have a lot to answer for."
Cait watched him enter the ship, shaking herself before she followed. She stopped next to him, the latter having froze in the entrance hallway as he stared to the side. She followed his gaze, looking through a side door into the bathroom and finding Garret inside, humming a jaunty toon as he looked in the mirror and combed the thin white hair on top of his head.
Garrett caught their gaze in the mirror, turning around with a smile. "Well, took you long enough."